Organizers of Vietnamese language classes hope Americanized children will reconnect, then pass on the lessons.
By DONG-PHUONG NGUYEN
Published August 25, 2003
[Times photo: Ken Helle]
Teacher Minh Anh Do Truong asks Chi Nguyen, 6, what color shirt he is wearing. The children were learning the Vietnamese words for the different colors during a recent class.
TAMPA - Cuc Ngo has seen the looks of disapproval and the sheepish grins.
His friends sit at the dinner table with their grandchildren. English words gush from the kids' mouths like water from a busted dam.
The grandparents, new immigrants from Vietnam, don't understand a thing. The kids, in turn, have no idea what the adults are saying. It may be in Vietnamese, their native tongue, but they never took the time to learn the language.
"Their parents all wanted their children to do well in school, so they let them speak English at home," said Ngo, of Tampa. "They lost their ability to understand Vietnamese. Now they can't even talk to their own grandparents."
So the first thing Ngo did when his grandson, Chi Nguyen Ngo, came to the United States three years ago was demand that he communicate with his relatives in Vietnamese.
The second thing he did was enroll Chi, now 6, in Vietnamese language classes.
The classes, held each Sunday in a cramped real estate office on Waters Avenue, are the Vietnamese community's way of reconnecting America's Vietnamese youth with their roots.
The hope is that the kids, assimilated to American life, will never lose the ability to speak Vietnamese, and will pass traditions on to future generations.
Here, the children learn how to read and write in Vietnamese, how to address elders with respect, and how to sing Vietnamese folk songs.
French, Spanish and Latin are taught in schools and also are available through private tutors. These Vietnamese language classes are free, everything is donated, and all instruction comes from volunteers.
"Leave it up to the school to teach our children English," said Ngo, who once whacked a child's hand with chopsticks for asking for "shrimp" instead of the Vietnamese word "tom" at the dinner table. "We must make it our responsibility to teach them how to speak the language they were born with."
During a recent lesson, Ngo watched with pride as Chi joined his classmates in singing "Tet Trung Thu," a song about the mid-Autumn Festival.
Ngo hissed at the youngster to sit up straight. Chi, a bag of Fritos in one hand and a Kool-Aid Jammer in the other, quickly obliged.
Chorus time follows about an hour of lessons. On this day, teacher Minh Anh Do Truong taught the youngsters, ages 5 and up, their colors. She used colored markers to write the matching English and Vietnamese words on a dry-erase board.
"Who has on pink today?" she asked in Vietnamese.
Heads turned to inspect barrettes, shirts and shoes.
At an adjoining room, a table of kids younger than 5 were also learning their colors. Construction paper had been pasted on a white background to create an image of a brown boat on blue seas, beneath a yellow sun.
Three-year-old Thao Vy Le shyly rehearsed her annunciation of the Vietnamese word for brown as a teacher pointed to the boat. Five-year-old Meghan Benson watched.
Meghan's father, Tuan Benson, is Vietnamese. Her mother is American and Hawaiian.
Tuan Benson said he doesn't speak Vietnamese at home as much as he should. He wants Meghan to be able to communicate with her grandmother when Meghan visits her in New Orleans. And when Meghan becomes a teenager, he wants to take her on a trip to Vietnam.
"I want her to know where her dad came from," Benson said. "And I want her to feel at home when I take her there."
In the middle of the lesson, one grandmother entered the real estate office, sunglasses perched on top of her head, snack-sized chips and drinks in her arms.
The kids squealed. Everything is donated by the parents - writing utensils, notebooks, food and beverages. The lessons do not come from textbooks, but are all either handwritten and photocopied or downloaded from the Internet.
The owner of Home Town Realty Inc., at 4040 Waters Avenue, offers the space for free.
The grass roots effort, which started in June, has outgrown its space. Teachers hope to find a bigger meeting room for the 15 or so students.
Among the learners is 7-year-old Brianna Gibbs, an African-American girl whose father works at the realty office. When her parents learned of the classes, they immediately enrolled her.
"We saw it as an opportunity for her to learn something totally different," said her mother, Ruth Gibbs. "She just loves the class."
Truong, the teacher, also leads free English classes for adults two nights a week. Those classes also filled up quickly.
Truong works as an Oracle systems administrator for the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority during the day.
"I wanted to do something useful, and think about the future," said Truong, 40. "My hope is that they will grow up and do the same, pass on the lessons they have learned."
Teaching the young another language is not only wise, but is in the national interest, a linguistics expert said.
"Not to preserve diverse native languages is an unbelieveable waste of taxpayer's money," said Dennis R. Preston, professor of linguistics at Michigan State University. "You need those speakers."
Countries need citizens who speak different languages to operate in the modern world, he said, be it in business, politics, war, economics.
He points to such groups as the CIA, who have had to recruit heavily in times of terrorism for Arabic speakers.
U.S. citizens who speak other languages provide a valuable resource. Without that, "the terrorists will have won," he said.
America was shaped by different cultures. To lose that is unacceptable, he said.
"We didn't just inherit one thing from a tiny group of bearded, helmet-horned Anglo-Saxons," he said. "Why in the world would you want to insult people's backgrounds and language in a country that prides itself for having taken in and preserved all of the attributes of diversity that makes us the great country that we are?"
For this group of Vietnamese-Americans in this small realty office, preservation takes place each Sunday, starting at noon.
They are being taught lessons to last beyond their lifetime.
