Time flies so fast without a hint. Our seminar is entering its second last week. For old time’s sake, I want to reflect on a little event that I created in this seminar at the beginning of the term.

I planned a norm-breaking experiment* with a friend, who was going to give a presentation to the SOCI 433 class with me. I told him that I want to break a norm by speaking Chinese in a class setting, and at the same time displaying important contents in Chinese, and he can do the same in Filipino, one of his mother tongues. (For those who are not familiar with the class, it is a student directed seminar on identity and structure. I am one of the four coordinators of this class. It has15 enrolled students, whose majors are sociology and political science; all of them are in second year level or higher. Every week, students attend two 1.5 hours classes, and one to three of them have to give a presentation on the assigned readings and facilitate a discussion afterwards.) Our presentation took place in the fourth class, when personal network was not well established between the presenters and the audience.

At the beginning of the presentation, I showed a PowerPoint slide with a rather long introduction of the reading and discussion contents in traditional Chinese. At the same time, I stood in front of the classroom, faced 14 colleagues, and talked in a serious tone about the contents in Mandarin for roughly one minute. Then my presentation partner at the back of the classroom began to speak fast in Filipino, with the long written Pilipino displayed in another PowerPoint slide. After that, we switch our language back to English. Before the class ended, we asked our colleagues to reflect on our behaviours and we debriefed on our experiment.

At first, I feel a little unprepared and uncomfortable, mainly because I had to start the presentation with Chinese. My nervousness affected my speech, making me unable to speak Mandarin as fluent as English. But as I continued talking, I came to an assumption that the contents were communicated to the audience, who remained silent but attentive. I somehow forgot the fact that all I said and displayed in Chinese would not be understood by the majority of the students. Later, when listening to my partner speaking a language that I am unfamiliar with, I was unable to capture any meaning, although I judged from the duration of the speech and the length of the written words that he was mentioning some important points.

Speaking in a non-English language in a sociology class was so unnatural that it seemed to be merely a performance. I had to control myself not to laugh at our pretentiousness. No one interrupted our speech or raised questions. When we finished this introduction, we suddenly spoke in English again, because we knew that English is the only language to sustain the operation of this class. At the end of the class, students reflected on our acts. A white female responded that at first, she expected us to translate what we said; then she came to question herself in her head why she should expect that. Another white female also reflected that she unexpected us to speak in non-English languages, but then she also realized that speaking English as a norm in universities is questionable.

By speaking non-English languages for a certain period of time without notifying my classmates, and acting as normal as I can, I intended to challenge other students’ expectation of receiving a presentation in English in a formal class setting. According to Neil Smelser, social norms are a set of mutual expectations of how to think and behave (as cited in Nick, 2002, p. 40). Their surprise would reflect that English is the normative language used in Vancouver’s higher education institutions like the UBC. Why is English the normative language at UBC? This question triggers a series of complex discussions about space, language, and identities of Vancouver. In brief, UBC is based on the unceded territory of the Musqueam community, but its official language is exclusively English, which reflects the white settler society’s identity control of communications and values over this public space.

As a Chinese, I share neither the indigenous identities nor the white settlers’ identities. Speaking my own language in a classroom, where communication in English is mutually expected, not only challenge the normalization of a white settler society’s language, but also challenge my legitimacy of speaking Chinese in public. Chinese characters and Mandarin represent my identities and values as a Chinese; they also represent knowledge and experiences that are required to understand the language. My location in the front of a classroom facing all students put me into a public space, and since I am one of the presenters, I became the center of the public discourse.

Occupying a foreign public space, being the central of focuses, and speaking in my mother tongue that few audience understood, make me a representative of a single unified identity and value as a Chinese. Yet as an individual actor in this experiment, I realized that communicating my Chinese identity and value to a public space outside China contains several barriers: the displacement of collective knowledge and experience relevant to China, the displacement of China’s cultural and political contexts, and the displacement of the audience that I can communicate.

* this experiment was part of the assignment of another sociology course that I enrolled in, which was a seminar on social movement.

Reference

Nick, C. (2002). Making Sense of Social Movements. McGraw-Hill International.