Scene 1: Restaurant entrance

 

Emily arrives at a Graduate Student Social event.

Organizer greets her.

 

Greeter:           Hi. Welcome to Graduate Student Social. Do you mind wearing a name tag?

Emily:             Sure.

Greeter:           Great. Grab a drink and sit wherever you like.

Emily:             Thank you.

 

Scene 2: Event room

 

Any and Michael are in the event room.

 

Emily:       Hi Andy, Hi Michael, sorry for being so late…[sigh], parent-teacher night…need I say more.

 

Andy:        No worries, Emily. I get it.

 

Michael:    I’m sure when you went into teaching French in school, it wasn’t for those inspiring parent-teacher conferences. I’m just happy you came out in one piece (laughs)

 

Emily:       (laughs) Well…Barely. So, get this.  I’m sitting there, right, and I have my Eiffel Tower on the corner of my desk, I know it’s cliché, but I want parents to know who I am. But they still keep coming up and asking me ‘Are you the Chinese teacher?’ or ‘Are you the music teacher?’

 

Michael:    (sigh or other sound of disbelief or frustration)

 

Andy:        What?!

 

Emily:       I mean I made it obvious who I was—like my name tag says ‘Madame Chan’ in French, and I was even standing in front of a big Québec flag AND a French flag. But a lot of the parents just can’t seem to accept that I’m the French teacher.

 

Michael:    Oh. So sorry to hear that.  That must be frustrating, Emily. …  But, to be honest, it doesn’t surprise me. Like, my whole life I’ve been dealing with the assumptions people make based on the way I look. I remember when I was a kid, I would do everything I could to not seem Chinese. I didn’t want the teachers to associate me with the kids from China= [1]

 

Emily:       =Yeah= [or other sound of agreement and/or acknowledgement]

 

Michael:    =Cuz otherwise, they’d assume that I didn’t speak English properly and ignore me or even give me a lower mark. So yeah, I did everything to blend in with non-Asian kids.

 

Andy:        Yeah, I can totally relate to that, Michael.  Although, in my case, I often lived between those worlds. I mean, I was actually born in China but immigrated here, to Vancouver, while I was still young enough to learn English without an accent. Actually, I spoke so well that, growing up, people were shocked when they found out I was not from here. They would just assume that I was Canadian. But when they would start saying things like ‘oh, you know those people,’ like referring to Asian immigrants … I was like ‘um, excuse me, I am actually one of those people.’  My accent kind of allowed me to move between those worlds, it allowed me go to into spaces that most of the other Chinese kids couldn’t go.

 

Michael:    But at the same time, I think that speaking English so well is a bit of double-edged sword.  Like sure, it allowed me to integrate more easily with the non-Asian kids, but what about with my Chinese friends and family?  For years I didn’t want to speak Cantonese in public so that I could fit it, then when I was in grade nine, I remember one of my Chinese friends asking me straight up—“Why is your Cantonese so shitty?” That hit me super hard, I didn’t know what to say. I guess until that point, I had taken my Cantonese for granted, and her comment made me realize that I’d better start learning the language.

 

Emily:       Totally, I know what you mean, Michael. Like, I speak Cantonese with an accent from the 1940s [laughs]. No one speaks that way anymore but that was when my family left Asia.  So, we just never picked up the Hong Kong accent or the mainland China accent or any of this new slang. People ask me a lot why I’m speaking so funny.  I find it so frustrating because I can see that they’re trying to pigeonhole me or judge me because I don’t speak Cantonese in the way I’m supposed to.

 

Andy:        Ya, I know what you’re saying but maybe it’s important to recognize that in a certain way we ARE different. Like maybe we have a different role to play specifically because of who we are.

 

Michael:    Ok, Interesting. But what exactly do you mean?

 

Andy:        Well, I often wonder if I’m taking full advantage of the privilege I have as an English speaker by using it to challenge the system.

 

Emily:       Right! Exactly, Andy. Our English abilities give us a certain amount of power and if we don’t use it to push back, aren’t we implicitly supporting the structures that continue to fuel racism and oppression?

 

Michael:   Right. Language is tied up with many other social issues too—white supremacy, heteronormativity, gender, patriarchy. So I think it’s important to always ask ourselves if we are part of a solution or part of a problem. Like for example, as I told you guys before, I’m helping with a program that has lots of international students from China. And many times, I find myself questioning why we’re expected to always speak in English.  I mean, by speaking it, aren’t we continuing to reinforce the cultural hegemony of an official language?

 

Emily:       Yeah, that’s a great point.  So then, how do we apply these ideas in our university? What does change look like when we are talking about education in general?

 

Andy:        I’m not totally sure, but all I know is that we need to do more than simply hiring more racialized people. Like, we need actions that go beyond the surface. A total revamping of the content we teach and the lens we apply to learning languages, especially English.

 

Michael:    Yeah. Am I part of a problem?

 

Emily:       or Am I part of a solution?  (possibly said in Cantonese)

 

 

 

Note: This script is drawn from Kubota, R., Corella, M., Lim, K., & Sah, P. (2021). “Your English is so good”: Lives of racialized students and instructors of a Canadian University. Ethnicities. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968211055808

 

 

[1] = means latching, little to no pause between intonation units. A’s utterance follows immediately after, almost on, B’s.