“Du nót ri-eo cao-bồi:” The Beauty of Language in Butterfly Yellow

 Thanhha Lại’s Butterfly Yellow (2019) clearly stands out among Asian American texts for its delightful play with both the Vietnamese and English language.

The main character, Hằng, is a native Vietnamese speaker who journeys to the United States to find her airlifted younger brother. She ends up carpooling with LeeRoy, a wannabe cowboy raised by professors, who can understand her accented English pronunciation. Lại wields both languages to her advantage in this novel, utilizing the Vietnamese alphabet to capture a distinctly Vietnamese pronunciation of English words. Unlike in English, every Vietnamese word is pronounced exactly as it is spelled. The diacritical marks above vowels indicate changes in tone – follow those, and one cannot mispronounce.

Images from http://mylanguages.org/vietnamese_alphabet.php

Lại’s choice to write out English words using Vietnamese diacritical marks does more than just educate a linguistic outsider. It poses a unique puzzle to the readership that is fluent in both languages, a readership often unacknowledged in texts that aim to educate ignorant readers about the “authentic” experience of refugee children. This implementation of language encourages readers who know how to read diacritical marks to sound out each syllable, then translate the resulting sound into a word in the English lexicon. Readers are given clues: spaces separate words and dashes indicate which sounds belong together in a single word.

For example, the main character Hằng says, “Thanh kìu” (60) – “Thank you.” 

Using the chart above, try to decipher “Ai phai bờ-ró-đờ” (52)!

If readers cannot solve the riddle or do not know how to read Vietnamese, Lại smoothly uses the English-speaking listener, LeeRoy, to repeat the words in English spelling so that the meaning is revealed whether or not one has the linguistic knowledge.

Despite the accented pronunciation, this writing choice demonstrates that Hằng knows much more English than refugees are given credit for; her father taught English in Việt Nam and passed on his expertise to his daughter. Hằng even diagrams sentences in English, arguing with LeeRoy as to how sentences should be parsed. At the novel’s climax, Vietnamese, English, Spanish, and French are all sung, becoming a moment of unbounded connection between Hằng, the native Vietnamese speaker, her brother David, who had forgotten the language, and LeeRoy, the native English speaker. This novel shows that language is not an assimilation barrier but a multifaceted means to form relationships despite cultural differences.

Works Cited

Lại, Thanhhà. Butterfly Yellow. Harper, 2019.