Presenting my work and Presenting myself in Vietnamese

Recently I was invited to speak and present my research at the Institute of Social Sciences Information (Viện thông tin khoa học xã hội). The presentation was the first of many firsts, where I shared

• my dissertation topic, “Creating the Library: Builders and Users of Vietnamese Libraries 1887-1986”
• my research findings in Hanoi thus far
• observations on libraries to library staff (rather than an academic history audience)
• and the most challenging part of all this, was that it was the first time that I presented anything in Vietnamese.

As I’ve written before, learning Vietnamese has been a journey of coming to terms with the familiarity of Vietnam, its culture, its language as well as its foreignness to me. Vietnamese is the foreign language that I always knew since I was a child. It was the language where I was taught about family values, morality, kinship, and also about food, tradition, and religion. But English was the language that I learned to express myself as an individual, to question and challenge those same traditions and values, and to communicate and explain who I am, what I want, and why.

My vocabulary for both languages is a product of this linguistic upbringing. Vietnamese Cindy speaks and uses words such as duty (bổn phận), to sacrifice (hy sinh), and to sin (phạm tội). English Cindy discusses her professional academic life, questions gender normative practices, and wonders why this, why that. Since Vietnamese is a relational based language with gendered kinship pronouns, Vietnamese Cindy only refers to herself “I/me” as “child (con)”, “niece (cháu)”, and “grandchild (cháu)”, because she only spoke to adults in Vietnamese. Vietnamese Cindy never knew how to refer to herself “I/me” as “older/younger sister (chị/em)”, “aunt (dì/cô)”, and definitely never as the relationally equal pronoun “tôi.”

This presentation of my academic work in Vietnamese was the first time I referred to myself as “tôi.” It was the first time where my two cultural-linguistic worlds came together in a formal setting. I introduced my intellectual work that had only existed in English, into Vietnamese–the language of family, ethics, and food. Thus, how do I translate abstract ideas of modernity, national and institutional histories, and subjectivity? How should I introduce myself—with my Vietnamese name or English name?

I decided to make this ‘professional’ situation, more informal, honest, and more like who I was—a cultural mélange who wanted to learn and improve her Vietnamese speaking. I briefly introduced my linguistic training and asked the audience to “thông cảm đi (have compassion” when I make language mistakes.) I would use English idioms and try to find Vietnamese comparisons. I would pause, look at several audience members and confirm if what I was explaining in Vietnamese made sense. Everyone was encouraging, attentive, and incredibly supportive.

And I realized that I was actually having a conversation rather than a presentation. Compared to so many presentations I have given and listened to, this multi-lingual, multi-cultural exchange offered something that other presentations did not: it made me the presenter, human.

My language ability in Vietnamese is finally at a point where Vietnamese Cindy and English Cindy can be one in the same. I can begin to express political and personal opinions and subtly joke in Vietnamese. At the same time, I still misuse relational pronouns, and am uncomfortable with calling myself this distant pronoun “tôi” in professional situations. But through this presentation, I was reminded that I could present myself as a fallible, imperfect human, with a unique backstory just like everyone else.