When we came to America, my mom stopped speaking Vietnamese to me and my older brother. That said, we lost a lot of our heritage right there. Well, a lot of times we tried to entertain ourselves (video games, computers and cable hadn't been invented yet). Often times we would sit around and listen to our mom talk on the phone to her Vietnamese friends. We would pick up on one or two words that sounded entertaining and repeat them to annoy her.
One particularly dreary morning it was raining out and my mom was on the phone jabbering away. My brother and I were jumping on her bed and she says "mu'a" which sounds to us like "moo" or "muuuuuuh" so we pick up on that word and decide to start acting like cows while repeating the word over, and over, and over...you get the idea.
My mom starts laughing so hard she has tears running down her face. She hangs up on her friend and tells us, "your darn crazy kid! You have to be careful when you say thing in Vietnamese! You say mu'a (pronounced muhhh) that mean rain. You say mu^'a (pronounced muah), that mean throw up!"
Can you really believe she told two kids that? Of course we ran with that saying the word over and over, while we were pretending to throw up. About that time we got kicked out of her room.