‘Really meaningful to me’: Bilingual storytelling headlines Inner West Lunar New Year celebrations

By PATRICK MCKENZIE

When Nga Le performed a song at Marrickville Library as an eight-year-old after coming to Australia as a refugee, she never expected to be performing there again, let alone decades later. 

“From when I was a little kid who hadn’t fully grasped the English language, to come back as an adult and to tell a story in English and Vietnamese is something really special,” she says.

Nga performs bilingual stories and songs as part of the Forked Tongues Multilingual Storytelling group, a collective run in Fairfield by multilingual bookshop and community space Lost in Books.

As part of the Inner West’s Lunar New Year celebration, Nga facilitated a Vietnamese and English bilingual storytelling session at Marrickville Library on Wednesday. 

The session included a folktale about foods used to celebrate Tết – Vietnamese Lunar New Year.

“All those years, the journey that I’ve been through, coming back to this place where I started from, it’s just really meaningful to me,” she says.

The shop’s managing organisation, the Think+DO Tank Foundation, is a non-profit arts and community development organisation dedicated to championing multilingual creativity and elevating the voices of low-income and excluded community members through the arts.

The Foundation trains bilingual women as part of Forked Tongues to perform folklore, written stories and original material for audiences of all ages.

Nga believes that the stories and songs she’ll be sharing with an audience of mostly children are important for celebrating her mother tongue, as well as building cultural understanding and continuity.

“I’m a Mum of two young kids and I want them to be able to speak to their grandparents. Language is a very important part of our culture and identity,” she says. 

“To be encouraged to get that out there, and to encourage others from different backgrounds, or even monolingual folks to take on another language is really exciting work.”

Finding common ground

Yuanyuan Yang, a fellow Forked Tongues storyteller, performed a session in Chinese and English at Ashfield Library earlier this week.

Yuanyuan says (like Nga) that the power of presenting stories across two languages is in building understanding and developing a “wider perspective towards the world”. 

“It’s a good opportunity for children from all kinds of backgrounds to know the importance of [Lunar New Year] for Chinese people,” she added. 

Building on her previous experience as a community language teacher, Yuanyuan integrates chants and repetitions within her stories, so that her audience, often a mix of Chinese-speaking and non-Chinese speaking children, can remember basic words.

One of the stories she told was mostly in English, but introduces the names of Chinese Zodiac animals in Chinese.

“The children are really in the story and practice the things that Chinese people do during the new year.”

The Year of the Water Tiger began on February 1 this year.