A Simple Twist of Fate (I)

Earlier this week, I received the news (on Instagram!) of the passing, in Montreal, of Anh Lai, the husband of my friend and teacher Phuong Nguyen, father to Duy, Alain and Philippe. Of all of these family members, none of whom I've seen in more than 20 years, I probably had fewest conversations with Anh Lai, since when I would see him he was generally much too busy to sit and talk. (I've learned over the years that some people thrive on constant activity, so that when I hear "I've been really busy recently" it's no longer clear to me whether to offer commiseration or congratulations; I believe that Lai was the latter type of person.) And yet the few words he ever addressed to me were career-changing, for without Lai's intervention I might never have spent the rest of my professional career studying Vietnamese, which pursuit has resulted in over 20 single-authored and co-authored publications (many with my former PhD student Trang Phan), and which has brought Vietnamese linguistics to the attention of preeminent researchers in generative grammar, and vice versa. More significantly, I like to think that these publications, however flawed, have laid much of the groundwork for research in Vietnamese generative linguistics, in syntax at least. All of this is ultimately due to Anh Lai.

Sometime in 1994 or 1995, just after I had started an Assistant Professor job at McGill, I walked out of the university main gate, crossed Sherbrooke, and headed down one of the cross streets to Bio Optimum, a Vietnamese restaurant I had seen a few weeks earlier. (Google tells me the restaurant was on Union, a few blocks east of the gate, so that must be it; still, in my memory it was located directly opposite). The impetus for this 100m excursion was a mental itch that had developed some months previously: a otaku desire to learn a non-Indo-European language. From prep school on, when it all started, through the end of undergraduate studies, the extent of my fascination with foreign languages has only been eclipsed in passion by Gollum's, with a certain Ring; hopefully, I will not suffer the same fate. In terms of first exposure, I have come to know something of French, Latin, (six words of) Greek, German, Italian (outside school), Spanish. After graduating university, I added Swedish ('...in six months', thanks Hugo, for forever imprinting the putative Vad är livet för en börda! in my mind), and Dutch. My PhD dissertation focussed on the syntax of Modern Irish. It's fair to claim that I am what Norbert Hornstein recently coined—a languist, not a linguist, in his sense; cf. Hornstein (2024). 

All of these languages are related, they regularly betray their Indo-European origins, such that learning one or other Romance or Germanic variety, for example, involves little more than retuning the phonological dial on an old analogue radio set. So, I was curious to see if I could acquire a language with a completely different lexical base, and alien phonetics.

The choice of Vietnamese was as much a matter of exclusion—a House-style diagnostic differential—as of opportunity. First, I didn't want to put in the hours learning a language without an alphabet or similarly accessible orthography (hangul would have been acceptable, Greek or Cyrillic is always an option), given how dependent adult L2 learning is on literacy. This choice excluded Arabic, Thai, Chinese varieties, Japanese (beyond children's story books), Dravidian, many North American and Arctic varieties. Second, I didn't want to learn in a classroom setting: being only a year into my tenure-track job made me insecure about learning alongside my students. At the same time, given work commitments, I didn't want to travel too far for my education. Finally, the chosen language needed to be spoken by a reasonable number of Montrealers. This odd calculus led to Vietnamese, and to my afternoon stroll down Union.

In retrospect, given the turn my life took two years later, when I met Ayumi, I should have learned Japanese instead: a slightly earlier start might have saved years of frustration and ineptitude. I doubt, though, whether it would have made much difference: Japanese is the one foreign language I've ever needed for daily life that I've never been able to embrace. Even after 15 years in Japan and a quarter century of married life, my Japanese is—as Julian would say—"a bit rubbish."

And so to Lai, at Bio Optimum, ca 1994. Just after lunch service was finished one Monday, I walked into the restaurant, and explained—in English or French, I no longer remember—that I was interested in learning Vietnamese, and did he know of anyone that might be able to help. Never one to ignore a financial opportunity, he said something like "yes, my wife help you. Very good teacher. $20 dollar a hour. She not here now. Come back 4 o'clock." Again, I can't remember the exact words, or whether this message was conveyed in English or French. What is certain is that the utterance lacked all of the grammatical categories that became the focus of my work on Vietnamese, where they are as optional in usage (languistically), as they are crucial to understanding the syntax (linguisitically).

'And so it was...' I returned at 4pm that day, and for an hour every Monday after that. Chi Phuong was indeed an exceptionally good teacher, just through conversation, and she and her family became very good friends to me, and later to Ayumi, later still to Sean. After two years, a personal interest had become a professional research topic: further details populate my cv, from 1998 on.

Anh Lai, cám ơn anh nhiều lám!

(This piece was intended to be part of a discussion of Dylan's song title Simple Twist of Fate. Just the title, not the song itself, which doesn't fit at all. But there is no time for that, this weekend.)