Recently, there has been an influx of acronyms used to group different demographics of people under one umbrella term. The Asian American community has especially experienced this, ranging from AAPI to APIDA and more. While these terms are created under the pretense of inclusion, there is still work to be done in digging beyond language to understand its meaning and intention.
UCLA students are required to take a year of a foreign language in order to graduate. Luckily, students are given many options to choose from, ranging from commonly taught foreign languages such as Spanish to other languages such as Swahili. I chose to take Chinese to fulfill my…
Three years ago in my high school classroom, I watched as a college student mocked an entire language in the halls of my future university. My 11th-grade teacher projected the video for the whole class to see, the audio loud enough that the words rang through our minds.…
One of my earliest memories is of panic. At four years old I returned from a summer with my family in India and struggled to take hold of English. It was in many ways an unbalancing, a question posed with no clear answer – if I could hold…