Zoe Chen

“Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. In which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be that third language that animates where the tongue falters.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Is the position hopeless? It is, of course, if we are content to give up hope. There is nothing in the world more comfortable than to give up hope. For then one can go on to enjoy life.”
― James Griffiths, Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language

“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

“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. Had the Hawaiian renaissance come a decade later, many of these people would have been dead, and the process might have been closer to reviving an extinct language than revitalizing one under threat, a far, far harder task.”
― James Griffiths, Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language