[ESSAY] “Dubbing Disfluencies: Grief, Translation, and the Vietnamese-American Tongue” by Kathy Ngoc Nguyen

Editor’s introduction: In “Dubbing Disfluencies, Grief, Translation, and the Vietnamese-American Tongue”, Kathy Ngoc Nguyen writes about grief, caregiving, memory, and the difficulties of moving between English and Vietnamese. Beginning with the death of her father and the challenge of articulating grief across languages, the essay then turns towards questions of fluency, accent, translation, and dubbing, asking what may be altered, lost, or preserved when experience passes from one language into another. These concerns also shape Kathy’s creative work, particularly Nonfluent Bodies, Switchable Tongues, her collection of interconnected stories exploring linguistic estrangement, familial intimacy, and the limits of translation.

After reading the essay, we invite you to continue with an excerpt from the collection, “Speak Subtitles, Hear Dub”, which brings many of these preoccupations into fictional form. You can read the excerpt HERE.

Dubbing Disfluencies

an essay

Perhaps it was the nonlinear experience of caregiver guilt, of being in direct contact with death and witnessing that impending death, and of living with anger and grief that led me to prose writing.

None of these feelings, guilt, anger, and grief, exists in isolation; their close intersections exacerbate one another.

Perhaps my guilt, anger, and grief manifested, and continue to manifest, in that hauntingly tangible image of my father, his left hand weakly holding my right as he painfully breathed his last. I was the only person present to see my father die in that cold hospital room, presumably sterilised but still very much contaminated with a reservoir of germs. Years earlier, after my father was hospitalised following a blood transfusion prompted by possible drug-induced thrombocytopenia, he and I had a conversation about the haunting germs left by patients dying in the same room. Judging from his tone and the low, throaty chuckle at the end of our conversation, he might have been making a joke, albeit a morbid one. I was not sure how to respond at the time, so I remained quiet. But his words, like some of the stories he repeatedly retold and reshared, troubled me. They still vex me.

Thinking that I could write only in academic language, the presumed analytically objective but inaccessible and often isolating language embraced by academia, I began writing more prose after my father’s ashes were buried in his still-unmarked burial plot, since his headstone did not arrive until after his funeral.

I remember being irrationally angry at the sight of that unmarked burial plot. There was something about the intangibility of namelessness that made the visibility of erasure all the more palpable.

Months after my father’s ashes were buried, the headstone arrived without flower vases, something I had neglected to request. I called my mother in tears over the mistake. I can no longer remember what I said. I remember only sobbing over the phone while my mother consoled me. I disliked myself and loathed the way that anger was consuming me because it felt selfish. Even over the phone, I did not feel sufficiently present for my mother.

It is grief. Everything circles back and returns to grief. And guilt.

Elsewhere, in an essay about my father and the inadequacies of language, “Eulogies of the Unknown: Stories After Death,” I wrote:

The image of you painfully exhaling your last breath still haunts every fragile fibre of my memory. Recurring nightmares, or dreams, I’m not sure how to separate the two since they both seem to blur the threshold between corporeal and incorporeal realities when attempting to untangle a collation of your past memories. And now you’re manifesting yourself into my present. Continued moving images of your face struggling to breathe have haunted, revisited, me since.

There is always a guilt that saturates grief when I describe seeing my dead father in dreams as nightmares. I cannot remember whether it was my mother or one of her friends who said it, but the sentiment, expressed in Vietnamese, was that my father was visiting me in my dreams.

Whoever said it meant well, but regardless of how well-intentioned the comment might have been, I was not sure that I appreciated it. It did not sit easily with my grief; all I felt was another flash of anger that I desperately contained. Those dreams were affecting me and my mental health. But I did not dare voice this because focusing on my own grief while remembering the dead felt irreconcilable.

All they chose to hear was that I did not want to see my father in my dreams.

Remembering the dead was part of grief, always. What I had difficulty voicing clearly, and did not know how to convey in Vietnamese, was that I simply did not want to relive my father’s death every night.

Mourning in Vietnamese became difficult. I was not fluent enough. Because I was unable to vocalise this grief to my mother, it felt ineffable and difficult even to write about.

Another haunting, manifested through the inability to render grief in its multiple forms.

❧

Months after my father’s ashes were buried, while we were still waiting for his headstone to be securely placed on his burial plot, I began having recurrent dreams of my father dying in front of me. The first came on a weekday, a Wednesday, when I was teaching a Gender and Social Change section. That moment remained unchanged in my dreams: my father, his face contorted in pain, breathing his last. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday followed, and I was still dreaming about the very moment my father died in front of me.

I told no one, not wanting my family to be burdened by my grief when they were going through their own.

Reading cosy healing literature translated from Japanese and Korean provided fleeting respite. My magical-realist favourites featured cats, often charmingly placed on beautiful, artful book covers, serving as dependable speaking or nonspeaking companions while cups of coffee or laundromats suggested the sentimental possibility that grief and love might transcend the duality between life and death. That respite lasted until each story came to an end. I could not speak to my dead father. All that continued was the experience of reliving his death through dreams.

The same dream occurred the following Monday. I called my older sister, who becomes justifiably irritable if her sleep is interrupted before she has to wake at 5.30 a.m., and cried to her, sobbing as I described the recurrent dreams in detail.

Repeated apologies followed. I remember telling her that I felt guilty for not wanting to dream about my father because it felt as though I wanted to erase him, or at least that specific moment, from my memory. But his death was haunting me. I did not know how to reconcile the guilt and grief because they overlapped. At that point, I began forcing myself not to sleep, intentionally making myself an insomniac by languidly grading, washing clothes, performing noisy chores that kept me awake, giving my two cats extra attention, and drinking glasses of Coke. When those methods became ineffective, I would physically exhaust myself until I fell asleep, desperate for nothing but total darkness, without images of the recent past intruding upon the present.

Perhaps it is what Phryne Fisher says in “Death by Misadventure”, an episode of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012-2015), when referring to her sister’s unsolved murder after she was killed as a child, a death that haunts Phryne throughout the first season: “I understand. I know what it’s like to have someone taken before their time. It’s enough to drive you to distraction.”

I have never understood how murder mysteries came to be described as cosy, but I recognise the idiosyncratic moments, characters, and low-stakes tensions that can produce a peculiar sense of comfort. Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries did this for me, despite at least one person, and often more, dying in every episode.

Death and dying do not discriminate. Witnessing my father die in front of me did make it feel as though he had been taken before his time. The doctors declared that he was dying, and he died after being placed in hospice care for a day. It felt irrationally unfair to me then.

Grief still makes it feel unfair to me, sometimes irrationally so.

Those extreme insomniac methods briefly distracted my mind from dreaming of my father’s death again, until eventually they no longer did, and my father continued dying in my dreams, over and over.

Years later, I read Amy Lin’s memoir Here After. Lin writes about her husband’s death. One of her honest, succinct lines that resonated with me was: “When he dies, I fall out of time” (p. 31). I am not sure whether I fell out of time. If anything, I felt distractingly conscious of it. What I feared then was that this particular moment in time would become the only memory I would retain of my father. That fear still exists and continues to manifest itself over time.

Falling out of time, or a particular moment becoming a point of stasis, became a theme to which I repeatedly returned, ironically becoming a referential point in my own writing.

Whether moving forwards or remaining at a standstill, time became repetition. I did everything I could to distract myself from seeing how time was regressing. And now I was regressing with it.

Those same dreams continued to plague my mind. I kept witnessing my father dying again each night. I recognised how relentlessly endless my grief felt.

Another week passed, and watching him die repeatedly in my dreams became too much. This time I woke in tears and called my mother, who listened and offered words of comfort. I could hear her exhaustion over the phone. My mother said many things that morning, gently telling me that it must have been particularly difficult for me because I had been the only person in the room when my father died.

Sobbing and hyperventilating over the phone, all I could do was repeatedly describe the dream in Vietnamese. It was not really a sequence at all, but a realistic replay of watching my father die in front of me. The same realisation came after the conversation slowed into hesitant, accented Vietnamese. Again, how could I speak clearly and fluently to my mother about my grief? In English, grief was omnipresent, consuming enough to breed unchallenged guilt in my mind, a monosyllabic word that felt too heavy on the tongue.

The ability to describe grief fluently in English made it all the more difficult to translate into Vietnamese. Do I expose a vulnerable part of myself to my mother, telling her that my grief feels akin to đau buồn or sự buồn rầu, or do I describe it as sự đau khổ? Those words should describe everything succinctly, yet words never felt sufficient. They could never encapsulate the entirety of my grief. Descriptive language during that time felt empty and made me feel equally hollow.

Or should I tell my mother that my grief mutated into anger before blurring into immense guilt? My mind continually replays the accusation of someone close to me that I had failed to provide sufficient care, that I had not done even the bare minimum expected of a caregiver, as though I had been lackadaisical with my father’s time and uncaring about his condition. According to this accusation, all I had done was stay awake playing games while checking on my father at specifically timed intervals.

I was not confident enough to confide in my mother about what I perceived as the chronicle of my failures as a caregiver. Had I really not done enough? Had I failed to care enough or to provide enough care? Had I failed to translate his words and actions effectively for medical professionals when he could no longer speak, having almost completely lost his voice unless he forcefully strained his larynx after his second stroke, several days of intubation, and complications from aneurysm surgery that ultimately left him completely disabled? Was the word thất bại?

A close friend, a social worker in whom I often confide, explained caregiver guilt to me. I had already suspected it, but being told that I had been an uncaring caregiver had made me question those thoughts. My friend, a confidante, though often regarded as an outsider to the family, reminded me: “It’s easy criticising someone when they’re so far away. Maybe they’re feeling hopeless or upset that they’re unable to visit as often as you do. So they’re just projecting that anger onto you. It’s unfair, understandable in a way, but they have no right to accuse you of not caring or doing enough when you’re the one driving back to your father every weekend.”

She paused, then tentatively asked, “Who’s taking care of you?”

No one expects the caregiver to be cared for. There were only conjectures.

My older sister and I shared caregiving duties. When I finally revealed my self-loathing and how my anger towards that person had increasingly transformed itself into guilt and doubt, she tiredly echoed similar thoughts.

Between Vietnamese and English, how could I explain that I drove home every weekend between two states, five hours apart, boarding two innocent, restless cats each time, and forced myself into patterns of insomnia to ensure that my father was looked after from Friday to Sunday, relieving my older sister because she had her own responsibilities and work commitments during the week? How could I explain that I drove him to follow-up appointments, accompanied him to his pre-surgery consultation, and stayed with him overnight in hospital after his surgery?

How should I convey in Vietnamese that I would do chores to remain alert while remaining constantly conscious of my father, entering his room every hour, sometimes every few minutes because of a chronic fear that he would suddenly stop breathing without anyone realising, to make sure that he was still breathing, however laboured? Then, on Monday mornings, without having slept, I would drive back to Texas in time for the afternoon class I was scheduled to teach that semester. The night before each Monday return, I would spend several hours preparing for class while checking on my father, helping him with his faculties, or wiping away the excess weeping oedema leaking from his swollen leg.

Every day was brutal. My eyelids constantly felt heavy and my eyes burned with exhaustion, but I forced myself to remain awake.

Could I articulate those justifications with equal weight and care in Vietnamese?

It was difficult, a miserable way to exist in that moment, but I chose to care for my father. Even if it did not seem enough. During my undergraduate years, I had also been one of his caregivers when he suffered his first stroke. Comparatively speaking, the spring semester of 2007 was easier because my community-college instructors were lenient and understood that humanity meant caring.

I willed myself to believe that I had been an adequate caregiver, that I had tried to care and had been more than sufficiently present for my father, speaking to him even when he was unable to respond. As transient as that belief was, like a fleeting positive affirmation, my body remained heavy with doubt. Being told that I had never done enough, that I had not cared enough for my father, stayed with me for months. It still does, years later. The initial anger I felt after hearing those words gradually dissipated until all that remained was guilt seeping into my exhausted muscle memory and bones.

Who gets to decide who bears the weight of care? It was a story I wanted to write but could not. A story saturated with grief and personal rationalisations?

Nobody cares about your own guilty conscience. And your grief is your own.

“When was the last time you slept?” my older sister asked tiredly one morning as I put my cats back into the car to return to Texas for the week.

Guilt still persists overwhelmingly whenever I ruminate on these thoughts because it feels ableist. I never asked how my father felt. How could I communicate with him when all I could see was his constant pain? Towards the end of his life, he was unable to speak unless he forced his chest to produce whispers of words that were barely audible. Even in death, I am still speaking about him without knowing his thoughts, his life.

Once I returned to Texas, I called him, sometimes two or four times a day, because I dreaded receiving a call instead. The last time I waited ominously for my father to return my calls, my sister eventually telephoned, her voice trembling with panic, to tell me that he was in hospital and the doctor was not sure whether he would survive. Calling him became important to me. But the one time I asked him how he was, he breathed out in weak Vietnamese, “It hurts, Kathy.” All I could hear was his harsh breathing from prolonged emphysema.

How does a person write and speak about someone’s illness when their body breaks down horrifically from age and multiple chronic illnesses that progressively damage once-healthy muscles and organs?

❧

Shortly after my father’s death, I returned to Texas, continued my coursework, and attempted to work on my candidacy portfolio. The dreams continued, and the guilt of wanting, however minimally, to re-exist and move towards a precarious normality beyond my father’s death became so overwhelming and consuming that I went to the university’s counselling service. I went largely because there remained an innate fear of speaking to my mother about grief.

Speaking to a professional was beneficial, and I recognised that the dreams would not reflexively disappear after a few scheduled sessions. Later, while interning at several institutions for my MSW degree, I came to recognise that therapy did not have the capacity to reconcile everything either. As always, it is a continuing process.

The uncontrollable weeping continued during each session. Therapy prompted raw vulnerability, leading me to reveal how guilty I felt about not wanting to see my dead father dying in my dreams every night. It always returned to my desire not to re-experience his death.

During one of my many sessions, the therapist diagnosed me with complicated grief, now identified as prolonged grief disorder, anxiety, and possible depression.

Somewhere in that small office, and after leaving it, I realised that I would cry inconsolably, or that my eyes would blur with tears, whenever my father was mentioned in passing.

My body and mind were overwhelmed with grief.

I could speak freely in English while remaining reticent in Vietnamese.

❧

Sleepless nights and remaining conscious of every tedium while waiting for something that felt inevitable became themes in my writing. Caring, and the insomniac over-caring born from the fear of witnessing death, became part of that interiority. A projection of my guilt.

There is a passage in Bae Suah’s story “The Non-Being of the Owl” that always resonates with me and feels relevant whenever I ruminate, read, or write about death. In the story, several characters remain dislocated and geographically adrift as they mourn a writer they once knew:

“Someone at the funeral asked about the clothes, wondering what their particular characteristics, exceptionally rough fabric, sloppy needlework, exposed stitches and conspicuously loose finishing, could have to do with mourning. I didn’t know the answer back then, but perhaps now I can say: we wear this sort of clothing because a person’s death is our fault. We have a guilty conscience because, in other words, those who are living are the cause of death. Because someone gets old while we are still in the prime of our life. Because they become ill while we remain in good health. Because they end up dying while we are still alive. Because life is in debt to death. Because one person dies, and in that way the deaths of those remaining are postponed. If this world were to be summed up in a single sentence, it would be this: nature maintains its equilibrium, and man grieves.” (p. 98)

Bae’s writing is elusive, but her meditation on death is simultaneously a rumination on the grieving process. It feels nihilistic, and its tone is both dispassionate and philosophically clinical, leaving almost no room in which to mourn. A biting cultural commentary persists even as the female narrator processes grief methodically. Women’s pain and grief after death are denigrated, dismissed, and criticised, while men’s pain is over-validated, over-valued, and lionised.

How long is a person, a woman, permitted to grieve after a death before she is described as excessively emotional about her own conscience?

Like Bae’s narrator, I am unsure. But Bae’s elusive, haunting tone captivates me. An indeterminate place where geographical locations, borders, realities, and mangled languages collide and undergo multiple slippages is precisely where I want to displace the characters I write.

Like many others, I became obsessed with writing about death. Is this part of my process?

I am still unsure.

It was Kat Chow’s sparse opening line in Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir that influenced my writing: “Like many ghost stories I’ve grown up with, this one needs to start with a death” (p. 3).

No one has ever asked whether it was my father’s ghost visiting me, and for that I am grateful. I dare not see my father, or configure him, as a ghost that haunts me. That image, that conjuring, feels unfair. But his treatment, what he endured in hospital and during a required two-week inpatient stay at a rehabilitation centre, where his voice gradually but audibly disappeared, and the surgery that might have contributed to his body becoming paralysed, haunted me and continues to haunt me. I was also present when his doctor told me that the stroke had probably caused further brain damage leading to dysarthria and aphasia. I remember crying in front of both the doctor and my father. My father looked at me, his face blank and his eyes confused.

That same blank face and those confused eyes, sometimes staring unblinkingly into nothingness, would turn towards the discoloured white walls of his room. At other times, his left hand would absent-mindedly reach for a bag of assorted chocolates I had left for him, and he would eat them mechanically, his expression blank.

During those nights, I would speak to my father. Sometimes he would respond, opening his mouth and moving his lips, but I could hear nothing. At other times, I could understand his whispering register if I leaned close enough. And on some nights he would simply stare at me, unblinking, while eating one small chocolate bar after another.

One night, I asked him in my quiet Vietnamese, “Are you hungry?”

He gave me a blank look and shook his head, yet continued eating one chocolate bar after another, as though doing so were a prerequisite, an automatic action, perhaps an automated response.

I forced myself not to cry in front of him.

Those nights were among the hardest. And, like everything from that period and everything that led to my father’s death, those moments haunt me.

It is inescapable, this act of remembering.

❧

Variations of a character witnessing a father’s death became a recurring theme, passage, and scene in my writing. The first appeared in my short story “The Veteran,” which would later expand into a series of interconnected stories in my chapbook. I began with a succinct line: “Father was dying.” In “The Veteran,” that line grounds another familiar meditation on death and on characters navigating an unknown afterwards.

I wrote the story as a reimagined conversation between a father and daughter, something on which I often dwell. In the chapbook, the father, although his aphasia affects his ability to respond to his family, is aware that he is dying and recognises that his daughter is with him before he breathes his last. It anticipates an absence, whether of a person, language, or voice, that isolates and estranges the characters. These issues quietly intensify already-existing tensions that remain unspoken because the characters lack the confidence to confront their inability to speak one another’s language.

When I wrote “The Veteran,” I did not know how to translate “veteran,” one among many words I either could not translate or mistranslated in Vietnamese. It was not until my brother referred to Tú Nhi’s song “Tâm Sự Người Thương Binh,” one of the many songs my father repeatedly listened to, that I finally found a word that might mean veteran in Vietnamese. Our mother later corrected my brother, explaining that thương binh can mean veteran but specifically refers in Vietnamese to a wounded soldier or veteran. She told me that quân đội giải ngũ or chiến binh giải ngũ would be more accurate translations because both can refer to retired veterans or veterans returning home.

In the end, our mother conceded that any of those Vietnamese descriptions could mean veteran, since English often relies on broad nouns modified by adjectives to achieve greater specificity.

But are noun classifiers not also present in Vietnamese?

I did not know how to translate “noun classifiers” into Vietnamese. All I could do was describe them with a string of Vietnamese words and cite examples of affixes in an attempt to clarify what I meant.

My mother shrugged and answered in the affirmative.

Somehow, language still feels elusive. It is jarring to realise that the fluent conversations that flowed in colloquial Vietnamese within my family did not amount to professional fluency and could still result in stilted exchanges. I could barely translate medical terminology. In 2007, the year my father experienced his first stroke, I did not know how to translate “stroke” into Vietnamese and could only describe his symptoms to my mother. She told me the word was đột quỵ. My dual English-Vietnamese tongue struggled to lift those two monosyllabic words.

My disfluency became increasingly apparent as I noticed how often my mother and I reached moments of tedium in our conversations. Many began with one of us asking the other how to translate a word into English or Vietnamese, sometimes resorting to describing it when neither of us could locate the word itself.

When writing about the irreconcilability of multiple languages that seem to diverge, and about how both languages can feel foreign on the tongue, I always return to the lines in Yoko Tawada’s story “Canned Foreign”: “Most of the words that came out of my mouth had nothing to do with how I felt. But at the same time I realized that my native tongue didn’t have words for how I felt either. It’s just that this never occurred to me until I’d begun to live in a foreign language” (p. 87).

That internal process of translation was always active whenever I spoke to my parents. My response would first be processed internally in English, after which I would translate it inwardly and respond in Vietnamese to the best of my ability. The more complex the vocabulary became, and the more syllables a word contained, the more difficult translation became. The delays in my responses were frustratingly noticeable.

The terror and apprehension involved in speaking on behalf of someone else, with the possibility of mistranslation always present, permeate my writing.

My inability to translate “stroke” as đột quỵ was one reason I wanted to write a piece entitled Nonfluent Bodies, Switchable Tongues.

Nonfluent Bodies, Switchable Tongues was originally an essay detailing my observations of how my father was treated in hospital and during his subsequent transfer to a rehabilitation facility. Apparently, I projected too much of my anger into that essay when writing about his treatment, our experiences of medical racism, and the perpetuation of foreignness within white systems of care.

I wrote about how family interpreters were perceived, perhaps understandably from the perspective of professional objectivity, as untrained, nonprofessional caregivers serving as their families’ ad hoc interpreters. I also wrote about how physical therapists, counsellors, and even social workers sometimes perceived family members as nuisances who impeded their patients’ progress. Unprofessionalism and mistranslation are inevitable risks, but do professionals understand how deeply nonfluent speakers may distrust the system?

The tensions between non-English speakers and medical professionals were a central focus of that piece. But that is another story. One to be told another time. One I attempted to explore and write about, only to encounter multiple rejections.

❧

Later, while writing my dissertation, repeatedly calling my mother to interview her and ask about correct translations, feeling unsupported by some members of my dissertation committee during the height of COVID, and watching the university remain silent amid increasing anti-Asian rhetoric and violence, I was also working on a series of short stories that eventually became a collection of autofiction. The collection reimagined the story of a father found unresponsive in his car after suffering a stroke.

At first, I attempted to write a mystery centred on the father’s death in the car and on the surviving family members’ delusions and grief. I wanted to write a mystery in which the family attempted to untangle the harsh corporeal destruction caused by an unsuspected and undetected stroke while struggling to speak to one another. I imagined a story about the ways language both intentionally and unintentionally exploits and mistranslates, preventing grief from being expressed between speakers.

The main focus was the family scrambling between mangled Vietnamese and English as they attempted to reconstruct what had happened during the unexplained period between the father’s morning walk and his being found unconscious in his car during a heatwave. Neighbours had witnessed him vomiting outside, sitting on the family bench, and dozing off, yet there had apparently been no witnesses during the intervening period. There was no cohesion in that version.

After multiple attempted rewrites, I decided simply to write what haunted me: a story about impending death, mortality, anticipatory grief, and the ambiguities and limitations of language, told through multiple character perspectives.

The story began again with what felt like imminent death. I also knew that the story would end with death, specifically the father’s death.

When outlining the stories, I intended to retain the title Nonfluent Bodies, Switchable Tongues, even though the original version had been rejected. I initially wanted to introduce the word “dub” somewhere in the title, but adding a single word seemed to destroy its fluidity.

Grieving for everything expected in between, the stories intimately explore linguistic estrangement, uneasy familial tensions, the ambiguities of language, the desire to reconcile stiff multilingual tongues, and everything that devastates and traumatises the body. These become major unresolved points of tension between family members.

For these stories, I already had the beginning and coda of each piece mapped out. The stories in the middle are where I attempt to focus more closely on characterisation and narrative plotting, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. In fact, I normally write the ending first because I need a stopping point somewhere. I then work backwards, discovering how the story begins only after I have ended it with unresolved tensions and continuing grief.

One story, for instance, centres on a coda with which I have always wanted to end: a woman futilely attempts to recover her Vietnamese tongue by singing karaoke. Another story, which has undergone multiple title changes, ends with a son who, isolated from his family, prefers messaging to speaking but considers calling his father after his stroke. In the end, he decides to type a script for the telephone call before making it, or perhaps not making it at all.

I think I like to end on bittersweet notes.

❧

Writing about mistranslation means seeking to understand the rigorous confines of language and the experience of linguistic displacement. There appears to be no in-between, no either/or. Language is either accented or unaccented, fluent or disfluent. It becomes an interplay of dualisms.

Although I was born an American citizen, in a moment when even citizenship can feel precarious under the surveillance and regulation of a white ethnostate seeking to resecure white supremacy, Vietnamese people have variously described my Vietnamese as fluent for a Vietnamese American or as lớ lớ, meaning that I do not speak in an organically natural tone, even though my vocabulary does not feel repetitive but diverse. Or, more simply, they describe me as not fluent.

Perhaps I do speak Vietnamese with a noticeable American accent. But, like any speaker accustomed to their own voice and diction, I cannot isolate what other people actually hear. Most friends and acquaintances comment on my idiolect: I am slower in my responses, more careful and thoughtful, though haltingly hesitant when I speak. Far more noticeable is how stilted my Vietnamese sounds compared with my father’s distinctively calm storytelling voice or my mother’s strong, animated elocution.

My precarious grasp of Vietnamese fluency derived from my parents. Like so many things that now feel like missed connections, I never asked my father what he thought of my fluency. My mother, however, points out that their ears were always attuned to their children’s Vietnamese. Since they could understand us, we were sufficiently fluent and capable of maintaining the regional rhythms and vocabulary of Vietnamese. Yet familial ears might not detect what sounds like cacophonous disfluency to another Vietnamese speaker.

Whichever language I speak, I receive mixed messages or am teased about my fluency. Although my English is much stronger, colleagues and family members alike have told me that I have a “noticeable FOB” accent, using the abbreviation for “fresh off the boat”. Apparently, my English carries a discernibly Asian tone.

I consider “FOB” a pejorative because it ridicules and denigrates refugees and immigrants for possessing what some English speakers perceive as distinctive accents, pronunciations, and speech patterns, thereby othering and alienating them from native speakers who consider themselves superior in their fluency.

Equally absurd is the way accents culturally alienate.

Between languages, I am either lớ lớ or a FOB. Yet somehow my quiet, hesitant command of language and the clarity I possess when I am not mumbling are ignored. There is always strain in switching between languages. Sometimes I can switch with ease, but there remains a constant tension, a lilt whenever I suddenly move from one to the other because speaking both languages can feel so diametrically opposed.

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I find it humorous that peers and acquaintances, including some born in Việt Nam, have compared my Vietnamese to that of professional Vietnamese dubbers from California. A peer I met at a writing retreat in 2024 echoed this compliment, telling me that she had overheard me speaking fluent Vietnamese on the phone but detected a different cadence, one that reminded her of professional dubbers who voiced phim bộ, or television series.

Like many Vietnamese families, ours spent time renting Hong Kong, Chinese, and Taiwanese phim bộ dubbed into Vietnamese, preferably wuxia series. My parents, especially my mother, believe that they cannot watch or closely follow a long series of twenty, fifty, or more episodes unless it is dubbed into Vietnamese. Journey to the West and Justice Pao are among the few series she constantly rewatches.

My parents were adamant that all their children should grow up speaking Vietnamese first and English second. This may be true, but I think I acquired a more expansive vocabulary by watching and listening to TVB series dubbed by USLT, phim bộ dịch và US lồng tiếng, or series translated, dubbed, and produced in the United States.

I was aware of regional Vietnamese dialects, but it was not until I rewatched several TVB wuxia series, sometimes on pirated websites or on DVDs purchased years earlier while caring for my father, that I recognised how strongly USLT dubbing was associated with Vietnamese people living abroad or overseas, whom my mother once described as Việt Kiều.

Is it an odd distinction? Whenever language is involved, I am not sure.

Some of the same TVB series from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s that I grew up watching were later redubbed by FFVN, or Sài Gòn Phim, a group of professional dubbers from Việt Nam that began redubbing television series from across Asia.

Having grown up listening to a distinct group of voice actors throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, I prefer watching and listening to USLT, but many of those voices have now disappeared as FFVN redubs have proliferated and seemingly become more popular. When rewatching a redubbed series, my mother complains that she misses the distinctive emotional range of USLT voices, whereas FFVN performers, she feels, sound too similar to one another, without discernible tonal distinction.

I tell her that audiences in Việt Nam often prefer FFVN redubs, with one common criticism being that nobody actually speaks like the USLT dubbers. My mother often pulls a face and mumbles, “Who wouldn’t want to listen to clear voices that express emotions? Why prefer lifeless drones?”

It is the same dilemma, the same argument, returning like a linguistic haunting. USLT is perceived as accented Vietnamese, even though many of its dubbers were born in Việt Nam, because their dialects have been affected by living overseas, making their intonation and fluency audibly different from those of native dubbers.

Why should sounding authentically correct determine fluency? Is this what language entails? Must one cease to sound accented?

This dialectal preference, and the desire to speak in a crystal-clear, dubber-like voice, became focal points in two of my stories because my own fluency has been compared with that of a dubber.

Like many people fascinated by voice actors, I recognised their voices without ever knowing their names or faces. I knew them only through the characters they voiced. My mother still refers to one dubber simply as “the person who dubbed Idy Chan’s Little Dragon Girl”. One actor might speak in multiple Vietnamese-dubbed voices.

And so my stories also frame the ways language creates distance.

❧

Of course, it remains difficult to move on from my father’s death, even years later. As I kept reading, and as professionals have repeatedly told me, grief is here to stay because it has nowhere else to go. Dreams of my father dying in front of me still recur, although much less frequently now. And I continue to think about variations on, and riffs upon, Chow’s line that every story begins with a death, and that conclusions and linguistic conflicts remain unresolved.

Whether life is happy or unhappy, death has no end. I am still navigating that both/and while writing in accented tones and about mistranslations in stories that continue to haunt me.

Maybe living means being haunted.

I still speak to my mother in Vietnamese whenever I call or visit her. Amid her long, uninterrupted storytelling, some stories repeatedly retold, others new and offering glimpses of genealogy or hints of family history, there are occasional interruptions in which each of us asks the other for a translation or reflects on the complexities and inadequacies of being too transliteral.

Thinking about it now, I am uncertain how I would correctly translate “both/and” into Vietnamese for my mother.

Her answer might be cả hai because it can be both.

Because why can it not be?

Kathy Ngoc Nguyen’s Postscript: I would like to include here a couple of my late father’s personal documents that he was required to carry with him as a kind of passport. Shortly after his death, while cleaning and reorganising his room, I found some of them. Since this piece continues, in some sense, as a eulogy, I thought it might be fitting to include them. One photograph shows a “new life boarding pass”, a politically repugnant expression, alongside his medical screening card. Morbid as these artefacts may seem, they feel appropriate to the piece’s themes of life and death, as well as to what I recognise as my own recurring preoccupation with hospitals.

Bibliography

▚ Lin, Amy. Here After: A Memoir. Zibby Books, 2024.
▚ Bae Suah. North Station. Translated by Deborah Smith. Open Letter, 2017.
▚ Chow, Kat. Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir. Grand Central Publishing, 2021.
▚ Tawada, Yoko. Where Europe Begins. Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky and from the Japanese by Yumi Selden. New Directions, 2007.

^{How to cite: Nguyen, Kathy Ngoc. “Dubbing Disfluencies: Grief, Translation, and the Vietnamese-American Tongue..” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 7 Oct. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/10/07/dubbing-disfluencies.}

Kathy Ngoc Nguyen received her PhD in Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies from Texas Woman’s University and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Ethnic and Gender Studies at Metro State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her works have appeared in Gulf Coast, Drunk Monkeys, Short, Vigorous Roots: A Contemporary Flash Fiction Collection of Migrant Voices, which is a 2022 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Anthologies, Food of My People: The Exile Book of Anthology Series, diaCRITICS, Kartika Review, FIVE:2:ONE, Fearsome Critters, which was selected as the Editors’ Choice for Top Contributor in Hybrid Work, The Activist History Review, and elsewhere. She was a former Short Fiction Section Co-Editor at CRAFT Literary. Her chapbook Nonfluent Bodies, Switchable Tongues is forthcoming. [All contributions by Kathy Nguyen.]