[EXCERPT] “Speak Subtitles, Hear Dub” by Kathy Ngoc Nguyen
Editor’s introduction: “Speak Subtitles, Hear Dub” is an excerpt from Kathy Ngoc Nguyen’s Nonfluent Bodies, Switchable Tongues, a collection of interconnected stories exploring language, family, and cultural dislocation. The excerpt offers a fictional counterpart to many of the concerns she reflects on in her essay “Dubbing Disfluencies: Grief, Translation, and the Vietnamese-American Tongue”, also published in Cha, particularly questions of fluency, translation, and the distances language can create between people.
You can read the essay HERE.
Speak Subtitles,
Hear Dub
an excerpt
She prefers listening to the original language of any film, hearing the original actors’ voices carry the intended emotional impact, unless the films are redubbed in Mandarin, which dialectically diverges from the original inflections. Sometimes she doesn’t even read the subtitles; sometimes she’s too captivated by the setting and the emotional backdrop to pay attention to the subtitles. Bong Joon Ho said, “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” Films aren’t inherently foreign; they’re diverse in their multicultural backdrops. The same can be said about any language; languages aren’t foreign, they’re the mother language spoken by native speakers. That is, if they don’t lose their mother tongues in favour of another language that strives to dominate and subjugate.
“Quyên, you know I can’t read the subtitles. Even if I can read a bit of what’s on the screen, they appear and disappear too quickly for me to comprehend. I prefer listening to the English dubs with my limited fluency in the language. The very least I can do is listen and try to process. The film is still enjoyable to me.”
The revelation burns Quinn. As if her own mother is comparing Quinn’s nonexistent Vietnamese to bad English dubbing. Still, there are times she wishes she could return to her younger years when she was once a capable interpreter for her parents at the doctor’s office or during those grim parent-teacher conferences. Acting like a linguistic conduit between people, exchanging languages, not only connects her to her parents but to their culture.
A part of Quinn’s childhood memory is filled with tongue twisters, oscillating between processing English words and mentally translating them to her parents’ ears, two people who became residents with fluency issues, resettling in the United States and living as displaced, residential outsiders. That back-and-forth mode is always automatically switched on. Since whenever (time not being relevant in this case), Quinn and her siblings, especially Sam and their brother Keith, were given their first unofficial job titles before they even realised it: the interpreters. All three of them were interpreters for several years, with their parents delegating who went with whom, when, and where.
A defence is forming on the tip of her tongue until she notices Má setting her embroidery down on her lap to watch the first major, long fight sequence in The Nine Demons, where Joey’s father and Gary’s father are viciously murdered. It’s Chang Cheh’s prevailing plot point: character motivation meant brutalising each other for honour, vengeance, and justice, themes she resisted. But the English dubbing takes away the emotional impact framed in the original.
She wonders if this is what Má feels like: being confined to a space that’s only beneficial when there’s a conditional transaction involved. Má’s English fluency is considered below elementary level; some of Sam’s translations, even with all that hard work put in during a single second where time necessitates urgency, might not even make sense to Má. Translations are woven with additions and deletions; they’re never perfect nor complete, hinged with unreliable accuracy when the original speaker can’t comprehend the interpreted translation. They’re difficult and her siblings have been mediocrely translating for their parents for years. Their parents are still able to decipher what Sam tries to convey in Vietnamese as echoes of both Vietnamese and English occupy their specific living space. Attempts to translate become difficult; sometimes they treat it transliterally and without consideration for their parents.
Something jarring that exists onscreen and in audio is how the dubbing doesn’t even match with the presented subtitles, something that Má hasn’t figured out yet since her ears pay more attention to the spoken words firing out somewhere in those reclusive internal speakers. That’s what Quinn gets for focusing on reading the subtitles and ridiculing the dubbed language. It’s like listening to herself speak in broken Vietnamese as she does a mental translation that’s nothing more than a lattice of bilingual incoherence. Even now, watching the film, Quinn wonders if Má attempts to listen to the English dub while translating the words she can understand in Vietnamese, finding the simplest words to process, to find meaning in translations. And does she even care about reading the subtitles, knowing full well the selected subtitles are meant for the original language and not the dub? The desire to understand and speak in a language that’s much harder to pen in words proves to be strenuous, but in the end, through laborious repeated attempts, with a television screen filled with strange English voices without subtitles, Má gives up, electing to simply watch the action and interpret the story as she sees it. Maybe it’s the truth after all: Sam’s and Keith’s Vietnamese is not as fluent as Quinn initially believed it to be. Both are capable interpreters, but did their language capability express any true resonances and echoic impact as the original speaker intended?
The drive to clearly amalgamate two languages is met with undesired outcomes. And even then the authenticity lessens as interpreters focus more on the literal translations in an effort to make sure the exact information is being conveyed. Listening reflectively, compassionately, and attentively is simple, almost straightforward, but the act of translation becomes unintelligible and too intricate, almost impossible to do. Sounds, forms, speech, and conviction decrease as translations take precedence, lost in translation. They are constantly dubbing languages through simplification without realising it. What’s the distinction between dubbing and interpreting literal translations? When do both acts become so enmeshed to the point the interpreter simply dubs words from native speakers as native speakers passively observe, not understanding the translation when they have to depend on an interplay between words and actions to decode what was just expressed by someone else? Words meld into nothing more than a division between speaker and interpreter and between divisive worlds. Language is multiplex; it becomes an essential organ to the body, communicating to survive as well.
“Quyên?”
“Má?” The only Vietnamese words she can unfailingly pronounce are Má and Ba. Even with her audibly accented Vietnamese, she can still call her parents Má and Ba.
“I can’t tell which one is which and who is who. The voices all sound the same to me this time. Is Joey the one who just got sliced by the evil clan?”
After binge-watching three Shaw Brothers films in dub, Quinn is ready to fall asleep, preparing for the disturbing nightmares The Nine Demons is going to summon. It turns out Joey becoming a demon to gain otherworldly powers for revenge meant that his body acted as a vessel to house nine demonic children who have an insatiable thirst for blood. The film isn’t their first foray into the wuxia and horror genre, but it did scare Má senseless. Still, the fighting sequences, with all those majestic weapons, are spectacular; they didn’t care for the absurdity of the Faustian lore Chang Cheh attempted to retell by employing his signature wuxia style.
“Before you go to bed, could you take that DVD out and put this one in for me?” Má asks, giving Quinn the DVD. “I’m too lazy to get up.”
“Aren’t you sleepy?”
“No, not after watching those children happily devouring the opposition’s blood-stained spears, spitting out the metal parts to hit their opponents’ vital parts, and then drinking the blood leaking from their dying bodies.”
“You know these films are ridiculously bloody, Má. It’s not the first time. House of Traps and Five Elements Ninjas are equally bloody.” Quinn rolls her eyes and points to the other DVD covers.
“Bloody but not disgusting. That movie with Gary and Joey used children to show men’s bloodlust. That’s just terrible.”
Quinn releases a tired laugh. Má, a raconteur, did have a point, although it feels almost hypocritical because of how much Má enjoys the fight choreography. Most Shaw films deliver some creatively horrific deaths. Quinn compares wuxia’s violent deaths as equivalent to the genre described as torture porn. The narrative and motivation behind Chang Cheh’s House of Traps is eerily set up to be an impending doom of torturous deaths. Death, while torturous, didn’t have to be that violent.
Examining the DVD, Quinn realises it’s one of those cheaply produced Vietnamese karaoke DVDs where the song is visually accompanied by an unrelated music video or short film, usually about a cisgender couple’s fractured relationship or some slow or quick sequences of nature that serve as a sentimental scenic backdrop to the song’s narrative.
“You don’t want to watch those Paris By Night or Asia Entertainment DVDs where singers dramatically perform their renditions on stage? Why watch karaoke?” Quinn looks at the back, attempting to decipher if she can recognise some of the song titles or artist names. She knows Sam can read a bit of Vietnamese after repeatedly watching these karaoke DVDs with Ba. Watching certain words drift on screen while concurrently listening to the songs’ lyrics allows Sam to recognise words and read them within context. Words become easier to recognise when they’re regularly seen; seeing the words makes it easier to identify them within reasonable context. Although Sam can write in limited Vietnamese, she still can’t mark the necessary words with the correct diacritics.
“I just want to listen to the songs while embroidering this pillow out here. I don’t want to go to sleep yet.”
It’s another unspoken but direct reference to silently explain how Ba’s absence is too palpable. The room they shared only serves as a reminder of a missing body in their home.
“Má?” Quinn wants to do this; she wants to see if Sam’s method worked. Can visualising the Vietnamese language regain her ability to converse in Vietnamese with Má? With Ba, who can’t really speak above a whispering register?
If she can read and follow some of the subtitles on screen, then maybe she can patiently decode Vietnamese words until her brain registers their familiar words, intonations, and expressions. There’s a possibility that her returning Vietnamese might be regressive, contributed to by the time she left it unused and unspoken, and accented, but a language threaded in unfamiliar words still provides some sort of familial consolation that closes a cultural distance between them.
“What?” This time she responds in English. Má sits at a weird angle on the carpet with her legs in a strange butterfly position where her toes aren’t touching but providing an in-between gap so she can weave the dark purple thread around her toes. Her tightly threaded frown lines become more salient as she squints her eyes in concentration. Her toes work to detangle the purple thread; her hands move in circles as if she’s looming something invisible.
“Let’s karaoke.”
Má possesses a surprisingly soft, gentle singing voice that contrasts with her raucously sonorous speaking voice. It’s the first time Quinn hears her mother sing; she’s heard Ba sing multiple times because he knew almost every popular Vietnamese song by memory, songs he used to sing in his band, a trio, during their free time, those rare minutes when they weren’t fighting in the war or worried about being killed. Má’s emoting lilt is melodic and blends with the original singer’s vocals. The music’s tempo shifts from a quiet lullaby to the usual dramatic tenor Vietnamese music tonally carries. There’s that resonance she remembers hearing in Ba’s room.
Hearing Má sing, her voice carrying the lyrics while controlling a harmonised pitch, makes the song somehow more identifiable. It’s a memorable one that Ba always listens to, well, one of the many Vietnamese songs he listens to, but this one she remembers her father also humming the melody to when he’s outside repairing his unreliable Oldsmobile. She tries to identify the singer’s voice, the singer whose distinct throaty voice once sounded familiar to her. It’s a corporeal voice that became a part of her childhood, a time when Vietnamese music was forcefully played in their rooms at night as a remedy to tranquillise their erratic sleeping rhythms. But these lulling Vietnamese voices feel more like a foreigner invading her mind as she fights to search for the familiarity. It isn’t a negotiation between remembering and forgetting. The singer’s face is located somewhere in her memory; she just needs to recover that face buried somewhere deep in her memories that she occasionally revisits to relive that forgotten time by returning to those vanished years, as Wong Kar-wai always interiorised so poetically, that she herself internalised for the sake of nostalgia. All she remembers is a time she once spent watching this song being performed in one of the many tapes Ba has in his personal collection of Vietnamese DVDs and VHS tapes; this person is also one of Ba’s favourite singers, among many. Her name is on the tip of Quinn’s rigid tongue, but she can’t pronounce it. What’s the title of this song again? Both are printed on the screen; she can easily see it, but she fails to recognise both because she feels illiterate just seeing Vietnamese words and names being visibly spelled out to her. Má smiles and wordlessly places the microphone into Quinn’s shaking hands.
“What song did you just sing?”
Even when Má slowly enunciates the song and artist’s name and she hears the recognisable elocution, her tongue still refuses to lift itself to pronounce them. Muscular, rotund words feel intimidating to her tongue. Her uncompromising body is experiencing a vocabulary elusion.
“Do you want Má to pick a song for you?” Má’s voice is gentle and caring, like she’s aware of Quinn’s intentions. After reviewing the menu screen, Má selects one of the twelve tracks listed, possibly another song she once heard in the past.
“You used to like this singer. When you were little, you wanted to sound like her because you said her voice was so beautiful and melodious.”
Quinn nods and watches as a medley of lyrics floats on and off screen, tauntingly moving away from her sight as the tones she thinks she can carry in pitch evade her; the weight of their vocabulary is something her tongue refuses to accommodate. The prolonged elongation of what she recognises as the perceived r sound in Vietnamese makes her forcefully lift her tongue up as she pretends to exude an air of practised mastery. And yet the noise she can only make shatters. All that audibly remains is her mangled pitch of mispronunciations. Her body trembles, showing the impacts of her mispronunciations. She refuses to even turn to look at Má’s sympathetic eyes. She’s already lost her voice before the flow of words appears and disappears onscreen.
How to cite: Nguyen, Kathy Ngoc. “Speak Subtitles, Hear Dub.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 7 Oct. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/10/07/speak-subtitles.
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.]