Zoe Chen

“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

“No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue. But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely? The Vietnamese I own is the one you gave me, the one whose diction and syntax reach only the second-grade level.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“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

“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