A note from the founder
I built Heardloom because I was losing my family’s story to a language barrier
“I am the child of an immigrant family. Over the years, I lost a lot of connection to our traditions, and I have always struggled to properly communicate with my family because of language.”
Growing up as the child of immigrants, I lived between two languages. I knew enough of my parents’ and grandparents’ language for the surface of family life — “sit down and eat,” “put on a jacket,” “how is work?” — but the moment a conversation turned to memory, history, or feeling, I ran out of words.
Because of that language gap, so much went unasked. I saw holiday traditions and family dishes happen around me without really knowing where they came from or what they meant. As I got older, I realized how much connection to our roots I had already lost — and how hard it was to sit down with my family and have the conversations that actually mattered.
[Your personal story placeholder: Add a specific memory here — for example, a holiday dinner, a grandparent’s dish or hometown you wished you knew more about, or the moment you realized you needed a bridge between your language and theirs.]
That is why I built Heardloom, and why we created Lana (兰兰). Lana is the patient, fluent listener I could never be on my own. She sits with our parents and grandparents in the language they think and dream in, asks the questions we send her, and turns their words into a forever capsule of bilingual stories, voice recordings, and family traditions that we — and our children — can hold onto forever.