A PUBLICATION OF CLASS COM 492 AT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY IRVINE - SPRING 2010 SECOND EDITION
Pho Huynh, founder of the TTVHVN language school
Enabling Vietnamese Children to Talk To Grandma
By EMILY WATSON
Hanh Ngoc Nguyen, a vigorous sixteen-year-old Vietnamese American, lives between two worlds of second- and third-generation students in Orange County. While some of her friends maintain their Vietnamese roots, others neglect their heritage, according to Hanh (see Olen Kittelsen’s article “Teen to Teen” below). She enjoys traditional cultural festivals but her limited Vietnamese vocabulary hinders her from communicating with first-generation Vietnamese Americans eloquently.
Take Hanh’s immigrant grandparents. “They make me repeat one or two words slowly because they don’t understand my accent that well,” she said.
Many Vietnamese-Americans in Orange County fear that this generation gap will widen, which is why they send their children to linguistic Sunday schools. Each weekend, 10,000 children and adolescents attend classes in local schools and temples to learn how to speak and write their parent’s tongue properly; they range from kindergarten age to twelfth-graders.
One of the largest of these schools is Trung Tâm Văn Hóa Việt Nam (TTVHVN). Its founder and current chairman is current chairman Pho Huynh. His daughter, My-Lan Huynh, recalled how 15 years ago she confused her father’s name with the popular noodle soup, phở. She asked him, “Daddy, why are you so famous?”
VIETNAMESE CULTURAL CENTER
14171 Newland St. Westminster, CA 92683
(714) 425-4554 E-mail: info@TTVH.com
At this point, said Pho, he realized that something had to be done: Children such as his daughter could no longer speak with their grandparents and their contemporaries because only 70 percent of that generation spoke good English, according to Pho. This is a particularly bad state of affairs in an Asian family context where the elderly are highly revered.
Some 750 Vietnamese-American students from Little Saigon, Buena Park, Lakewood and Riverside and other cities attend TTVHVN. Most are of elementary school age. Sleepy-eyed, wearing blue TTVHVN uniforms and Hello Kitty and Spiderman backpacks, they walk to their classes at Warner Middle School in Westminster in flip-flops. Ten minutes before class begins a teacher rings the bell.
It was at 9:30 in the morning. I peered into a classroom filled with docile kids practicing their pronunciation in a staccato rhythm. The picture was quite different in the high school room where I took a seat. There were ten students. Some perfunctorily participated in the study lesson packet. But four listened to one young boy’s iPod, joking with each other. Eventually the iPod owner was told to put it away. When he was called on, he tripped through the letter chart, receiving a hand of assistance from his teacher.
But special classes are also offered for adults. In an interview, Pho recalled several lawyers taking courses at TTVHVN last year. According to ho, it takes seven years of instruction to develop mastery of the Vietnamese language.
“For the most part… students belong to the second generation… so they speak the language, or can at least understand,” My-Lan said, adding that these grown-ups improve their reading and writing skills in class.
All TTVHVN instructors possess teaching credentials and have already taught in Vietnam. They also offer history classes that include Vietnamese literature and geography. According to 15-year old TTVHVN student Vincent Nguyen history courses focus on their homeland’s founding dynasty rather than the Vietnam War, which ended 35 years ago.
Nguyen, dressed in an all-white Scout leader uniform for Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in Westminster, is an articulate Fountain Valley High School tenth grader. He began attending TTVHVN in sixth grade following this parents’ wish but said that he greatly enjoyed learning Vietnamese. He told me that language schools in Orange County compete in an academic decathlon every summer, testing their knowledge of Vietnamese literature, geography and history, at Orange Coast College. He added proudly that TTVHVN usually wins this contest.
TTVHVN charges $175 for 33 weeks of instruction, plus a $75 rent for the facility. Pho told me that students attending Vietnamese study schools also do better at college later. His daughter graduated from UCLA after six years at TTVHVN.