(Featured Image: Enchanted Rock, Fredericksburg, Texas)

(Image Description: A reddish, rocky terrain dotted with wild trees and bushes. In the background, dark storm clouds loom by.)

(Note: The following serves as my positionality to the work I do.)

I was born and grew up in southeastern Texas, in a part of the United States referred to as the Cajun Belt. My father worked as a commercial fisherman while I was growing up, and much of my childhood was spent exploring the coastline next to our home with my siblings.

My formative years were spent growing up in a Roman Catholic household, with my mother being an ex-Buddhist in name only. I spent my childhood attending Sunday mass, with the occasional visit to the temple. Today, I no longer practice organized religion. Instead, I choose to do service for the greater good.

From a young age, I was surrounded by languages. I grew up in a predominantly Black town, where I was exposed to and spoke Black English (also called by other names, including African American English [AAE], African American Vernacular English [AAVE], and Ebonics) up until a certain age. My family members on my mother’s side spoke (and continue to speak) several languages, as a consequence of constantly being uprooted from our ancestral and adopted homelands. Those languages include, but are not limited to, Vietnamese, Cantonese, English, Mandarin, French, and Hakka.

Looking back, my heart was already devoted to language from a young age. One of my fondest memories of my a poh (阿姨, Cantonese word for maternal grandmother) is devising a makeshift Cantonese-English dictionary with her when I was only eight years old. Growing up in a town where we were some of the very few Cantonese people, I elicited words for fruits and colors from a poh, quickly documenting them in a spiral notebook. Within a few months, we filled the pages with Chinese characters. Complete with a makeshift phonetic transcription I devised from English, the resource was what I used to communicate with her before she passed a few years later.

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I am also a guest in the Deaf community. Who would have known that meeting a Deaf friend during my freshman year in high school would have lead to a lifelong commitment to sign language? I thank my good friend Geraldine for everything: for dealing with my dysfluency while I was learning American Sign Language and for our friendship, which I still look back on with fondness. You were the catalyst for a series of events in my life that have led me to where I am today. Thank you to my Deaf and DeafBlind friends and colleagues for taking me in and teaching me about your culture and language. Thank y’all for allowing me to be a part of your lives, and I thank y’all for being in mine.

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At the moment, I reside in Houston, Texas (USA) and work as a professional interpreter, translator, and linguistic consultant. I am a strong proponent of the merits of social justice in my professional and personal life, and I often spend my free time trying to spread awareness about the Deaf, DeafBlind, immigrant, and other marginalized communities from the aspect of ability/disability, language, and policy.

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I am also a firm believer that language is intrinsically tied to the communities in which it is used. Language grows, thrives, morphs, and changes, based on the wants and needs and whims of its speakers and signers. I do not support linguistic analysis for the mere sake of linguistic analysis, especially for personal and professional gain at the expense of the language community in which said language is used. Doing so only perpetuates the systems of inequity deeply rooted in colonialism and imperialism.

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In my free time, I am devoted to my children (i.e., my plants) and partake in fiber arts (e.g., sewing, weaving, knitting, crochet, dyeing, and macramé). I have a (now defunct) knitting blog called The Introspective Knitter here, and my Ravelry page is located here.