How to Tame a Wild Tongue

or her people. Being a minority myself, I was sympathetic to her point of view yet embarrassed because I am a full-flesh Vietnamese, yet I cannot proficiently speak, read, or write my own language. In her writing, she made numerous claims that language is definitive of culture. “ Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity- I am my language.” To her I lacked culture. As I “feel” my way through her essay, I quickly became confused of the sudden changes in topic and emotions. I was baffled by the incessant usage of Spanish words and was distracted by her unconventional organization. She vacillated between arguments. The way I went about reading these confusing paragraphs was to filter out all the narrative from commentaries. I skimmed through the narratives and carefully examined the commentaries so I could figure out what emotion is being conveyed and henceforth use that emotion to retrace and define unknown words. If I felt satire and anger in certain clusters of sentences I could be certain, that the Spanish words in that sentence or nearby must also be a negative word denouncing whatever she was criticizing. Every word triggers some type of emotion. In a paragraph, the emotions encompassed must be uniform and consistent. Therefore knowing what emotions was displayed, one can use it to second-guess what the words used in the paragraph means. In the excerpt “Deslenguadas. Somos los del espanol deficiente. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally a