By Jaimie Bin Li (she/her), teacher, Langley
My name is Jaimie Bin Li, and I am a Chinese woman who lives in Canada. I grew up in a small village in the southeast part of China. I speak Mandarin as my first language and used to speak Fu’an dialect as my second language. I learned how to speak English when I moved to Canada at the age of 26. I now speak English better than I can speak the Fu’an dialect.
My life was very simple. Growing up in a small village in southeast China, poverty was all we knew. I had a few friends with whom I hung out every day. When the weather was nice, we would carry our bowls of congee and sit in a row on a tree log. My friend’s mom would put some soy sauce in our congee; that was one of our favourite foods. We did not know what the outside world was like. We had nothing to compare our lives to, so we were happy.
My mother was not around much. I accepted the fact that as a single mom she had to make money to support my grandparents and me, so I never complained. I was used to living without her. I went to a very small school that had only around 100 students from Kindergarten to Grade 5. I learned how to recite poems from the Tang dynasty and the multiplication tables. My teachers liked me. When I turned 13, my mom registered me at a middle school that was a one-and-a-half-hour walk from my grandparents’ home. My mother repeated over and over that I had to study hard to get out of poverty. I told myself to try hard and one day take all my family out of the village.
Attending middle school was very exciting. Kids were all in uniforms, so I did not need to wear the oversized hand-me-down clothes from my cousin. I learned the word “race” at the age of 13. My geography teacher taught us that there were three races in the world: black, white, and yellow. Chinese belonged to the yellow race. I still remember I looked at my skin and questioned, “But we don’t look yellow.” My teacher reminded me that this was knowledge from the textbook and that I only needed to remember it.
I immigrated to Canada in 2008, trying to pursue a teaching career with all my credentials and qualifications from China. However, with minimal English and zero local working experience, survival was difficult, and my dream of becoming a teacher in Canada seemed almost impossible. I started my free English language learning by working at McDonald’s, volunteering at elementary and high schools, taking a teacher assistant job at a preschool that paid half the minimum wage, and talking to strangers whenever possible. As an adult learner, I used every possible opportunity to speed up my English acquisition. In 2010, after taking TOEFL four times, I finally met the language prerequisite to start my teacher training at Simon Fraser University. In class, I always felt utterly jealous of classmates with the perfect English accent. Every word that rolled out of their mouths seemed so perfect and sophisticated. I became the quiet student in the class. I chose not to talk because I did not want to sound stupid.
“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.” – Parker Palmer
Unpacking my identity was not easy. I was resistant and confused. I did not want to find fault, judge, or criticize the terms with which I was supposed to identify myself. I thought that the assumption that racial identity was shaped by my heritage and culture was pretty accurate, and there was no need to re-examine it. My doctorate program pushed me to pause, reflect, and seek “information that lies beyond our common-sense ideas about the world,”(1) and to think critically. I asked myself, if racial identity was affected by only my heritage and culture, wouldn’t I just simply call myself Chinese-Canadian now? It might be absurd to say, but I tried to understand myself. I looked back at my years of self-actualizing. I believed that immigrating to Canada would allow me to get my family out of poverty.
Somewhere on the journey of becoming Canadian, I began trying hard to leave the Chinese in me behind. I did not want to use my Chinese name anymore. I reminded myself to make Canadian friends so I could speak like a native English speaker. I went to church, although I was a Buddhist. I gave my daughter an English name because I thought that would make my family more Canadian. All these “common-sense” actions turned into a moment of mind-blowing self-recognition: I called myself Chinese, but I did not even want to be Chinese. What I have been trying to do was to fit in—I just wanted to fit in!
All these self-actualizations opened up years of assumptions I had embraced about what was desired. I wondered if this was pernicious, internalized racism—a form of self-hatred.
Combs stated, “We may ignore the self in our teaching, but we cannot … escape the fact of our influence upon the self or our responsibility with respect to whether the effects of schooling are positive or negative.”(2) If my well-planned years of being and becoming have created internalized racism, I wonder what kind of impact I have been passing down to my students unconsciously. I learned about the importance of ethnic identity development and how positive perceptions of our ethnicity can help separate our personal worth from social problems, and I learned to distinguish personal responsibilities from attempted impositions of blame by others.(3) I reflected on my own practice as a teacher of multilingual learners. Over the years, I have encouraged my students and their families to read more English at home when they told me they read books in their first language. At school, I introduced so many different cultures to my multilingual learners to embrace diversity, but never really reinforced that they needed to value their own ethnic heritage, promote self-authentication, and develop healthy and positive self-concepts. I thought what I did was good for my students so they would speak perfect English, succeed at school, and have a better life in Canada. But I was wrong.
“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”(4) Revisiting one of my favourite author’s notes helped me reclaim the courage I needed for change. “I want to learn how to hold the paradoxical poles of my identity together, to embrace the profoundly opposite truth that my sense of self is deeply dependent on others dancing with me and that I still have a sense of self when no one wants to dance.”(5) I asked myself, if I cannot fix the misjudgments I had made in the past, can I now use my lived experiences of acculturating and self-actualizing to help raise awareness and understanding among teachers of the processes, identity formations, and challenges emergent multilingual students might go through in our school system?
This narrative is a channel for me to share my study with educators like me and others who wish to become mentors to emergent multilingual students, fostering beliefs in their potential and supporting them to dream big, just like their English-speaking peers who are firmly grounded in their linguistic and cultural knowledge.
1 O.Z. Sensoy & R.J. DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal? : An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education (2nd ed.), Teachers College Press, 2017, p. 48.
2 G. Gay, 11 “Ethnic Identity Development and Multicultural Education,” Racial and Ethnic Identity in School practices: Aspects of Human Development, 1999, p. 195.
3 ibid.
4 P.J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, John Wiley & Sons, 1999, p. 78–79.
5 P.J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, John Wiley & Sons, 2017, p. 74.