Vietnamese Mandarin in circulation
I trace how a stylized Vietnamese Mandarin accent travels from online parody into television and everyday interaction in Taiwan. This work asks how digital repetition produces a recognizable racialized voice, how that voice becomes detached from actual Vietnamese speakers, and how Vietnamese marriage migrants receive and contest the parody.
The common focus is listening as a social act: listeners do not simply decode voices; they position speakers and themselves within histories of nation, race, class, and mobility.
Selected papers
Language regimes across Taiwan and Singapore
A second strand examines mobility within the Global East. In Singapore, Taiwanese marriage migrants encounter an emotional–linguistic regime in which language and appropriate feeling produce hierarchy even among ostensibly co-ethnic populations. Related work on Singapore Colloquial English shows how World Englishes become sites of metalinguistic conflict, authority, and belonging.