Zoe Chen

“As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“We feel Wales should get independence from normal political channels but by the time she does the only people left to celebrate will be Liverpudlians’.”
― James Griffiths, Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language

“In 1999, for the first time in over a century, a class of students educated entirely in Hawaiian from the age of four to eighteen graduated,”
― James Griffiths, Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language

“It cannot be overstated how close Hawaiian came to extinction. Many of the immersion preschools had to bring in elderly people to act as teachers, as so few in the intervening generation spoke the language.”
― James Griffiths, Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language