“Khao Jai”/Enter the Heart Versus “To Understand”: How English Colonizes and Lao Language Harmonizes

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Refusing the “Magic” of Western Knowledge Systems: Toward Epistemic Justice in Black and Asian American Education (Table 33)

Abstract

Purpose
This autoethnography explores letting go of Lao language to take up hegemonic English as a way to navigate U.S. schooling and the harmful impacts on epistemology. It theorizes the significance of Lao language in bridging the mind-body duality prevalent in western paradigm. It dreams up spaces of being and belonging made possible by holding onto Lao language, which offers a worldview harmonizing the head and heart.

Theoretical Framework
Drawing on women of color perspectives, this paper understands the mother tongue as connected to one’s identity and epistemology (Anzaldua, 1999) and a return to that language as a decolonial project (Wilson & Schommer, 2005) to disrupt the ways compulsory English curriculum racializes (Motha, 2014) and colonizes (Goodwin, 2010). Language is linked to systems of thought, acting as a foundation that shapes (sub)conscious beliefs while simultaneously providing the words that give outlet to those beliefs. Teaching heritage language affords minoritized students affirmation of cultural identities and connection with families and communities. Nourishing Lao language, in particular, offers an epistemology that aligns thinking with feeling as the word “jai”, meaning “heart,” “occurs in most Lao expressions related to emotion, and denotes the primary ‘seat’ of cognitive and emotional activity for the Lao, the so-called ‘heart’ or ‘mind’” (Enfield, 2001).

Methods and Data Sources
This paper uses autoethnography (Ellis, 2004) to illuminate the sociocultural norms that sustain English hegemony by analyzing language experiences of how I khao jai (enter my heart) my mom’s refugeehood and sia jai (lose heart) about English disconnecting me from community. Excavating these narratives allows for “a recovery of our language and epistemological foundations” (Smith, 1999, p. 39).

Results
-khao jai/enter the heart vs to understand
Asking my mom how and why she came to the U.S., she responded, “Mae bpen refugee. Bor khao jai va?” While the literal translation is “Mom is a refugee. Don’t you understand?”, the interlinear translation– embodying the essence of meanings in experiences–is “Mom is a refugee. Does that not enter your heart?” With hegemonic textbook knowledge, I understood her as a refugee fleeing from Lao PDR. Yet, I did not khao jai that refugeehood entailed displacement, living in-between cultures, and building a new life in a country that did not want her.

-sia jai/lose your heart vs to be sorry
Being “sorry” or expressing regret does not viscerally encompass how I understand that the ways I’ve been compliant to dominant ideals are harmful to my subjectivity as an Asian American queer woman. Thinking in Lao repairs my cognitive dissonance to recognize that English-only curriculum led to sia jai or losing my heart. Expanding language epistemology moves me to get that heart back.

Scholarly Significance
This autoethnography aims to illuminate how teaching minoritized students to speak English-only leads to thinking English-only, indoctrinating students with notions of the inferiority of their heritage language and culture. Researchers and practitioners must envision revitalizing heritage language as epistemic justice. Implications will guide culturally sustaining pedagogy to disrupt the boundaries dictated by English and re-connect students with community.

Author

• Diana Chandara, University of Minnesota