Language Learning with the Novels of Thanhhà Lai

Susan Corapi

Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature, Volume 59, Number

1, 2021, pp. 70-75 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/bkb.2021.0004

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/785313

[ Access provided at 19 Mar 2022 17:00 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]

 Language Learning with
the Novels of Thanhhà Lai
by SUSAN CORAPI

O
ne of the greatest challenges when learning a language is physi-
cally opening your mouth and uttering words or sounds that are
new. It is daunting. The fear of making a mistake is real, and stories
abound about inadvertently saying something that does not make sense or
is a serious cultural blunder. Vietnamese American author Thanhhà Lai
captures the experience and emotions of immersion in another language
and culture in her three books, Inside Out & Back Again (2011), Listen, Slowly
(2015), and Butterfly Yellow (2019).
I first read Lai’s debut novel Inside Out & Back Again in 2011, right after it
was awarded the US National Book Award. I read it in one sitting because I
could not put it down. Finally someone had captured the agony of learning
another language when living in a new country. The story of ten-year-old
Hà’s linguistic and cultural adaptation mirrored my own.
Through her first-person poems, she describes the puzzling
parts of a new language, the challenges of making friends
with people who look at you as different, and learning in a
school system that does not know how to help the language
learning and adaptation process. My journey was not forced
like Hà’s—I did not move to France when I was ten because
of danger. But my language-learning journey was the same.
Hà’s voice is what makes this book so powerful.
Lai describes herself as a voice-driven author, and it is
this that makes her stories of adolescents and teenagers
struggling to learn English or Vietnamese compelling for
the many students with whom I have read the books. Each
of Lai’s three novels gives a window into a different aspect
of the language-learning experience. In Inside Out & Back
Again, Hà leaves Saigon in 1975 with her family and eventu-
ally lands in the southern United States, where she begins
to learn English (her third language) and adapt to American
culture. In Listen, Slowly, twelve-year-old Mai travels back to
her parents’ home country, where she begins to voice Viet-
namese, a language she understands because it is spoken in her Cali-
fornia home, but one she has not used to communicate. In Butterfly Yellow,
eighteen-year-old Hằng arrives in Texas following an escape on an over-
loaded fishing boat and time in a refugee camp. She uses her basic school
English to look for her younger brother Linh, who was pulled from her
arms and airlifted out of Vietnam on an “orphan plane” to the United
States in 1975. Her language skills grow along with her cultural under-
standing as she works on a horse farm alongside LeeRoy, a gentle Texan
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 LANGUAGE LEARNING WITH THE NOVELS OF THANHHÀ LAI

who dreams of being a rodeo cowboy. And she slowly begins to build a
bridge between her memories of her little brother, who adored her, and
David, who has no memories of his life in Vietnam as “Linh.”
In all three books the misconceptions about the target language
are transcribed through free verse or Vietnamese phonics so the
reader can begin to understand how complicated it is to train one’s
ear and tongue to master a whole new set of sounds and words.
Lai explains that “when you enter a new language…you have to
somehow reconfigure it to your mind so that you understand it”
(Worlds of Words). For example, Hà records in her journal the
incongruity of pluralizing a noun with an additional s even when
the noun already has one:

Glass

Glasses

All day
I practice
squeezing hisses
through my teeth.

Whoever invented
English
must have loved
snakes. (Lai, Inside Out 118)

Hằng transcribes in her mind how to pronounce English words

using a Vietnamese pronunciation key. She asks LeeRoy to “Thóc
sì-lâu, bò-li-sì”—"talk slow, please” (Lai, Butterfly 41), breaking the
words into separated phonemes. Each example of speech gives
readers a chance to hear what Hà and Hằng hear as they try to
understand and master English.
I am a professor at a university where I teach students training
to be teachers. Most have studied another language in school but
are fluent only in their mother tongue. The visceral voices of Hà,
Mai, and Hằng help them understand the experience (and some-
times trauma) of immersion language learning in another country.
But as I guide students through these stories, I juggle two aspects
of the reading experience:
I want my students to hear the voices of Hà, Mai, and Hằng
and understand the complexities of what the characters are expe-
riencing and feeling.
I also want to give my students a chance to voice their questions
and thoughts about immersion language learning and cultural adaptation
that they have not experienced themselves.
So, when discussing Inside Out & Back Again, we engage in ways of inter-
acting with the books that encourage student-led discussion.
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LANGUAGE LEARNING WITH THE NOVELS OF THANHHÀ LAI

Our first task is to build background because most of my students know

very little about the 1955-1975 war in Vietnam. Through a webquest and
YouTube footage of April 30, 1975, students begin to understand that Hà
and her family did not come to the United States to improve their quality
of life. Instead, they came to escape danger. That is an important counter-
narrative to what my students hear through the
news media’s presentation of walls and immigra-
tion quotas.
After reading the novel in verse, we talk
about the story through a graffiti board in which
students write/draw and discuss their initial
reactions to the book (image 1). This gives them
a chance to get the differences from and connec-
tions to their own lives out in the open. For
example, in the first poem in which Hà describes
the Tết celebration, they learn about a significant
celebration they are not familiar with, but they
connect with Hà’s feisty personality when she
questions why her brother should have the privi-
lege of being the first to step on the floor in the morning and bring luck to
the house “because only male feet / can bring luck” (Lai, Inside Out 2). Hà
decides she would like that privilege and gets up early and sticks her toe
on the tile floor before her brother. It is that same feisty spirit that keeps
her reflecting and commenting through the poems about the experience
of changing languages and cultures in the second half of the story.
Through the tool of a cultural x-ray (Short), we then explore Hà’s cultural
beliefs and values (image 2). We start with a human stick figure, then
we record on the outside what we know about her life (family structure,
languages she speaks, likes and dislikes, places
she has lived, and so on). The most important part
is what we write on the inside of the figure. That
is where we use Hà’s voice in the poems to infer
her values and beliefs, the things at the core of
her being that inform her choices and actions. We
use Fennes and Hapgood’s Iceberg of Culture (1997)
to prompt our thinking about different categories
of values and beliefs (e.g., family, personal space,
time management, religious beliefs). Ultimately, I
want my students to understand that their future
students’ actions are motivated by the differing
values and beliefs that families hold. Actions are
culturally informed.
The cultural x-ray gives us a good picture of Hà, but I want my students
to also think about the adults who may have helped or hindered her
language learning and adaptation. So, we add a section to the right and
the left of our portrait of Hà (image 3) and begin to list the actions and
infer the perceptions of her teacher Miss Scott (MiSSS SScott) and her
neighbor/tutor Mrs. Washington (MiSSSiss WaSShington). As we look
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at what motivates these women’s very different actions, students begin to

understand the differences between the cultural backgrounds of Hà and
the two women who are trying to help her learn and adjust. My students
are changed as we look at Miss Scott’s misguided perceptions and Mrs.
Washington’s compassion. In the process of reading Inside Out & Back
Again, refugees and immigrants become people instead of a feature on the
news. But more importantly, my students begin to understand the arduous
journey of immersion into another country, language, and culture. They
have seen compassion in action when they hear how much Hà benefits
from Mrs. Washington’s advocacy with the school. They understand the
impact of kindness when they read Butterfly Yellow and watch LeeRoy
practicing stories in English over and over with Hằng so she can connect
with her brother. They appreciate the richness of language and culture
as they follow Mai’s increasing appreciation of her parents’ homeland in
Listen, Slowly.
As I write this, the world is experi-
encing increasing spikes in COVID-
19. We do not yet know the long-term
impacts of isolation due to a pandemic.
Stories of hope and healing become
all the more important, and that is the
particular focus of Butterfly Yellow. Fresh
out of university, Thanhhà Lai worked
as a journalist in Orange County, Cali-
fornia, where large numbers of Viet-
namese refugees had settled. As she
interviewed them, Lai noticed they
would skip over the painful stories of
their escape (Lai, “Live Episode”). “When I asked about what happened
people would always say, ‘I’ve heard rumors. I’ve heard rumors that there
were rapes. I’ve heard rumors that pirates would take the men.’ No one
would say that it was their story, because it’s such a dark story that you
don’t want to put your name to it” (Roper).
In Butterfly Yellow, Lai gradually reveals details of Hằng’s trip so the
reader understands the horror of her escape on an overloaded fishing
boat. But Lai does so by relating flashbacks that are injected into the
repartee of LeeRoy and Hằng as they work at the horse farm, mucking out
stables, digging post holes, or watering the cantaloupes. As Hằng’s back-
story unfolds across the novel, Lai balances the horror of Hằng’s trip with
the humorous character of LeeRoy, a teen who is breaking away from the
academic dreams his parents have for him to fulfill his own dream, that
of being a cowboy. Lai explains, “The story is really about healing. I didn’t
want to write a story just about what happened on the boat, because I feel
that’s all you get to know about [Hằng] and I wanted her to heal” (Worlds
of Words). Through the voice of Hằng, readers can watch her struggle with
memories and hang on to her hope for a reunion with her brother and
even the chance at some romance. This book gives hope. Telling stories
is a marvelous language-learning tool, but stories are also a vehicle for
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LANGUAGE LEARNING WITH THE NOVELS OF THANHHÀ LAI

healing. Ultimately, Butterfly Yellow is about resilience, and as Hằng and

LeeRoy work in the heat as farmers, they grate on each other, trick each
other, laugh together, and slowly learn to care for each other.
There is one final lesson I want my students to learn from these books,
and that is the role of humor in helping children learn. Most of the char-
acters in Lai’s books have a sense of humor. Thanhhà Lai herself is a very
funny person to listen to, and the humor that was part of her own family,
in spite of having a missing-in-action father, infuses each of her characters.
Hà describes the snake hisses of English, Mai narrates her sassy feelings
as she meets “the fourth son of Ông’s second cousin” (Lai, Listen 31), and
Hằng tries to understand Texas idioms. Humor provides light moments in
the middle of difficult times. Humor sustains.
Quite candidly, Thanhhà Lai is one of my heroes because of what her
books do for my students. With each semester, as I read Inside Out & Back
Again with my preservice teachers, they gain immeasurable insights from
Hà’s story that will help them teach their English language learners in a
way that supports them academically, socially, and emotionally. Hà’s story
teaches what compassion looks like. The relationships, cultural clashes,
and questions she has with teachers, neighbors, schoolmates, church
attendees, and family members help readers gain a window into how
a newly arrived refugee might feel and think. And I have yet to meet a
college student who was not moved to be a better teacher for children who
are adjusting to a new culture and language. That is a powerful book! As
the world experiences increased chaos due to the pandemic, resulting in
unemployment and violence, there is an important place in schools for
narratives that teach students compassion, the ability to get along, and
especially the need to understand behavior as motivated by values and
beliefs. The stories of Hà, Mai, and Hằng do that for readers willing to
engage with their journeys.

Works Cited
Children’s Books
Lai, Thanhhà. Inside Out & Back Again. Harper, 2011.
---. Listen, Slowly. Harper, 2015.
---. Butterfly Yellow. Harper, 2019.

Secondary Sources
Fennes, Helmut, and Karen Hapgood. Intercultural Learning in the Class-
room: Crossing Borders. Cassell, 1997.
Lai, Thanhhà. “Live Episode! Butterfly Yellow.” The Vietnamese Boat People,
podcast #15, 11 Dec. 2019, www.vietnameseboatpeople.org/podcast
/episode/44ccde73/15-live-episode-butterfly-yellow.
Roper, Ingrid. “Q & A With Thanhha Lai.” PublishersWeekly.com, 22 Aug.
2019, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens
-authors/article/80981-q-a-with-thanhha-lai.html.
Short, Kathy G. “Cultural X-Rays.” Strategies for Responding to Literature:
Language and Culture Book Kits and Global Story Boxes. Worlds of Words,
wowlit.org/links/language-and-culture-resource-kits/.
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 LANGUAGE LEARNING WITH THE NOVELS OF THANHHÀ LAI

Worlds of Words. “A Conversation with Thanhhà Lại.” Worlds of Words, 14

Sep. 2020, wowlit.org/event/a-conversation-with-thanhha-lai/.

Susan Corapi is an associate professor of education at Trinity

International University (near Chicago). After growing up in
France, she worked as a K-12 teacher in the United States, Canada,
and Côte d’Ivoire. Her years of cross-cultural life experience
inform her professional work and publications. She is the coau-
thor of Exploring International and Intercultural Understanding
through Global Literature and coeditor of Reading the World’s
Stories: An Annotated Bibliography of International Youth Litera-
ture. Currently she is the coeditor of WOW Review, a critical book
review site that profiles multicultural and global books (wowlit
.org/on-line-publications/review/).

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