Intergenerational autoethnography of heritage language maintenance: Focusing on emotion, identity, and power

Abstract

This collaborative autoethnography explores the intersection of heritage language (HL) maintenance, emotion, and identity from the perspectives of a mother and her 15‐year‐old daughter learning and maintaining Korean in the United States. The analysis of their narratives concerning critical emotional experiences relevant to HL maintenance reveals that their complex emotional experiences were guided by a feeling rule: Be evincive of a desire for HL maintenance. Both of them engaged in emotion labor by demonstrating their continuous desire for HL maintenance and masking other felt emotions such as anxiety, shame, guilt, and regret. The results also demonstrate that complying with the feeling rule (for immigrant families) goes beyond emotional expressions—it entails self‐fulfillment and social recognition. The mother's desire for establishing her identity as a good (Korean) mother by fulfilling her gendered responsibility of maintaining the HL bolstered her desire for her daughter's Korean language maintenance. The daughter's desire for meeting expectations of others via learning Korean increased her desire for developing bilingual skills, through which she moved away from a racialized and stereotyped Asian image to construct an image of a cool kid with bilingual skills. The article ends with implications for immigrant families’ emotional well‐being and further research on HL maintenance.