Identity

A Hong Kong-Chinese-Canadian Goes to Shanghai . . .(by Janan Chan)

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Photo credit: Janan Chan 陳臻

Janan Chan陳臻, our guest blogger this week, lives in Shanghai. His poems are published in The Mitre (118, 122, 126, 128), yolk. (1.1), Soliloquies Anthology (25.2), Warm Milk (3), and the chapbook “Water Lines”. Janan’s poems explore themes such as identity, place and belonging (Chinatown, Montreal, pg. 62-63); feelings of mundanity and ephemerality (Cavity Sonnet, describing a cavity filling during the pandemic); and feelings of nostalgia and longing (On Track, pg. 15, Knowing Few People in Early Semesters, and 15.) Janan is a graduate of Concordia University in Montreal and Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec.

This blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

Drawing credit: Janan Chan 陳臻

In 2004, my mom and I left Hong Kong for Toronto. I was seven years old. Although I cannot recall this, she tells me I struggled in English class. My weekend Chinese lessons were no better. I could not see the use of the language, and the lessons reminded me of a community and identity I no longer wished to be a part of. In school, I refused Chinese dishes for lunch, preferring instead the white bread sandwiches that my classmates ate. Later, in high school, I would even try my best to distance myself from the Chinese international students. In university, I completed a BA Honours in English Lit. with a Minor in Creative Writing and Journalism, and an MA in English Lit. and Creative Writing.  These achievements and how I lived allowed me to insulate myself within an English-speaking identity.

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Ces petits refrains (par Caroline Dault)

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Les études… et la liberté! (photo de Nenad Stojkovic, Flickr)

Mai 2005. J’ai 18 ans. J’ai été acceptée au bac en théâtre à l’UQAM, dans quelques mois, je vais quitter la résidence familiale. Déménager à Montréal. Je suis tellement excitée à l’idée de partir vivre cette nouvelle vie, loin de tout ce que j’ai connu, mais si près de tout ce que j’ai toujours voulu. À deux heures de route de mes parents, du confort de mon enfance, je vais pouvoir commencer ma vie d’adulte. Je suis triste de déménager loin de mon chum, mais j’ai 18 ans et la vie devant moi.

Dans ma chambre, je commence à mettre ma vie de jeune fille en boite. À la radio, commence une ritournelle que je connais par cœur.

Cré moi, cré moi pas, quelque part en Alaska
il y a un phoque qui s’ennuie en maudit
Sa blonde est partie gagner sa vie 
dans un cirque aux États-Unis. [i]
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The lure of white subjectivity (by Dr Sunny Lau)

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Last year, one of my education students (let’s call her Saira) asked to meet with me. Saira was an international student from South Asia who spoke at least three languages other than English and majored in Teaching English as a Second Language. She was musing about leaving the program here in Quebec to pursue instead a postgraduate teaching diploma in the UK. Since it was her plan to teach in Europe, she believed that having British teacher certification might help “cancel out” all negative images associated with her as a non-native English speaker, and that it might also afford her a better chance of getting employment than the certification from Quebec.

Photo under Pixabay License

My heart sank as I listened to her rationalization.

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Thinking with and beyond liminality: (re)claiming the ‘in-between’ (by Magali Forte and Parise Carmichael-Murphy)

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This week we have two guest bloggers. Magali Forte is a doctoral research assistant in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, as well as a French immersion teacher in Vancouver, BC. In her research, she adopts a sociomaterial perspective, putting to work posthumanist, new materialist and Deleuzo-Guattarian theories, in order to examine identity in a different way in multilingual education settings. Doing so, she acknowledges and continues to learn about the rich Indigenous perspectives that are informing her work. Parise Carmichael-Murphy is a PhD student at the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester. She has worked with children and young people across the 0-25 age range in formal and informal education settings. In her research, she embraces Black feminist thought and Intersectionality to unpack how education policy and practice can perpetuate social inequities.

As doctoral students in education, we have been thinking critically about normalized language practices in education which hinder children’s and teenagers’ sense of belonging and negatively impact their process of identity construction. We ask the following questions:

  • How might the notions of liminality and threshold help us consider how children’s and teenagers’ identities find or lack space to express and transform in education with/in all of their languages?
  • How does the curriculum viewed as an imposed political box limit the ways in which we (are) educate(d)?
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Why is my reflection someone I don’t know? On language, culture, and being a critical applied linguist (by John Wayne N. dela Cruz)

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We are all plurilinguals (Piccardo, 2019).

This is a quote from one of my courses in Fall 2020, one that has resonated with me profoundly. It’s a line that I keep hearing in my head, and a lesson that I’ll take with me beyond this course’s online classroom (thanks for that, COVID-19!). For the final course assignment, I decided to take inspiration from this quote: to create a digital collage, and to write a blog post to go with it. Through the digital collage and post, I wish to unpack this quote by asking and responding to the question: if I am a plurilingual, how so and in what ways?

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