Language as a form of Trauma and Storytelling - Emily Harris | PGO 2023

My language learning journey started when I was abandoned at a Buddhist temple. I wasn't even two years old. Already, my life was heading towards a trajectory that would forever change the way I learned languages and how I integrated my life story into that process.
Go on a journey with me as I explore the true depths that our stories behind the foreign languages we speak can take us. We are whole people, not just the amount of languages or proficiency levels, behind the languages we speak.
We all have a story that got us to learn the languages we do.
Learning a foreign language is not only for us to meet fluency goals, learn through textbooks, and expand our interests of different cultures. They also uncover negative emotions, our feelings of perfectionism, loss, or feeling unworthy. For me, they also uncover trauma. They take us on an unpredictable journey back to ourselves.
This is just the beginning of mine.
EMILY HARRIS
Emily is a language enthusiast and creator of Language Travel Adoptee. She is a transracial adoptee, born in China but raised in the USA in a white family. She has found that by embracing her story, she can apply the same, self compassionate mindset to language learning. Emily advocates not shying away from difficult feelings in language journeys, self care, and delving deeper into the stories of the languages others speak.
Website: / @languagetraveladoptee
This video was recorded at the Polyglot Gathering Online 2023 (www.polyglotgathering.com).

[@sungalaxia]

Her experiences abroad were truly just insanely racist. I'm ethnically Polish and Slovak, but, being white, of course no one ever interrogated me about why I wasn't learning Polish and Slovak, or why I wasn't trying to connect to my "roots". They just saw an ethnically Chinese person and said, "You should fit into the box I made for you and if you don't, you're wrong." Listening to that part just made me so mad on her behalf. It's just racist BS, and she shouldn't have had to deal with it.