Mom and the Motherland
Snippets of my family history
Journey with me into the past as I discover my Ngai ethnic roots, and strive to capture my family history starting with my mother's humble and harrowing past.
Heritage
My mom comes from a family where children worked on the family farm, often at the expense of attending school. Consequently, illiteracy, especially among women, is common in my ancestral line.
What remains of my family history survives through word-of-mouth. This website is an effort to record and preserve snippets of my heritage, with a focus on my mom's background.
Geography
My mom was born in 1959 in a rural town amid the jungles of northern Vietnam. Her father had emigrated from Guangxi Province, China, though there is no record of when. Her maternal family, too, had emigrated many generations ago at an unknown time.
Neither a Vietnamese speaker nor a native of China, she grew up straddling two different cultures while maintaining her own unique cultural identity.
Language
My entire family speaks a relatively unknown Sino-Tibetan language called Ngai, which originates from the Canton region of China. Ngai is somewhat reminiscent of Cantonese with a Vietnamese twang borrowed from China’s southern neighbor.
Ngai translates literally to "I" or "me"
Fittingly, Ngai also identifies an ethnic minority group now scattered across China, Vietnam, and other southeast Asian countries.
