This chapter lays the foundational framework for the relation between language, culture, and identity. Through an analogy, it illuminates the developmental parallels between heritage language and the rhizomatic growth of bamboo. Introducing the method of serial narrative ethnography, it underscores the significance of narrative knowing across the lifespan as a means for scientific understanding and the power of multiple stories through voices. It also presents an outline of the book.

Chapter 6 portrays two adolescent speakers of Chinese as a heritage language and their respective families.  Drawing upon interview data as well as face-to-face conversational data in everyday interactions, it situates the adolescents’ attitude toward the Chinese language in the contexts of talking about their respective families in terms of values, behavioral patterns, and accents, talking for their families as they interpret and translate from Chinese to English for their parents and polish their parents’ English in everyday social encounters, and talking with their families in digital communication across three generations. It explores second-generation immigrant children’s perceptions of their parents’ attitudes toward child rearing, college preparation, and career choices. It also investigates the impact of the parents’ triumphs and challenges in their immigration experience on the children’s language choices.

Chapter 2 uses one first-generation immigrant mother’s narrative as a basis to outline the language background of the family and to explore the construction and the characteristics of the bilingual space at home, as well as the history and the forces behind the shift of linguistic repertoire in the household during the early years of children who are speakers of Chinese as a heritage language.

Chapter 5 takes the reader to a community-based weekend Chinese language school. Drawing upon reflections from a Chinese language teacher there, it delineates the historical complexity of Chinese language traits and cultural values as well as the challenges in choosing what to impart to children who speak Chinese as a heritage language and how to instill a cultural ethos which may be divergent from mainstream culture. It explores the history and evolving emphasis of Chinese language schools over time, the nature and cultural significance of the Chinese writing system as well as the challenges it poses to learners of Chinese as a heritage language, the culturally specific ways of conceptualizing education, and the cultural shift that accompanies and motivates language shift.

Chapter 7 follows a young adult college student who speaks Chinese as a heritage language and his girlfriend as they explore language, life, and race relations during the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to use the Chinese language to transform the very Chinese-American communities they grew up in and transcend the cultural identity that is assigned to them by society. It explores societal language ideologies regarding Americans of Chinese origin, cultural legitimacy and authenticity for second-generation Chinese immigrants both in the U.S. and in China, the relation between diaspora and domesticity, and the transformative role of Chinese as a heritage language in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the nonlinear nature of language shift.

Chapter 3 presents a grandmother’s perspective on child rearing and cultural values in the household of two second-generation Chinese immigrant children. It explores the distribution of childcare responsibilities across generations, the values imparted to and instilled in the children, and the management of caring and teaching across languages at home. Drawing upon both narratives and recorded and transcribed interactions, it examines the family’s use of both Chinese and English during a range of recurrent speech events, such as having dinner, reading stories before bed, and doing homework after school.

Chapter 4 depicts a US elementary school that a second-generation Chinese immigrant child attends. It explores the school’s multicultural ideology and monolingual ethos from the child’s kindergarten teacher’s viewpoint. It further explores how this child’s family language ideology and policy are shaped by his first-generation immigrant parents’ own language limitations in the U.S. and their comparative views on Chinese versus American communicative styles. Through observation and narrated stories, this chapter brings the reader to the child’s elementary-school classroom, his school’s field day and international day, and his parents’ workplaces. It presents a case where not only do the parents fully support the English-only policy and practice at school, but they also are ready and willing to deliberately shift to greater use of English at home, based on their careful cost–benefit assessment of the consequences of the language shift for their family.

Chapter 8 concludes the book with a recapitulation of how the serial narrative ethnographic method sheds light on theories of language shift and cultural adaptation in general; a consideration of some alternative lenses through which to conceptualize the heritage language repertoire; and a dialectical, dialogical, and ecological take on language shift. It ends with projections regarding the trajectory of the heritage language repertoire; a call for shifts from a focus on discrete heritage languages to heritage linguistic repertoires and from static to dynamic views of diaspora with social justice and multilingualism at the core; and a reminder that heritage languages are not static relics but living narratives that evolve in response to tradition, adaptation, and the interplay between the past and the future.

This chapter presents a qualitative approach to research on heritage language development – narrative ethnography, which integrates text-based methods of narrative analysis with field-based, interaction-enriched methods of linguistic anthropology. It begins with an overview of its epistemological orientations and an exploration of its usefulness for heritage language research before discussing its methodological orientations. It is argued that such an approach is particularly productive for a context-dependent field such as heritage language development. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the merits and challenges of this approach and its potential to advance knowledge about heritage language development and learning.