Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital: Taiwanese Narratives of Struggle and Strategy 9781788923026

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Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital

ENCOUNTERS

Series Editors: Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University, The Netherlands, Ben Rampton, Kings College London, UK, Anna De Fina, Georgetown University, USA, Sirpa Leppänen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland and James Collins, University at Albany/ SUNY, USA The Encounters series sets out to explore diversity in language from a theoretical and an applied perspective. So the focus is both on the linguistic encounters, inequalities and struggles that characterise post-modern societies and on the development, within sociocultural linguistics, of theoretical instruments to explain them. The series welcomes work dealing with such topics as heterogeneity, mixing, creolization, bricolage, crossover phenomena, polylingual and polycultural practices. Another highpriority area of study is the investigation of processes through which linguistic resources are negotiated, appropriated and controlled, and the mechanisms leading to the creation and maintenance of sociocultural differences. The series welcomes ethnographically oriented work in which contexts of communication are investigated rather than assumed, as well as research that shows a clear commitment to close analysis of local meaning making processes and the semiotic organisation of texts. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

ENCOUNTERS: 15

Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital Taiwanese Narratives of Struggle and Strategy

Mark Fifer Seilhamer

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/SEILHA3019 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Seilhamer, Mark- author. Title: Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital: Taiwanese Narratives of Struggle and Strategy/Mark Seilhamer. Description: Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters, [2019] | Series: Encounters: 15 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018046187| ISBN 9781788923019 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781788923033 (epub) | ISBN 9781788923040 (kindle) Subjects: LCSH: Women—Taiwan—Social conditions. | Women—Taiwan— Economic conditions. | Middle class women—Taiwan—Attitudes. | Taiwan— Social conditions. | Multilingualism—Taiwan. | Individualism—Taiwan. Classification: LCC HQ1777 .S45 2019 | DDC 305.48/220951249—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046187 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-301-9 (hbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https​://ww​w.fac​ebook​.com/​multi​lingu​almat​ters Blog: www.c​hanne​lview​publi​catio​ns.wo​rdpre​ss.co​m Copyright © 2019 Mark Fifer Seilhamer. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services Limited. Printed and bound in the UK by the CPI Books Group Ltd. Printed and bound in the US by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

Contents

1 Introducing Distinction A Brief Background on Taiwan’s Sociopolitical Situation Background on the Study The Structure of This Book

1 4 7 10

2 Processes Involved in Achieving Distinction Linguistic Abilities as Capital in Bourdieusian Fields The Capacity for Change in Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice The Impact of Gender

12 12 15 18

3 Neoliberalism and English in Taiwan Neoliberalism and Its Embrace in Taiwan Tertiary Education in Neoliberal Taiwan English in Neoliberal Taiwan

23 23 30 39

4 Narrative and Its Use in This Study Narrative Inquiry My Interviews with Participants My Story

49 49 53 59

5 The Intellectual – Gigi’s Story Gigi’s Life before Saint Agnes Gigi’s Struggle and Strategy at Saint Agnes Gigi’s Life after Saint Agnes Graduation English as a ‘Door to the World’ Conclusion to Gigi’s Story

64 64 68 80 84 88

6 The Social Butterfly – Audrey’s Story Audrey’s Life before Saint Agnes Audrey’s Struggle and Strategy at Saint Agnes Audrey’s Life after Saint Agnes Graduation v

91 91 94 104

vi Contents

Languages as Tools Conclusion to Audrey’s Story

112 114

7 The Ideal Neoliberal Subject – Rachel’s Story Rachel’s Life before Saint Agnes Rachel’s Struggle and Strategy at Saint Agnes Rachel’s Dreams Come True Rachel’s Life after Saint Agnes Graduation Rachel’s Relationships with Her Languages Conclusion to Rachel’s Story

116 116 119 123 133 138 141

8 The Competitor – Shannon’s Story Shannon’s Life before Saint Agnes Shannon’s Struggle and Strategy at Saint Agnes Shannon’s Further Struggle and Strategy at Saint Agnes Shannon’s Further Relations with English and French Conclusion to Shannon’s Story

144 144 150 159 162 169

9 Cross-Participant Analysis and Conclusions 173 Capital Conversion 173 Intersectional Questioning 178 Conclusions192 10 Postscript: Where Are They Now?

200

References207 Index 216

1 Introducing Distinction

In his seminal work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Bourdieu (1984: 466) demonstrates how the cultivation of taste serves to reproduce class differences. ‘Taste,’ he explains, ‘is an acquired disposition to “differentiate”…to establish and mark differences by a process of distinction.’ Bourdieu investigates a huge range of classed preferences, illustrating how social differences are actively produced rather than merely found, with numerous examples, such as preferences for dainty ‘feminine’ foods and hearty ‘masculine’ foods serving as distinguishing markers of the French upper and working classes respectively, regardless of the costs involved. These preferences, after all, are not as much a matter of financial resources as the ability to convert any resources one might have into symbolic capital – utilizing particular cultural goods for their differentiating power. Upper- and lower-class children, Bourdieu argues, are socialized into their respective dispositions from an early age. For nouveau riche or middle-class individuals who did not undergo this socialization process from birth, acquiring dispositions of distinction is indeed possible, especially through education, but in order to do so, strategy and struggle are generally required. This book chronicles the strategy and struggle of Taiwanese young women utilizing cultural goods for their differentiating power. Instead of classed preferences, such as tastes in food or leisure activities, however, the particular cultural goods these young women employ are linguistic resources – cultural goods that have proven readily convertible to symbolic capital. In addition to the enormous amount of effort required, the financial costs involved in obtaining coveted linguistic resources often render the pursuit of distinction by this route an unrealistic option for many whose circumstances deny them even the opportunity for strategy and struggle. The young women featured in this book were not from this disadvantaged segment of society, nor were they from the segment at the other extreme end 1

2  Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital

of the linguistic advantage continuum – those who had acquired the valued linguistic resources at an early age with seemingly little effort. The women whose stories I chronicle here did, however, come from families that were sufficiently well-off financially to enable them a good chance for strategy and struggle through education. And while they did indeed need to exert a great deal of effort to acquire coveted linguistic resources, they experienced varying degrees of socialization early in their lives that facilitated their later conversion of these linguistic resources to symbolic capital. In the decades since the publication of Distinction, there has been much debate (e.g. Lamont, 1992; Peterson & Kern, 1996) about the extent to which Bourdieu’s classed preference analysis of surveys conducted in 1960s France continues to be applicable in different times and contexts. Yet Bourdieu (1991: 231) himself made it very clear that he considered social class merely a theoretical construct, stressing that ‘classes on paper’ do not actually constitute real-world groups or communities, but merely serve to classify those ‘who occupy similar positions and who, being placed in similar conditions and submitted to similar types of conditioning, have every chance of having similar dispositions and interests, and thus of producing similar practices and adopting similar stances.’ So, it may be simply a matter of degree, but in any given time and place, we will always find variation in the sorts of socializing experiences people have, based on the resources available to them, and these differing socializing experiences do, of course, result in the varying observable practices that allow us to identify ‘classes on paper.’ Numerous scholars (e.g. Broaded, 1997; Smith, 1981) have argued that in Taiwan, Confucianism serves as a leveling force that accounts for a relatively equitable distribution of socialization resources. According to Smith (1981: xxxi), Confucius taught that ‘Education knows no class,’ and the notion that educational opportunities should be available to all is indeed entrenched in Taiwan. Broaded’s (1997: 39) observation that respect for teaching and learning is ‘more diffused into the lower reaches of Taiwan’s class structure than is the case in the United States’ is, in fact, in line with what I’ve observed in both contexts. Yet, as Cheng (2012: 16) points out, ‘To suggest that parents of different SES [socioeconomic status] engage in similar educational beliefs and practices due to the Confucian influence is taking the proposition further than evidence allows.’ Cheng’s study examining Taiwanese parents’ income, their cultural capital, their children’s accumulated cultural capital, and the children’s educational achievement did indeed find students’ levels of cultural capital and educational achievement to be stratified in accordance with their parents’ income.

Introducing Distinction 

3

While Taiwanese parents and students of lower socioeconomic status do appear to value education and subscribe to beliefs that can be conveniently labeled ‘Confucian,’ such ‘large culture’ (Holliday, 1999) essentialist explanations ignore and serve to obscure the role of states, educational institutions and labor markets in constructing educational desires and ideologies. Because Taiwanese of both low and high socioeconomic status are subjected to the same structural realities of high-stakes examinations and employers that prioritize degree credentials, it does stand to reason that they would have similar orientations toward education – with or without adherence to Confucianism. Kipnis (2011: 91) characterizes this institutional construction of educational desires as one of ‘exemplarity, examinations, holistic hierarchy, and nation building’ and explains how this ‘imperial governing complex’ (Kipnis, 2011: 90) affects parents and students in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as well as other Asian societies, including Taiwan. Having similar context-shaped educational desires and ideologies, however, does not mean Taiwan’s higher and lower socioeconomic classes are equally equipped to address these similar desires since they do, of course, have vastly different access to the various forms of capital necessary to make these desires a reality. Accessing the various forms of capital is, however, merely the first step in the strategy and struggle of the distinction game. One must not only access the particular forms of capital that have the potential to differentiate oneself from others in the given context, but then subsequently put them to work, converting them to other forms of capital. Linguistic features (particularly those of English) have proven readily convertible to various kinds of capital. They are, thus, very much commoditized cultural goods (Duchêne & Heller, 2012) and, in one way or another, key markers of class distinction in most societies today. But they are evaluated differently in different contexts. As Blommaert (2003: 616) points out, ‘“Good” and status-carrying English in the periphery may be “bad” and stigma-carrying English in the core of the world system.’ Complicating matters for distinction seekers is the fact that, in any given context, the rules are liable to change at any moment, with the criteria for evaluation shifting – often as a result of calculated efforts to limit the distinction to a select few (Park, 2011). And although it is very often the case that language proficiency is bought and paid for with financial resources, monetary investment alone will not, in and of itself, be sufficient to secure the ‘profits of distinction’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 3). Distinction ultimately depends on whether one manages to convert the linguistic ability into symbolic capital, which can then ideally be converted to additional economic capital.

4  Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital

And in the Taiwanese context, conditions do indeed seem highly conducive for this capital conversion due to the association of English language resources with high social status, internationalization and upward mobility. The extent to which English in Taiwan is conferred with these associations is spotlighted in S.C. Chen’s (2010) report of the 2003 ‘Language Vitality in Taiwan’ research funded by the National Science Council. This large-scale questionnaire study sought to gain insights into patterns of language use as well as the status perceptions and associations that Taiwanese have about local languages, Mandarin Chinese and English. Administered in 11 areas of Taiwan (representing both rural and urban communities), the 2139 questionnaires that were completed and returned to researchers reveal that English is perceived as having the highest functional value as a marker of social status, global views and upward mobility, despite the fact that only 2–4% of respondents actually reported using the language routinely. Noting, however, that as a ‘tool of communication,’ Mandarin was actually rated higher than English, S.C. Chen (2010: 97) comments, ‘This shows that Taiwanese people perceive English to have greater instrumental value than Mandarin, while Mandarin is perceived to be the primary tool for communication in Taiwan.’ Status attainment research by Tsai (2010) furthermore indicates that English proficiency does yield significant capital in the labor market. This research applied regression analysis to panel data in order to tease out how the separate variables of education, gender, ethnicity, Mandarin proficiency and English proficiency impact occupational status and earnings, finding that English proficiency impacted both earnings and occupational status more than Mandarin proficiency. Emphasizing the distinction that English speakers have in the job market and the fact that Mandarin Chinese abilities afford a job-seeker no such distinction in Taiwan, Tsai (2010: 238) states, ‘It is evident that nowadays people in Taiwan may advance their socioeconomic status more with fluency in a global language such as English than with fluency in Mandarin as the dominant code of Chinese-speaking societies.’ So how did Taiwan get to the point that a foreign language spoken routinely by only a tiny segment of the population has achieved such a vaulted status? In order to begin to address this question, we first need to consider Taiwan’s particular sociopolitical situation. A Brief Background on Taiwan’s Sociopolitical Situation

Taiwan has had a tumultuous history of outside languages being forcibly imposed on its people. It was this history of language imposition

Introducing Distinction 

5

and other forms of political control that then president Lee Teng-hui was referring to when he lamented, ‘[The Taiwanese people’s] lives are influenced by history. I think the most miserable people are Taiwanese, who have always tried in vain to get their heads above water’ (April 14, 1994, quoted in Hsiau, 1997: 302). Lee’s characterization of Taiwanese as continuously ‘miserable’ is, however, just one particular local understanding of history’s effects on Taiwanese consciousness. The Taiwanese people were indeed repeatedly the unwitting pawns of political forces outside their control – subjected to two successive political regimes in which the positioning of languages against each other for specific political purposes was a reoccurring theme. This occurred first with the forced imposition of Japanese during Taiwan’s 50-year period of Japanese colonization. Throughout most of this period, the Japanese did tolerate use of local languages and even allotted them limited classroom hours alongside Japanese instruction, which was prioritized, but at the tail end of this Japanese colonial period, when China and Japan were officially at war with each other, local languages were actively suppressed, with only Japanese use officially sanctioned – even in the home domain (Tsurumi, 1977). The Japanese colonial period was immediately followed by a language policy promoting Mandarin monolingualism by Chiang Kai-shek and his Chinese nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government after they fled China in the face of imminent defeat by Mao Zedong’s communist forces and set up shop in Taiwan in 1945. This KMT language policy was at least as oppressive as the one imposed by the Japanese during wartime, discouraging the use of local languages and banning the use of Japanese in an attempt at ‘de-Japanization’ – a move which rendered most educated Taiwanese, who were Japanese dominant after 50 years of Japanese education, effectively voiceless (Huang, 2015: 139). According to Huang (2003, 2015), Taiwanese initially welcomed the end of Japanese rule and repatriation with China, but disillusionment soon set in as a result of the KMT’s repressive governance – not just with regard to language policy, but more consequentially with its corruption and general disregard for human rights. This disillusionment came to a head on 28 February 1947, when an incident involving a policeman beating a woman selling contraband cigarettes sparked protests and riots, which in turn resulted in four decades of KMT-imposed martial law, during which time dissidents were imprisoned, tortured and executed. Although there was considerable discontent with and resistance against Japanese rule during the colonial period (see Ching, 2001), the subsequent experience with the KMT brought many Taiwanese to view the Japanese colonial period with nostalgia. As Huang (2003: 309) puts it, ‘In their comparisons,

6  Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital

the earlier colonizers turned out to be a better set.’ These comparisons account for the very positive attitudes toward Japan that we often see today among many Taiwanese (Huang, 2015). Variance in experiences and attitudes toward Japan and China greatly impeded the development of a Taiwanese group identity throughout the first few decades of KMT rule. Very different lived realities were experienced by different segments of the population – experiences that varied along a myriad of dimensions, such as age, socioeconomic class and ethnicity. While acknowledging age and socioeconomic class as relevant factors, Huang (2015) prioritizes ethnicity as determining individual Taiwanese identity-shaping perceptions of the Japanese colonial period and the subsequent period of KMT ‘colonization.’ Ethnicity as a determiner also seems, however, to intersect with geographic distinctions, with the three main ethnic groups, the Hoklo, Hakka and Aborigines (speakers of Tai-yü1, Hakka and various aboriginal languages respectively) tending to cluster in separate parts of the island, thus having different historical experiences. The Hakka and Aborigines, for example, lived in more rural areas, so they were not subjected as much as the Hoklo to the bloodshed in urban areas following the 28 February 1947 incident (Huang, 2015). Some semblance of a ‘Taiwanese’ group identity did emerge among the Hoklo, Hakka and Aborigines under KMT rule as these groups collectively positioned the Mainlanders that arrived from 1945–1949 as the ‘other,’ with a few key differences between the two new categorizations of ‘Taiwanese’ and ‘Mainlander’ constantly highlighted (Wei, 2008). While the Hoklo, Hakka and Aborigines tended to see themselves as Taiwanese, Mainlanders generally considered themselves Chinese. Mainlanders also tended to advocate eventual unification with China, while ‘most local people had long ago realised how unrealistic and wishful such a policy was’ (Tsao, 1999: 366). In line though with Brown’s (2004: 2) assertion that ‘identity is formed and solidified on the basis of common social experience, including economic and political experience,’ a more inclusive Taiwan group identity did, however, begin to take shape, starting in the 1970s, as a result of various political developments that impacted the entire population – ‘Taiwanese’ and ‘Mainlanders’ alike. Firstly, a series of diplomatic setbacks – beginning with the United Nations shifting formal recognition to the PRC, followed by the United States and other countries doing the same – resulted in a collective feeling of being ostracized from the international community (Tsao, 1999; Wei, 2008). Chiang Ching-kuo, who became president after his father, Chiang Kai-shek, died in 1974, also contributed to a new group identity with gradual reforms that began with

Introducing Distinction 

7

his ‘“Taiwanization” of the KMT’ (Hsiau, 2000: 104) – recruiting local Taiwanese for high-ranking government positions that had previously been reserved only for Mainlanders. Other moves by Chiang Ching-kuo included removing restrictions on television broadcasts in languages other than Mandarin and prohibiting schools from punishing children for using languages other than Mandarin (P. Chen, 2001). In 1987, Chiang Ching-kuo also lifted the martial law that had been in effect since 1947, clearing the way for new political parties, most notably the newly formed independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), to challenge the KMT in future elections. Unprecedented economic prosperity and the PRC’s 1996 attempt to influence the outcome of the island’s first democratic presidential election by firing missiles across the Taiwan Strait also contributed to a change in mindset among the people of Taiwan (Tsao, 1999; Tse, 2000). As Tse (2000: 159) states, ‘It was against this background of diplomatic setback, of amazing economic growth, of the liberalization of society, of the democratization of politics and of saber rattling from the Mainland that a new sense of group identity gradually emerged.’ And while societal divisions between those with Taiwanese and Mainlander family backgrounds are still evident today, a Taiwanese group identity has arguably solidified, with a recent survey conducted by National Chengchi University finding only 3.5% of respondents identifying as ‘Chinese’ – a huge decrease from the 26.2% that reported considering themselves ‘Chinese’ in 1994 (Tseng & Chen, 2015). The landslide presidential election victory of DPP candidate Tsai Ing-wen in 2016 suggests a Taiwanese populace that is indeed eager to proclaim a distinct Taiwanese identity. Identity politics in Taiwan, however, are complex, and the PRC’s continued threat of unification by force is an ever-complicating factor. The 23 million people who call the island home are caught in the middle of an ideological struggle in which local, international and Greater China2 identities are in constant competition. And in this ideological struggle, language is featured front and center. This will be discussed in considerably more detail in Chapter 3, which will also discuss how Taiwan’s unique political situation has interacted with neoliberalism, ‘the currently dominant political and economic logic of globalization’ (Price, 2014: 569), to create and maintain particularly potent ideologies valorizing English abilities. Background on the Study

When I initially embarked on the study reported in this book, neoliberalism and distinction were not issues that I specifically set out to focus

8  Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital

on. I was, at the time, posing broader research questions on the relationships participants had with the various languages in their linguistic repertoires, and the impact of their linguistic abilities on their identities. Distinction through linguistic abilities (particularly English abilities) emerged as a prominent theme when I analyzed my interview data, but it was just one of several themes that were dealt with in the doctoral thesis that immediately resulted from the research (Seilhamer, 2010). In the years since then, I have published journal articles focusing on several of the other themes: participants’ orientations toward English  – as a lingua franca or a language associated with particular cultures (Seilhamer, 2012), English L2 personas (Seilhamer, 2013), and English ownership (Seilhamer, 2015). All the while, I was saving distinction, the theme that I felt dominated my participants’ interview narratives, for a book-length treatment. In the doctoral thesis, I hardly addressed gender issues at all, almost ignoring the fact that gender was indeed central to my participants’ language learning experiences. Relationships with foreign men (some romantic, others not) provided them with a considerable amount of practice using English. With my focus here on distinction, however, the issue of gender takes on an even greater significance than mere access to English conversation partners. The aforementioned status-attainment research by Tsai (2010), in addition to showing that English abilities afforded Taiwanese more socioeconomic status advancement than Mandarin Chinese, revealed some interesting gender-related findings. Although Tsai (2010: 235) controlled for the effects of ethnicity, age, background and gender in the analysis of language skills and educational attainment mediating occupational status and earnings, she does present data on these ‘antecedent influences.’ While males were shown to have an advantage in terms of educational attainment, females appeared to have the advantage when it came to language skills (more so actually for Mandarin Chinese than English), suggesting that distinction via language abilities is indeed very much a gendered phenomenon in Taiwan. Kelsky (2001: 25–26) characterizes Japanese women’s transnational cosmopolitanism as demonstrating ‘the ambiguous and contradictory ways in which intersecting vectors of (domestic) economic disenfranchisement and (global) economic privilege, gendered discrimination and gendered opportunity, racial belonging and racial exclusions, sexual objectification and erotic desire operate simultaneously in scattered hegemonies.’ While the contexts of Japan and Taiwan do differ in some respects, many of the same ‘intersecting vectors’ are relevant to my participants’ gendered experiences.

Introducing Distinction 

9

Commenting on intersecting class, race and gender vectors in a working-class community in the United States, Weis (2008: 292–293) characterizes these social divisions as ‘nested nodes,’ explaining that social class… …is constructed thematically and practically around, and in relation to, gender and race rather than primarily in relation to other classes. Such ‘nested nodes’ (class, race, and gender) cannot be understood, however, only in relation to one another, as they are themselves nested in political economy which, in the final quarter of the twentieth century, means neo-liberalism.

The community in the United States that informed Weis’ previously mentioned characterization is quite different from the Taiwan context. I would not conceptualize social class in Taiwan as ‘nested’ within or constructed around gender and race – not the way that it appears to be in the community that Weis studied. Social class, gender and race/ethnicity are nevertheless very much intertwined in Taiwan though, and these three intertwined ‘nodes’ are indeed ‘nested’ within the neoliberal political economy, just as they are in the community Weis examined. This book is thus very much about intersections. Through examinations of my participants’ struggles for distinction via linguistic capital, I aim to probe the intersections of neoliberalism and the dynamics of multilingualism in Taiwan. And probing these intersections necessitates probing the intersections of gender, social class and race/ethnicity (which, in the case of Taiwan, entails not only the broad Han Chinese ethnic classification, but also ancestral background status as Taiwanese or Mainlander) because all of these social divisions are ‘nested’ within neoliberalism. My participants, whose narratives of distinction are chronicled in this book, all attended the same college in Southern Taiwan that I refer to here as Saint Agnes College.3 In the late 1970s, the Saint Agnes English department instituted a policy of using only English as the medium of instruction, and Saint Agnes’ continues to be the only English department in Taiwan to have such a policy. Shortly after instituting this English-as-medium-of-instruction policy, the department also adopted Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) methods. Both moves are generally considered to have been hugely successful, for Saint Agnes English majors, by the time they graduate, are among the most fluent English speakers in Taiwan. The English-as-medium-of-instruction policy and use of CLT, however, are not without their critics within the department.

10  Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital

Some faculty members believe that although students do indeed become extremely adept at expressing themselves fluently and confidently in oral English communication, this fluency has come at the expense of grammatical accuracy. As one Saint Agnes teacher told me, They can use English quite well, but on the other hand, their weakness is usually the grammar cause I think…in their third year, they have a grammar class…But I think that it’s the only course that deals with grammar. And so their grammar accuracy is sometimes not as good as general high school students.

Despite occasional criticism though, it is unlikely that either the use of CLT or the English-as-medium-of-instruction policy will be changed any time soon, for as another teacher/curriculum developer explained, ‘It is a tradition and it is more like a reputation that the department has to keep.’ I was a teacher at Saint Agnes for the 2005/2006 academic year and taught my participants’ class when they were second-year students there. Over the years since then, I have maintained communication with these participants. My involvement in their lives was, of course, most pronounced during the year-long 2009/2010 period in which the study was conducted, but even after the research and doctoral thesis were completed, I continued to stay in touch with them through email, Facebook, Skype and periodic visits to Taiwan. I have witnessed their growth – from the teenage Saint Agnes students that sat in my classroom to the mature adults that they became. The narratives presented in this book represent just a snapshot of one period of that transition – documenting the particular ways in which, over a one-year period, they framed their personal struggles for distinction and conceptualized the role of English and other languages in these struggles. The Structure of This Book

In the next chapter, I will discuss the processes by which identities of distinction are constructed and the theoretical lens through which participants’ narratives will later be viewed. In Chapter 3, I discuss neoliberalism, its embrace in Taiwan, its impact on Taiwanese education and the role that the English language plays in present-day neoliberal Taiwan. Chapter 4 serves as the ‘methodology’ chapter, where I discuss my decision to employ narrative inquiry and describe the process by which the narrative data presented in this book was collected. I also, in Chapter 4, attempt to describe my personal background and my relationship with

Introducing Distinction 

11

participants in some detail so that readers will be able to more accurately gauge the extent to which my personal subjectivities might be affecting my presentation of narrative data. Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8 each present the individual ‘stories’ of my four focal participants, with a bit of fleeting analysis along the way, but mostly focus on the telling of their stories. Finally, I wrap things up with cross-participant analyses and conclusions in Chapter 9 and a postscript Chapter 10 to update readers on my focal participants’ lives after the completion of the year-long study. Notes (1) I use the term Tai-yü (literally ‘Taiwan language’ in Mandarin Chinese) to refer to the language that, in Taiwan, evolved from the Southern Min that Chinese immigrants from Fujian province brought with them in the 17th and 18th centuries. Because the language, as it is spoken now in Taiwan, contains loanwords from Japanese and is distinct from the varieties spoken in Fujian and Singapore, I use the term Tai-yü (following Hsiau, 1997 and Wei, 2008) to distinguish the particular variety spoken in Taiwan. The term ‘Taiwanese’ is also frequently used to refer to the same Taiwan variant of Southern Min, and some participants do use the term ‘Taiwanese’ in their narratives to refer to the language. (2) ‘Greater China’ is a somewhat controversial concept that generally includes the PRC and the territories it claims – Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. As Harding (1993) notes, however, the term has been interpreted differently by various analysts, with some including Singapore and others the entire Chinese diaspora the world over. (3) Saint Agnes was a Chinese Catholic figure from the 1800s known for her zeal for educating girls. Since the student population of the institution I’m dubbing ‘Saint Agnes’ is 90% female and it is a Catholic-affiliated institution, I thought this pseudonym highly appropriate. Readers with any familiarity with Taiwan tertiary education will surely be able to identify this college and using a pseudonym is arguably pointless, but I have opted to do so anyway. My depiction of the college here is generally quite positive, so use of its actual name could have potentially been perceived as blatant advertising. At all points in this book where participants’ and faculty members’ quotes include the actual name of the college, I have substituted the pseudonym ‘Saint Agnes.’

2 Processes Involved in Achieving Distinction

The basic processes by which the participants of the study presented in this book were able to achieve distinction through their linguistic abilities in Taiwan are not new or distinct to any particular context. They are the same basic processes that were in effect in the 1960s and 1970s when Bourdieu was examining class distinction in France. These processes, however, have been amplified by the neoliberal world order that we now find ourselves having to contend with. Large-scale societal changes in many contexts (attributable to not only neoliberalism, but other factors as well) have also now altered the conditions under which the processes occur. The experience one is likely to encounter in attempting to achieve distinction through linguistic abilities can be expected to vary wildly in different contexts – in part because the manner in which different localities deal with the demands of neoliberalism varies. In Chapter 3, I will discuss the tenacious ideological grip neoliberalism has on Taiwan, making for an environment very conducive for distinction-making processes to proceed with remarkable efficiency, but first, in this chapter, I will briefly outline Bourdieusian distinction-making processes and discuss the intersections of gender and social class that I will later probe in Chapter 9. Linguistic Abilities as Capital in Bourdieusian Fields

In Distinction, Bourdieu (1984: 101) presents his theory of practice in the form of an equation: [(habitus)(capital)] + field = practice

By depicting his theory in this manner, Bourdieu makes it clear that it is the interaction between individuals’ dispositions (habitus), their resources (capital) and the particular cultural context (field) that results in practices – not the independent effects of any of these three. One’s 12

Processes Involved in Achieving Distinction  13

habitus alone does not determine his or her practices in a field, nor does the capital that he or she brings to the field. As the square brackets around habitus and capital in Bourdieu’s equation indicate, practices result from an individual’s particular configurations of habitus and capital, collectively influenced by the conditions of the field the individual is operating in. Bourdieu (1984, 1986, 1990, 1991) details how the resulting practice constitutes attempts at capital conversion in one form or another. Since he regards economic capital as ‘the root of all the other types of capital,’ referring to the other capital types as ‘transformed, disguised forms of economic capital’ (Bourdieu, 1986: 252), Bourdieu emphasizes how the acquisition of these other types of capital (e.g. cultural capital, social capital, symbolic capital) are facilitated by material wealth and this facilitation is not always so obvious to the actors engaged in capital conversion or those around them. People are inclined to focus on individuals’ practices – efforts (or their lack of such efforts) to cultivate skills and relationships – often rendering invisible the role of economic capital (or lack thereof) in determining the success of these attempts. Although some struggle might be required for nouveau riche individuals to convert their economic capital into cultural, social or symbolic capital (with their attempts to do so perhaps seen as lacking in taste or being ostentatious), this struggle invariably pales in comparison to the efforts required of those with lesser means to cultivate cultural, social or symbolic capital (in the hopes of converting these to economic capital). Parents blessed with sufficient material wealth start the capital conversion process early with their children, paying fees for prestigious schools and supplementary classes in an effort to increase the academic capital of their offspring, all the while nurturing, in a more implicit manner, practices intended to result in an increase in symbolic capital and other forms of cultural capital through constant modeling of these practices for their children – ways of speaking, behaving and being that the parents themselves, more likely than not, acquired in the same manner. For children, a high degree of social capital is also likely to result from their enrollment at particular schools and interaction with those in the same social circles that have inculcated comparable cultural and symbolic capital. And ultimately, if all goes as parents intend, their children’s accumulated cultural, symbolic and social capital will be easily converted back into economic capital. While this capital conversion process is certainly more roundabout and subtle than a direct inheritance transfer of material wealth from parents to children, the end result is the same. As Bourdieu (1986: 253) puts it, ‘this effort…is a solid investment, the profits of which will appear, in the long run, in monetary or other form.’

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Returning to Bourdieu’s (1984) equation depicting the relationship between habitus, capital and field in producing practice, the ‘+ field’ represents the influence that particular social contexts have on how the actors within these fields play the capital conversion game.1 Since, within a large nation-state field, there exist many smaller often overlapping fields, such as an education field, a political field and an underground music field, it is possible to discuss the general values accorded different resources – for our purposes here, linguistic resources – in the (de facto) nation-state field of Taiwan at the macro level, and then subsequently to focus on particular fields operating within the larger Taiwanese field such as the Taiwan workplace field, or zero-in on even more micro contexts, like the field of a particular workplace, to discuss differing values accorded the same linguistic resources in the smaller fields. Each field, of course, features its own distinct values and norms, which can pose difficulties for actors navigating the often-conflicting demands of the various fields they are part of (Park & Wee, 2012; Stroud & Wee, 2011). Jan Blommaert and his colleagues, in numerous publications (e.g. Blommaert, 2003; Blommaert, 2010; Blommaert et al., 2005) have repeatedly stressed the necessity, in our current era of globalization, of addressing ‘matters of scale: the macro and the micro, the global and the local, the different levels at which “language” can be said to exist and at which sociolinguistic processes operate’ (Blommaert, 2003: 607). And since Bourdieusian fields occur ‘as a dynamic multidimensional network of lattices rather than a rigidly defined strict hierarchical structure’ (Park & Wee, 2012: 29), the scalar processes at play are by no means straightforward and predictable. They are often instead quite chaotic, with clear scalar hierarchies not obviously apparent. To address the challenge of examining the processes by which linguistic resources accrue value (that can potentially result in distinction) across a wide variety of scales ranging from usage by individuals to macro-level linguistic practices, Bourdieu’s concept of field provides us with a very useful conceptual unit, for as Park and Wee (2012: 32) point out, it ‘allows us to move relatively seamlessly across various phenomena at different scales, while still capturing the complex interconnections between them.’ And since language learning is always situated in specific social fields, which directly influence the nature and amount of effort expended, learners’ investment (Norton Peirce, 1995) in the cultural capital accumulation enterprise of language learning can be expected to vary in accordance with field circumstances, just as the investments of stock market players vary from day to day or even minute to minute in response to financial market conditions.

Processes Involved in Achieving Distinction  15

The Capacity for Change in Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice

As was previously mentioned, the ‘rules’ for what sorts of cultural goods or resources can potentially result in distinction in any given field are ever-shifting. Such shifts in evaluation criteria occur because fields are, in fact, not closed systems in which actors with no influence from other fields mechanistically submit to the dominating force of one shared habitus, carrying out capital-conversion practices that produce totally predictable winners and losers in an endlessly circular fashion. Such a field could exist only in theory. In reality, the fields we inhabit are, in varying degrees, open systems in which actors’ practices are guided by heterogeneous habituses. Since we all operate in different configurations of overlapping fields, the habitus for no two individuals will be identical. Even twins growing up in the same environment are sure to have some variation in their experiences and influences. Bourdieu does acknowledge individual differences, but stresses the habitus commonalities among members of particular status groups or social classes, highlighting a shared sense of what is possible for those of their social position and stating that ‘agents shape their aspirations according to concrete indices of the accessible and the inaccessible, of what is and is not “for us”’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 64). Providing this shared sense of what is possible, plausible or downright unthinkable is what gives Bourdieu’s habitus its practical orientation. Bourdieu depicts social actors’ practices as being habitus-guided as they do ‘predispose actors to select forms of conduct that are most likely to succeed in light of their resources and past experience’ (Swartz, 1997: 106). According to Bourdieu, such habitus-guided choices tend to not be the result of conscious deliberation, weighing the pros and cons of alternative actions, but are instead generally selected unconsciously. As he states in Distinction, ‘the schemes of the habitus…owe their specific efficacy to the fact that they function below the level of consciousness and language, beyond the reach of introspective scrutiny or control by the will’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 466). The habitus concept has, over the years, been subjected to a considerable amount of criticism on charges that it is overly deterministic, places too much emphasis on initial socialization in early childhood and does not allow for conscious reflexivity (e.g. Alexander, 1994; DiMaggio, 1979; Jenkins, 1992; King, 2000). Bourdieu himself vehemently refutes charges of determinism, arguing that they are based on superficial readings of only portions of his large body of work (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Researchers and theorists have indeed presented adaptable

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characterizations of the habitus without posing substantial extensions to Bourdieu’s theory – focusing, for example, on its generative nature (McNay, 1999; Skeggs, 1997) or its permeability (Reay, 2004). Given the fact that habituses and social fields do change and are, in fact, not endlessly circular reproduction loops, numerous theorists, such as McNay (1999), Decoteau (2016) and Yang (2014),2 have taken up the challenge of accounting for societal changes within Bourdieu’s theory of practice, presenting cogent arguments that ‘traditionally neglected concepts or ideas in Bourdieu’s original text can be integrated together to illuminate change’ (Yang, 2014: 1534, emphasis in original). The main basis for the potential for change within Bourdieusian theory is Bourdieu’s (1990: 108) acknowledgement that in crisis or high-stake situations, the habitus ‘may be superseded…by other principles, such as rational and conscious computation.’ These ‘crises,’ in which we find the habitus to be out of alignment with the norms and values of a particular field, are increasingly commonplace for most of us these days – situations in which our previous assumptions about the fundamental workings of the world seem to no longer apply. McNay (1999: 110) argues that ‘dissonance’ results when individuals enter new social fields. Dissonance within individuals due to habitus-field mismatches prompts conscious reflexivity, which may or may not impact their habituses, and the individuals’ practices within the new fields potentially create dissonance as well, which can result in at least piecemeal changes to the fields. Decoteau (2016: 317) points out the necessity of considering the particular field dynamics in evaluating the change-making potential of social actors’ practices, stating that ‘[a]ny individual or collective action can be analyzed by exploring the conjuncture of both field-specific mechanisms and disjunctures within the habitus (which also reflect previous field experiences and conflicts).’ Because reflexive thinking resulting from habitus disjunctures, as well as the strategic secondary habitus acquisition through explicit pedagogy that Yang (2014) identifies as another route to change within Bourdieusian theory, are both reliant on context, field dynamics play an especially important role in determining the extent of possible change. According to Yang (2014), the fields must be open systems – social fields that are far more amenable to interventions than most of the ones Bourdieu discusses. Yang and others (e.g. Adams, 2006; Sweetman, 2003) argue that the social conditions of the world we live in today have indeed become drastically different from the ones that informed Bourdieu’s thinking – a development that requires updated conceptualizations of social fields. Unlike the relatively stable and predictable social fields that Bourdieu presents as exemplars, the fields that many of us find ourselves interacting

Processes Involved in Achieving Distinction  17

in today are those in which ‘living and acting in uncertainty becomes a kind of basic experience’ (Beck, 1994: 12). Classifications and power hierarchies are far less distinct than in the past, and boundaries between fields are often quite fuzzy. Technology allows us an abundance of information and interactions with multiple fields. With neoliberal valorization of self-reliance, flexibility and continuous self-improvement (discussed in the next chapter), reflexivity is absolutely essential in many of today’s workplaces. All of these factors and others, such as questioning of gender roles and the conscious fashioning of identities through consumerism, lead Sweetman (2003: 537) to propose ‘that for some, reflexivity and flexibility may characterise the habitus, and that for those who display a flexible or reflexive habitus, processes of refashioning – whether emancipatory or otherwise – may be second nature rather than difficult to achieve’ (emphasis in original). In spite of the fact that reflexivity has arguably become second nature for many in the increasingly open systems that we encounter today, such a ‘reflexive habitus’ is certainly not universal, even in those fields that have changed most radically. As Yang (2014) points out, such drastic changes to the fundamental ‘rules’ of many fields in what has been a relatively short period of time inevitably results in increasing ‘crises,’ with actors experiencing frequent mismatches between habitus and field norms. Some actors, of course, find it far more difficult than others to identify the habitus-field mismatches, and some are unable to adjust the habitus accordingly even if a mismatch is consciously identified. Of the various ways in which it is possible to characterize the ability (or lack thereof) to identify and adjust to habitus-field mismatches, I personally favor habitus permeability, taking cues from both Reay’s (2004: 434) description of habituses as ‘permeable and responsive to what is going on around them’ and from Guiora’s (1967, 1979) Language Ego concept, which proposes that the extent to which an individual’s first language (L1) language ego is permeable determines the individual’s success at taking on a new linguistic identity. Bourdieu conceptualizes secondary socialization in habitus formation/evolution as a process that ‘tends to be slow, unconscious, and tends to elaborate rather than alter fundamentally the primary dispositions’ (Swartz, 1997: 107). This slow unconscious process of primary habitus elaboration may well still be the norm for many social actors, but habitus adaptability, like most societal tendencies, is probably best conceptualized as lying at some point on a continuum, and I think a permeability continuum seems quite applicable here. At one extreme end of the continuum, we would find individuals for whom primary socialization was

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so durable that the habitus is not permeable at all – totally resistant to further adaptation. At the opposite extreme end would be those for whom the habitus resulting from primary socialization is remarkably porous, soaking up all subsequent socialization experiences and instantly adding them to a dynamic constantly evolving habitus. Most of us, of course, would fall at some point between these two extremes, with the majority perhaps tending to be more toward the non-permeable end of the continuum despite the huge societal shifts that seem to necessitate more permeable habituses. But regardless of how permeable an individual’s habitus is, the practices resulting from that habitus’ interaction with the individual’s capital, in response to the conditions of the particular field, serve to impact the habitus of all who inhabit the field. While the actions of individuals are usually nowhere near as consequential as those of governments or media, individuals’ practices do indeed impact the habitus. Those practices that are in line with status quo field values and norms serve to reinforce these structures, making them even more durable, while practices that resist status quo structures serve to alter environments in some small way, potentially impacting the habituses of others in the fields, ‘either on the level of small-scale everyday practices or on the level of dominant structures of authority’ (Park & Wee, 2012: 32). The Impact of Gender

Many feminist scholars have found Bourdieusian theory useful in examining gender issues (e.g. McNay, 1999; Skeggs, 1997), albeit generally with qualifications or extensions to address the fact that Bourdieu ‘doesn’t grasp gender nuances and falls into polarized views of women as dominated and men as dominant’ (Silva, 2016: 176). In the works where Bourdieu directly addresses gender, ranging from his early anthropological work (Bourdieu, 19903) to Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984) to Masculine Domination (Bourdieu, 2001), Bourdieu depicts the categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ as completely unambiguous and natural, seemingly oblivious to widespread acceptance of the notion that gender is not a given, but is instead accomplished (West & Zimmerman, 1987). This inflexible gendered habitus conceptualization appears to have been informed primarily by his anthropological work with Algeria’s Kabyle tribes in the 1960s (Bourdieu, 1990), where he observed especially strict divisions between male and female cultures that extended to the physical spaces that men and women were expected to occupy. The Kabyle community case was later treated as an archetype in Masculine Domination, where Bourdieu

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(2001) claims that even in modern-day cosmopolitan contexts, the very same principles apply. As Silva (2005: 92–93) comments: Bourdieu thinks of sex identity, originated in a sexed body, as given and common across time and cultures. From the Kabyle to modern France, UK and USA, he assumes an invariant relationship between biology and character.

Also problematic are Bourdieu’s treatment of gender as secondary to social class (McCall, 1992) and ‘of women as objects – as repositories of capital for someone else’ (for men) rather than legitimate accumulators of their own capital (Lovell, 2000: 22). Regarding Bourdieu’s relegation of gender to secondary in significance after social class in the distinction process, McCall (1992: 841) acknowledges that Bourdieu does seem, at first reading anyway, to consider gender and age ‘general, biological forces that gain specificity from social class position’ (emphases in original). She then goes on, however, to propose an alternative interpretation of secondary, arguing that Bourdieu’s intention could have been to indicate that gender and age, as forms of social stratification, were indeed quite significant, but concealed – exposing ‘how real principles of selection and exclusion are hidden behind nominal constructions of categories such as occupation and educational qualification’ (McCall, 1992: 842). As for the issue of Bourdieu not regarding women as bearers of their own capital, this just seems preposterous, especially since he does, in parts of Distinction, make statements that contradict this notion – mentioning women of the petit-bourgeoisie class cultivating beauty capital and highlighting that ‘certain women derive occupational profit from their charm(s), and that beauty has acquired a value on the labour market’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 152–153). Several feminist scholars, such as Lovell (2000), McCall (1992) and Skeggs (1997), have taken the notion of deriving occupational profit from feminine ‘charms’ and developed the idea of gender capital. Citing shifts in the labor market – decreased demand for physical attributes associated with masculinity and increased demand for skills associated with femininity in professions such as eldercare, Lovell (2000: 25) asserts ‘that femininity as cultural capital is beginning to have broader currency in unexpected ways.’ Empirical explorations of some of the expected and unexpected ways that female capital and feminine capital4 can be utilized for advantage in the labor market include those by Huppatz (2009) and Ross-Smith and Huppatz (2010). Huppatz (2009: 50) investigated advantages resulting from gendered capital in social work and

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nursing – ‘caring’ professions specifically chosen because ‘it was clear that this may be a field in which feminine capital operates.’ Ross-Smith and Huppatz (2010), in contrast, examine the management field – one that is decidedly not feminized, and women are still vastly outnumbered by men. Ross-Smith and Huppatz (2010: 547) point out that, although not large in number, ‘a generation of women have successfully sustained careers beyond the glass ceiling and overcome other differential barriers to advancement.’ They present the narratives of Australian women in senior management positions, as well as those of some of their male colleagues, revealing that these women, who were reaching retirement age, had indeed profited at various points in their careers from skills associated with femininity and feminine appearances, but such instances of securing advantage with gender capital were limited and highly situational, suggesting that ‘women’s gender capital may only manipulate constraints rather than overturn power’ (Ross-Smith & Huppatz, 2010: 562). Gender clearly has the potential, in conjunction with socioeconomic class and other social divisions, such as age and race/ethnicity, to both advantage and disadvantage individuals as they navigate social fields. While a particular identity or status may be foregrounded or especially salient in a given situation, the multiple social classifications that might be attributed to an individual all play roles in influencing, in one way or another, the individual’s experiences. In light of this fact, I will, in this book, complement a Bourdieusian theoretical lens with an intersectional perspective. In the context of feminist scholarship, intersectionality refers to an approach that highlights ‘the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations’ (McCall, 2005: 1771). Intersectionality was originally a response to the marginalization feminists of color felt with attempts by mainstream feminism to universalize the experiences of all women, with the term intersectionality first proposed by Crenshaw (1989: 149), illustrating the concept with a traffic analogy: Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination…But it is not always easy

Processes Involved in Achieving Distinction  21

to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm.

Accidents do frequently occur at the intersections of gender, social class, race/ethnicity, age and an almost infinite number of other social divisions – sometimes grisly collisions resulting in life-threatening injuries and sometimes just minor fender-benders. Encounters at the intersections of social divisions aren’t necessarily unfavorable though. Social actors may benefit at the intersections as well and, just as with the accidents, it’s often difficult to determine which factor, or which combination of factors, influenced a beneficial outcome. As I highlighted near the end of the introductory chapter, the aim of this book is to probe the intersections of neoliberalism and the dynamics of multilingualism in Taiwan through an examination of my participants’ struggles for distinction via linguistic capital accumulation. Probing these broad intersections exclusively through a gender lens or exclusively through a social class lens would, at best, only reveal partial truths, and at worst, lead to an inaccurate determination of ‘which driver caused the harm’ (or benefit). My participants’ gender, social class, age and ethnicity are just a few of the social categories that intersected in their day-to-day interactions.5 To gain insights into how the complex interplay of these ‘nodes’ (Weis, 2008: 292) served to advantage and disadvantage my participants in their quests for distinction, I will, in Chapter 9 of this book, employ intersectional questioning, following Stahl (2012: 82), who argues that intersectionality ‘is not an approach; it is rather the questioning of too narrow an approach.’ Notes (1) Bourdieu uses the terms field, market and game to refer to capital conversion sites, often interchangeably. Since I begin this section by presenting Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of practice equation that employs the term field, I will continue to do so for the sake of consistency. (2) Yang’s (2014: 1531) argument is prefaced with an acknowledgement that Bourdieu’s emphasis on structural reproduction at the expense of capacity for change does make it ‘difficult to produce convincing evidence that Bourdieu is not a pessimistic determinist.’ (3) The Kabyle House or the World Reversed was first published in 1970, but it was also included as an appendix in The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu, 1990). (4) Huppatz (2009: 50) distinguishes between female capital – ‘the gender advantage that is derived from being perceived to have a female (but not necessarily feminine) body’ and feminine capital – ‘the gender advantage that is derived from a disposition or skill set learned via socialization, or from simply being hailed as feminine.’

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(5) A list of all possible categories of difference would, of course, go on and on, including religion (or lack of religion), able-bodiness and attractiveness, as well as political positions (which in Taiwan would typically be alignment with either Pan-Blue or PanGreen political parties) and categories resulting from individual lifestyle /consumption choices. As Ludvig (2006: 246) proclaims in lamenting the ‘seemingly insurmountable complexity’ of intersectional analyses, ‘the list of differences is endless or even seemingly indefinite. It is impossible to take into account all the differences that are significant at any given moment’ (emphasis in original).

3 Neoliberalism and English in Taiwan

Thus far, I have bandied the term neoliberalism about and made reference to the neoliberal world order with some frequency, assuming that readers have at least some general fuzzy understanding of the concept. I will now discuss neoliberalism in more detail, discussing its impact on Taiwanese tertiary-level education, and examining the ways in which Taiwan’s embrace of neoliberalism has intersected with other political forces to create the sort of stratified environment in which linguistic abilities – and English abilities in particular – serve as ideal means to cultivate identities of distinction. Neoliberalism and Its Embrace in Taiwan

The term neoliberalism refers to the belief ‘that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade’ (Harvey, 2005: 2) – in other words, the embrace of totally unbridled capitalism, with as little government regulation as humanly possible. Identifying the neoliberal ‘policy trinity’ as ‘the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending,’ Klein (2007: 18) astutely observes that ‘For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society.’ Neoliberalism has been characterized in a variety of ways. Some consider it simply the latest incarnation of capitalism (e.g. Coyle, 2003) and some (e.g. Fairclough, 2006) characterize it as a discourse. Harvey (2005: 19) contends that it is both an economic theory and a political scheme devised specifically ‘to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites.’ After evaluating some of these characterizations, Holborow (2012) makes a convincing case for 23

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neoliberalism to be considered an ideology. While acknowledging that it is indeed also an economic theory, she persuasively argues that neoliberalism is, above all, ideological in that it is a one-sided worldview designed to serve the interests of those who control capital flows – a particular societal group that, in their promotion of neoliberalism, has been undeniably successful in convincing the world that it is ‘simply how things are, a pervasive “truth”’ (Holborow, 2012: 30). How did we get to the point that this belief in the supremacy of the free market has come to be so universally taken for granted – regarded as simply the way things are? According to Harvey (2005), the proliferation of neoliberalism began in the late 1970s, when economic stagnation and rampant inflation provided a crisis scenario opportunity for politicians and economists in the US and the UK to dismantle Keynesian economic policies of regulation and state intervention. This public policy revolution started with Margaret Thatcher’s efforts to promote ‘enterprise culture’ as an antidote to the welfare state that she believed the UK had become. Paul du Gay (1996: 56) describes the Thatcher government’s view as follows: Basically, the government argued that the permissive and anti-enterprise culture that had been fostered by social democratic institutions since 1945 had become one of the most serious obstacles to reversing decline. The economic and moral regeneration of Britain therefore necessitated exerting pressure on every institution to make it supportive of enterprise.

This pressure exerted ‘on every institution to make it supportive of enterprise’ amounted to large-scale privatization and incessant political rhetoric that presented the government’s vision in terms of a cultural shift from a culture of dependency to one of enterprise in which self-reliance and a host of other qualities normally associated with the entrepreneur launching a new business, such as the readiness to boldly accept risk and take responsibility for one’s own choices, were valorized. This new enterprise culture was not simply a rationalization for government policies, but it was instead aimed at affecting all domains of society. As Peters (2001: 65–66) remarks: The notion of enterprise culture…can be seen in poststructuralist terms as the creation of a new metanarrative, a totalizing and unifying story about the prospect of economic growth and development based on the triumvirate of science, technology, and education…the new neo-liberal metanarrative is based on a vision of the future: one sustained by ‘excellence,’ by ‘technological literacy,’ by ‘skills training,’ by ‘performance,’ and by ‘enterprise.’

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The need to constantly upgrade oneself in the pursuit of ‘excellence’ is indeed central to the enterprise culture vision, and to neoliberalism itself. Margaret Thatcher famously stated that there was ‘no such thing as society, only individual men and women’ (Harvey, 2005: 23), and this statement is, sure enough, perfectly in line with the neoliberal worldview that regards the state as not at all responsible for the well-being of its citizens. It is instead individuals themselves that are considered to be solely responsible for their own successes and failures. As Harvey (2005: 76) comments in his discussion of the neoliberal rollback of welfare provisions, ‘The social safety net is reduced to a bare minimum in favour of a system that emphasizes personal responsibility. Personal failure is generally attributed to personal failings, and the victim is all too often blamed.’ Ronald Reagan’s election as US president in 1980 saw his administration joining the Thatcher government in an alliance to relentlessly institute neoliberal policies in their respective countries. As Harvey (2005) documents in some detail, US deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, along with an abandonment of Keynesian Federal Reserve Bank policies, had already begun under the Carter administration, but Reagan embarked on a large-scale deregulation binge, accompanied by budget cuts, drastic cuts in corporate taxes,1 and union busting. Shortly after taking office, he responded to a strike by the country’s air traffic controllers by simply firing them all, in effect declaring war on the US labor movement. A few years later in 1984, Margaret Thatcher waged a similar war against organized labor, breaking Britain’s powerful coal miner union, and in doing so, sending a potent message that ‘it would be suicide for weaker unions producing less crucial products and services to take on her new economic order’ (Klein, 2007: 173). But Thatcher and Reagan were not content with their successes at making neoliberalism mainstream only in their respective countries. With the US and the UK possessing a disproportionate amount of power in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank,2 the two leaders were perfectly positioned to see to it that neoliberal policies got instituted far and wide. As Klein (2007: 204) explains, ‘[T]heir highly ideological administrations were essentially able to harness the two institutions for their own ends, rapidly increasing their power and turning them into the primary vehicles for the advancement of the corporatist crusade.’ Whenever crisis-hit countries appealed to the IMF for emergency assistance, such as loans and debt relief, the IMF generally provided the requested assistance – but with a host of neoliberal strings attached. According to IMF senior economist Davison Budhoo (1990: 102, cited in Klein, 2007: 205), ‘[E]verything we did from 1983 onward was based on our new sense of mission to have the south “privatised” or

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die.’ One after another, developing countries in distress were ‘required to swallow the poison pill of neoliberal institutional reforms’ (Harvey, 2005: 75), and these reforms, referred to as ‘shock therapy’ by Harvey (2005: 122), Klein (2007: 205) and others, invariably resulted in mammoth increases in inequality – fabulous wealth creation for a privileged few and precious little for everyone else. Klein (2007) highlights the fact that in each instance of neoliberal structural reform, it was some sort of crisis that enabled these measures to be implemented with minimal public dissent. Whether it was an economic crisis with shock therapy being required as a condition for receiving IMF loans, the ‘shock and awe’ firebombing of Iraq facilitating consent to hand over the country’s assets to US corporations, or Hurricane Katrina ushering in the privatization of education in New Orleans, some sort of crisis does always seem to have preceded the neoliberal structural overhauls. It was the Asian financial crisis of 1997/98 that provided the opportunity for the IMF to see to it that thoroughly neoliberal policies were instituted in South Korea and much of Southeast Asia. Throughout most of their meteoric rise to economic prominence, the Asian Tiger (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea) and Tiger Cub (Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia) economies had maintained a balance of free trade and state protectionism, with many sectors under government control. As Klein (2007: 337) puts it, ‘They were economic success stories unquestionably, but ones that proved that mixed, managed economies grew faster and more equitably than those following the Wild West Washington Consensus.’3 By the time the IMF finally stepped in to offer assistance with a slew of neoliberal strings attached, the citizens of the countries most affected by the Asian financial crisis (South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia) were in full-blown panic mode. Klein (2007) and Piller and Cho (2013) both vividly describe, for example, the rash of suicides that swept South Korea in the wake of businesses being shuttered and life savings instantly vanishing. The governments of these countries saw no other option than to accept, in exchange for long-overdue financial aid, the budget cuts, deregulation and privatization that the IMF demanded. Taiwan, in contrast, weathered the Asian financial crisis with relative ease4 and did not need to appeal to the IMF for assistance.5 M.H. Chen (2001) cites several reasons for Taiwan’s emergence from the crisis relatively unscathed – among them a high rate of savings, a fairly low external debt and the fact that Taiwan’s predominantly small and medium-sized businesses6 had mostly borrowed domestically rather than from international lenders (avoiding the catastrophe that befell Korea’s

Neoliberalism and English in Taiwan  27

huge chaebol conglomerates, with massive international short-term loan debts). Taiwan’s ability to endure the financial crisis of the late 1990s without acquiescing to neoliberal demands, however, does not mean that it did not face external pressure to liberalize its financial system. As Kil (2004) highlights in his comparative examination of Taiwan and South Korea’s differentiated abilities to withstand the Asian financial crisis, Taiwan has, throughout the latter half of the 20th century and beyond, been the beneficiary of huge amounts of trade7 and economic aid from the United States, creating ‘a situation of dependence’ (Kil, 2004: 229). While Taiwan has not hosted US military bases like South Korea and Japan, the expressed commitment by the United States to defend Taiwan in the event of a PRC attack and occasional US sales of military hardware to Taiwan (always provoking condemnation by the PRC) further serve to provide a sense of dependence on the United States. Taiwan leaders have thus felt obligated to periodically appease demands by the United States to open up Taiwan markets. Taiwan’s isolated diplomatic status (after the United States, in 1979, changed diplomatic recognition to the PRC) required negotiations between Taiwan and the United States to be unofficial in nature, and this, according to Kil (2004: 226), ‘guarded Taiwan from direct and forceful demands for financial liberalization from the United States.’ But even with US demands indirect and relatively unforceful, Taiwan did, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, open up some of the markets to foreign investment and begin to privatize some sectors it had previously monopolized, dominated or protected (Tsai, 2001). Ultimately, the real pressure to liberalize came with Taiwan’s bid to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). Since Taiwan was not only highly reliant on foreign trade,8 but also desperate for any sort of official international recognition, WTO membership represented a prize for which concessions were warranted. And after committing to all the market liberalization measures the WTO demanded, Taiwan (under the name ‘Chinese Taipei’) was accepted into the WTO with Most Favored Nation status in 2002 (Kil, 2004). Taiwan arguably had fully embraced the neoliberal world order, but all was justifiable if doing so was for the cause of achieving recognition as anything close to a normal state. As Whitehead (2002: 194) so cogently states, however, Taiwan ‘is certainly not a “normal” state, and the peculiarities of its status and security problems condition all aspects of its policies and economics.’ While Taiwan’s neoliberal policies were not forcibly instituted as a response to a hugely debilitating financial crisis as they were in South Korea and so many other countries, Taiwan’s status as only a de facto state with formal diplomatic relations with just a small handful

28  Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital

of developing countries and its precarious security situation with the PRC do indeed constitute an ongoing crisis, and the impact this ongoing crisis has had on the mindset of the Taiwanese people cannot be underestimated. Despite a guarded approach by the government to ensure that Taiwan’s financial system remained relatively free of the shocks a globalized market (or deliberate PRC market manipulation) might throw at it, the profound sense of insecurity that is pervasive in Taiwan eventually forced Taiwan’s markets to thoroughly liberalize. And the desperation for international recognition that compelled the Taiwan government to acquiesce to WTO demands extends well beyond the spheres of economics, trade and international relations at the stateto-state level. It is acutely felt by individuals as well. At the personal level, individual Taiwanese citizens seem to be committed to playing a role in international relations. A quick Google search of ‘Taiwanese kindness’ produces blog after blog of accounts – from not only Westerners, but also from tourists and students from Asian countries like Mongolia – raving about the phenomenal kindness of the Taiwanese people with exuberant proclamations like ‘never, ever, have I met people as consistently wonderful, warm-hearted, generous, and downright kind as Taiwanese people’ (adventuresintaiwan, 2010: para. 2). When I lived in Taiwan, I was also repeatedly amazed by the kindness extended to me and my family by complete strangers. On one occasion, for example, my wife, son and I were wandering the streets of Kaohsiung in search of a particular restaurant. When we asked a random stranger we passed on the street if he knew where this restaurant was, he told us he didn’t know of the place, but proceeded to call several friends to inquire on our behalf. When these friends proved unhelpful, he then spent the next 30 minutes accompanying us in our search, questioning passersby (who also joined in the search) until the restaurant was finally located. When I told my Taiwanese students about such experiences, extolling the extraordinary kindness of the Taiwanese people, the response was always something like, ‘Everyone is so kind to you only because you’re a foreigner. We’re not especially kind to one another.’ In a recent discussion of this Taiwanese kindness issue, a former (Taiwanese) colleague from Saint Agnes voiced similar sentiments and went on to assert that she believed Taiwanese feel compelled to play a role in international diplomacy on a person-to-person level in order to compensate for Taiwan’s lack of official recognition on the world stage. Viewed from this perspective (which I personally find quite valid), Taiwanese acts of kindness toward foreigners can be seen as performative acts of identity (le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985) attempting to distinguish Taiwanese people from

Neoliberalism and English in Taiwan  29

those of other nations – particularly the PRC and Thailand (which, much to the annoyance of Taiwanese, Taiwan is frequently confused with – even by Barack Obama on one occasion). Pan (2014), in his contribution to an internet forum discussion of the question ‘Why do so many people from Taiwan dislike being called Chinese?’ highlights the frustration Taiwanese feel over their lack of recognition in the world and the need to distinguish themselves. Responding to allegations that Taiwanese refusal to identify as ‘Chinese’ constitutes their looking down on those from the PRC, he argues In 1971, when Resolution 2758 was passed in the UNGA [United Nations General Assembly], the ROC effectively lost its name in international politics and was denied its political claim to the name ‘China’. Taiwan doesn’t even exist as a UNGA member now; Taiwan doesn’t even exist in the eyes of most of the world. This means that when most people think ‘China’, they think ‘PRC’ – which is obviously not the same as the entity we belong to…Next up, it’s nothing about superiority. It’s about identity…yes, we want to feel special…Identity is not just what we are, but also what differentiates us from others whom we perceive as outside of our group. (Pan, 2014: post 11, boldface and italics in original)

Pan’s discussion forum post illustrates Taiwanese anxiety regarding Taiwan’s status in the world (while also encapsulating the main theme of this book), but it does not directly address the precarious security situation of the PRC’s ever-present military threat. The two intertwined anxieties together constitute the ongoing crisis driving Taiwanese to champion internationalization and embrace neoliberalism, along with its associated ‘virtues’ of competitiveness, flexibility and self-reliance. Thus, I contend that Klein’s (2007) observation regarding the shock of crises facilitating the implementation of neoliberal policies and practices also holds in the case of Taiwan. The big difference, however, is that, in contrast to the many other cases in which neoliberalism was forcibly imposed in carefully orchestrated acts of crisis exploitation, neoliberal practices and mindsets in Taiwan were actively sought by the Taiwanese people themselves, with relatively minimal coercion from outside forces.9 While crisis exploiters elsewhere took advantage of windows of opportunity, doing their dirty work while citizens were numb from the shock of sudden crises, Taiwan’s citizenry, unquestionably numb from a crisis that had spanned decades, readily embraced neoliberalism in a desperate bid for recognition and to align themselves with what seemed to be the way of the world.

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Tertiary Education in Neoliberal Taiwan

Throughout Taiwan’s rapid economic expansion period and, in fact, well into the 1980s, the authoritarian government maintained a tight controlling grip on higher education, strictly regulating curriculum standards, admission processes and admission quotas, while also restricting the number of new institutions that could be established. During this time, the tertiary education system was carefully crafted with economic development in mind. Universities served to cultivate a small elite portion of the population, while technical and vocational training constituted ‘the core of Taiwan’s economic development strategy’ (Chou, 2014: para. 13). With the lifting of martial law in 1987, however, Taiwan embarked on a higher education reform path in which the neoliberal tenets of decentralization, privatization, and marketization changed the face of the system (Mok, 2003, 2014), and brought about a dramatic expansion of the tertiary education sector. Between 1986 and 2012, the number of higher education institutions in Taiwan grew from 105 to 165 and the number of students enrolled in Taiwanese universities increased from 345,736 to 1,259,490 (Chou, 2014). This transformation of Taiwanese university education from cultivating a societal elite to educating the masses will be discussed here along with other recent changes in the Taiwanese higher education landscape, but first, some explanation of the streaming system leading up to tertiary-level education is in order. Educational streaming begins in Taiwan at the end of junior high school, when most Taiwanese students take the Basic Competency Test, which covers the subjects of Chinese, English, social science, natural science and mathematics.10 Scores on this test determine whether students can attend three-year senior high schools, three-year vocational schools or five-year junior colleges.11 While senior high schools offer instruction geared specifically toward preparing students for tertiary-level entrance examinations, vocational schools aim to provide students with skills they can, upon graduation, immediately put to use in specific professions, such as agriculture, business or nursing. Taiwan’s five-year junior college programs offer a bit of academic/vocational fusion. The first three years are the equivalent of senior vocational school with much of the instruction focusing on particular specialties, and the final two years are equivalent to Taiwan’s two-year junior colleges, which are very similar to community colleges in the United States. Graduates of five-year junior colleges are awarded a junior college diploma (equivalent to an associate’s degree in the United States).12 Once students’ Basic Competency Test scores send them down one of the three institutional paths, their professional

Neoliberalism and English in Taiwan  31

destinies are not necessarily fixed. Many graduates of five-year junior colleges go on to obtain bachelor’s degrees at four-year colleges and universities. With three years of documented work experience, five-year junior college graduates can even qualify for admittance to master’s degree programs at Taiwanese universities. Graduates of senior vocational schools can apply to colleges and universities just like senior high school graduates, but since vocational school students have not had the same level of intense exam preparation as their high school counterparts, these students find it difficult to achieve entrance exam scores high enough to attend the more prestigious universities. With the aforementioned dramatic expansion of higher education, however, any student who desires a tertiary-level education can almost be guaranteed a place in some institution, regardless of educational background or scholarly aptitude. With the government relaxing its control of higher education, giving more autonomy to institutions and allowing more new players to enter the higher education sector, tertiary education in Taiwan has become subject to free market dynamics, just like any other product or service. According to neoliberal theory, the increased competition that results from more players entering the market should benefit the sector as a whole, with those offering superior ‘services’ able to charge higher prices, thus enticing competitors of lower quality to improve the ‘services’ they offer. This simple free market logic, however, is complicated by the fact that it is the government-funded public universities that have the most prestige in Taiwanese society. Therefore, the huge number of private institutions that have entered the market in recent years find themselves competing with one another for only the students who are unable to get accepted at the more prestigious public universities. And the competition for this non-elite segment of the student population is getting increasingly cutthroat, for as Lin (2012) points out, Taiwan’s declining birthrates have led to low enrollments that threaten to force some private institutions into closure. Neoliberalism promises increased choice for consumers, but for most consumers in the Taiwan higher education marketplace, choice is still rather limited. The huge expansion of the higher education sector that resulted from the establishment of so many private institutions with often less than stringent admissions criteria did indeed provide higher education access to many who would have previously found it far beyond their reach. But while they have a choice of quite a few private institutions competing for their tuition dollars, these private institutions that accommodate over 70% of Taiwan’s tertiary students are twice as expensive to attend as government-funded public universities (Chou, 2008). Ironically,

32  Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital

it is most often those least able to pay the high tuition private institutions charge that find themselves faced with this limited choice and excluded from consideration at the more affordable public universities. Liu and Cheng (2012) cite data from a 2003 survey of freshmen at Taiwanese colleges and universities showing that students from the lowest income households (with an annual income of below 500,000 New Taiwan dollars – slightly more than US$15,000) constituted 29.3% of the students beginning their education at private institutions and only 11% of the freshmen at public universities. As Wang (2012) notes, it is the wealthier segment of the population that is most able to provide children with resources, such as private tutoring and cram school classes, that enable them to later get accepted at prestigious public universities. Here we see in action the capital conversion process that Bourdieu (1986: 253) refers to as ‘a solid investment, the profits of which will appear, in the long run, in monetary or other form.’ High school graduates that are not academically inclined ostensibly do, of course, have the choice of simply entering the workforce rather than continuing their studies at the tertiary level. In hyper-competitive neoliberal Taiwan, however, this is not considered a realistic choice. With higher education now available to practically anyone, having some sort of tertiary degree is regarded as a baseline requirement for all but the most menial jobs that are likely to be considered too demeaning by most Taiwanese students (and/or their parents). With incessant circulation of neoliberal rhetoric promoting competitiveness, pursuit of excellence and perpetual skill upgrading, the stigma of settling for the sort of employment one can get with only a high school diploma is, not unsurprisingly, something the vast majority of Taiwanese wish to avoid. Even those without the means to pay the high fees of private institutions are hence finding ways to do so. The number of students taking out loans for attendance at private institutions during the 2005/2006 academic year was 4.7 times that of students taking out loans to attend public institutions (Wang, 2012). And with the glut of graduates competing for a limited number of white-collar jobs, the prospects of getting a lucrative job to recoup the educational investment and pay off student loans are not bright if one’s degree is from a low-prestige private institution. Despite their high price tags likely to send lower income students and their families into long-term debt, private institutions tend to be of substantially lower quality than public universities in terms of resources and general conditions for study. Wang (2012: 79), for example, cites Ministry of Education (MOE) statistics from 2006 showing that the average number of students per class in public institutions was 36.94, but 43.76 in private institutions. Attempting to reduce the gap between resources

Neoliberalism and English in Taiwan  33

available to students at public and private institutions, the government has, since 1999, provided some subsidies to private institutions, cutting public institution funding by 20-25% in order to do so (Mok, 2014). Subsidies to private institutions, however, according to Chou and Wang (2012: 13), only cover, at best, 20% of private institutions’ expenditures, with the remainder coming from students’ tuition. Public institutions, in contrast, only rely on tuition to cover 10–25% of their operating costs. Even with their costs still heavily subsidized, public institutions often experience funding shortfalls and, as Chou and Wang (2012: 14) highlight, ‘the subsidization of private institutions without hindering the development of public institutions is a thorny dilemma in higher education today.’ This is indeed a thorny issue, for any reduction in subsidies to private institutions will of course be at students’ expense – to their wallets, their quality of education or both. Institutions struggling to survive would surely open up their admissions even wider, accepting absolutely anyone able to pay the tuition costs. Although Saint Agnes is nowhere near the bottom of the barrel in terms of private institution rankings, Saint Agnes teachers I interviewed frequently bemoaned the fact that they had students in their classes that they considered just not cut out for higher education. In the following interview excerpt, for example, one teacher, Klarissa,13 lamented this situation after I asked her about the previous orientation of Taiwanese colleges and universities only being open to the elite. Mark:

 efore, everyone couldn’t go to university. It was much B more restrictive before, right? Klarissa: Uh – a long time ago – couldn’t – yeah. But now they have even system – because we want everyone to graduate, you know, from college. Mark: Right. Klarissa: So everyone can go now. Do you think this is kind of sick? Everyone goes to university. Because this – this is about culture, you know, because Taiwanese think education is the most important thing, so every household, they want their kids to, you know, to graduate from college. So, no matter how hard their life, you know, is, they will still push their kids to study more because they think education is everything – yeah. But well, from my point of view, I think this is kind of weird because I think some students, they just don’t – you know some people are just – they don’t want to study. Mark: Not for everybody.

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Klarissa: Yeah. I think they can just go uh – just graduate from high school, and they can learn something then – learn how to fix up cars. Mark: Some skill. Klarissa: Yeah, some skills, right. And they don’t have to spend so much time uh – you know, studying. Mark: Right. Klarissa:  Or sleeping in class, you know. Klarissa’s students sleeping in class are clearly the same sort that Lin (2012: 66) is referring to when she writes In Taiwan, almost all high school students can go to college, and students with poorer academic records enter relatively lower-ranked schools. They seem to not have focused their minds on academic learning and are aware of their own poor academic performance, but they still do not want to participate actively in their studies.

Compounding the frustration teachers feel when dealing with such students in their classrooms is some institutions’ insistence that these students receive passing grades in spite of their minimal efforts and lackluster performance. In a free market, customer satisfaction is, after all, of extreme importance. This tension that inevitably occurs when applying neoliberal free market principles to higher education is by no means one particular to Taiwan though. It is an issue debated now in most educational contexts around the world. Sharrock (2013: para. 13) highlights the typical teacher’s perspective on this issue when he writes ‘To a lecturer marking assignments, the notion that “the customer is always right” soon gets mugged by the reality that “the student is often wrong.”’ I find it interesting that in attributing blame for the sleeping (but paying) customers winding up in her classroom, Klarissa neglects to consider neoliberal ideologies produced by the state, educational institutions and labor markets at all, and instead heaps the blame on Taiwanese culture. The basis for this attribution of blame is understandable though. As Wang (2012: 73) reminds us, ‘Though its force may easily be exaggerated, the fact remains that among Chinese in all stations of life – including the poor – the figure of the scholar traditionally has been revered and the value of formal education prized.’ This ideology valorizing scholarly endeavors is one that is spoken of frequently, often with great pride – unlike neoliberal ideologies, which, taken for granted as they are, insidiously lurk in the background.

Neoliberalism and English in Taiwan  35

Another change in Taiwan’s higher education landscape that could be attributed to both neoliberal ideologies and traditional Chinese ideologies valorizing scholarly endeavors is a decrease in the number of vocational and technical colleges. As was previously mentioned, technical and vocational training was central to the Taiwanese government’s strategy for economic development under the earlier authoritarian regime. Institute of technology is the general term used in reference to any tertiary-level institution that focuses on a particular specialty, such as business or engineering. Those that offer graduate-level degrees are considered universities and those that don’t are referred to as technical colleges. In addition to their four-year programs, most institutes of technology offer two-year programs, designed specifically for graduates of two and five-year junior colleges to continue their studies as juniors and seniors and obtain undergraduate degrees. Institutes of technology are not necessarily considered inferior to regular colleges and universities. Some, like National Taipei University of Technology, are public institutions that enjoy a great deal of prestige. The university designation itself, which only applies to institutions offering graduate degrees, does, however, confer considerably more prestige than the college designation, and many colleges, over the course of the last decade, have hastily developed graduate programs and overhauled their curricula to obtain the coveted university status. These efforts, according to Chou (2014: para. 13), changed their fundamental nature as it ‘allowed them to convert into “comprehensive universities” at the expense of their original educational foundation for vocational and technical training.’ The motivation for such a change, of course, lies in the relatively unregulated neoliberal free market competition for consumers – consumers that are, of course, undeniably influenced by both neoliberal ideologies and traditional Chinese ideologies valorizing all things ‘academic.’ Although I’m in no position to judge whether or to what degree it has strayed from its vocational roots, Saint Agnes College is one of the many private Taiwanese vocational/technical colleges that has now added graduate programs, recently making the transition to university status. Saint Agnes was established in 1966 as a five-year junior college, and later became a technological institute as well – the only one in the technical and vocational education system that specializes in foreign languages – with two and four-year programs offering degrees in English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish and a variety of more specialized language related majors, such as Translation and Interpretation, Foreign Language Instruction and Chinese Applied Linguistics. Even with all the changes, Saint Agnes has retained its five-year junior college program, and it was, in fact, the five-year junior college program that my participants

36  Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital

all graduated from. Despite its nationwide renown for producing some of Taiwan’s most fluent speakers of foreign languages, Saint Agnes’ five-year junior college program has, in recent years, had declining student numbers. Another Saint Agnes teacher, Idelle, attributed the declining enrollment to larger societal forces. The following is her response to my question about what she considered the five-year junior college program’s greatest strengths and weaknesses to be Idelle: Um – for the strengths, I think our students come here relatively younger, and they have a longer time – five years – to focus on language skills. Probably that’s the strength. And as for the weakness, I think it has something to do with the bigger environment – because the five-year college uh – you know the government – the government wouldn’t put too much focus on this – this – what would you say – the educational system. So actually, in fact, a lot of schools – a lot of colleges – have abolished their uh – five-year junior college division. So – well, probably a lot of parents would be more conservative in thinking about sending their children to study in the five-year college. It’s because of the bigger environment I think. Mark:  Could you explain that further – bigger environment? Idelle: Because there are a lot more universities being established in recent years, and a lot of parents – okay, they would rather have their children go to uh – high school, and then uh – they have a very big chance to uh – for their children to go to universities. Mark: So if they go to a regular high school, they have a greater chance of going on to one of the universities? Idelle: Right. Mark: Than if they went here and then transferred after the end of this program? Idelle: Yeah, still if you study in the junior college, you’ll have a chance to take the transfer examination to go to universities, but since there are a lot of universities available, maybe some of the parents would – or some of the students would – not think that it is necessary for them to study in the junior college first and then take a transfer examination. They can just go directly from the high school track to the university. Mark: Okay, so would you say then that the weakness is not necessarily uh – a weakness of the program itself as much as just um – Idelle: The policy.

Neoliberalism and English in Taiwan  37

The ‘bigger environment’ that Idelle here attributes to the five-year junior college’s declining enrollments is the new Taiwan with an increased number of educational options. In this new Taiwan with enhanced choice, students and their parents are increasingly opting for the path that seems more expedient and not burdened with ‘technical/vocational’ associations. A bit later in my discussion with Idelle, I was telling her about a Singaporean child I had tutored whose high-stakes examination score had landed him in the Singapore system’s technical track. This child’s parents, in an effort to prepare him for a re-examination that might allow him to move to the academic track, had enrolled him in many cram school courses. Upon hearing this story, Idelle, like Klarissa, placed the blame on Chinese culture, exclaiming ‘Chinese ideology! I can’t see why students in the technical track, or technical track in any sense, is inferior to academic track! In Taiwan it’s the same!’ and subsequently proclaiming ‘We have to reform our ideology before we can reform anything! That’s my conclusion – because Chinese always think that academic is superior to anything else.’ With the confluence of traditional Chinese ideologies prioritizing all things academic, neoliberal ideologies emphasizing the perpetual self-development necessary for a reasonable chance to compete in the marketplace, and also, no doubt, the limited number of employment opportunities for graduates, master’s and PhD student enrollment in Taiwan has skyrocketed. The number of students pursuing master’s degrees in 2010 was 185,000 – a huge increase from the 54,980 in 1999, and the number of students pursuing doctoral degrees rose to 34,178 in 2010 from the 1999 figure of 12,253 (Lin, 2012: 60). Even without considering the increased prestige that comes with the university designation, the recent surge in graduate student numbers would serve to further encourage colleges to hastily throw together graduate programs in order to take advantage of this rapidly growing student market. Although prospective graduate students and undergraduate students alike can be almost certain of finding some institution that will admit them, they all need to go through an admission process that, for most, still involves examinations. The admissions process, however, is another aspect of Taiwanese tertiary education that is experiencing deregulation. Previously, admission to tertiary-level institutions was accomplished through the Joint University Entrance Examination and an equivalent exam administered by the Department of Technical and Vocational Education (for entrance to two-year technical college programs). These examinations, characterized by Lin (2012: 61) as a ‘narrow gateway,’ were taken by all prospective students, who received their scores along with an

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indication of which institutions these scores qualified them for admission to (provided that their desired programs at the particular institutions had available spaces). Hierarchical rankings assigned to tertiary institutions have hence long been an issue of central concern for students, parents and the institutions themselves. It has, however, become possible for senior high school students to gain admission to Taiwanese colleges and universities through alternative channels. In 2001, individual institutions were given more autonomy in selecting their own admissions criteria, such as admissions exams developed and administered by the institutions themselves or recommendation from students’ high schools. According to Lin (2012: 62), even with the high school recommendation option, most institutions still require students ‘to take subject-area aptitude tests and mandated exams as a means of selection or placement.’ Clark (2010) also points out that recommendations by high schools are based not only on exam scores and grades, but also extracurricular activities, such as participation in student organizations and international competitions. As far as tertiary-level admission goes, deregulation and offering consumers more choice appears to have done little in alleviating the pressures faced by prospective student applicants. Official efforts to promote the neoliberal imperative of constantly striving for tertiary-level educational excellence have, just like in other contexts, often produced underwhelming results, given the large amount of funding involved (Chang et al., 2009), or unintended negative consequences. Since, in today’s neoliberal Taiwan, international competitiveness is of utmost importance, in evaluating tertiary institutions, global rankings are prioritized above all else. Institutions’ global rankings are largely determined by quantitative indicators of faculty publication and citations, so the MOE bases funding to institutions on faculty publication in journals indexed in databases like the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Science Citation Index (SCI). Institutions, in turn, base faculty salaries and promotion on these quantitative indicators (Chou, 2008; Chou et al., 2013). This ‘publish or perish’ policy actually emphasizes sheer quantity of research output over research quality and many contend that it forces faculty members to prioritize research over teaching, undermining the quality of instruction (Cheng et al., 2014). The Plan to Develop First-Class Universities and Top-Level Research Centers (MOE, 2015) includes lots of vague platitudes about the pursuit of excellence in research and teaching, but it emphasizes the quantitative indicators of research (excellent or not), with a call for 80,000 papers to be published in 10 years. The plan also stresses the importance of internationalization for maximizing the competitiveness of Taiwanese higher education – and central to plans for competitiveness and internationalization in Taiwan is the English language.

Neoliberalism and English in Taiwan  39

English in Neoliberal Taiwan

One of the most visible manifestations of Taiwan’s embrace of neoliberalism has been its valorization of English language abilities. While many states are indeed pressured to varying degrees, by more powerful states and institutions, to adopt neoliberal economic policies, no such explicit pressure is exerted to force emphasis on English. Price (2014) notes this fact, but goes on to highlight the reality of the situation: Given the interlinked and competitive nature of the global political and economic system, however, it is questionable whether, as the proponents of neoliberalism would have it, adopting English is exactly a choice. States perceive English as having a utilitarian necessity and construct it as such in economic and political discourses as a means to connect with the world politically, or gain (or maintain) a competitive economic edge. (Price, 2014: 570)

Since connecting with the world and gaining/maintaining ‘a competitive economic edge’ are especially pressing concerns for Taiwanese, the discourses constructed by the state to justify emphasis on English as a necessity find a particularly receptive audience in the Taiwanese populace. Throughout compulsory Taiwanese education, languages account for 20–30% of the curricula. In addition to Mandarin Chinese and English (from at least the third grade), studying a Taiwanese language (Tai-yü, Hakka or an aboriginal language) is required from the first grade to the sixth grade (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2015) and in January 2018, a bill was passed to extend compulsory local language education all the way to high school (Chen, 2018). But the political indexicalities of Mandarin Chinese, Tai-yü, Hakka and Taiwan’s aboriginal languages have only served to enhance the position of English, for it is against a backdrop of various political factions jockeying to promote or demote Mandarin Chinese to suit their particular agendas that English, which has long been synonymous with the term ‘foreign language’ in Taiwan,14 has achieved its exalted position in Taiwanese society. Pushing for an ever-greater emphasis to be placed on English is, after all, a safe move for government officials and politicians, for English, since it is not encumbered with the many hot button indexical associations that other languages are in the Taiwan linguistic landscape, is perceived as being neutral.15 As Wei (2008: 87) explains …opting for English in place of Mandarin or other linguistic varieties such as Hakka, Tai-yu, or the aboriginal languages is a deliberate way

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to avoid another ethnolinguistic conflict, the one in which Mandarin is identified with the political regime in Beijing, Tai-yu with independence, and Hakka or the aboriginal languages with separatism.

The pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), for example, would prefer to emphasize Tai-yü in its efforts to promote a distinct Taiwanese identity, but doing so invites charges not only of desinicization by the KMT, but also language chauvinism by speakers of Hakka and the aboriginal languages. The promotion of English, in contrast, secures support from a diverse array of potential voters anxious about Taiwan’s lack of recognition and their children’s ability to compete on the world stage, while simultaneously satisfying the DPP’s aim of taking some of the focus away from Mandarin Chinese. After a failed 2002 proposal to make Taiyü, Hakka and the aboriginal languages official languages along with Mandarin Chinese, then president Chen Shui-bian called for English to be named Taiwan’s second official language (Lin, 2002). This proposal never resulted in any such legislation,16 but in some official documents, English was subsequently referred to as a ‘quasi-official language’ (e.g. MOE, n.d.). Promoting English to score political points has indeed become widespread at all levels of government, with city and county officials, according to Huang (2006), vying in a sort of competition to provide English education to younger elementary school children than other local governments. While many school districts with the resources to do so started offering English instruction to elementary school students prior to 2001, the language was then only required to be taught to students starting in junior high school. In 2001, however, Taiwan’s English-in-education policy was revised, making English instruction mandatory for all fifth-grade public school students nationwide. To explain their motivations for enacting this change in policy, the MOE provided the following reasons: (1) to develop in students an international perspective; (2) to maximize students’ critical period of language acquisition in language learning; (3) to optimize the timing of the implementation of the new nine-year integrated curriculum; and (4) to follow the trends of the new era and to fulfil parents’ expectations. (MOE, 1998, cited in Lin, 2006: 816–817) Tsao (2008) notes that by including the bit about fulfilling parents’ expectations, the MOE is making a point to announce that the public’s

Neoliberalism and English in Taiwan  41

expectations are indeed taken into account in the formulation of educational policy. Such expectations, in fact, proved to be especially influential, for the policy was again changed just two years later, largely due to pressure from students’ parents (Tsao, 2008) – this time mandating that English instruction start at the third grade, beginning with the 2005 school year, with a minimum of one-class period of instruction per week. Since this policy stipulated only the minimum requirement, local governments were free to start English instruction in even lower grades and dedicate even more classroom hours to English if they saw fit to do so. And indeed they did. The governments in several areas, such as Taipei city, Hsinchu county and Taichung county, chose to start English instruction in the first grade, and others like Taipei city and Tainan city devoted two class periods to English each week instead of just one (Tsao, 2008). In response to critics who questioned the wisdom of teaching English to very young children before they had even acquired a firm knowledge of Mandarin Chinese or local languages, Taipei officials argued that developing English proficiency early was essential for promoting Taiwan internationally and increasing the nation’s competitiveness on the world stage (Huang, 2006). Explicitly reiterating this rhetoric that had already been circulating for quite a few years was the Challenge 2008 National Development Plan (2002–2007), a six-year strategic development plan released by the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) in May of 2002. This plan identifies areas for substantial investment (an estimated expenditure of approximately US $75 billion), and then lists 10 specific sub-plans detailing the benefits of these investments. These 10 sub-plans all reiterate the discourse of competitiveness, with increased competition from Mainland China and Southeast Asia repeatedly mentioned throughout the document. All 10 sub-plans also relate, in one way or another, to the goal of transforming Taiwan into an Asia-Pacific business center (CEPD, 2002). The strategy in this national development plan that explicitly emphasizes the importance of English in the realization of national goals is Sub-plan (1) – Cultivate Talent for the E-generation. The English summary of the plan states The first step to facing future challenges requires a high adaptability to globalization, as well as an environment for fostering such abilities. The ability to use foreign languages (especially English) and Internet communication is the focal point of this project. English in particular has become essential to global connection, and accordingly the government

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made English a quasi-official language six years ago to boost the range of English application in everyday life. (MOE, n.d.: para. 2)

Not only does this report recognize English as a ‘quasi-official language,’ but it also calls for the use of English to be expanded into domains of life that have, since 1945, been the official preserve of Mandarin Chinese, highlighting the lengths the Taiwan government is willing to go to maintain a competitive edge internationally, and the importance placed on English in achieving this goal. In keeping with the neoliberal emphasis on the continuous pursuit of excellence and upgrading of skills, the development plan also argues that ‘Life-long learning is a goal we have to strive for…to quickly enhance citizen quality and elevate the nation’s competitive advantage to international standards’ (MOE, n.d.: para. 16). All members of Taiwanese society are basically urged to take personal responsibility for their own life-long self-development and attempt to become the idealized neoliberal subjects celebrated in Margaret Thatcher’s enterprise culture discourse. And just as Abelmann et al. (2009: 230) contend is the case in South Korea, in Taiwan as well, ‘At the heart of this personal development project is English mastery.’17 Mastery of English remains only a distant goal in the perpetual self-development projects of most Taiwanese, and the use of English in Taiwan has definitely not become ‘a part of daily life,’ but English does indeed seriously impact the lives of many due to the gatekeeping role it now plays for education and employment. Not only does English feature prominently in high school and university entrance examinations, but the ability to achieve a minimum score on standardized English tests like the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) has also become an exit requirement for graduating from 90% of Taiwan’s universities (Taipei Times, 2015). And upon entering the workforce, Taiwanese young people are, yet again, encountering the use of English as a gatekeeper, for as Pan (2009) reports, Taiwanese businesses are increasingly requiring job applicants to achieve certain minimum scores on standardized English tests to even be considered for employment. Such requirements, Pan argues, are largely for the purpose of simply narrowing down the pool of applicants, as many of the positions in question actually involve little to no use of English on the job. It is, of course, not only in Taiwan that English is now one of the most coveted and prized cultural goods around, but Taiwan’s political situation has enabled officials, policymakers and corporations, through the public discourses of competitiveness and internationalization, to

Neoliberalism and English in Taiwan  43

instill in the populace a particularly potent and uncritical acceptance of the notion that English proficiency is the panacea for the nation’s economic challenges. As Chen (2003: 162) comments, ‘anyone who has opposed the teaching of English in elementary schools has been regarded as old-fashioned and lacking a modern or international perspective.’ Pointing out that the younger-the-better ideology (language learning being facilitated if started at a younger age) ‘is well suited to neoliberal discourses of competition for a language that is a valued capital,’ Price (2014: 581) discusses the competition that has ensued among parents to expose their children to English as early as humanly possible and the resulting proliferation of the private supplementary education industry in Taiwan. The Mandarin Chinese term for private supplementary schools is buxiban (補習班), and in English, they are almost always referred to in Taiwan as cram schools.18 Regardless of what terminology one employs, however, such establishments are, without a doubt, doing booming business. Citing Taipei Bureau of Education statistics, Price (2014: 578) highlights the fact that the number of licensed buxiban focusing on foreign language instruction doubled between 2003 and 2008, attributing the sector’s extraordinary growth, in part, to the 2002 release of the Challenge 2008 development plan. Price goes on to point out two striking neoliberal contradictions presented by the phenomenal buxiban success story. First, despite neoliberal opposition to government interference in the free market, government-sponsored discourses of competitiveness and internationalization actually played a big role in creating the environment in which buxiban could flourish so spectacularly. Secondly, neoliberal rhetoric would contend that the increased competition that comes with more players entering the buxiban ‘free market’ will result in more and better choices for the consumers seeking the valued cultural capital these players provide for their children. In reality, however, ‘parents were hardly exercising their “choice” within a free linguistic or educational market; rather, they were impelled to compete in it’ (Price, 2014: 578). In the case of Taiwan buxiban, the notion of free choice is indeed illusory. As Bray (2006: 526) notes, private supplementary education ‘maintains and exacerbates social stratification’ since ‘prosperous families with the necessary resources can invest in greater quantities and better qualities of tutoring than can their less well-endowed neighbors.’ Here, of course, we have the familiar scenario of those with sufficient economic capital having a wide variety of options for their conversion of that economic capital to valued cultural capital. In Taiwan, however, even those with a sufficient amount of economic capital might not have such choices if they happen to live outside of a major metropolitan area.

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Buxiban, since they are, of course, for-profit operations, tend to set up business where the money is – in areas that they are most likely to attract the largest number of consumers. If a rural community does have an ample number of sufficiently well-off individuals for a buxiban to stay afloat, one might open-up there, but having no competition in the immediate area, this lone buxiban is not compelled to enhance the quality of its services. Thus, the quality of buxiban in rural areas does tend to be quite poor. As Price (2014: 579) puts it, ‘private buxiban operate according to the iron logic of the market.’ Those who reside in rural areas are also disadvantaged in the public sector offerings of the public schools where English instruction is concerned. As mentioned earlier, in 2001, when the MOE mandated that all public schools begin English instruction in fifth grade, some school districts had been offering English to children as early as first grade for some time already, and such early adapter districts were generally those in wealthier urban areas. Schools in rural areas struggle to hire qualified English teachers. According to one of Price’s (2014) informants, the Miaoli County education bureau director, Miaoli County schools were unable to institute English instruction for third grade students when the MOE mandated this – simply due to lack of teachers. When the MOE attempted to compensate for the lack of Taiwanese English teachers in rural areas by recruiting foreign teachers from traditionally English-speaking countries like the US, UK and Canada (attempting also to appeal to the ideological notion subscribed to by the general public that ‘native speakers’ make ideal teachers), this initiative proved to be a dismal failure, for foreign teachers, just like their Taiwanese counterparts, were not at all attracted to the rural areas. As Price (2014: 584) reports, ‘The MOE…recruited just five foreign teachers in 2004, vastly short of the original goal of 1,000 per year.’ So, students in the wealthier more populated urban areas benefit doubly by the structural forces in place. Not only does the free market provide them with a smorgasbord of buxiban options (if their families possess the economic capital to afford such options), but the free market also serves to provide them public sector English education superior to those in rural areas, since their better-funded school districts in more appealing locales are able to attract more and better teachers. One might think that with the better English education in wealthier school districts, many parents would deem buxiban services unnecessary. This, however, appears to seldom be the case. To thrive, or even function with some modicum of success, in neoliberal Taiwanese society entails constant competition and self-improvement. The superior public school English

Neoliberalism and English in Taiwan  45

instruction only serves to up the ante so that the baseline starting point for everyone is considerably higher than in rural areas. From that point, the sky’s the limit as far as benchmarks go, with each buxiban claiming that an extra dollar spent on its services will pay off in terms of exam scores. Rather than view buxiban as competitors or see their popularity as indicative of low-quality public education, many individuals working in Taiwan public education seem to simply accept private supplementary education as an unquestioned necessity of modern life. Another one of Price’s (2014: 579) informants, the principal of a school in a wealthy area of Taipei, actually went so far as to state that there ‘ought to be many students studying’ at buxibans, given the high-stakes of English as a gatekeeper in Taiwan. Not all of Price’s informants, however, were so uncritical of the place of private supplementary education in Taiwanese society. The director of the Bureau of Education in Taidong County likened buxibans to ‘the drugs people use in the Olympics’ – enhancing performance, but ultimately ‘not positive for the education system’ (Price, 2014: 578). Working, as he was, in rural mountainous Taidong, this director undoubtedly understood all too well the limited prospects of the students in his district due to the structural realities of neoliberal Taiwanese society. Yet despite an ever-increasing amount of money being spent at buxiban, incessant promotion of English and widespread support for English learning initiatives, the general public’s level of English proficiency remains low – even in wealthier areas where the majority of pupils have so many advantages. Reiterating again the Challenge 2008 National Development Plan’s rhetoric of English promotion for the sake of competitiveness and internationalization, a 2009 Executive Yuan white paper entitled Plan for Enhancing National English Proficiency essentially declares previous efforts at achieving this a dismal failure, lamenting that ‘In daily English conversation ability, Taiwan is at a similar level to South Korea, mainland China and Thailand’ and on standardized English tests, ‘Even mainland China has recently been performing more creditably, especially in TOEFL scores’ (Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, 2009: 22). Such a context in which dominant ideologies celebrate skills that the general public lacks provides an ideal playing field for those who possess the skills in question to cultivate and maintain identities of distinction. The game played on this playing field, however, is nevertheless still one of strategy and struggle for typical Taiwanese English users – a game that, to produce identities of distinction through English, involves four mechanisms that Bucholtz and Hall (2004) identify as the mechanisms by

46  Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital

which all identities are produced: ideologies, indexicality, practice and performativity. Looking specifically at language ideologies and indexicality at work in practice in Taiwan, the use of various English resources index an array of associative meanings in different Taiwan fields. In some fields, the use of English resources projects worldliness, cosmopolitanism and sophistication, while in others, the very same resources index pretentiousness or arrogance. These varying indexical associations made by participants in particular fields are linked in an ideological indexical field19 (Eckert, 2008) where all interpretations are related in some way to the notions of competitiveness and internationalization, which have been imbued with special significance by the broader ideology of neoliberalism. Which indexical field associations a Taiwan field denizen is likely to make upon encountering or making use of English resources may largely depend on the extent to which the individual’s habitus allows him or her to consider himself or herself a potential beneficiary of the neoliberal world order. Regardless, however, of whether they stand to benefit from the valorization of neoliberal free-market forces or are among the legion of individuals these forces have rendered relatively powerless and voiceless, all are drawing meaning from the constellation of ideologically linked interpretations in the same indexical field, impacting both the way interlocutors view and behave toward the speakers and the way the speakers view themselves. For many in Taiwan, however, opportunities to use English are few and far between. For those who possesses the English skills and a desire to cultivate or maintain identities of distinction but lack authentic opportunities to put the identity construction mechanisms into play, the opportunities must be manufactured through performativity – ‘highlighting of ideology through the foregrounding of practice’ (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004: 381). These calculated performances specifically intended to position oneself as different or special, as well as the other three identity construction mechanisms of ideology, indexicality and practice, feature prominently in the chronicles of strategy and struggle for distinction that follow in Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8. Notes (1) Personal taxes were drastically cut as well for those in the highest tax bracket – reduced from 70% to 28% (Harvey, 2005: 26). (2) As Klein (2007: 204) points out, the IMF and the World Bank were never institutions that operated on a ‘one country, one vote’ basis, but instead, since their very beginnings, allocated countries power based on the size of their economies, with the United States effectively able to veto any major decisions.

Neoliberalism and English in Taiwan  47

(3) Had they steadfastly maintained their mixed managed economic policies, these economies may have completely avoided the trauma of the Asian financial crisis, but under pressure from the WTO and the IMF just a few years prior to the crisis, compromises were made in which state-owned entities would not be privatized, but barriers to foreign participation in financial sectors would be lifted. The lifting of these barriers effectively linked these economies with the world and with one another, so when rumors started to circulate that Thailand’s currency was not sufficiently backed by dollars, the panic selling that resulted affected the entire region (Klein, 2007; Piller & Cho, 2013). (4) According to Chen (2000: 46), Taiwan’s combined index of currency exchange rates and stock prices dropped only 35.4% during the highly volatile year-long period between 30 June 1997 and 30 June 1998. Compared to some other countries in the region, such as Indonesia, which saw its index drop 96.7%, and South Korea, with a whopping 122.1% drop, Taiwan’s 35.5% drop seems like a mere inconvenience. (5) Going to the IMF for assistance would have, in any case, not been an option since the diplomatic isolation of Taiwan excluded it from IMF membership. (6) As Weller (2001: 218) notes, ‘the heart of Taiwan’s economic growth has been very small-scale entrepreneurs…Taiwanese bosses complain that workers stay around only long enough to learn the business, and then set themselves up in competition.’ (7) The United States was also, for years, Taiwan’s main export market. Citing USITC statistics, Kil (2004: 232), for example, points out that in 1985, exports constituted 50% of GNP for Taiwan, and 48% of those exports were from trade with the United States. (8) For Taiwan at the time, dependence on foreign trade and desperation for official international recognition were two very intertwined factors. Without formal diplomatic relations with its trading partners, Taiwan was not protected from trade discrimination (or threats of trade discrimination) by international treaties or agreements. WTO Most Favored Nation status provided protection from such discrimination and formal mechanisms for resolving trade disputes – particularly those with the PRC (Kil, 2004). (9) Singapore represents a comparable case, with its status as a tiny, predominantly Chinese, city state with no natural resources, surrounded by potentially hostile neighbors constituting the premeditating crisis. In Singapore’s early days as a sovereign nation, this situation was indeed cause for concern, and the government’s response was to valorize particular guiding principles, such as meritocracy and competitiveness, that are largely in line with neoliberal tenets. Singaporeans today don’t feel the same sense of anxiety over this situation that earlier generations did, but the government, nevertheless, continues to stress the country’s vulnerabilities and attempts to keep the public in crisis mode to some degree in order to discourage complacency. (10) Efforts are currently underway to offer ‘an “exam-free” pathway to upper secondary school, in hopes that schools will take residency status, civic involvement and other factors into account when accepting students’ (NCEE, 2015: para. 5). These efforts, however, are controversial and face a substantial amount of opposition from students, parents and teachers, who are concerned that basing admissions on criteria like recommendations from schools will create ‘a state of continual examination’ among students, actually serving to increase their stress levels (Clark, 2010: para. 27).

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(11) This is a somewhat simplified account. In recent years, distinctions between senior high schools and senior vocational schools have become increasingly blurred, with senior high schools offering some vocational courses and senior vocational schools offering more academic courses. In 1996, several schools dubbed dual-stream high schools that offered a combination of academic and vocational skills courses were established, and these ‘later became comprehensive high schools’ (Chou & Ching, 2012: 152). (12) Associate’s degrees, however, are not only offered in the United States. They are also common in other contexts, such as Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Australia and Canada. Foundation degrees in the UK are also analogous to Associate’s degrees. (13) Klarissa and Idelle are both pseudonyms. (14) English has been taught in Taiwan’s junior and senior high schools since the 1945 repatriation to the ROC government, and in 1968, English became the only required foreign language in junior high schools, with official documents listing the characters for ‘foreign language’ followed by ‘English’ in parentheses (Chen, 2003). Since 1993, senior high school students have been offered other foreign languages that they can study in lieu of English, such as Japanese, French and German (Chen, 2003), but English is by no means suffering any drop in popularity in Taiwan. (15) Far from actually being neutral, English is indeed, as Dua (1994, cited in Pennycook, 2003: 519) asserts, ‘ideologically encumbered.’ In comparison to other languages spoken in Taiwan, however, English does not have the same potential to incite conflict. (16) Chen’s proposal to make English an official language was met with some opposition, most notably from then Taipei mayor and future president Ma Ying-jeou, who proclaimed it unrealistic given the low level of English proficiency among Taiwan officials and the need to translate all government documents into English if it were an official language (Lin, 2002). (17) Abelmann et al. (2009: 243) also point out that taking personal responsibility for one’s own development is especially appealing to individuals in countries like South Korea and Taiwan that have only recently democratized. As they explain, in such countries, ‘the discourse of self-development is all the more easily celebrated because of the ironic historical conjuncture between neo-liberal and post-authoritarian/collective liberal transformations.’ (18) In Taiwan, lessons at these schools are generally ongoing (rather than short-term for exam preparation) and would, in some contexts, be referred to as enrichment centers. (19) In proposing the term indexical field, Eckert (2008) actually expresses reservations about her use of field, concerned that it could potentially be confused with Bourdieusian fields – confusion that I invite here by using both field senses in the same discussion.

4 Narrative and Its Use in This Study

In this chapter, I first discuss narrative inquiry and my choice of employing this form of qualitative research for this study. I then examine various contextual issues that, without a doubt, impacted the narratives produced by my participants. Since these influencing factors include the particulars of the relationship that I, as the interviewer, had with these participants, I will focus especially on my position as a researcher throughout the data collection process and my own background, which undeniably influenced my analysis and presentation of the data I obtained. Narrative Inquiry

While storytelling is, of course, an age-old practice and narrative methods have been utilized by academics since the 1920s,1 the ‘narrative turn’ (Bruner, 2010) of the 1980s was largely a result of widespread disillusionment with positivist research approaches. As Brockmeier and Harré (2001: 39, italics in original) explain, positivist philosophy ‘has been sharply criticized, opening up new horizons for interpretive investigations which focus on discursive and cultural forms of life, as opposed to a futile search for universal laws of human behavior.’ Narrative inquiry, with its focus on the storied experiences of particular individuals, offers opportunities for researchers to be unshackled from the positivist requirement of generalizability. My decision to expressly elicit narrative responses from participants for my interview data and present this data in storied form stems from my belief that narrative structure – the causal linking of events with a unifying plot (Polkinghorne, 1995) – is ideally suited for illuminating human experiences. Life as we live it lacks the coherent plot that it gains in the telling (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Many causal connections are, after all, only known in retrospect (Polkinghorne, 1995). We are all inclined to impose 49

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narrative structures on our past experiences and organize these experiences in a storied form in our memories, and this reconstruction is in fact what makes autobiographic narratives so much more than a simple relating of past experiences. Individuals attribute their own personal meanings to their experiences and connect seemingly disconnected events with the plots they apply to their stories. As Casanave (2007: 18) points out, ‘It is this power of narrative to ascribe meaning to parts, and to configure them into wholes, that defines narrative as a meaning-making phenomenon.’ By presenting my focal participants’ data in storied narrative analysis2 form, I am also striving to portray these participants in a manner that truly allows the reader to get to know each of them as ‘a distinctive individual, in a unique situation, dealing with issues in a personal manner’ (Polkinghorne, 1995: 18). Although qualitative researchers utilizing all types of presentation methods attempt to understand their participants’ lived experiences from the point of view of the participants themselves, participant quotations in many studies seem to me, all too often, like collections of disembodied voices. This is what I expressly wished to avoid as I wrote up storied chapters for each of my focal participants.3 For me, the work that especially stands out in its ability to vividly capture participant point of view is Yasuko Kanno’s (1997, 2003) longitudinal examination of four Japanese returnee students’ identity struggles at Japanese universities after spending substantial portions of their earlier lives in Canada. This was the work that first won me over to narrative inquiry. In her detailed compassionate portrayals of each participant’s story in separate chapters, Kanno managed to not only make me, as a reader, feel that I really got to know her student participants and understand their shifting conceptualizations of themselves and the notion of ‘home,’ but also genuinely care about them. Experiencing this sense of becoming so thoroughly acquainted with research ‘subjects’ was, for me, a hugely refreshing change from the disembodied participant voices that I had become accustomed to seeing in write-ups of qualitative research – voices that seemed to be presented purely for the purpose of illustrating a particular theme or point, without concern for the individuals behind the words. To say Kanno’s work was influential in shaping the study discussed here would, I believe, be an understatement. Not only did the methodology she employed for her study roughly serve as a model for mine, but the manner of presentation she used for both her original 1997 dissertation and subsequent 2003 monograph based on the same research served as a sort of template for the structure of this book. The fact that my research, like Kanno’s, was primarily concerned with identity issues makes narrative inquiry especially appropriate.

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Identity, as concisely defined by Bucholtz and Hall (2005: 586), is simply ‘the social positioning of self and other,’ and personal narratives are a perfect mode for such positioning to be revealed, generally providing a far better impression of who one is in relation to others than responses to direct questions about identity or observations of behavior. As Giddens (1991: 54, emphasis in original) states, ‘A person’s identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor – important though this is – in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going.’ Although identities are multiple, continuously changing, and frequently contradictory, individuals seek to impose coherence on the self, and this is done through the constant editing and revision of our life narratives. It is the imposition of coherence in the presentation of the self that Linde (1993: 52) focuses on in an examination of life story narratives relayed to her by 13 American interviewees chosen ‘specifically because they were known to have professions that were important to them, and that would therefore form an important part of their life stories.’ The interviewees’ chosen professions did indeed prove to be the dominant themes in their self-presentation, with various systems employed to create coherence and account for causality in their narratives. These coherence systems ranged from appealing to societally accepted ‘common sense’ notions often marked by ‘of course’4 to Freudian psychology (relating choices to early childhood experiences). Linde (1993: 17) stresses that coherence in our life stories is not only societally expected, but also a personal expectation that we demand of ourselves, arguing Just as the life story as a social unit has some correspondence to an internal, private life story, so the coherence that we produce for social consumption bears a relation to our own individual desire to understand our life as coherent, as making sense, as the history of a proper person.

Coherence, in short, is not simply something that we strive for in the telling, with a consideration for addressees’ impressions and ability to follow our accounts, but it is also essential for our own understanding of ourselves – necessary measures for making our identities seem somewhat less schizophrenic. My participants for this study were not yet to the point in their lives that professional personas would dominate their life stories, but they each had particular personas that dominated their narratives, and in their presentation of these personas, relied on neoliberal ideas regarded as ‘common sense’ as their ‘coherence systems’ (Linde, 1993: 163).5 Gigi’s presentation of herself as The Intellectual, Audrey’s as The Social

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Butterfly, Rachel’s as The Ideal Neoliberal Subject, and Shannon’s as The Competitor all made use of a particular neoliberal belief system familiar to others in Taiwanese society (and myself as the interviewer) to render the narratives coherent to both the addressee (me) and to themselves. This neoliberal belief system is basically the positive evaluation of qualities associated with the entrepreneurial self (Miller & Rose, 1990) – qualities like self-reliance, boldness, flexibility, competitiveness and the willingness to take risks in order to achieve goals. The approach to the study of identity that Linde (1993) and I, with this study, share is one that De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2012: 167) call ‘identities as self-presentation.’ They go on to identify the underlying assumption of this approach, explaining that ‘by presenting themselves and others as characters in story worlds and by negotiating these self-images with interlocutors, tellers are able to portray themselves as people who think and act in specific ways without directly talking about who they are.’ While the imposed coherence just discussed can be expected to appear in such narrative presentations of the self and are, in fact, narrative aspects that some researchers, such as Linde and myself, are especially interested in, this does not mean that contradictions and revisions do not occur, for indeed they do. Wagner and Wodak (2006: 393), in their examination of the identities revealed in self-presentation among eight successful female professionals, focus specifically on these more chaotic aspects of identity presentation, proclaiming, ‘It was our explicit aim to dig up the detours, confusions, and contradictions in the women’s seemingly coherent biographies.’ For researchers working in narrative inquiry, ‘detours, confusions, and contradictions’ are not considered a problematic threat to the validity of a study, for they recognize that such messiness simply ‘reflect[s] the multiplicity, flux, and indeterminancy of an individual person’s life as played out in a complex social world’ (McAdams, 2006: 16). The issue of participants deliberately lying has, however, been addressed in the narrative research community. Loh (2013: 2), for example, asks ‘If the data is collected through the participants’ telling of their “storied experiences,” how do I know if they are being truthful? What if they made up a story or embellish the retelling? Will the research be valid then?’ I don’t have easy answers to these questions as they relate to narrative inquiry practice in general, but for my purposes for this study, I don’t consider them especially relevant. While my participants’ stories may well have been embellished somewhat, everything they told me does mesh with my conceptualizations of the sorts of people I know them to be. In other words, based on my knowledge of these participants prior to, during and in the

Narrative and Its Use in This Study  53

years subsequent to the interviews that I will be focusing on here, all they told me in these interviews absolutely does ring true. In any case, I am actually less concerned about the facts of my participants’ experiences than their presentation of these experiences (truthful or not). With the identity as self-presentation approach that I am taking here, participants fabricating or embellishing experiences would, in fact, arguably be especially valid for my purposes, for if they are so committed to projecting a particular identity that they are willing to lie to do so (or do so more emphatically), that in itself speaks volumes. Linde (1994: 14) makes a similar argument under the heading ‘Sidestepping the Issue of Truth,’ arguing that her participants’ life stories as texts are themselves the focus of her investigation – not ‘the relation of the life story to some supposed set of facts in a postulated real world.’ While revisions participants might make to previously told narratives may well be due to lies told the first time around, they are more likely just indicators of their shifting identity positions. Polkinghorne (1991: 135) explicates how narrative inquiry highlights identity development over time when he writes that ‘viewing the self as a narrative or story, rather than as a substance, brings to light the temporal and developmental dimension of human experience.’ Since this study was a longitudinal one, ‘the temporal and developmental dimension’ of my participants’ views and the selves they tried to project over the course of a year were a principal concern. Hence, I believe narrative inquiry provided an ideal approach. As Kanno (2003: 11) asserts, ‘Tapping into issues of identity – how one views oneself and relates to the world around one – requires an inquiry into people’s experiences and meaning making, and an inquiry into those areas calls for the use of narrative.’ My Interviews with Participants

In the chapters that follow, I draw on a variety of sorts of data in my presentation of the four focal participants’ stories. These include bits from my field notes, artifacts such as notes participants wrote to me when they were my students, posts they made on social media and email exchanges I had with them. The largest portion of the data utilized, however, is from the face-to-face interviews I conducted with them in May 2009 and March 2010. Linde (1993) emphasizes that when we relay our life stories, however detailed or abbreviated they might be, we tailor them to both the particular situations in which we are speaking and to the particular individuals we are speaking to. De Fina (2011: 36) makes the same point, highlighting the fact that research interview contexts are

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‘truly interactional settings’ in which the different ways researchers and participants align with one another has a huge influence on the sort of data obtained. With these facts in mind, it is thus imperative that I provide here some additional details about the particular relationship that I had with my participants and the contexts in which our interviews were conducted. My position in carrying out this research in Taiwan was simultaneously one of an insider and an outsider. Although I was clearly not Taiwanese, I had, as previously mentioned, lived in Taiwan and taught my participants’ Conversation and Writing class at Saint Agnes during the 2005/2006 academic year when they were second-year students in the five-year junior college program. When I first arrived at the college, before teaching a single class, an administrator who had been with Saint Agnes since its founding in the 1960s told me that there were basically two types of students there – those who were genuinely passionate about languages, and those whose parents wanted them to be passionate about languages. It didn’t take me long to figure out which of my students fell into each of these two categories. My participants’ class had very few students from the latter group – likely due to the fact that they were English majors and French minors. In the Saint Agnes five-year junior college program, students can major in English, Japanese, French, Spanish or German, and are also required to choose a minor from these same language choices. Those who score highest on the program’s entrance exam have priority in choosing which major and minor language concentrations they will study. Consequently, English majors are generally more academically inclined than those with other majors, since English is the most popular major, and English majors with the most popular minor language concentrations (French and Japanese) tend to be exceptionally good students. In any case, my participants’ class greatly impressed me with their English proficiency and their seemingly genuine passion for learning languages. While I believe I was, in general, a popular teacher at Saint Agnes and got along well with students in all of my classes, I formed an exceptionally close bond to the students in my participants’ class. It was a large class, with approximately 50 students (a typical class size for the five-year junior college program at that time), but the atmosphere in the class contrasted sharply with some of my other large Saint Agnes classes, where, in spite of my efforts to lighten classroom proceedings, an air of formality seemed inescapable. In my participants’ class, students seemed much more relaxed, and although it was, of course, impossible for everyone in such a large class to participate in whole-class discussions, these students

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were far less hesitant than those in my other classes about providing comments and voicing their opinions. While I would like to take all the credit for facilitating this relaxed environment, I think it was largely due to the dynamics of the relationship this particular group of students had with one another. Much like the Vietnamese college class that Kramsch and Sullivan (1996) describe, five-year junior college students at Saint Agnes are, for the most part, together with the same group of students for almost every class during the first three years of their five-year course of study. Consequently, the students in this class had already been together for one year when I entered their classroom at the beginning of their second year in the program. By this time, they had gotten to know one another quite well, but in contrast to another five-year junior college group I taught that would have also had the same previous year to become acquainted, cliquish behavior with small groups of students preferring not to interact much with other groups was not evident in my participants’ class.6 I believe my popularity among Saint Agnes students probably had much to do with my storytelling and discussion of my life experiences in the classroom. I always made a point of peppering my lessons with anecdotes from my travels, experiences and family life – particularly stories about my son, who was a toddler at the time. My students, I believe, came to feel that they really knew me as a person. For most of my Saint Agnes classes, I never saw students outside of the classroom, but this was not the case for many students in my participants’ class. Some of these students routinely invited me to their extra-curricular events, such as dance performances, and I attended these whenever possible. Some even came to my apartment on weekends to play with my son. I think it would be accurate to say that even at that time, when I was actually my participants’ teacher, they would have characterized me as a friend as well. Just before my family left Taiwan to move to Singapore in 2006, my participants’ class threw me a big party with a cake and trivia games in which the details of my life were the focus of trivia questions. At this party, some of my students actually cried, telling me how much they would miss me, and pleaded with me to stay in touch. And I did stay in touch with several of them. Audrey, in particular, was especially good about maintaining contact with me through email, regularly sending me updates on what she and her classmates were up to. In 2007, I set up a Facebook account and for about a month, only had one Facebook friend (a former classmate from the University of Hawaii). Then my former Saint Agnes students, seemingly all at once, discovered Facebook and started friending me. For a time, Facebook, for me, was almost exclusively a forum for interaction with my former Taiwanese

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students. At one point when I was still thinking that my thesis research would be focused on the Singapore context, I considered including some of my former Taiwanese students in my research in order to contrast the views and experiences of students in the two societies. When I contacted a few, asking if they would be willing to participate in my research, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Since I was having trouble finding participants in Singapore willing to commit to the sort of longitudinal study I had in mind and the scope of my planned study was getting rather large and unwieldy, I subsequently decided to focus my research entirely on my former students in Taiwan. As was previously mentioned, my research questions going into the study were quite broad. I simply wanted to investigate participants’ relationships with each of the languages in their linguistic repertoires and how their foreign language abilities impacted their identities. I was also interested in participants’ feelings of English ownership – the extent to which they might regard English as one of their languages. With these notions in mind, I set out to specifically select participants in much the same manner that Linde (1993) specifically selected participants whose professions would likely dominate their life stories. Since some degree of proficiency would likely be necessary for linguistic ability to have any significant impact on one’s identity, I wanted participants who were proficient in foreign languages (for these students, English and French). I also wanted participants whose foreign language use routinely extended beyond the classroom, providing them with ample identity construction experiences to relay in their narratives. The fact that interviews would be conducted in English also mandated that participants be proficient in the language. Giving participants the option of conducting interviews in Mandarin Chinese would, of course, have enabled them to relay stories of their experience with greater ease. This, however, was not an option as my Mandarin abilities were (and still are) strictly at a rudimentary survival level, and use of an interpreter for interviews would have, I felt, greatly hindered the relaxed dialogue that I aimed to achieve in these interviews. English, in any case, was arguably the more appropriate medium for the research process here since it was participants’ English abilities and the role of these abilities in their identity negotiation that constituted the study’s main focus of inquiry. Upon initially returning to Taiwan for my research in May 2009, 23 of my former students, all from the same class I had taught back in 2005/2006, threw me a pizza party. At this point, they only had one month left in the Saint Agnes five-year junior college program as they were all graduating in June 2009. At the pizza party, I explained to

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attendees that my research aimed to examine their feelings about each of the languages in their linguistic repertoires and stressed that participation would involve multiple face-to-face interviews and staying in regular communication with me throughout the coming year. After eliciting volunteers and getting information about their use of English and French outside of classroom situations, as well as their availability throughout the coming year, I narrowed my participant pool to seven. Gigi, Audrey, Rachel and Shannon became my focal participants, while Monica, Fiara and Negra7 became non-focal participants. Wary of focal participants abandoning the study or suddenly leaving Taiwan and becoming less accessible, I wanted to have the non-focal participants available on stand-by if necessary, and I actually did spend nearly as much time with the non-focal participants as the focal four. Four, I believe, is a good number to spotlight though, so while I will briefly mention some of my non-focal participants’ views and experiences in Chapter 9, only the four focal participants’ stories will be featured here with their own chapters. I believe all my participants, focal and non-focal alike, were completely comfortable with me and regarded me as a friend. They therefore seemed to have no problem immediately opening up in relaying their narratives, allowing the interviews to proceed smoothly without an awkward initial ‘getting to know the researcher’ period. I don’t believe any power or status issues related to my being their former teacher impacted our interactions to any significant degree. In spite of the fact that I was 20 years older than them and had been their teacher just a few years earlier, the tone of our interviews was not at all one of ‘research.’ It was instead very conversational, and to an observer, would have appeared more like old friends catching up with each other’s lives. While I made a point of touching upon certain issues, all the interviews featured winding twists and turns, with my son’s development and my family’s life in Singapore often becoming a major focus of our conversations. Participants’ awareness of the fact that issues related to language were my central concern surely did, however, influence the sort of data I obtained throughout each of the interviews. As previously mentioned, I was an insider in some respects. Having lived in Taiwan and taught at Saint Agnes, I was very familiar with the local context and the particular practices there. At the same time, however, I was, as a foreigner with very rudimentary Mandarin Chinese proficiency, very much an outsider. This outsider status had some advantages. Participants, for example, felt more at ease discussing potentially hot-button issues, such as Chinese versus Taiwanese identity and Taiwanese/Mainlander relations, with me than they would a fellow

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Taiwanese. A few participants told me that they tried hard to avoid any of the touchy political issues even with their closest friends. In the first of the audio-recorded semi-structured interviews I conducted with the four focal and three non-focal participants, I began by asking them to tell me anything about themselves that I would have to know in order to say I really knew them. This initial request, a strategy Kanno (1997) reported using, proved to be a very effective prompt for narratives detailing childhood experiences that participants regarded as landmark events. I then specifically elicited narratives describing past experiences with learning the various languages in their linguistic repertoires, and then moved on to narratives of the present, requesting that they reflect on their communicative interactions in the present (both faceto-face and technology-mediated interactions) and describe their daily language use in as much detail as possible along with the accompanying contexts. I also elicited specific sorts of stories from participants by asking questions such as, ‘Can you tell me about a time when you were able to help someone by using English, French, or another foreign language?’ ‘Can you tell me about a time when using English, French, or another foreign language made you feel good?’ and ‘Can you tell me about a time when using English, French or another foreign language made you feel not so good?’ My final planned portion of these initial interviews was then the elicitation of narratives of the future, asking participants to envision their future interactions – both in the professional realm of their future careers and outside the workplace. After transcribing participants’ initial interviews, I focused on organization and preliminary analysis of the mass of data that I had obtained. This involved thematic sorting – first identifying the main themes from each participant’s interview and follow-up email communication, and then cutting and pasting all the data pertaining to each theme for each participant into its own Microsoft Word document.8 Some theme codings, such as English Debate Society and Facebook identified particular contexts that participants were commenting on, while others identified more conceptual themes, such as Distinction and L2 Personas. Each participant had between 35 and 47 main themes. Some themes were common among participants while others were particular to individual participants. After these preliminary analyses had been done, I started writing up storied drafts for each participant. These storied drafts were emailed to participants shortly before I returned to Taiwan in March of 2010. In addition to conducting follow-up interviews with participants during this trip, I also discussed with them the story drafts they had just read, giving them the opportunity

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to correct factual errors, comment on my analyses and provide alternative interpretations. During this subsequent trip to Taiwan, I also conducted interviews with Saint Agnes English department faculty members that provided me with a far better understanding of the Saint Agnes five-year program than I ever had when I was actually a teacher in the department. After analyzing the complete body of data from each of my participants (the initial and follow-up interviews, as well as relevant data from email correspondence during the intervening months and Facebook cyber-ethnography9), I updated chapter drafts of each focal participant’s ‘story’ and emailed them these drafts so that they could again confirm, modify or reject the interpretations I had made. For the further revised storied chapters presented in this book, I more recently repeated the same procedure, following up with participants via email or Skype to get their approval and comments. Involving participants in the data analysis like this not only helped prevent me from misrepresenting their experiences. It also allowed for the sort of empowering research advocated by Rampton (1992: 56), which ‘places informants in the driving seat, with the aid of researchers reflexively constituting themselves as objects in a theory which they are partly shaping themselves,’ making the entire research process, rather than just the data collection phase of the study, a dialogue between the researcher and participants. My Story

Just as the particularities of researchers’ relationships with participants and their alignment with participants during interviews can heavily influence the narratives that participants convey, researchers’ lived experiences – even those experienced long before meeting their research participants – do impact presentation and analyses of participants’ narratives (Chase, 2005). It is, therefore, appropriate and in keeping with the narrative inquiry tradition for me to now attempt to fill in some of the blanks not already discussed about my own background so that readers might be able to recognize ways in which my particular subjectivities might affect the presentation and analyses in the chapters that follow. Growing up in an almost entirely Caucasian area of the US state of Virginia with middle class parents of mostly German ethnicity10 in the 1970s, my childhood was fairly devoid of multiculturalism. My family and the community I grew up in were staunchly Christian and fairly conservative. In retrospect, I realize that in my adult life, I have done my best to explicitly reject many of the values of my upbringing, with religious views that are basically agnostic, political views that I generally characterize

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as ‘left of left’, and a marked preference for life outside of the United States that ultimately led me to become a naturalized Singaporean citizen. This observation that my life trajectory and beliefs were largely shaped in reaction to my early background is definitely an instance of applying coherence to my story here in the telling, for as I made life choices and developed my personal positions on various issues, I wasn’t doing so with the conscious intention of rebelling against my primary habitus. It’s only in looking back and identifying a consistent pattern of contrast with the environment I grew up in that I make this observation. And while my lack of conscious reflexivity in making my life choices would find much support in Bourdieusian theory, my own experience definitely speaks for the potential power of secondary habitus socialization. As Silva (2016: 179, emphasis in original) points out, ‘[P]eople have relational lives beyond their origin; they take alternative paths in response to varied social predicaments, including because of their origin (or families).’ My habitus, I suppose, could be characterized as ‘highly permeable.’ In my teens and early twenties, all my language learning was restricted to European languages. I studied French in junior high and high school, achieving some reading proficiency, but with no opportunity to use French outside the classroom, I promptly forgot all the French I ever knew after high school. Any knowledge of German that I acquired after three semesters of university study was likewise quickly forgotten. My affiliations (Rampton, 1990) with both of these languages were definitely quite weak. Outside the classroom, I participated in no communities where French or German were spoken, and I saw these languages as having little relevance to my life. After graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University with an art degree, I supported myself with jobs in restaurants, bars and chocolate shops, focusing most of my attention on music. I played in several bands and, along with one of my bandmates, started a small underground record label to release records and CDs for our bands and those of friends. Most of the music we played and that our record label released could loosely be referred to as ‘rock,’ but much of it was decidedly experimental and not made with any intention of appealing to mainstream audiences. That being the case, the record label failed to make much money for the first few years of its existence, but in 1994, our music, much to our surprise, started selling in Japan due to positive reviews in an influential Japanese music magazine. I started to receive lots of mail from Japanese fans and musicians wanting me to release their music. The record label’s relative success in Japan, however, proved to be short-lived as Japanese consumers, by 1996, finally realized that their

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bubble economy had burst and stopped spending money on frivolous things like American underground music. By this time, however, I had, through letters and email, firmly established friendships with many Japanese musicians and released music for some of them. I was quite impressed by the effort these Japanese friends exerted to communicate with me in English, and since I was not expected to make any attempt at all to use Japanese, I came to feel quite guilty about the imbalance in expended communicative energies. This monolingual guilt led me to enroll in a beginning Japanese course. I totally embraced my Japanese study. Not only did I have friends in Japan and opportunities to use the language when I went to Japan to play shows, but in San Francisco (where I was living at the time), I also had several Japanese friends that were studying as international students at colleges and universities in the area. I became particularly close to one of these friends and we eventually married in 2000. Throughout our courtship, I apparently impressed my future wife with my storytelling, for she repeatedly told me that my storytelling abilities would make me a good teacher. At that time, I was also coming to the realization that I would never be able to support myself entirely with music and was seeking a change career-wise. With my newfound passion for language and intercultural communication, teaching English seemed like a good choice. In 2000, I started my TESOL studies and have since taught English in San Francisco, Guam, Hawaii, Japan and Taiwan. It was my fascination with Singapore’s sociolinguistic situation11 that led me to leave Taiwan in 2006 to pursue doctoral studies at the National University of Singapore, and my original intention was to focus my dissertation on issues related to language and identity in Singapore. Circumstances, as previously mentioned, led me back to Taiwan for the research described here. I now teach trainee teachers at Singapore’s National Institute of Education, where I continue to make a point of peppering my lectures with my own stories and stressing the power of narrative to my students. The previous account of my transition from an art and music orientation to one focusing on language and academia is yet another instance of the application of coherence in narrative. This linear account is one that has developed over many tellings – sometimes to friends from the old days who regard me as the most unlikely academic ever and want to know how on earth my life came to take such a radically different course, sometimes to prospective employers in job interviews who elicit such a coherent narrative in order to account for apparent gaps and inconsistencies on my CV. The versions of the story I provide for each of these two groups of recipients are, of course, quite different. In all cases, however,

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it is the causal links that are stressed – causal links that are foregrounded in the telling. In my life as it was lived, I was simply making the choices that seemed to make the most sense at the time, given my mindset and circumstances. It was only with the retrospective gaze that I was able to recognize the causal links that helped create a linear storyline. Finally, to wrap up this chapter, I must acknowledge that the feelings of guilt I continue to have over the inherent unfairness of English’s status as an international language – the fact that millions of English users worldwide have to struggle to learn this language of power that I acquired effortlessly from birth – could potentially influence my presentation and analysis of participants’ stories in this study. My tone, for example, could be construed as a bit too celebratory in discussions of participants’ language learning achievements. My four focal participants have all reached much higher levels of proficiency in English than I have been able to reach in Japanese, even after almost 20 years of working at it. I am in awe and more than a little bit envious of their linguistic achievements, which I readily admit I am, in fact, inclined to celebrate. Notes (1) See Chase (2005) for a discussion of life history narratives collected by the Chicago school of sociologists in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as anthropological studies from the 1920s that employed life history methods to document Native American tribal cultures. (2) For narrative analysis, the data may or may not be in narrative form, but the texts in which researchers present their analyses are storied syntheses of their data (Polkinghorne, 1995). This is in contrast to analysis of narratives, where participants’ storied experiences serve as data – their experiences are categorized, common themes are identified across multiple narratives, and the focus is on the production of conceptual knowledge. I actually employ both approaches in this book. (3) A good illustration of quotations that seem like a collection of disembodied voices can be found here in this book in Chapter 9, where I report data obtained in interviews with non-focal participants and some Saint Agnes faculty members. This is done in a typical analysis of narrative fashion, using direct quotations to help illustrate general themes and observations derived from interviews. Storied presentations of non-focal participants’ and faculty members’ experiences that allowed readers also to get to know them as individuals would, of course, have been valuable, but alas, time and space restrictions prohibit such a presentation. (4) One example of such ‘of course’ statements appealing to common sense notions is ‘I was an actress through college and had fantasies about making that a life which were of course unrealistic’ (Linde, 1993: 198, italics added). (5) Linde (1993: 163–164) dubs the coherence systems utilized by her interviewees ‘semiexpert coherence systems’ and locates them in ‘a position midway between common sense…and expert systems, which are beliefs and relations between beliefs held, understood, and properly used by experts in a particular domain.’ She goes on to justify the semi in ‘semi-expert coherence systems’ with the explanation that they are

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(6)

(7)

(8)

(9)

(10)

(11)

‘beliefs derived from some expert system, but used by someone with no corresponding expertise or credentials.’ Although the neoliberal ideologies that make up the coherence system employed by my participants were of course derived from an expert system, and my participants have no economics or sociology credentials, these neoliberal ideologies, as I highlighted in Chapter 3, have come to be very much regarded as ‘common sense’ – just the way things are. Cliquish behavior was not evident to me anyway. By the time I returned to Taiwan to do my research at the end of my former students’ 5th year in the program, they were clearly divided into distinct friendship groups. Participants told me that these smaller groups had already started to form during the year I was their teacher, but it wasn’t until their 4th year, when five-year junior college students ceased having all their classes together with the same classmates, that the distinct groupings would have become more obvious. I gave all participants the option of choosing their own pseudonyms. Some chose to do so, while others wanted me to refer to them by the ‘English’ names they actually went by, insisting that these were, in fact, pseudonyms since they weren’t actually their legal names. While I’ve found qualitative research software like InVivo somewhat useful for coding in some other projects I’ve worked on, I always end up supplementing these tools with more manual methods. For this project, I just employed old school methods from the very start. According to Ward (1999: 100), cyber-ethnography is ‘where the researcher observes the interaction on a particular website in order to gain a fuller understanding of internet culture.’ Since I was a Facebook friend of each of this study’s participants, my participant observation on Facebook provided an additional source of data. Most of my ancestors immigrated from Germany approximately 200 years ago, and there were no traces of German culture in my family life. My mother lived in Germany and Austria for two years after her college graduation and did speak fairly fluent German, but she was reluctant to speak German to her children from infancy. She now tells me that this is because she didn’t want us to pick up her Americanaccented German pronunciation. By ‘Singapore’s sociolinguistic situation,’ I mean the country’s co-official status of English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil and the spaces that each of these languages officially and unofficially inhabit in Singaporean society. For more information on multilingualism in Singapore, see Wee (2002) and Wee (2003) – two highly informative articles that served to initially pique my interest in Singapore and ultimately led to Lionel Wee becoming my thesis supervisor.

5 The Intellectual – Gigi’s Story

The ‘Intellectual’ persona that I’ve labelled Gigi within this chapter is not one that she projected strongly from the very start of the study. Although segments of our initial interview did hint that this could become a major theme for her, Gigi’s self-presentation at that 2009 meeting could perhaps be best characterized as ‘one who is searching’ – searching for direction. At the very end of that first interview, in fact, when I asked her if she wanted to add anything else before I turned off the voice recorder and we went off-record, she replied, without any explicit discussion of ‘identity’ previously in the interview: Gigi: I think I’m still searching for the identity, so right now, no more comments. Mark:  Still searching? Gigi: I’m still working hard on it. Her hard work at identity construction seemed to have paid off, for in our subsequent interview 10 months later, Gigi clearly projected the persona of ‘the intellectual’ – presenting herself as living a more examined life than the majority of those around her. And she largely credited her foreign language abilities for making this possible. Gigi’s Life before Saint Agnes

For our initial May 2009 interview, conducted on the Saint Agnes campus in a relaxed area with tables where students commonly came to meet and chat, I began by asking Gigi what I would need to know about her background to be able to say I truly knew her. Gigi, in response, chose to highlight her rural background – the fact that she grew up in a small town and attended a very small school there. She went on to point 64

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out to me that almost everyone she knew as a child in this small town was a Tai-yü speaker. ‘Everyone spoke Tai-yü – Taiwanese style,’ she reported. ‘We didn’t speak Chinese that much.’ Although teachers at the elementary school she attended did conduct their classes in Mandarin Chinese, many of these same teachers used Tai-yü when speaking to students informally. In this school of only one hundred students, there was, in fact, only one student that came from a Mainlander family and did not speak Tai-yü. Not surprisingly, this child had a pretty hard time in such an environment. ‘He didn’t feel comfortable with friends,’ Gigi recalled. ‘Tai-yü was definitely the language that if someone could speak, we would speak.’ Gigi reported having happy memories of her elementary school years at this small school. Although she claimed that she didn’t exert very much effort with her studies as a child, she nevertheless excelled academically due to support she received from her mother. The resources that Gigi’s mother had to support her children’s education did indeed far exceed that of typical parents in rural Southern Taiwan. Immediately after highlighting how small her hometown and school were at the beginning of our interview, Gigi credited her mother with her earliest achievement of distinction in elementary school, telling me, ‘I was always the top student in the class because my mom, she really paid lots of attention on my education – like mathematics or science stuff.’ It wasn’t until a bit later in the interview, however, when I inquired about whether Gigi’s mother exerted any pressure on her to learn English in her early years, that she revealed the extent of the educational resources at her mother’s disposal. Mark: Ah – well you said that your mother, from the time you were very young, tried very hard to get you strong in math and science. Did you get pressure from her for English too? Gigi: No, because my mom, she has all these cram school teachers – she owns a cram school and she – Mark:  She owns one! Gigi: She also teaches. Mark:  In the small town? Gigi: Yes, in the small town. Mark:  And she teaches there. What does she teach? Gigi: Chinese and mathematics and English as well. Mark:  Oh – all. Gigi: Yeah, all – but she also hires some other teachers to come – come in to teach.

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Gigi’s mother was not only a fairly fluent speaker of English herself, but actually owned and taught at her own buxiban. As the owner of this buxiban, Gigi’s mother was in the position of being able to utilize her school’s teachers and learning materials for the education of her own children, who received private tutoring from the school’s teachers. Although English education at Gigi’s elementary school did not begin until the sixth grade, her mother employed a private tutor for English lessons for her and her brother when they were very young and later sent them both to another buxiban that specialized in teaching English to small children. Gigi didn’t remember much from these early English experiences, except that they played games. ‘I was not inspired at all,’ she reported to me in a January 2010 Facebook message responding to my request for further commentary on educational experiences prior to Saint Agnes. At the beginning of her fifth grade year, Gigi got additional English tutelage when her mother sent her to private lessons with an American couple that had just returned to Taiwan from overseas, but it was not until a year later in her sixth-grade year when she started English classes at her elementary school that Gigi started to have a very positive view of English. This came about not because of any newfound passion for the language itself, but simply because her years of private tutoring and buxiban lessons had provided her with a greater knowledge of English than her peers, and she truly relished the feeling of distinction this provided her. As Gigi herself put it in her January 2010 Facebook message to me, ‘I happened to be the student who had the better English knowledge background in my class, so I guess I wanted to learn it because I felt a certain superior sensation in front of my mates, but not because of the language itself.’ After completing all six years of elementary school in her hometown, Gigi was sent to an exclusive prep school two hours away in Kaohsiung. Her experience at this school, which she described as ‘a private school mostly for rich students,’ was a thoroughly miserable one. To start with, she was dreadfully tired every day as a result of the two-hour commute by bus – four hours spent daily just getting to and returning from school. ‘I had to wake up at five, and then went to school every day…I was really tired every day, so it was really stressful,’ she recalled. At this school, she no longer had the star pupil status she enjoyed at her elementary school. ‘I didn’t like to go to school, and so I didn’t study hard…I didn’t get good marks. I was always the 30-something ranked,’ she told me. Going to school in an environment that was not as Tai-yü dominant as her small town and elementary school had been also proved stressful for Gigi. Her Tai-yü, she felt, negatively impacted her Mandarin pronunciation. She commented on this, telling me, ‘I was very embarrassed cuz I didn’t

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pronounce the Chinese very well – “correctly” as they say.’ The distinction Gigi’s Tai-yü background offered was here not a desirable sort of distinction, for Tai-yü did not carry any cultural or symbolic capital in this prep school field. Since the prep school was in Southern Taiwan, the majority of Gigi’s classmates there would have also had Tai-yü abilities, but even within Southern Taiwan, urban and rural fields have differing value allocations placed on linguistic resources. In Gigi’s hometown, Tai-yü positively indexed locality, while in urban Kaohsiung, and particularly in the prep school micro-field, its indexical field included negative indexicalities, such as backwardness and lack of sophistication. Despite her low class ranking at the prep school, Gigi’s grades there were not uniformly bad. It was mostly her poor performance in math and science classes that brought down her ranking. Her scores in English, in contrast, were quite good. One thing that almost certainly helped Gigi’s English during this period was practicing spoken English with her mother at home. Gigi told me that she and her mother continued with this practice for several years, but it was during her time in junior high school that their practice sessions were most frequent, surely giving her a spoken English advantage over her junior high school classmates. Most of Gigi’s classmates, after completing the three years of junior high at the prep school, continued there for their high school years. Gigi reported, however, that her mother, recognizing that English was the only subject Gigi was performing well in, suggested that she instead enroll in the Saint Agnes five-year junior college program. Gigi told me that she was quite receptive to this idea. ‘I was really happy,’ she explained, ‘cuz I didn’t want to go to high school to study mathematics and science – that stuff again.’ The avoidance of math and science, however, was not the only thing that appealed to Gigi about attending Saint Agnes. For her, it was yet another point that would make her stand out from her peers. ‘I think the decision taken was a mixture of the expectation of my mom and my fantasy of being an English major college student while all my junior high school mates were going to high school,’ she explained in the January 2010 Facebook message. The fantasy life Gigi envisioned at Saint Agnes at the time was largely influenced by her mother, who had, for years, regarded Saint Agnes quite highly. ‘She told me back in her college years, Saint Agnes was, like, the top school for every girl who graduated from junior high school,’ Gigi informed me. Her mother had also seen a friend who had graduated from Saint Agnes become quite proficient in English and go on to secure a job with an international company, which sent her to work abroad in the United States. In her January 2010 Facebook message to me, Gigi

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described the way her mother depicted Saint Agnes to her ‘as a school with exotic atmosphere, vivid people with different language knowledge and who would finally work and experience the life internationally.’ Her mother’s characterization of the school as an exotic environment uniquely suited to cultivate an international outlook appealed to Gigi’s desire to distinguish herself. ‘That’s the image that my mom gave me,’ Gigi recalled. ‘And also, if you go to study French, then you will become like French – as romantic as French people – and you will be speaking like you’re European…That was fascinating for me.’ Reflecting on this imagined community her mother had instilled in her at the time, Gigi further commented on its influence on her decision to attend Saint Agnes, saying, ‘Obviously my intention at the moment was not English language itself, but more likely an imaginative idea towards the future.’ Gigi’s Struggle and Strategy at Saint Agnes

Although she claimed to have had no particular passion for the English language itself upon entering Saint Agnes, being good at English was an integral part of Gigi’s identity at that time. English was something she had consistently proven herself able to excel at, relative to others in her elementary and junior high school classes. This part of her identity, however, took a beating during her first year at Saint Agnes, where her English skills paled in comparison to some other classmates. When I asked her to describe her English learning experience at Saint Agnes, Gigi initially characterized it simply as ‘a very difficult process,’ and when I asked her to elaborate, she replied as follows: Mark:  Explain more about the difficulty. Gigi: Um – I say in the beginning of Saint Agnes here, I was really stressed when I see the other students speaking English so well, so – also in the class, sometimes teacher would ask questions, and these students, they – they always take initiative to answer, but – Mark:  Certainly not everybody – just a few people. Gigi: Yeah, only a few people, but I wanted to be like them as well, but it was difficult cuz I couldn’t uh – have a very good structure when I speak, and then, the grammar – I was really worried I would speak wrong. The ‘few people’ in the class that Gigi was referring to – those who I remember, as a teacher in Gigi’s class, always being able to count on

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for a response to questions and engagement in class discussion even when others would not – were generally those that had spent substantial portions of their childhoods overseas in English-speaking environments (South Africa, the UK and Canada). Gigi went on to describe the role these classmates played in her struggle to improve her English – a role that she depicted as both intimidating and motivational. Gigi: In the beginning, I was really shocked because I didn’t know there’s – I never had friends that are coming back from abroad, like there’s Vivian and Marie,1 in our class, and they’re – they speak really good English. Mark:  Haley too. Gigi: Yeah, Haley too. And then, I heard about their experience overseas, and I was really envious in the beginning – about their language skill. I didn’t – I didn’t speak fluently English at that moment, so I tried – went to the library every day and listened to radios and tried to better my English in any possible way. Being intimidated by these classmates’ higher English proficiency wasn’t the only blow Gigi’s ‘English speaker’ identity took that first year. At one point, all first-year English majors had to take a proficiency exam that would determine their groupings for the listening classes they would take in their second year, with Class 1 being those that got the highest scores on this exam and Class 6 being those that got the lowest scores. Gigi’s mediocre score placed her in Class 3 for listening. ‘I was in the middle,’ she told me. Gigi presented these experiences her first year – being intimidated by classmates with higher English proficiency, lacking the confidence to speak in class and achieving only a mediocre score on the placement exam – as all making her determined to become more proficient in English. It was, after all, a matter of pride – regaining her identity as someone better at English than others. After telling me about her somewhat humiliating Class 3 listening placement, I further queried her on her subsequent improvement, at which point she again credited her efforts to expose herself to English media, pointing out as well that other students were making similar efforts: Mark:  But after that first year, you were able to improve rapidly, right? Gigi: Yeah, and again I think it was because I started to listen to radio. And I – I tried to watch – because I was living in the school dorm, and then I went to the library every day, and teachers say that we can try to watch the movies, um – with the English subtitle.

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Mark: Right. Gigi: And that’s really helpful. I tried to note down what – what are they speaking, and I look up the words after I go back home. Mark:  You said you really focused on media in a big way. Gigi: Yeah, and I knew someone that was trying harder than me – because in the English department, there is a self-study media center. And there were some students that would go there every day and there’s some course for them to study. Mark:  Not just you – many people were doing the same thing. Gigi: Not just me. Mark:  What radio station were you listening to? Gigi: Um – in the beginning, I tried to search some really easy programs – I forgot what I listened in the beginning, but after that, I started to listen BBC – BBC Radio 4, but I did not listen to the news channel. I listened to something called Women’s Hour, which talks about women’s topics, and that’s more – that’s easier for me to understand. Um – in the beginning, I did not understand what they’re saying, so I just keep playing even though I didn’t understand it, so – Mark:  Did you record it and listen and re-listen to it? Gigi: Um – yes, you can download it and I always listened the same program. This dogged determination to improve her English was, in fact, what I remember most about Gigi as a student in her second year at Saint Agnes when I was her teacher. I remember her overall English proficiency level as being decidedly ‘in the middle’ relative to her classmates; some were far better English speakers, while many were far worse. It was obvious to me, however, that she was trying very hard. She was one of just a handful of students in this class for whom I could clearly see a very marked improvement over the course of that year, both in the fluency of her written English and with written assignments. Gigi told me that her proficiency continued to improve steadily, and by her third year at Saint Agnes, her grades in the previous year’s listening class enabled her to be promoted to the highest-level class – Class 1. It was not until her fourth year, however, that Gigi claimed to really feel confident about her English language abilities. According to Gigi, it was actually a single classroom event – a gestalt moment while delivering a speech in front of approximately 50 students – that true confidence in her English ability finally came to her. In response to my request for a story in which use of English or another foreign language made her feel good, Gigi told me

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It was fourth year in Saint Agnes – I participated in a class called English Speech – and then we finally had a chance to speak on a stage to talk about certain topics that teacher chose for us, and then it was at that moment I could speak in English, and I was feeling good because teacher gave me really good mark and she said, ‘You speak good and fluently.’

Upon hearing this story, I reminded Gigi of a storytelling competition I had observed during her second year in which she had, in fact, spoken English very proficiently to an audience of far more than 50. She subsequently downplayed that earlier experience, telling me, ‘Yeah, but I didn’t have to speak too much during the storytelling competition.’ Gigi’s role in the storytelling competition was less than two minutes long, and she was just one member of a group storytelling ensemble. The resulting praise was, therefore, directed at the group rather than her individually. Gigi depicted the fourth-year speech as having far more impact – a more significant challenge that she performed expertly in, garnering individual praise from her teacher, and giving her confidence in her English abilities that she still has to this day. Another experience that Gigi presented as significant for her English development and, in the longer term, the cultivation of her worldly intellectual self-image, was her participation during her third and fourth year in Saint Agnes’ English Debate Society. During her third year, a friend invited Gigi to join, and for two years, she was an active participant in this school community. The group met twice a week, learning debating techniques from instructors as well as reading about and discussing current issues and international news stories that provided material to debate. During the summer and winter vacations, the English Debate Society also held workshops in which students from other schools around Taiwan came to learn debating skills and participate in debate tournaments. In this community, English use was not restricted to the debates themselves. English was also used for informal interactions among group members. Gigi attributed this to the fact that many members had lived abroad in English speaking environments, and were, therefore, quite comfortable speaking English for routine interaction – even with Taiwanese classmates. The friend who invited Gigi to join the Debate Society was, in fact, one of the classmates whose English proficiency had intimidated her so during her first year at Saint Agnes. This friend, Vivian, had spent five years in England while her mother had been going to school there. The following interview excerpt is Gigi’s first mention of the English Debate Society in response to my question about whether she ever speaks English with any of her Taiwanese classmates.

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Gigi: With certain friends, such as Vivian. In the third year, she invites me to the English Debate Society in Saint Agnes, and there everyone speaks English with each other. Mark: Right, sure – because it’s the English Debate Club – but even when you’re not actually debating – when you’re just in casual conversations? Usually English within the debate society? Gigi: Um – yeah, sometimes. It depends, but sometimes. But it’s still quite weird – a little. Mark: Do you think it feels weird for everybody? Gigi: Um – it seems some people who have the experience studying overseas, they don’t feel embarrassed. According to Gigi, participation in this community increased her spoken English proficiency considerably – particularly winter and summer debate workshops, which required her to continuously use English for an entire week at a time. ‘I was really happy cuz finally I could have the chance to talk naturally with the other classmates,’ she told me. At the beginning of her fifth and final year at Saint Agnes, Gigi realized her busy schedule did not permit her continued participation in this community, so she quit the English Debate Society, but the practice of English media consumption, which had become even more habitual with the need to do so to obtain material to use in debates, served to nurture her worldly intellectual self-image, as we can see in the following excerpt where Gigi provides justification for her preference for English-medium news consumption (beyond simply providing English practice): Mark: As far as news goes, certainly you could get plenty of quality enough news from listening or reading in Chinese. It’s just your choice? Gigi: Yeah, it’s just my choice. Also, I don’t like – the reason I don’t like to read Chinese is because it’s not objective enough. Mark:  You think the BBC and CNN are much more objective? Gigi: Yes. Mark: Can you explain that a little bit more? – your feelings that the Chinese – Gigi: Yeah, so I don’t – every time when I read the news – because it is always focusing on the gossip – and then the politics, which I don’t read that much. Mark:  So you don’t care much to get involved in Taiwan – Gigi: No. I tried to, but it was difficult because um – I don’t like to get involved in politics.

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Mark: Yeah, it’s – more so than many places, political issues here are really hot-button issues. Gigi: Yes. Mark:  In a way, that’s good. People are passionate about it. Gigi: Yeah, but too passionate! Gigi here presents her preference for English news from the BBC and CNN as allowing her to rise above the fray of local gossip and politics, which she finds distasteful. This local/international contrast was the first hint in our initial interview of the worldly intellectual persona that Gigi was nurturing. Gigi’s English interaction during her time at Saint Agnes was not limited though to media consumption and English interactions with fellow Taiwanese. One summer, she volunteered as a tour guide at a local art museum, providing English tours for foreign visitors. She did also have regular English interactions with non-Taiwanese Saint Agnes students. Although quite a few foreign students studied Mandarin Chinese at the Saint Agnes Chinese Language Center, interaction between these students and Taiwanese students tended to seldom occur due to both groups’ lack of confidence in their linguistic skills. As Gigi put it, ‘We didn’t have occasion to start a conversation with them, so it was quite difficult for us to go approaching them and talk, and also they kind of only communicate with the people studying at the Chinese Language Center.’ Gigi, however, was lucky enough to meet two foreign students who proved to be exceptions to these campus interactional norms. One such student was, Evelína, a student from the Czech Republic who was taking Chinese classes at Saint Agnes. Gigi told me that one afternoon she was sitting on campus reading when Evelína approached her and struck up a conversation. The two ended up becoming good friends and spent a great deal of time together, all the while communicating in English even though Evelína was ostensibly in Taiwan to learn Chinese. It was also through a chance encounter that Gigi met another foreign friend, Nathalie, who was from Switzerland. Nathalie, also a student at the Chinese Language Center, came to sit in on a philosophy class and happened to take the seat next to Gigi, leading to the two of them establishing an enduring friendship. Although Nathalie and Evelína (who did not know each other) later returned to their respective home countries, Gigi continued to maintain communication with both of them via the internet. Computer-mediated contexts accounted for a great deal of Gigi’s foreign language use. Like everyone else in her class who all shared the

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French minor, Gigi had had no experience with French before her introductory French class at Saint Agnes. She reported that her experience learning French was a very positive one, but opportunities to practice French in Taiwan are scant – far fewer than opportunities to use English. Hence, Gigi turned to the internet and Skype to find French speakers to converse with. She told me that at first, her experience communicating in French online was a pleasurable one. ‘I tried to search for people online to practice French with them,’ she recalled. ‘And that becomes a quite nice experience because you don’t have to correct – to have 100% correct grammar…When I was in third year, I was quite crazy about that [Skype] – I used it every day.’ It didn’t take too long, however, before Gigi’s enthusiasm for being able to use her French without worrying about grammar mistakes was dampened by Skype users with less than noble intentions. ‘I no longer use it because there are some perverts who would write you,’ she told me with a laugh. Before these perverts drove her away from Skype, Gigi actually did have quite a few English interactions in addition to those in French. One of these English interactions was with Amedeo, a young Italian jazz guitarist who would later become her boyfriend. According to Gigi, neither she nor Amedeo held any romantic thoughts when they first met online. Gigi had a boyfriend in Taiwan at the time anyway. They continued to keep in touch though, and approximately a year after their first online interaction, Gigi and her brother took a month-long trip to Europe in which they visited Switzerland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and Italy. When they arrived in Italy, Amedeo met Gigi and her brother at the airport and spent several hours showing them around his city on each of the five days of their stay there. At this point, Gigi and Amedeo’s relationship remained a platonic one. ‘We didn’t get together at the moment when I was in Europe,’ Gigi explained. ‘I came back to Taiwan. Then he wrote me email. Then we started to eh – have certain feelings, and we decided he would come to Taiwan again after one year.’ At the time of our May 2009 interview, Amedeo had come to Taiwan to see Gigi twice and each of these visits had been a month long. In the following interview excerpt, Gigi explains how Amedeo’s interest in Taiwanese culture initially distinguished him from others she had interacted with on Skype, eventually leading to their prolonged online courtship. Mark: How much time between the time you first started to communicate with him on Skype and when he first came to Taiwan? Gigi: Um – three years.

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Mark: Wow! So, you actually – by that time, you probably knew him pretty well. Gigi: Yes. He was always really polite, and he – we didn’t – he was a really strange person – special, I would say – because he wanted to know about Taiwanese culture, and that was really special because most of the time, the other people I met in the Skype, they wanted to talk about um – some very boring stuff. Mark:  It seems like mostly small talk. Gigi: Yeah, small talk, and I was really not interested, but he was the one that I thought he was really a person I can keep in touch with. Gigi told me that although the chances she and Amedeo had to be together face-to-face were infrequent, they communicated with each other daily via email and MSN instant messaging, almost entirely in English. Although this was written English (or at least the written simulation of spoken English that characterizes much internet communication), it provided Gigi with regular practice using English that she would otherwise not have been getting since Evelína and Nathalie had both left Taiwan and her participation in the English Debate Society had ceased. Amedeo spoke almost no Chinese, but their online interactions did occasionally include some Italian. Gigi told me that her interest in Italian had been initially sparked by seeing the movie Death in Venice prior to meeting Amedeo on Skype. She claimed that upon seeing this movie, she instantly fell in love with the sound of Italian and decided to learn it on her own. It was shortly after this that she and Amedeo began communicating in English on Skype. Their interaction, however, continued to be predominantly in English even after Gigi’s knowledge of Italian increased. ‘We are used to speaking English, so it’s hard to change – to switch the language to Italian,’ she explained. ‘It’s not natural, but sometimes I do – when I write him a message or email, I will use Italian.’ Another internet locale where Gigi used Italian and French, but more often English, at the time of our May 2009 interview was on Facebook. In contrast to her previous use of Skype to meet new foreign friends, Gigi’s Facebook community was composed of individuals she already knew  – both foreign friends and her Taiwanese classmates. Somewhat surprisingly, English served as the main language of communication on Facebook for both of these groups. ‘It’s quite strange,’ she told me, ‘because the classmates from Saint Agnes, they all speak English on Facebook…it’s strange because normally they don’t speak English with me, but only on Facebook.’ When I asked whether she thought this was due to the fact that typing Chinese characters on the computer was rather cumbersome,

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she replied, ‘No, I think secretly they want to speak English.’ These classmates’ use of English on Facebook status and wall postings was, of course, actually, far from secret. It was visible to everyone on their Facebook friends list, and that was precisely the point. It’s a clear instance of performativity. These classmates of Gigi’s may have secretly wished they could speak English to their classmates in face-to-face interactions, as members of the English Debate Society did, but lacked the confidence to do so or thought that doing so seemed entirely too strange. Facebook, however, provided them with an opportunity to use English and project their identities as English speakers in a manner that was less face-threatening than in-person communication. ‘Maybe they feel shy to speak in the normal days,’ Gigi explained, ‘so they choose to type…everyone speaks English [on Facebook], so it seems more strange if you type Chinese.’ Although her use of French and Italian were far less frequent than English, Gigi did occasionally use both of these languages on Facebook public wall posts as well, achieving even greater distinction in Taiwan than the performative use of English would afford. In an exchange with a former Saint Agnes teacher fluent in Italian, for instance, Gigi was able to publicly put her Italian to use. In response to the former teacher’s inquiry in Italian about whether she was in Italy or Taiwan, Gigi replied, ‘sono in taiwan per ora ma vado in italia in gennaio e non voglio pensare quanto freddo fa!’ (I’m in Taiwan for the time being, but I’m going to Italy in January and don’t want to think about how cold it will be!). Just as Facebook provided an opportunity for Gigi and her Taiwanese classmates to performatively project their identities as English speakers, it allowed Gigi to present her French and Italian-speaking identities as well, showcasing her multilingual and multicultural self to all her Facebook friends. Gigi’s five years at Saint Agnes had indeed provided her with the ability to confidently project a truly international identity in a variety of languages, but at the time of our May 2009 interview, she was very much preoccupied with scoping out a career path not at all language-oriented. As we were discussing the career prospects of English department graduates, Gigi voiced a concern that I heard from multiple participants – the lack of distinction that mere English abilities can provide in the competition for employment: Mark: I guess just knowledge of language doesn’t give you really a specialty unless it’s a language that is very rare. Gigi: (laughs) No, because there are still – still more people that can speak better than you, so I think – I think I can never be top – the best – so I still search for the other interest for me – for myself.

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Maybe before – 10 years or 20 years ago – that worked – because lots of the teachers in Saint Agnes and many people I know, they majored in English teaching, and then when they came back to Taiwan, they could find a job in a university or college, but right now, it seems every university – they want PhD. Mark: Right, and in Taipei, there are even lots of unemployed PhDs. Gigi: (laughs) So it’s quite difficult since I don’t plan to study PhD. Gigi’s response to this situation was to set her sights on a career in design. Toward the end of her elementary school years, she had taken some painting classes, and although she greatly enjoyed these classes, they only lasted a few months, abruptly ending when she was sent to the prep school for junior high. Gigi never lost her artistic aspirations even though they had to take a backseat to language studies at Saint Agnes. Around her third year, she found herself considering fashion design as a career option, and this idea was soon abandoned when she became interested in industrial design (the industry term for product design). In her fifth-year research writing class, where students were required to write a research paper of substantial length in English, Gigi chose the topic of eco-design and became fairly knowledgeable on this topic. Throughout her fifth year, she also took design classes at a buxiban. Having had almost no formal design training, these classes, she hoped, would provide her with sufficient knowledge of the field to gain admission to a university design program – preferably one at a prestigious national university. Just as she reported being intimidated by classmates with higher English proficiency when she first started at Saint Agnes, Gigi, discouraged by the superior artistic skills of her classmates in the cram school design classes, expressed doubts about whether she stood a realistic chance of competing with students who had more consistently focused on art and design study: Mark: How about the cram school design courses that you’re taking? Gigi: Uh – yes. Right now I’m starting to paint again, but it isn’t – because I never received the kind of academic training – painting skill, so there are still lots of people whose painting is better than me. Mark: But based on what you’ve learned so far in this cram school course, do you feel relatively confident that you could have a chance anyway of succeeding in this field? Gigi: Um – I don’t think so – because I saw the other people’s works, and they – they are really good. Teachers say, ‘You did good too,’ but it doesn’t sound really positive to me.

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Mark: So again, here we have the case of people with really high levels of proficiency with something intimidating you. Gigi: Um hmm. Yeah, that’s why I insist to go university to study design – because there I could finally have the kind of professional training on design or painting, so that may help. But actually, I’m not sure if I could really become a successful designer just because I liked to paint when I was very little, and I don’t – I don’t know if there is any connection between painting and the creativity – because being a designer, you need creativity rather than painting skill. Mark:  Do you consider yourself a creative person? Gigi: Um – I don’t know! I want some proof. Despite all these self-doubts, Gigi was, at the time of our May 2009 interview, planning to apply at eight different Taiwanese universities that had design programs that interested her. This would require that she take eight different entrance exams the following July. Since each of these design programs would only be accepting a few applicants, competition was sure to be fierce, so Gigi was not optimistic about her chances of gaining admission to any of them. She also expressed concern about how she would fare in the university interviews she could potentially be faced with. She described herself as ‘an introverted person,’ but insisted that, in an interview situation, she would do her best to promote herself and her abilities with confidence. When I asked if that might be risky, given the traditional value placed on modesty in Taiwanese society, she replied Gigi: No, because I heard that in the industry um – both. They want people who – because traditionally it’s being modest, but right now, you have to be confident, so – Mark:  Showing confidence is more valued now, you think? Gigi: Yes, I think so. Mark:  Where have you heard about this? Gigi: Um – I think my dad told me – because himself – he has quite a similar personality to me – he’s kind of shy, and then he told – it’s his experience – it’s not a good thing to be shy and modest. It’s better you try to promote yourself and speak about what you can do and what – even you can try to be kind of exaggerating (laughs). Mark: Does your father think that he’s lost out sometimes because of his personality? Gigi: Um – right. But he also – because he is a very detailed person. He’s an engineer – and he said he works hard every day

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and he knows lots of technology and he has um – quite good skill, but he feels he doesn’t have so many chances to earn the money, I mean – than the other people who speak – who are exaggerating, and like – he says you – it’s better you have a mouth to speak rather than good skill. Gigi cited instances in the past where she herself had lost out on opportunities due to her introverted personality. ‘Some of my classmates, they tried to have the chance of being translators during the World Games, but I was kind of shy and I said, “Oh no – not me,”’ she recalled. ‘And lots of events, I was having this kind of attitude. I think that is not good, and I try to be more brave and um – like take initiative to do things…I still want to keep my personality. I don’t want to make too much change, but things to survive in this world – you have to do some things which is against your will.’ These comments illustrate Gigi’s reluctant willingness to respond to the demands of the neoliberal society – trying to take full responsibility for her own success and show her commitment to a personal self-development project that required an increase in her boldness and willingness to take risks, since she believed inadequacies in these areas had, in the past, constrained her access to valuable opportunities. She told me that she thought she had already made much progress with this self-development project, and for this she credited a Saint Agnes marketing class in which she and her classmates got a lot of practice with promotion. ‘Teacher said we have to sound aggressive when we are promoting our things,’ she told me. ‘So I think that right now, if there’s an interview, I could sound confident without any problem.’ Near the end of our May 2009 interview, I asked Gigi if she thought the government’s promotion of English was effective in increasing the profile of Taiwan internationally, and her response was yet another indication of the worldly intellectual persona she would project 10 months later: I think that will help because uh – the government thinks – I don’t know – probably they think we are kind of ignorant. Taiwanese people used to be very ignorant. They only know things about Taiwan. Like I ask lots of my friends where’s Milan, and they didn’t know where it is. They think it is a country. So I think learning English could have some help.

Gigi clearly does not have a high regard for the mindset of the Taiwanese general public (including lots of her friends), and highlights ignorance of anything international with her chosen example of friends thinking Milan is a country, implicitly differentiating herself as someone familiar with Milan, the locations of foreign cities and international issues in

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general. Such differentiation would become more explicit in our next interview 10 months later. Gigi’s Life after Saint Agnes Graduation

Over the course of the 10 months that followed our May 2009 interviews, I stayed in touch with Gigi via email and Facebook messaging. In this correspondence, she informed me about which university she ended up attending, but I didn’t inquire then about the specifics of her admissions and school selection processes, intentionally waiting until our March 2010 interview for her to present these details in person. At the start of this March 2010 interview, conducted over dinner (and a very extended dessert and coffee) in a relaxed Taipei café, Gigi told me that instead of applying to eight different universities as she told me she intended to do when we conducted our first interview, she ended up only applying to two – and only one of these two schools had a design program. The problem, she told me, was that all the schools with design programs held their entrance exams for transfer students on the same day. She was, therefore, forced to pick just one of these schools and place all her hopes on getting accepted into that one program. The design program she chose was one in interior design at a prestigious national university. ‘Some universities, they had only a few vacancies for my department – for the Department of Design,’ she explained. ‘So I chose the one that had more vacancies.’ This interior design program, in fact, only had four vacancies, but chances of being one of the four accepted there were considerably better than at other school that had even fewer vacancies in their design programs. The school, for example, that was her top choice – a university renowned for its industrial design program – only had two places available. On a whim, Gigi also took the entrance exam for admittance to an Italian program at a private university in Taipei County that, like Saint Agnes, was famous for foreign languages. ‘Probably I was a little mad at the moment to think maybe I could continue my study in Italian if I go to that school,’ she told me. Gigi’s entrance exam for this Italian program consisted of two parts – one was English and Chinese, tested together on the same exam paper, and the other was Italian. Despite the fact that she had never had any formal Italian instruction, Gigi performed astonishingly well on the exam’s Italian section – even better than on the English/ Chinese portion. ‘Italian, I got 94 [out of 100],’ she told me. ‘But English and Chinese – I’m sure the English part I did pretty well because I knew that was pretty easy, but Chinese was sort of difficult for me because

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the questions were mostly about Chinese literature that were difficult… old classical stuff.’ She couldn’t have done too badly with the Chinese literature questions though, for Gigi’s combined score was high enough to secure one of the five Italian department vacancies. This alone would have been quite a feat, but Gigi’s score was actually the highest out of the 30 or so students who took the exam! ‘That I knew because it is written – your ranking,’ she informed me. ‘I was the number one!’ I was flabbergasted when she relayed this information to me, and while Gigi was herself surprised by these results, she downplayed the magnitude of this achievement, telling me that the students she was competing against could not have been very proficient in Italian. ‘All of those students were not Italian majors,’ she said. ‘It’s the only school that has Italian department in Taiwan.’ For the interior design program at the national university that Gigi also applied for, there were 84 students vying for the four department vacancies, so she was dealing with far greater odds than in the Italian program with 30 students competing for five spaces. In the following interview excerpt, Gigi informs me of the details of this entrance exam after I express surprise over her triumph over the odds, beating out 81 other competitors: Mark:  Four. So, it’s still not a very good chance, but you got it! Gigi: Yeeaaah! Yeah yeah. I was the last one (laughing). The fourth – the last student picked. Mark:  Out of 84? So – Wow! Gigi: Yeah, I thought I would fail, but because they had exams in three subjects – one is Chinese, and English, and Design – Basic Fundamental Design. And I received my grade card, which is written that my Chinese and Design were both in 50-something, which is not that good. Mark:  Out of how many points? Gigi: One hundred. And English, I got 85, so I think that – Mark:  So that pushed you over – ahead of 81 other students? Gigi: Yeah (laughing). I think English really helped me a lot. Even though the program she was examining to get into was Interior Design and not a language-related field, the emphasis that Taiwanese society places on English as a gatekeeping mechanism, with the English part of the exam constituting a third of the total points – clearly benefited Gigi here.

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So, Gigi was accepted at both of the two schools she attempted to gain admittance to.2 She had her choice of two programs – one interior design and the other Italian. And despite her passion for the Italian language, her love of design took precedence. ‘I wanted to learn design, so I have to,’ she explained. Another consideration was the fact that, in Taiwan, national universities are considered far more prestigious than private universities. Gigi’s parents were, therefore, overjoyed that she had been accepted at the national university and were strongly encouraging her to attend this school. ‘When I told my dad I’m going to the exams of this university, he was saying, “Oh, that’s quite impossible,”’ she told me with a laugh. ‘And I made it, so…they were really surprised!’ Gigi’s parents were not the only ones that were surprised by her acceptance at a prestigious national university. As news of her admission spread throughout her hometown, Gigi found, much to her embarrassment, that she was suddenly regarded as a sort of town hero. The mayor of the town even wrote a congratulatory card and stuck it to the gate of her family’s house. ‘My town is, like, a really traditional and old place,’ she explained. ‘It’s in the countryside, so there were not so many children that can have this possibility of going to this university in Taipei.’ All of Gigi’s relatives also gave her money – money that she didn’t really feel good about accepting. ‘I wanted to tell them, “I’m still not sure if I could finish my course at the university, and now you’re giving me the money!”’ she said. Gigi depicted all this adulation as thrusting great pressure onto her, making her feel that she absolutely had to successfully complete her course of study, for if she failed to do so, she would not just be letting down her family, but also her entire hometown. She told me that this pressure weighed heavily on her during her first semester in the interior design program as she struggled with required calculus and physics courses – the sort of classes she had sought to avoid five years earlier by attending Saint Agnes: Mark: So now you have that pressure to not let down the whole town. Gigi: Yeah yeah. I think I mentioned in my email that I have to take calculus and physics. Mark:  Yes, your dreaded math. Gigi: Yeah, yeah. And I was ready to crash in the last semester, but luckily I passed the exam. But the last semester, I was thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to drop the school.’ And I told all my friends that I don’t wanna be here anymore. But I couldn’t tell my parents. I couldn’t tell my relatives because they think I’m the hero!

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Mark:  So those classes made the whole semester horrible for you? Gigi: Yeah, dreadful. Although Gigi’s university experience had been dampened by the required calculus and physics courses, she spoke with intense enthusiasm for her program’s design courses. ‘It’s great!’ she told me excitedly. ‘Now I’m having one which is called Space Design, and we have to do paper models, and sometimes, when I finish it, I find it’s probably already 4am in the morning!’ She had nothing but praise for her design instructors and their efforts to encourage the creativity she so desperately wished to cultivate. ‘The teacher doesn’t give us so clear indication about what to do,’ she told me. ‘They want us to be more creative – in the first year especially.’ Gigi did still express some anxiety over her creativity, but she nevertheless presented herself in this March 2010 interview as someone with headstrong determination and confidence. This is evident in the following extract, after I bring up the issue of her parents’ support for her design aspirations: Mark: So you said before that your parents were cautiously supportive – that they wanted you to stay focused on languages, but they were still supportive of the design idea? Gigi: Yeah, because – that’s because once I got older, I probably expressed myself pretty well when I want to do anything. So, my parents would think once you get these ideas of doing something, just do it. That’s better than not having any idea and not knowing what to do. Mark:  So they’re pleased with your determination. Gigi: Yeah, but probably my dad thinks I’m a little bit unrealistic (laughs) of the idea of becoming a designer. I can prove him he’s wrong. Gigi’s university is especially known for training teachers and she did have the option of taking courses specially designed for those intending to teach interior design in Taiwan’s technical high schools. This was the route her parents wanted her to take. ‘Of course my parents want me to be a teacher,’ she informed me.3 Gigi had no intention of teaching design, but she told me that she had actually, the previous semester, had a brief stint as an English instructor teaching children at a Taipei buxiban for two months. Although the main reason she gave for quitting this teaching job was that she was too busy with her own schoolwork, she went on to reveal another reason for not wanting to continue teaching. She found that she could no longer,

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in good conscience, conduct English lessons focusing on grammar with no use of the language for actual communication. This, in her opinion, was not how languages should be learned, and she didn’t feel right about engaging in a teaching practice that she so vigorously opposed. ‘I think if I have children, I wouldn’t send them to cram school,’ she told me. Perhaps due to my subsequent comment pointing out that she and other participants had clearly benefitted from their supplementary English classes as children, she qualified her previous remark, telling me, ‘But it also depends on what kind of lessons are provided in the cram school. If they do create environments that all the students have to speak to communicate, but not teaching grammar and reading – the things I do right now – that’s what I was doing. So, I told myself I couldn’t do this thing anymore. I would feel guilty in the future.’ English as a ‘Door to the World’

Amedeo’s first two trips to Taiwan prior to our May 2009 interview had each been for only one month. ‘If you come to Taiwan for one month – 30 days, you don’t need to apply visa,’ Gigi explained. ‘So, he always stayed the maximum.’ For his visit during the summer between Gigi’s graduation from Saint Agnes and the commencement of her studies at the university in Taipei, however, the two of them took a short trip to Hong Kong after one month, which allowed him another month stay in Taiwan upon return. Amedeo had come to Taiwan this time with the intention of finding a job and staying there. He was able to find short-term employment giving guitar lessons at a music school in Taipei, but the music school was unwilling to sponsor him for a work visa. During these two months, Amedeo and Gigi rented a small apartment in Taipei County on a short-term basis and sent out lots of resumes to businesses that they thought might hire him and supply a work visa. These efforts proved unsuccessful though, so Amedeo returned to Italy just before Gigi started school and moved into the school dormitory. After Amedeo returned to Italy, he and Gigi continued to maintain daily internet communication until Gigi, after her first semester at the university, went to Italy during her winter break. On this second trip to Italy, Gigi also had the opportunity to engage in lengthy discussions with several of Amedeo’s friends. ‘I met, like, some of Amedeo’s friends, who are also very interesting people,’ she said. ‘We talked about literature. Also, music – musicology – and they were all speaking pretty interesting stuff with me.’ Since most of Amedeo’s friends were quite proficient

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in English, Gigi was not restricted to Italian use for these conversations and could use English to express more complicated ideas that gave her problems in Italian. In an email message sent immediately after returning from her second trip to Europe in February 2010, Gigi told me, ‘I feel very much benefited because I can speak English. I can say acquiring English is definitely a door to the world.’ Elaborating on English providing her with ‘a door to the world,’ a notion very much in line with Taiwan internationalization discourses, she told me in our March 2010 interview a month later that conversations she had had in English with Amedeo, Nathalie, Evelína and others had enabled her to view many issues in a completely different light and prompted her to critically evaluate many Taiwanese societal norms and attitudes she had previously accepted unquestioningly. One such attitude was the one she had held toward communism, which is a truly dirty word in Taiwanese society due to the long history of contemptuous relations between Taiwan and the PRC. From discussing communism with Amedeo and his friends in Italy, she found that, for them, it had very different – often positive – connotations. The casting of aspersions onto musicians and artists as a result of their drug use is another topic Gigi debated with Amedeo that led her to rethink her attitudes on the issue. In the following extract, Gigi makes a point of bringing up this issue just before I switched off the voice recorder at the end of our March 2010 interview: Mark: I think we basically, in a roundabout way, covered most everything I wanted to talk to you about. Gigi: Also one thing – morality. Before, I had – I had so much conflict with my boyfriend about our opinions to people who – who have drugs. Like I always told him if he had drugs – if he happens to be a musician, if we found out he had drugs, we would – I don’t want to listen to his music anymore. Mark: Really? Gigi: I told him so. Before I thought so – from moral aspect. And he explained me, ‘No, you should separate these two things – like moral – morality, and one’s artist talent.’ So right now, I also – I start to think probably it’s just because of this Chinese tradition that one person, if he happen to have a drug, or if he has any records in drugs, or affairs, then we start to punish him – start to attack him – with the regard of our moral ideas – like social norms, but really, I think it’s not necessary.

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Mark: And then, especially with jazz, there’s that stereotype of the tortured artists that have so much pain and anguish in their lives that the only way they can deal with it is to take drugs and make music. Gigi: (laughs) Yeah. Also, what I see in Europe is – it brings me a great contradiction with my background – Chinese tradition, Taiwanese tradition, all my parents taught me. In Taiwan, it’s like parents would wish you to do – like right now, I can do whatever I want, but I will still try to satisfy my parents. I will try to make them feel proud of me. I want to – because all the relatives will, like – I will wish that my parents will feel proud when my relatives will be asking about me. But in Europe, what I saw is that they don’t need to – the parents and the children will act like two individuals, and you don’t need to – also, you don’t need to do anything to please your parents if you don’t want to. According to Gigi, conversations about issues like those mentioned above were invaluable in providing her with an understanding of the world that would have otherwise been unobtainable for her. ‘If I have to read a book about maybe existentialism, probably it would take me days and I probably wouldn’t understand what it’s talking about,’ she explained. ‘But with someone who I can talk with – who I can have a certain discussion of the issue – that helps me to think and to understand.’ Gigi relayed other comparative cultural observations as well. One involved the very different work ethics in Asia and Europe. The observation of widespread apathy in Italy and subsequent discussions with Amedeo about nihilism also brought about in Gigi a newfound appreciation for dissent in Taiwanese society. In our first interview, she had expressed great distaste for the chaos of Taiwanese politics, but after returning from her second European trip, Gigi had come to hold a different view. ‘After all, I understand it should be [full of dissent],’ she declared. ‘If the country looks like a fully peaceful place – like when you go to China, you wouldn’t see people speak bad about its own country – then there’s other problems. There’s big problems.’ Acknowledging the huge impact her recent trip to Italy and her interaction with Amedeo and his friends had had on her worldview, Gigi told me that she thought she had really changed as a person. With these changes and her own increased knowledge of the world came a change in the way she viewed her friends and acquaintances in Taiwan. When she was telling me about the interesting and often philosophical conversations she had with Amedeo and his friends, she contrasted

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these discussions with conversations in Taiwan that she characterized as superficial, ‘where people will talk, like, “Okay, let’s go shopping this afternoon.”’ Most Taiwanese people, Gigi felt, were followers, blindly doing and expressing interest in whatever happens to be popular at any given time. When I asked her to further elaborate, she told me Gigi: Basically, I think there’s still some education needed. Mark:  So you’re thinking just not very cultured? Gigi: Not very cultured. People I’ve found also in Taipei and Kaohsiung – if you ask them what are their interests – what they do in their free time, they will answer you, ‘Uh, shopping. Go to movie.’ But they don’t know what kind of movie they like. They watch mostly Hollywood mainstream stuff. They don’t have that much cultural cultivation, as in art. Like some months ago, there was Andy Warhol’s exhibition in Taiwan. And there were lots of my friends that said they definitely had to go to this exhibition. But I asked them, ‘Who is Andy Warhol’ and they couldn’t answer me. Mark: They just knew it was something big, but they didn’t really know? Gigi: Yeah. And also, like, I feel they were just doing what everybody tells them to do and what advertisements suggest them to watch, to buy, to go. Mark: So you think they’re very able to be influenced – by the media or – Gigi: Yeah, by the media mostly. Probably also, like, still right now, when I see my classmates, they are still like this. I ask them, ‘Why do you want to learn design? Why do you come to this school?’ And very easy questions like, ‘Which kind of design do you like the most?’ They don’t know how to answer me. They will just say, ‘Ah, because everybody is learning design. It seemed to be a good thing to do. It seemed that you could have a pretty cool career in the future.’ Mark:  Very surface? Gigi: Yeah. I would say superficial. Mark:  Yeah, that’s a better word. Gigi: I don’t want to be a snob, but I just – hmmm – my perception. Mark: So you think you’ve definitely thought it through much more than many of your classmates? Gigi: I think. Well, probably not in a better way, but at least I think what I like, and probably before, when I was in Saint Agnes, I

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also do the things like everybody does – like go to movie – to watch the movie where everybody says, ‘Oh, you have to go to watch,’ and I go. But I think especially when I’m here, and especially when I have learned so much about various things from my boyfriend – like he told me, ‘You shouldn’t always follow what they tell you to do.’ But I changed. Gigi’s acknowledgement that she herself, not long before, had displayed the same sort of ‘superficial’ behavior she was denigrating clearly presents the change in terms of personal growth – as one who has benefitted from the sort of education she felt most Taiwanese were in dire need of. She saw her travels and conversations with Amedeo and other foreigners as invaluable to her self-development project, with English (and Italian to a lesser degree, since she did use some Italian in conversations with a few of Amedeo’s friends) as playing a key role in her personal transformation into Gigi – The Intellectual. This is a persona she presented not only in our March 2010 interview, but also in a personal blog in which she often discussed philosophical issues like existentialism in Chinese. Although she would have relished opening up her blog to a more international audience with the use of English, she chose not to do so, telling me ‘there’s still certain topics which I couldn’t, like, speak in English – like if you want me to talk about politics or economics, I would sound, like, somewhat stupid if I have to speak in English.’ When I reminded her that she did, in fact, routinely discuss philosophical, political and economic topics with Amedeo, she replied, ‘Yeah, yeah, but mostly we speak in a pretty easy way. We try to make lots of examples, and he tries to explain what he thinks in very easy English.’ Conclusion to Gigi’s Story

Throughout much of her life story, Gigi’s English abilities served to make her feel special, differentiating her from peers with lower proficiency in the language, and she highlighted that at those points where this was not the case, she exerted a great deal of effort to reclaim that valued good at English component of her identity. Gigi’s characterization of English as ‘a door to the world’ though best captures its role in helping to construct an identity of distinction for her during the course of this study. She made it quite clear that her image of herself as an international person with a broad worldview was substantially strengthened during this time period – especially by her experiences and discussions in Italy. This newly strengthened international identity served to again allow her to differentiate herself from her peers in Taiwan, who she regarded as

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generally lacking an international perspective. Since she credited English for making all her worldly knowledge gains possible, we can again see Gigi’s English language abilities providing her with a means to feel special and different from those she interacts with on a regular basis in Taiwan. I’ll end Gigi’s chapter by highlighting the future she envisioned for herself in March 2010, which did not differ significantly from the future she imagined in our first interview – living and working in Europe, most likely Italy, but eventually returning to Taiwan. And in these ponderings of an imagined future, Gigi again chose to contrast Taiwan with a European alternative that she believed would be more conducive for her creativity: Mark: You said you’d probably live a while in Europe, but eventually return to Taiwan. Gigi: Eventually, yeah. Mark:  You still think you would eventually return to Taiwan? Gigi: Yeah, because I would miss my family so hard. I don’t know, but in Taiwan, I don’t want to envision myself becoming an interior designer in Taiwan because what I saw is the people work in the design studio, they don’t have the chance to express their creativity because they have to follow what customers ask them to do. And what customers want are mostly the things that are already done by the other people. They want you to make a copy of that. Mark:  So you wouldn’t get a chance to express your creativity? Gigi: Yeah, yeah. I think so. Mark:  Europe, maybe more? Gigi: Yeah, maybe more. And also, I will probably find much more interesting people – interested in design. Throughout much of her life Gigi had invested in the English language, primarily for the purpose of maintaining her identity as a proficient English speaker, but at this point at the end of our study, her investment had clearly shifted to heavy investment in worldly knowledge more generally, fueling an identity as an international non-superficial individual who strives for creativity and an examined life – Gigi, the intellectual. Notes (1) These and all other names of individuals mentioned in focal participants’ stories are pseudonyms chosen either by me, the focal participants or the individuals themselves.

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(2) Unlike some Taiwanese universities that also conduct entrance interviews, admission at these two schools was determined entirely by the entrance examinations. Gigi, therefore, was not able to test whether she was able to confidently promote herself and her abilities in an interview setting. (3) For anyone unfamiliar with Taiwanese society, the of course in Gigi’s statement ‘Of course my parents want me to be a teacher’ is perhaps in need of some explanation. As in most Asian societies, teachers are highly respected in Taiwan. Unlike in some other countries, however, the teachers in Taiwan’s public schools are, in fact, compensated in accordance to the respect the society grants them (a good example of the state’s role in helping to construct ideologies normally labeled ‘Confucian’ or ‘traditional Chinese culture’). Teachers’ salaries are generally quite high and their extraordinary pension plans allow them to retire quite young – in their 50s – and receive a monthly pension check even higher than the monthly salaries they received when they were working. Public school teachers in Taiwan even receive discounts on their utility bills. In recent years, however, declining birth rates in Taiwan have resulted in a drastic reduction in the number of teachers hired, and competition for the coveted teaching positions has become unbelievably fierce. Training to be a public school teacher in Taiwan today is, therefore, a rather risky undertaking.

6 The Social Butterfly – Audrey’s Story

In contrast to Gigi, whose ‘Intellectual’ persona was projected only slightly at the beginning of the study but became more pronounced throughout the course of the year, Audrey’s projection of herself as an extraordinarily sociable person was extremely consistent – not only throughout the course of the study, but well prior to it. I remember her presenting herself in this way as a second-year student when I was her teacher and, as was previously mentioned, Audrey was the Saint Agnes student that took the most initiative to keep in touch with me after I left Taiwan and moved to Singapore in 2006. Even before she and her classmates discovered Facebook and began ‘friending’ me there, Audrey was regularly sending me emails with photo attachments and updates on her progress in the Saint Agnes five-year program. Due to the fact that her life, during the time period of this study, revolved around very public social contexts, such as parties and club events, Audrey was also the participant whose life I was most engaged with as a participant observer. As is often the case for very gregarious extroverted individuals, Audrey exuded an air of confidence in public, regardless of what language she was interacting in. Our interviews revealed, however, that underneath that air of confidence, Audrey was indeed contending with her own identity struggles. Audrey’s Life before Saint Agnes

In our initial May 2009 interview, conducted outdoors over lunch and coffee at a table in a tranquil tree-lined portion of the Saint Agnes campus, Audrey responded to my request for information I would have to know about to be able to say I really knew her by highlighting the independence she acquired as a child of divorced parents:

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Audrey: Well, I’m – my parents divorced when I was really little, and so my sisters and I had to move like all the time from Tainan to Kaohsiung – Tainan – Kaohsiung – Tainan – Kaohsiung. Mark:   One parent was in Kaohsiung and one in Tainan? Audrey: Yeah, so we gotta move a lot, so I guess – and my parents are always like busy at work or something, so I guess that – that kind of a situation – that kind of a life – really makes me as more independent. Audrey claimed to have basically raised herself while her parents were both consumed with work – her mother operating her own cosmetics shop, and her father supporting himself as a professional gambler. She was not completely on her own growing up though, for her two older sisters helped her considerably. Her oldest sister, almost five years her senior, in fact served as somewhat of a parental figure for Audrey when she was young. ‘She was old enough to watch us,’ she told me. ‘One of my sisters and I are very, very close cuz we live in this kind of situation. We gotta, you know, help each other.’ Audrey went on to explain to me though that in her very earliest years, it was mostly her paternal grandmother in Tainan that raised her, with most of her earliest linguistic input being in Tai-yü since her grandmother was a monolingual Tai-yü speaker. Mark: So your Tai-yü is purely uh – at home – spoken at home only? Audrey:  Um hmm. Mark: You said um – to speak to your grandmother? Audrey:  It’s my mother tongue actually. Mark: So that was the first language you learned? Audrey: Yeah, cuz like I say um – my mom and – my parents were always all the time busy and working or something, so I think probably when I was really little – like uh three or four, I think probably like my grandmom raised me up, and – you know – all the family member – cuz they live with my grandmom, so they speak to my grandmom in uh – Tai-yü. Audrey informed me that, interestingly, all the family members used Tai-yü to speak to her grandmother and to each other, but only used Mandarin Chinese when speaking directly to Audrey and her cousins. ‘To children, they will speak Chinese…it’s just kind of a rule or something,’ she remarked. ‘I guess it’s because knowing that the older generation like my mom and my father, they were not allowed to speak Taiwanese at school, so I guess they see the child and they don’t want them to be punished or something, so they try to speak Chinese to them.’

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Audrey described her childhood as generally a happy one, but admitted that, as a child, she did not like talking to classmates about her family situation – her parents’ divorce and particularly her father, the professional gambler, who was sent to jail for three years on a drug conviction when she was around 10 years old. ‘In that period, there was not that much single parent families in Taiwan,’ she explained, ‘so I would feel a little bit embarrassed about talking about my family’s stuff – especially my father cuz his job is not really good.’ Over time, however, her family’s situation ceased to be an embarrassment for her. ‘After growing up, there are more and more single parent families, so I just get used to it,’ she told me. Audrey claimed that despite all the moving between Kaohsiung and Tainan, she maintained very good grades throughout her childhood. She reported having no academic pressure from either parent at the time, saying, ‘I was doing my study quite well, so I guess uh – I would probably be in the top ten in the class – so my parents just were not worried about that.’ She told me that she had no buxiban lessons in early elementary school, and from the time her English instruction began in the fifth grade all the way through junior high school, she didn’t feel any particular attraction to English. ‘English for me – it was just like other subjects – not very special,’ she recalled. ‘Just like math and Chinese – like something you gotta learn.’ She went on to report that in junior high school, her grades continued to be generally quite good, particularly in English and Chinese, but she was weak in math, so at age 12, her mother sent her to buxiban lessons for not only additional help with the math, but also English lessons to strengthen her grasp of English grammar. According to Audrey, these buxiban lessons were all part of her mother’s plan for her to follow the typical Taiwanese academic path – to get into a good high school, and then a good university. In addition to math and English classes at the cram schools, which she continued with until she was 15, Audrey’s mother also intended, during her last year of junior high school, to enroll her in a preparatory program that guaranteed its participants would pass entrance exams at a specific prestigious high school. This program, Audrey told me, was quite expensive – 120,000 Taiwan dollars (approximately US$3,650). After telling me about her mother’s plans to enroll her in the program, however, Audrey explained how she managed to alter this plan: Mark: A hundred and twenty thousand – oh, okay – that’s a lot. Audrey: Yes, for a whole year program, so they can guarantee me to go to some specific high school which is better high school than others. Mark: Okay.

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Audrey: Yeah, so um – but after that – I don’t know why – someday, I  just saw the Saint Agnes – I don’t know – the flyers or something – advertisements or something, and then I just asked my mom, ‘Can I go to Saint Agnes?’ and she’s like, ‘Yeah, of course’, cuz Saint Agnes – you know the students from Saint Agnes – they got a good um – good characters or good ability of language or something – a good reputation. Mark: So pretty much everybody in Southern Taiwan is aware of Saint Agnes and its reputation? Audrey:  Yeah, especially language, of course. Audrey’s ‘of course’ in the last line of this excerpt reveals the extent to which Saint Agnes’ worth as a place to study foreign languages is regarded as a taken for granted, common sense fact in Southern Taiwan. This being the case, Audrey’s mother was well aware of Saint Agnes’ reputation for producing graduates with outstanding language abilities and required no convincing that Saint Agnes and its focus on languages was a good alternative to the educational plans she had previously laid out for her daughter. Audrey’s older sister, in fact, had attempted unsuccessfully to enter Saint Agnes five years earlier, and Audrey admitted that this could also have influenced her decision. Audrey’s Struggle and Strategy at Saint Agnes

Upon entering Saint Agnes, Audrey had a very hard time at first. This was mostly due to the English department’s policy of 100% English-medium instruction in all classes the department offered. ‘In the first year of Saint Agnes, I was really frustrated about all English class, cuz it’s all in English,’ she recalled. ‘I could only understand about 40 or 50%.’ On the listening placement test that had put Gigi in the Group 3 listening class for the second year, Audrey’s score placed her, she thought (although she couldn’t remember for sure), in the Group 4 class – the one slightly lower than Gigi’s. By her second year at Saint Agnes, however, Audrey seemed to understand most of what I said in my class taught entirely in English. For this improvement in her listening abilities, Audrey credited transcription. She informed me of this after I told her about my interview transcription process: Mark: Listening to one sentence, typing, listening again. Audrey: Oh, I used to do that when I was trying to improve my listening – you know, like – Mark: Transcribe?

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Audrey: Yeah, like, you know a lot of teachers will put the MP3 file on the internet – an e-course, and then I’ll like, listen to it – like, full conversation, and then listen to one sentence and then stop and write it down. That really helps. Mark: I guess it would. Audrey: Yep. Sometimes, like, to get one specific word, you have to listen to it 10, 11 times. I remember Audrey’s general English proficiency at that time being roughly comparable to that of Gigi – somewhere in the middle of the class if I were to rank all class members. While I didn’t notice as much of a marked improvement in her English throughout the course of that year as I had with Gigi, she always seemed confident in her English communication and her grades were fairly good. I also didn’t sense in Audrey the competitiveness that was so common in many of the students. Although she was certainly trying to improve her English, she seemed to me to be relatively comfortable with the proficiency level she was at then. When I asked her about this, she confirmed that she didn’t feel a need to compete with her classmates, but she asserted that she has by no means ever been satisfied with her English proficiency at any given time. ‘It feels like I’m always worse than other people,’ she explained. ‘So, I mean, like, I just feel like I have to improve myself. It’s not like I wanna win though, or I wanna be the best one. But I just feel like I have to be better.’ The sense of complacency that I thought I detected in Audrey when she was a student in my classroom perhaps had something to do with her attitude regarding school and grades. Audrey told me that, unlike many of her highly competitive classmates who were obsessed with grades, class ranking, and the like, she prioritized the actual knowledge gained over the grades she received and strove to achieve a balance between school and other aspects of her life. After telling me that she does feel a constant need to improve, she added ‘For me, I know that school work and studying is not the most important part. I mean, like, it’s not the whole thing of your life.’ When she was my student, Audrey was indeed dedicating quite a bit of time to non-academic pursuits. Ballroom dancing was one activity that she was particularly passionate about during her second year at Saint Agnes. I didn’t know it at the time, but there was also another language subject in which Audrey was able to shine far brighter than in my English class – French. Unlike the English department, which required all courses to be taught in English, the French department, acknowledging the fact that almost all Saint Agnes students started their French instruction there as absolute

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beginners, condoned the use of Chinese to teach French, especially at the beginning levels. Teachers from France and other French-speaking countries, who lacked Chinese proficiency, generally taught in a combination of French and English, but these teachers usually taught the more advanced-level classes. During Audrey’s first year at Saint Agnes, when she was struggling to understand even 40–50% of what English teachers said, the introductory French classes, where instruction was in Chinese, served as a welcome break from the frustration she so often felt in English classes. Reflecting on her first three years of French instruction at Saint Agnes, Audrey exclaimed, ‘I was so obsessed with French!’ When I asked her in a follow-up email to try to explain the reasons for this obsession, she gave me the following response: The very first reason I like french is because I really think it’s a beautiful language…and also, when I grow up, we have this image about france, that it’s romantic, beautiful, poetic, and also very untouchable! i mean when I was little, france is like a wonderland n a fantasy!! that’s why im so obsessed with it at the first place.

Audrey told me in our May 2009 interview that her obsession with French continued throughout her first three years of mandatory French classes at Saint Agnes, and that during this period of time, she did extremely well in these classes, practically memorizing her French textbooks. This clearly had an impact on her identity, allowing her to be positioned as a sort of French expert by classmates weaker in the subject who sometimes came to her for help. ‘My French grammar is pretty good,’ she told me, ‘and I can help others with their French grammar, and that makes me feel good.’ Due to her very extroverted personality, opportunities to use her language abilities to help others occurred with some regularity even before she had significant involvement in English-speaking communities. She told me that she often encountered foreigners having communication difficulties in stores, for instance, and always offered her translation assistance. She also told me about being able to use English to help her sister’s boyfriend navigate the British visa and immigration process when she visited her sister in England for three weeks during the summer between her fourth and fifth year at Saint Agnes. This assistance she provided her sister’s boyfriend, however, proved to be the only significant instance of English use on this trip due to the fact that her sister, who was there working on a TESOL master’s degree, had an almost entirely Chinese-speaking circle of friends. ‘Lots of her friends are Taiwanese and Hong Konger,’ she told me. ‘So, I guess in UK, I spoke less English than in Taiwan.’

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Immediately after returning from the UK, however, Audrey did find herself immersed in English in Taiwan. This immersion came in her role as a coordinator for a Chinese camp that was held on the Saint Agnes campus. For this camp, students from Saint Agnes’ sister schools in the United States, England, Korea and several other countries came to Saint Agnes for three weeks to practice and get exposure to Mandarin Chinese. Although these students were ostensibly at the camp to use and improve their Chinese, their Chinese proficiency tended to be quite low and, according to Audrey, it was actually English that was used the majority of the time. ‘They think it is both, but it is English,’ she remarked. ‘I never spoke so much English in my life!’ The discourse of this community was clearly one of English as an international lingua franca, but the fact that it was a Chinese camp and participants felt obliged to include some Chinese in their communication made their discourse a hybrid one unique to their specific situation. The three weeks of non-stop English (peppered with Chinese) at the Chinese camp proved to be a very significant experience for Audrey – not just because of the positive aspects of the increased proficiency that resulted from her constant English use there, but also effects she regarded negatively. In response to my May 2009 interview question asking her to tell me about an instance where foreign language use made her feel not so good, Audrey highlighted the effect her experience at the Chinese camp had on her Mandarin Chinese: Audrey: Like after that three weeks of the Chinese camp, when we were talking about something, we just can’t stop speaking English – even to our, you know, even to Taiwanese, so – Mark: Just out of habit? Audrey: Yeah. So of course, our English is not perfect, so we would still speak Chinese, and combine some English words, and I guess I didn’t realize that I used that much. And one day, I would just ‘Hey you know something? like – you know’ – and I can’t think about any Chinese words in my mind – only English. So that was – that is a little bit – I would say scares me – cuz it’s not good. It’s my language, and you forget your language – but there’s some English words in mind! Yeah, so I guess I um – from then, I start to – I decide to – not to put that much English words in my Chinese conversation. This experience of momentarily drawing a blank about how to express a thought in Chinese while the English words were instantly available really jolted Audrey. The personal language policy she refers to previously, deciding to not mix English and Chinese in conversation, was one

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she consciously tried to follow throughout most of the period of this study, and the fear that her English use would negatively impact her Chinese was frequently brought up during this period. Shortly after her three weeks as coordinator at the Chinese camp though, Audrey began working at an establishment that catered to a large number of foreign customers. This establishment was a restaurant and bar that regularly opened up its second floor to host live band and dance events. Audrey’s official job there was doing promotion – advertising food and drink specials as well as the various second-floor club events – but because all three of the managers were foreigners with little Chinese proficiency, she found herself helping in a variety of other ways as well, such as translating food items for the Chinese menus. And for Audrey, interaction at her workplace was by no means limited to her coworkers, for, as promoter, she was expected to attend the second-floor club events as well, and this proved to be quite a boon for her social life. She told me that after starting to work at this establishment and regularly attending its club events, she was able to count among her circle of friends quite a few of its foreign patrons, and the number of these foreign friends quickly snowballed. ‘I would say that now my friends are more foreigners than Chinese cuz something about foreigners is, like, if I know you, you introduce your friends to me, so I got a lot of friends, and their friends will introduce their friends to me,’ she explained. Since Canadians make up the majority of the area’s foreign population, it is not surprising that most of Audrey’s foreign friends were Canadian. Others were from the United States and South Africa. She also said she had met people from France, Belgium, Czech, Finland and Norway. A variety of different professions were represented in this circle of foreign friends and acquaintances. ‘I’ve known quite a lot of different kinds of people,’ she told me, ‘from CEO of a big company or something to, you know, just – I don’t know – normal person, like, working…just different careers.’ With such a large number of new foreign friends and a job that necessitated the use of English, Audrey’s spoken English fluency improved dramatically from her second year at Saint Agnes when I was her teacher – more so than any of the other former students that I spoke with when I returned to Saint Agnes. The amount of English speaking and listening experience she was getting was indeed truly substantial. ‘I guess now I would say that in my life, I would speak English and Chinese like half and half,’ she estimated during our May 2009 interview. Audrey also told me during that interview that her two groups of friends – foreigners and Taiwanese – were at that time completely separate. She attributed this to the stigma that clubbing has in Taiwanese society – particularly

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for females. ‘I guess, like, the clubbing stuff for Taiwanese, it’s still something bad,’ she explained. Sensitive to this fact, Audrey was quite cautious about luring her Taiwanese friends into her community of foreigners, which was very much centered around clubbing. When the restaurant at her workplace had a food special, she would tell her Taiwanese friends about it, but she never made any attempt to promote the second-floor club events to Taiwanese friends. The fact that Audrey’s foreign and Taiwanese friendship communities were so clearly separate facilitated her personal language purity policy of not mixing the two languages in conversation. It was not quite as simple for Audrey, however, when it came to computer-mediated communication. When Audrey first added herself to my Facebook friends list, she had not yet made the decision to cease mixing English and Chinese. At that time, she would frequently post on Facebook and another website her own poetry and writing that often mixed Chinese, English, and French. The following piece, entitled Splendeur, is one example of these creations, which she called her ‘freewriting’: 渺小的活著  懷著渺小的偉大夢想  以為  沒有甚麼能夠阻止  試圖攫取  在延長的道路盡頭  微弱的閃光  on and off  and on and off  and on and off  on my way  always hoping it will still be on when i get there  find it attracted  find it dangerous  feels like being friends with a lamb  yet im a lion  my precious  ca me fait triste que tu es au le pays loin loin de moi  ca me fait contente que je vais te vois pendant deux semaines  bisou

When I interviewed her in May 2009 though, Audrey told me that the experience she had had of momentarily forgetting how to express

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something in Chinese had prompted her to stop doing this sort of hybrid writing: Mark: On the website, you have a big combination of Chinese, English and even some French thrown in too. Can you comment on that? Audrey: I used to do that, but um – I realize that I don’t want to confuse Chinese and English anymore, so I stopped doing that. So, I would finish a sentence in English or Chinese only. Then I would start another sentence in English or Chinese – the different language. So anyway – I just don’t appreciate that anymore. I don’t – I don’t like the – even when we are speaking, I don’t like people to um – say some English words when we are speaking Chinese. Mark: You don’t think you do it yourself? Audrey: I did, but I try to correct myself. It’s super common, but I just don’t think it’s good. After ceasing to produce postings and writing that mixed languages, Audrey started using mostly English on her Facebook page. This was certainly understandable, considering the fact that her Facebook friends list of over 700 people included both Taiwanese and foreigners. Many of the things she wrote on the site, such as status postings, were clearly intended for both audiences. She told me that she felt somewhat conflicted though about her use of English in posts directed only at Taiwanese friends, such as comments on their photos. In the following interview excerpt, for example, Audrey responds to my inquiry about her use of English in online communities, revealing conflicting sentiments – an unexplainable compulsion to use English, but at the same time, guilt about using English with her Taiwanese friends and classmates and expression of the concern that such use of English will lead to loss of her Chinese proficiency: Oh, online community – Facebook. Yeah, mostly in English – except – oh – on Facebook, even when we’re talking to our – to Taiwanese, we will still use English…When I want to comment on a photo or something, I will probably – I will want to say, ‘I guess I met this person before,’ and I’d just rather speak in English – not in Chinese – yeah. I just don’t know the reason why, but I don’t think that is a good habit. I guess now I got some other people to practice English. I don’t have to practice my English with Taiwanese.

In spite of not thinking it was a good habit to use English in communication directed at Taiwanese friends, Audrey was able, after pondering

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the issue for a few minutes, to offer some justification for the practice. She explained to me that, for her, certain languages are just ideally suited for expressing specific emotions. Tai-yü, for example, was, according to Audrey, best suited for expressing any extreme emotion – especially anger. She explained these indexical associations, which reflect a commonly held language ideology about Tai-yü in Taiwan, with the following comments: Mark: You said before that you would use Tai-yü for a joke or just anything associated with anything emotional. Audrey: Yeah. Like um – Taiwanese um – when you wanna say something bad about someone or something, we will always say it in Taiwanese. It’s – I don’t know – it’s, like, it can express directly what you wanna say. Mark: More so than Chinese, you think? Audrey: Um hmm. I guess it’s because of the tone – yeah, it’s more emotional than Chinese – cuz Chinese, I guess is more gentle, more polite, but, like, Taiwanese is more emotional and it’s got more anger and uh – yeah, different emotion there. Similarly, Audrey felt that there were certain feelings and emotions that could most accurately be expressed in English. English, she told me, was in her view far more capable of expressing extreme casualness, for example. ‘Sometimes I want to greet some people like “How’s it goin?” – like “What’s up?” – something,’ she explained. ‘I wouldn’t say it in Chinese cuz we don’t use it…not in Chinese. We don’t say, “How’s it goin?” in Chinese cuz even if we say Ni hao ma? it’s not – no, it’s not the same.’ Audrey regarded Mandarin Chinese as sophisticated, elegant, and polite – all extremely favorable characteristics in her opinion. She told me, however, that these same qualities make it less than ideal to express extreme casualness, extreme anger or even tell a joke. ‘Jokes told in Taiwanese are more funny – funnier than other languages,’ she remarked. With this argument that Tai-yü, Mandarin Chinese and English are each uniquely suited to express specific feelings and emotions, Audrey was able to reconcile somewhat the guilt she felt for sometimes using English with her Taiwanese friends and classmates, whether in person or online. Sometimes, she felt that such practices were appropriate, ‘so you can express something like – for sure – excellence.’ Audrey also admitted in our May 2009 interview that, when communicating in English, she felt like somewhat of a different person than she did speaking Chinese. This, she claimed, was largely due to the different

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interlocutors that she used each of these languages with. In the following excerpt, she responds to my direct question asking her about different language selves by contrasting the English Audrey and Chinese Audrey: Mark: Do you see yourself differently when speaking the different languages? Audrey: I guess I would be more comfortable with foreigner friends – cuz I can be myself more. I don’t have to, like, be careful about everything. Mark: So that’s when you’re speaking English with that group, and when you speak Chinese? Audrey: I care about their feelings – like, I guess Chinese feelings are really easy to hurt – cuz even myself, it’s the same. Mark: Okay, so basically the Chinese Audrey is a little more um – Audrey: Caring about other people’s feelings – thinking about it more, more sensitive. When I spent some time with Audrey and a group of her foreign friends, I saw exactly what she was referring to when she made these comments. Audrey and these friends – mostly Canadian males, but some females as well – shared a jocular sort of camaraderie, constantly teasing one another in a jovial way. Totally absent were concerns about saving face that are so often present in interactions between Taiwanese. Audrey told me that in interactions with acquaintances who were not friends at all, these two selves – the care-free English one for communication with foreigners, and the more cautious Chinese one for communication with Taiwanese – still applied due to the different sensitivities typical of the two groups. She illustrated this with two examples from her workplace: Mark: Can you think of any good example? Audrey: Okay. When I’m working – there’s a party or something, and a man comes to me, and then he says like, ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ and I will say, ‘Okay, sure,’ and he will say, ‘What do you want to drink?’ ‘Um Gin and tonic.’ ‘Okay, gin and tonic,’ and after that, he – you know buying drinks for girls, I think probably is nothing for foreigners, but for Taiwanese, he will think like you have some kind of saying yes to something, like – Mark: Ahhhhhh. Audrey: Yeah yeah. You know, you can have some sort of different more special thing with – not in a sexual way, but you can talk to them more – something like that – and another thing is the asking for the telephone number. Okay, if a foreigner come to

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you and then ask you, ‘Can I have your telephone number?’ or something, it’s like, I would say, ‘Um – well, you can you can come to [this club] – like I will be at [this club] like – every weekend, so if you come to here, you will see me’ and obviously I am refusing you – that I don’t want to give you my phone number. Mark: Right. Audrey: And he will say, ‘Oh, okay,’ or I will say, ‘I have a boyfriend’ – something like that, and he’ll say, ‘Oh, okay.’ And if there’s a Taiwanese guy come to me, say the same thing, and I say the same thing back to him, he will probably feel offensive – like ‘Where? I don’t – I don’t – I don’t mean to uh ask you to be my girlfriend’ or something. You know what I mean? Umm – I guess they have that kind of intent, but they just don’t want to admit it. Since she felt the need to deal so differently with foreigners and Taiwanese, it’s not at all surprising that Audrey thought she was portraying different selves in the two languages. The fact that she tried not to mix English and Chinese even though some of her interlocutors likely had some proficiency in both languages surely contributed as well to the separate selves Audrey associated with English and Chinese. When I asked her whether she perceived a separate French Audrey, she admitted that she hadn’t had enough interaction with French speakers to really develop a distinct French self. But after a bit of contemplation, she identified the special role that French had for her in the construction of an identity of distinction: Audrey: I guess my French is usually for the function of surprising people cuz not many people in Taiwan speak French. So, the French people I met, they are just, ‘Wow! there is a girl speaking French in Taiwan!’ I would get really excited when I meet the French people cuz there are not many French people in Taiwan. Mark: Right – because English – being able to speak English – isn’t nearly as special. Audrey:  Um hmm. Mark: But being able to speak French – Audrey:  I guess it’s just to make myself different. While Audrey’s fluency in English did make her stand out from much of the population in Southern Taiwan, it hardly surprised anyone. It isn’t, after all, considered at all unnatural for Taiwanese to speak English.

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Audrey’s use of French, on the other hand, was definitely a case of performative denaturalization (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) since it subverted the essentialist assumptions people have about Taiwanese people and the French language. Each time Audrey was able to surprise people by speaking French, the reaction helped her to see herself as truly different from others. French here, for Audrey, was satisfying that basic human desire to stand out from others, and thus played a significant role for her identity, regardless of the fact that she noticed no distinct French self. The notion of different selves and different norms for different interlocutors also applied to Audrey’s views on how she might be most successful in an interview situation. She told me that she would be quite comfortable promoting her abilities in an interview situation, and I truly believe she would indeed have no problem doing so, but in contrast to Gigi’s view that self-promotion was now much valued in Taiwan, Audrey thought such an approach might not be the appropriate one for a Taiwanese university or company. ‘For most foreigners, they would appreciate more about your confidence about yourself and your courage,’ she explained. ‘But, like, for Taiwanese, if you say the same thing – you know, the exact same thing – to them, they would probably think you’re cocky or something. So, I guess I would not do that – not that much.’ At the time of our May 2009 interview, Audrey was not at all sure whether she would soon have any interviews or not, but she did have several possible plans for her near future after graduation from the Saint Agnes five-year program: to spend a year in an intensive Korean language program in Seoul if she were to receive a Korean government scholarship she had applied for, to continue at Saint Agnes to obtain a bachelor’s degree in French, or to get into a textile marketing program at the same fairly prestigious private university in Taipei that Gigi got accepted as an Italian major. ‘So, I guess I got three things going on now – French department, Korean scholarship and the university,’ she told me, summing up the various options she had in mind for her immediate future. Audrey wasn’t terribly concerned about the possibility of any of these plans not working out though. ‘I’m always prepared to go to work, so I guess that’s the back-up plan as well,’ she told me. Audrey’s Life after Saint Agnes Graduation

When I met Audrey for our March 2010 interview ten months later in a Kaohsiung Starbucks coffee shop, she filled me in on the many changes she had experienced in her life in the months following her graduation from Saint Agnes. She did not receive the scholarship to study in Korea or get accepted into the textile marketing program at the university in Taipei.

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Audrey, however, didn’t seem heartbroken by these rejections. She decided to work for a while, and then resume her studies as a French major at Saint Agnes a year later. This was a decision she made before the French department entrance exam, so she opted to just postpone taking the exam for a year. In response to my request for further explanation about this decision, Audrey told me When I was little, and the whole – through the whole time of my life, I always think that I have to study elementary school, junior high school, high school and college, and then finish all the studying at one point in time – like, straight away – straight – just nonstop. But I realize that actually I can take a break from the study, and, like, do something else – and go back to study. It’s not a big deal.

I subsequently validated Audrey’s position, telling her that taking such a break was the right thing for me as well, and this prompted Audrey to reveal her parents’ lack of support for this choice: Mark: For me personally, taking a break like that was the right thing to do. I took ten years between my undergraduate degree and master’s, and I think the extra time was important for figuring out what I really want. Audrey: I think it’s better for me as well. But parents, you know, they still – Mark: They want you to keep going? Not in favor of taking breaks. Audrey: Yeah. They think it’s weird. So, when I’m telling them, and they are like ‘What? What are you doing?’ They don’t understand. Mark: In their time, that just was not done, right? Audrey: Yeah, so they just think it’s a bad idea because once you go to work, you’re not going back to school ever. But it’s not true. A bit later in our conversation, after a discussion about the possibility of Audrey getting an educational loan for future study and the expectation in Taiwanese society that parents pay for their children’s education, Audrey revealed further tensions with her mother, telling me about a big fight they had recently had over another one of Audrey’s recent decisions – moving out of her mother’s house: Mark: Yeah, in the US, it’s not quite so automatic that the parents are expected to pay and students themselves taking out loans is much more common.

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Audrey: Yeah, my friend mentioned about that the other day, and then it occurs to me to think about it, which is – you know, most of the times, people – they stay at home with their parents until they’re getting married. Mark: Same in Singapore. Audrey: Yeah? Mark: Yeah. Audrey: Cuz, like, I have heard, like, in the States – a lot of Western countries, once you get 18, you get kicked out of the house. Mark: Well, usually it’s nicer than that – usually the kids are ready to leave and the parents are fairly ready for them to leave, so it’s more like a mutual thing. Audrey: Ohh. Cuz the fight was about – between me and my mom – it was about I’m moving out – cuz, like, she just couldn’t understand that. Cuz I’m old – I’m already twenty. So, she’s kind of like, you know, whatever – ‘I just consider that I don’t – I never had a daughter – such a daughter like you.’ Mark: Because moving out is just so unusual here? Audrey:  Yeah yeah. Pretty intense. Audrey’s characterization of the fight with her mother as ‘pretty intense’ seemed accurate, for, according to her depiction, some truly harsh words were exchanged. Audrey told me that since her mother generally took a fairly hands-off approach to parenting, she had assumed that her moving out would not be a problem, even though doing so was still pretty much unheard of for young unmarried people in Taiwanese society (except in cases like Gigi’s, where leaving the parents’ household was for the purpose of attending school or working in a different area). In a June 2010 email message to me, Audrey acknowledged that even living in her mother’s house, she enjoyed more freedom than most Taiwanese youth, but asserted that this amount of freedom was simply not sufficient for her. She wanted more! i want freedom, not just freedom, but i want more freedom. I want to see the world in my own way n experience myself. I know i have much more freedom compare to other people as same age as me, it’s not that i don’t appreciate. it’s just not enough for me!

If all of Audrey’s friends had also lived with their parents, Audrey would, in fact, have likely been far more appreciative of the amount of freedom her mother allowed her, but this was not the case. Despite many of them

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being Audrey’s age or just slightly older, all of the friends in the community of foreigners that she interacted with regularly enjoyed the total freedom of living alone. Audrey, of course, saw this and desired it for herself. At the time of my March 2010 interview with Audrey, she and her mother had not spoken at all since their fight occurred the month before, and she did not foresee reconciliation occurring any time in the immediate future. Although she thought her father would probably pay her tuition when she returned to Saint Agnes, Audrey acknowledged the greater responsibility that came with her newfound independence. ‘I have to be more realistic now,’ she told me. ‘I have to be more responsible for my own financial circumstances…I think it will be hard for me because, like, now I have to cut down a lot of expenses which I love – shopping, for example. So, it will be hard for me, but I have to deal with it.’ In order to finance her new fully independent, but frugal, lifestyle, Audrey started working at several part time jobs. One of these jobs was teaching at an English buxiban, where she conducted conversation classes to train high school students for the listening and speaking portions of the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) – an exam commissioned and administered by the Taiwan Ministry of Education. She went into this teaching assignment filled with enthusiasm, eager to impart her knowledge of the English language to her students using methods utilized at Saint Agnes, such as encouraging students to engage in active learning and using English as the sole medium of instruction – the practice that she herself had found so frustrating in her first year at Saint Agnes. ‘I’ve learned I’ve been through a great educational process from Saint Agnes,’ she told me during our March 2010 interview. ‘I’m trying to give them something that I got from Saint Agnes.’ Audrey quickly found, however, that the majority of her students were very resistant to the kind of instruction she was so passionately attempting to provide. ‘I try to give them something new – something different,’ she explained. ‘But they don’t seem interested in that.’ The root of the problem, Audrey realized, was that years of passive learning in teacher-centered classrooms had made most of her buxiban students highly reluctant to speak in class. ‘A lot of them – I would say like 70% of the students – they’d just rather sit there and be quiet,’ she told me, ‘because their past, let’s see, three, seven – past ten years’ education process is only, for them, sit there, be quiet, listen to the teacher.’ In one extreme instance, her insistence that a student speak in front of the class actually served to reduce the student to tears and subsequently withdraw from the course. With competition among cram schools quite fierce, Audrey’s employers were, of course, very concerned with retaining students. It was not

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unexpected then that when some students and parents complained about Audrey’s methods, she faced a reprimand from her superior. ‘I got in trouble because of this,’ she reported. ‘The other day, my boss is like, “Um – maybe you should cut off the time that you’re having those portions – like discussion time with your students – because the students think it’s too much.”’ Another concession that she was forced to make was the abandonment of the ‘English Only’ policy in her classroom. ‘At the beginning of this whole thing, pure English in my class – so students were not allowed to speak Chinese,’ she told me. ‘But now, I speak a lot of Chinese.’ Compromising her principles for the sake of job preservation was not at all easy for Audrey. She voiced her frustrations, telling me, ‘I actually don’t know what to do…I wanna keep my job, but also I wanna be a good teacher that my students can get something from.’ She did stress, however, that a few students in her class appreciated her methods and did, in fact, make the job a rewarding experience for her. ‘Some students are, like, trying to improve their English – trying to understand what I’m talking about in class,’ she said. ‘They like this, and they will try to answer, even if it’s wrong. I appreciate that.’ At the time of our March 2010 interview, Audrey was also doing six hours of private tutoring per week. In these one-on-one tutoring situations, she of course experienced none of the frustrations that plagued her at her cram school job and she was able to not only provide English instruction, but also French. One of her tutees, in fact, was a student at Saint Agnes who was working with the same French textbooks Audrey had obsessively memorized just a few years before. She was, thus, quite familiar with the material and didn’t have any problem conducting these tutorials. The restaurant/bar/club that Audrey had done promotion for at the time of our May 2009 interview closed down shortly after her graduation, but yet another part-time job that Audrey held in March of 2010 was one doing promotion for another bar/nightclub that had just been opened by two Americans. Unlike the restaurant/bar/nightclub she had previously worked for that catered to both foreign and Taiwanese customers, this establishment made no attempt to attract locals. Audrey was paid by the hour for the time she spent promoting events the club hosted. This promotion involved distributing flyers and spending a considerable amount of time on Facebook issuing invitations to some of her 700+ Facebook friends. ‘Every week, we’ll have different events – like two different events in a week at least,’ she told me. ‘So, I have to, like, invite a lot of people. That is, like, a lot of time consuming.’ For both the PR job at the bar/nightclub and the cram school teaching position, Audrey did have interviews, and she told me that, in both of

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these instances, she had made efforts to promote herself and her abilities. She thought that doing so in these interviews, however, was not such a risky proposition because the head of the cram school teaching team was a Taiwanese Canadian and the nightclub owners were American. These Americans were also already quite familiar with the promotional work she had done for her previous employer and, according to Audrey, were planning to hire her even before she walked into the interview. ‘They kind of, like, definitely wanted me to work there,’ she said. ‘So, they just wanted me to tell them about all things – like details.’ Similarly, prospective students seeking her services for private tutoring tended to already be quite aware of Audrey’s abilities since they were usually referred to her by mutual friends. Promotion of her abilities when initially speaking with these potential tutees was, therefore, generally unnecessary. Upon moving out of her mother’s house, Audrey rented an apartment with two roommates – an English teacher from Canada and a student from Guatemala. She also continued to maintain a large amount of involvement with the same international community dominated by Canadians and Americans that she had originally been introduced to at the restaurant/bar/nightclub she had worked at the year before. After this establishment closed, her relationship with Greg, one of her former managers there who was an Anglophone South African, also became a romantic one, and she reported that with the increased level of English interaction that this relationship brought, the ratio of English/Chinese usage changed from the 50/50 she had estimated in May of 2009. Being in this relationship with a non-Chinese-speaker and having jobs that required her to use English, along with the fact that she was no longer at Saint Agnes speaking Chinese to classmates, were all factors that she considered in giving me an updated usage estimate in March 2010 of 60% English and 40% Chinese. While she seldom saw her old Saint Agnes classmates, Audrey reported that more Taiwanese had joined her group of friends that, just 10 months earlier, had been composed almost entirely of foreigners. ‘They hang out with those foreigners as well, so I feel less that I live in a different world,’ she remarked. Additional foreigners had also joined the community. These newcomers were still mostly from Canada and other English-speaking countries like South Africa, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, but two new friends from France had recently joined the group as well, providing Audrey with occasional French practice. ‘The French guy, his English is not understandable,’ she told me. ‘I mean, like, his English is really good, but the accent is not understandable. I would rather speak French with him.’

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A few of Audrey’s friends from this community had, at the time of our March 2010 interview, recently formed a subcommunity – a comedy troupe that had staged two shows (mostly in English) at the bar/nightclub that Audrey worked for. Their shows consisted of some improvisational skits, some that were scripted and rehearsed, and some pre-recorded video footage. Audrey had been enlisted to help not only as an actress/comedienne, but with various other aspects of these productions as well. In the following extract, Audrey further discusses the comedy troupe and her role in it: Mark: Tell me about the comedy shows. Audrey: Oh, it was like maybe four months ago. A couple, they came up and talked to me – like, they want to do this – because last year, they have ImprovLeague, and this year, they want to do ImprovLeague as well, but in the show. So, it is a play. It’s a comedy – so mixed with a lot of skits – live skits, video skits. Mark: But they’re not improv – the skits? Audrey: And also improv – like, improv is a part of the show. Yeah, so just basically – take nothing seriously. Mark: The skits are practiced beforehand? Audrey: Yeah yeah yeah – definitely – and video shooting. You know, I went to the video shoot for like two, three times. And I realized that video shoots are very, very time consuming. Like, I’ve done two video shoots. Those two videos take like five minutes in the video. The actual time takes like seven, eight hours. Yeah, because you have to shoot, like, at the different angles. Sometimes people laugh or you have to cut. It’s just so tiring, but it’s fun. It was really good though. And we’re having a lot of fun. Mark: So what’s your part in the show? Audrey: Well, so I joined the writing meeting, and production meeting, promotion meeting. But I mean, like, writing meeting, I would just sit there and if people come up with some idea, I’ll be like ‘Oh, that’s cool’ or like just give a little small line. Mark: You don’t contribute many of your own ideas? Audrey: Writing, no. But there was one skit which – they want to constantly use it – the misunderstanding between Chinese and English – because, you know, sometimes people can’t speak Chinese that accurately in the pronunciation. So Taiwanese people will misunderstand. For example, the first show – the first show, one of the skits – oral sex and face mask. Sounds the same. Okay, face mask is kouzou.

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And oral sex is koujou. So, when foreigners try to pronounce it, it’s quite easy to be misunderstood. Mark: And so I guess with so much fear of H1N1 recently, a lot of foreigners have been walking around talking about face masks and mistakenly saying ‘oral sex.’ Audrey:  Yeah! (laughing) It was really funny! So, despite Audrey’s claim that she contributed little in the comedy troupe’s writing meetings, her Chinese abilities made her a valuable asset in the preparation and performance of skits such as the one Audrey highlighted, which derive their humor from mispronunciation of Chinese words – a concept that did, in fact, become an ongoing theme used in subsequent shows as well. The face mask/oral sex skit performed by Audrey and other members of the mostly Canadian comedy troupe actually illustrates quite well the sort of discourse that was prevalent, not only among comedy troupe members, but also the larger community, composed mostly of foreigners, that attended their shows. The majority of community members were from traditionally English-speaking countries and had only a rudimentary knowledge of Chinese, so communication within the community was conducted almost entirely in English. Since they were, however, all living in Taiwan, immersed in a Mandarin Chinese environment, and at least occasionally needing to make use of some survival-level Chinese, Chinese words and misunderstandings were frequently referenced. Linguistic difficulties, therefore, served as prime material to exploit for comedic purposes, with the audience of fellow community members able to recognize the linguistic inadequacies of their community in general, and laugh at them. Audrey and the handful of other Taiwanese community members, being adept at both languages, were perhaps able to appreciate the humor of this sort of skit most since they could simultaneously view such situations from the community insider’s perspective and from the perspective of Taiwanese outsiders in the larger Taiwanese society. Audrey’s association of English with casualness not only allowed her to distinguish separate English and Chinese selves, but also present a ‘casual self’ in English that differentiated her from other Taiwanese, in both her own view and the eyes of others. One Canadian member of the comedy troupe, for example, told me, ‘She’s very personable – not like most Taiwanese girls.’ In projecting a casual English persona and appearing so personable and relaxed with foreigners, however, Audrey did risk giving people an unfavorable impression. One of her roommates, for instance, told me, ‘Audrey seems like a girl that is not proud of her Taiwanese heritage and likes all things foreign.’ Audrey was quick to dispute

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this assessment of her though, telling me in a July 2010 Facebook message that she was often misunderstood in this manner and cited as the main reason for this misunderstanding the fact that her foreign and Taiwanese friends still, for the most part, seldom crossed paths: opposite from how they think of me, im very proud of my own culture. It just happens that I study foreign language and have the environment surrounded by lots of foreigners. i have a lot of Taiwanese friends and some of them don’t speak english very well. That’s why they don’t hang out with my foreign friends. and that is why ppl think i always hang out with foreigners instead of taiwanese. I don’t choose friends depending on their skin color but if they can get along with me or not.

As inaccurate as her former roommate’s assessment of Audrey may have been, I can certainly see how he and others might have gotten such an impression. In a discussion of the use of English on Taiwanese signs that seemed humorous or absurd from an English ‘native speaker’ perspective, for example, I observed Audrey aligning herself with her North American interlocutors by ridiculing and laughing at these translations. Using Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) terminology, this would be a case of adequation, with Audrey positioning herself as similar to and showing solidarity with her interlocutors, and distinction – differentiating herself from Taiwanese with lower English proficiency who might produce such translations or not recognize their absurdity. Her frequent use of the word like as a discourse marker could likewise be seen as an attempt at foregrounding similarity between her and the community of foreigners, and indexing her membership in this community, for this was a feature I observed in the speech of many of its members. After reading an early draft of her story, filled with quotations from our first interview, Audrey expressed surprise at the amount she had used like in this manner. ‘I didn’t realize I said like so much!’ she remarked.1 Languages as Tools

The tool metaphor is one that Audrey made constant reference to throughout this study when referring to all the languages in her linguistic repertoire. She described Mandarin Chinese as ‘a tool that I can communicate with other people and express myself,’ English as ‘a tool to communicate with other people and part of my work,’ and Tai-yü as ‘a tool to communicate with my grandmother.’ Explaining her frequent use of this tool metaphor further, she told me in our March 2010 interview, ‘It is like a key, and, like, if you want to open the door, you have to get out the key. The key is a tool.’ And for Audrey, likening languages to

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keys for opening doors is quite apt, for she had little interest in focusing on some aspect of any of her languages, such as literature or translation, as an area of specialization. Audrey’s personal development project instead involved filling her toolbox with various linguistic implements to aid her in achieving other goals that were less directly linguistic in nature. The tool metaphor Audrey made use of so often was not unlike Gigi’s characterization of English as ‘a door to the world,’ but unlike Gigi, who, in her narratives, consistently contrasted Taiwan with the rest of the world, Audrey’s circumstances allowed her to focus on access to communities within Taiwan. And while Gigi dwelt on her future career as a designer and an imagined future in Europe, Audrey chose to focus much more on the present. When I asked her directly about the future she imagined for herself, she relayed ideas about a possible future in fashion marketing, in America, France or Taiwan, but she seemed to almost disregard these visions, saying ‘It’s just a dream life.’ She preferred, it seemed, to dwell on the present and near future, telling me, ‘I would rather, like, go to work a little while, and then save some money. If I have enough money, I will definitely do that.’ And unlike Gigi, who envisioned a future for herself with Amedeo in Italy, Audrey had no intention of moving to South Africa. Her investment in English was, therefore, not at all motivated by an imagined community there. She reported that Greg didn’t plan on staying in Taiwan forever, but he had no intention of leaving any time soon and, at the time of our March 2010 interview, was actually planning to start his own business in Taiwan. But while English for Audrey was very often a door to present day communities in her own backyard, this is not to say that it had any less of an impact on her identity. For Audrey, English was a tool for access – access to different communities, access to goals (with a focus on immediate goals, but with an eye to the future), and access to making her voice heard. Thus, although she invested a considerable amount of time and effort in learning English, her investment in English itself paled in comparison to her investment in her identity as a legitimate member of international communities, and her increased spoken English fluency was a direct by-product of a large amount of investment in this community identity. Her success in achieving access to international communities and having her voice heard and respected within these communities (where she claimed she could actually be herself more) allowed her to see herself as distinct from most of her Taiwanese peers, and she recognized that it was her English that made this access possible. Despite the fact that she was less proficient in French than in English, the French proficiency that she did have was enough to have a significant impact on

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her identity as well, for using French with any degree of proficiency was enough to make her stand out and feel special in Taiwan, indexing, as it did, positive associations of romance and sophistication, rather than negative associations that a similarly rare language, like Tagalog in Taiwan, might have indexed. Conclusion to Audrey’s Story

For Audrey the addition of foreign languages to her linguistic repertoire was accompanied by a great deal of anguish. Throughout this study, she felt as if her languages were competing, and that her Chinese had been negatively impacted by her use of English. During the course of this study, she was also studying Korean a bit on her own and expressed an interest in learning Cantonese, so she didn’t necessarily buy into the container metaphor where the brain is conceptualized as a container that can only hold a certain amount of linguistic information. It is, however, a fact that language abilities will be lost (but not unrecoverable) if they are not used somewhat regularly, and since the hours in each day that one can use languages are finite, Audrey is sure to constantly feel that she is losing some of one or more of her languages – especially if more languages are added to the mix. At the very end of this study, however, just as I was about to finish writing up the final draft of Audrey’s original chapter in July 2010, I received a Facebook message from her informing me that Chinese attrition, at that moment anyway, no longer worried her. For this development, she credited not only her continued efforts to avoid language mixing, but also, somewhat ironically, an incident that, just a few months earlier, was causing her considerable grief – her employer’s demand that she use more Chinese in her buxiban lessons. In satisfying this demand, Audrey chose to continue explaining things to her students in English and immediately follow up these explanations with Chinese translations. ‘Because of the class i teach, i have more opportunity to practice the fluency of both of the languages,’ she wrote. ‘i have to explain things in English then do it again in Chinese and that really helps with my Chinese (or translation skills).’ On that positive note then, I will wrap up Audrey’s story – one that clearly showcases how English can be effectively used as a tool for community access, and how the increased linguistic proficiency resulting from engagement with various communities and subcommunities can substantially impact one’s identity, enabling one to project a ‘social butterfly’ identity. It does also highlight, however, the struggles that can result from participation in multiple fields that have differing ideologies and indexical associations.

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Note (1) Although Audrey did, in fact, use like as a discourse marker quite a bit in noninterview conversation, the interview situation could well have increased her use of this linguistic feature. Fuller (2003) found that her study participants from Southern Illinois actually used like as a discourse marker more frequently in relatively informal interviews than they did in casual conversations with friends (an average of 11.6 instances of like use per 1000 words in interview data and 7.8 instances per 1000 words in casual conversation data). She attributes this largely to the fact that contexts in which the use of like are pragmatically useful, such as approximation and marking focus, are especially common in interview situations.

7 The Ideal Neoliberal Subject – Rachel’s Story

Throughout the course of this study, Rachel totally personified the entrepreneurial self (Miller & Rose, 1990), intensely embracing the enterprise culture project of continuous self-development (du Gay, 1996) and repeatedly stressing that the responsibility for directing this project of constantly training herself was hers alone. Rachel’s story differs, however, from the experiences of the non-elite South Korean participants presented by Abelmann et al. (2009), who wholeheartedly bought into the neoliberal emphasis on self-reliance, taking full responsibility for their lack of success when it was, in fact, structural forces beyond their control that had played a big role in restricting their options. While Rachel had undeniably benefited from some cultural capital investment typical of more elite students, such as buxiban lessons during her childhood, she was hardly a student anyone would characterize as elite and had quite a few structural and personal challenges to overcome. She nevertheless presented her story as one of hope, in which perseverance and an unwavering dedication to her neoliberal self-improvement project focusing on language learning as a central component served to provide her with positive prospects for the future. Although Rachel’s is by no means a rags to riches story (with neither the extremes of rags at the beginning nor riches at the end), it does illustrate that it is indeed possible for those of relatively modest means and a willingness to play the neoliberal game of crafting and promoting a personal brand to circumnavigate the usual elite pathways to (relative) success. Rachel’s Life before Saint Agnes

My initial May 2009 interview with Rachel in a Kaohsiung café began with my standard starting point of asking what I would need to know in order to be able to say I really knew her, and she immediately highlighted 116

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her traumatic childhood. Her misfortune had begun at the age of five months, when the death of her father ushered in a miserable childhood plagued by family politics and an abusive stepfather: Rachel: Okay, maybe it’s mostly related to my family background. Mark: So any especially important events from childhood? Rachel: From childhood – it’s not really one important event. I think my situation is like continuous – continuously my family situation getting worse, because my father passed away when I was five months. My life started to be like this. Then the family situation never got good. After her father’s death when she was still an infant, Rachel spent her earliest years living with his Tai-yü-speaking parents in a rural mountainous region of central Taiwan. The environment that her paternal grandparents raised her in throughout her toddler years was far from a loving and nurturing one. Their attitude toward their granddaughter was instead basically one of indifference. Rachel attributed this simply to the fact that she was female. ‘My grandparents from my father’s side is a very traditional family,’ she told me. ‘They care more about boys rather than girls. Therefore, I don’t have a role to play there.’ When she was four years old, Rachel’s mother remarried and took her to live with her new husband and his family in Taipei. From that point on, her grandparents’ indifference was replaced with an environment of hostility and fear due to constant abuse by the man her mother married – her younger sister’s father. ‘I started to live with them, and I felt it was a cold family,’ she recalled. ‘There’s mental abuse and there’s physical abuse in my childhood and I see my mother is treated not like a person, so I really hate – I really hate – my sister’s father, and I feel this is a very bad family.’ Although Rachel’s working-class family was by no means well-off, her mother found the money to enroll her in English buxiban classes in Taipei, beginning her English instruction fairly early at the age of six. Her early experiences with English in these classes were very good ones, largely due to the stress-free manner of instruction. ‘I started to love English,’ she remembered, ‘because the way was better than now. It’s uh, singing, playing games – something like that.’ When she moved to Kaohsiung County with her mother, stepfather and younger sister at the age of nine, she continued to attend English buxiban classes, but found the instruction at cram schools in Southern Taiwan to be considerably less stimulating than what she had experienced in Taipei. ‘After I moved to Kaohsiung, I feel it’s not so good, so I a little bit lose interest,’ she told

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me. ‘We changed some cram schools and we finally realized it is not so good because we lived in the countryside in Kaohsiung County.’ When elementary school English instruction began for her in the fifth grade, the exclusive focus on grammar fairly well doused all the enthusiasm that she had had for English early on. Throughout her six years of elementary school, Rachel changed schools four times. This lack of stability, she claimed, was not a problem for her. ‘I don’t have too much feeling about this moving because I was moving, moving every time when I was in childhood,’ she recalled. ‘For me, it was easy.’ The lack of stability in her education also continued into junior high school, where she attended three different schools in as many years. In an attempt to remove Rachel from the abusive environment of their household, her mother arranged for her to stay with some relatives in Kaohsiung for her first year of junior high school. Rachel was not very close to these relatives and they did not get along particularly well, so she changed to another school the following year, living in the school’s dormitory. For her third and final year of junior high school, she changed schools yet again, this time staying with the paternal grandparents in central Taiwan that had raised her when she was very young. This year-long stay with her grandparents proved to be a very trying experience, for in addition to the aforementioned problem of these grandparents placing little value on a granddaughter, Rachel found herself embroiled in family politics – specifically, the long-standing tensions between her mother and her paternal grandparents. She explains this in the following extract: Mark: So you did live for a while during junior high with your father’s parents? Rachel: Yeah, with my father’s parents, but not so good experience. Mark: Did it have anything to do with them valuing a grandson more than they would a granddaughter? Rachel: Yeah, and also – my mother – since my father passed away very early and my mother took me away from this house, they don’t really like my mother. Therefore, during the time I lived there, they start to cut the connection between me and my mom. This made me feel uncomfortable. Mark: They tried to come between you? Rachel: Yeah. Mark: So many family politics! Rachel:  Yeah! I think most of the problem of my life is family!

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Rachel scored high enough on her high school entrance exams to attend a respectable normal high school, but like Audrey, she recognized that her strengths were in languages rather than math and science, which she would have needed to dedicate much time to at a regular Taiwanese high school. As she put it I don’t really like mathematic. I don’t really like science or something like this, but I know if I go to enter senior high, I need to learn all of these. And in junior high time, the better subject I got was English. Even it’s not so good, but better than others. That’s why I chose to go to Saint Agnes.

Rachel’s mother was supportive of this choice, but wanted Rachel to minor in Japanese, thinking that Taiwan’s extensive trade with Japan made this a far more valuable minor than the others offered. The class of English majors minoring in Japanese was already full, however, so Rachel chose French as her minor. Although her mother was disappointed, Rachel was delighted with the prospect of studying French due to its ‘romantic’ indexicalities, as she explained For me, I feel I am kind of – I’m thinking I’ve got some image – image of France – kind of romantic. Therefore, I choose English and French – these two subjects for my study for five years. I think there’s the simple reason. I didn’t really think too much about the future at that time. Rachel’s Struggle and Strategy at Saint Agnes

At Saint Agnes, Rachel lived in the dormitory and, like Audrey, reported having a hard time adapting to having English as the language of instruction. In the following interview excerpt, she estimates the percentage of instructors’ English that she understood her first semester to be even lower than Audrey’s estimation of 40–50% and also, like Gigi, reports being quite intimidated by the English proficiency of classmates who had spent a considerable amount of time abroad: Mark: Did the all English policy give you problems? Rachel: Oh, yes. At the beginning of class, you know, it’s all – you need to always speak English in the class, and for English beginning learner – it will be a bit tough for you to catch up in there, especially when you see your classmates who came back from the foreign country. They can really speak good English. You feel – you feel really stressed.

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Mark: Well, you weren’t really a beginner. Rachel: But I would call myself a beginner – full English-speaking beginner – yeah. Because, you know, for the past education you got in school, you were always taught about grammar, about how to give correct answer and about vocabularies – but never speaking. Mark: So what percentage of what the teacher said in class do you think you understood? Rachel:  Uh – for the first semester, kind of like 30%. In spite of being intimidated by some classmates’ higher English proficiency though, Rachel told me she felt that their presence in the classroom provided additional motivation to increase her own English proficiency, viewing their abilities as models that she herself could strive toward: Mark: Earlier you said that some classmates who had learned English very fluently – that you were kind of envious of them. Would you say that you were comparing your abilities to theirs? Rachel: Yes, they were a model for me because I want to be like them – to think in English and to speak out in English. I really wanted to be like them at that time. Rachel saw in these classmates and their experiences abroad a future that could be her own – a possible future self that was not confined physically or emotionally to the island of Taiwan and possessing English abilities that would allow communication with the world. Rachel reported that by her second semester at Saint Agnes, her listening abilities had increased substantially, and she could, by then, understand approximately 60–70% of what teachers said in class. When I was her teacher during this second year, Rachel’s English proficiency was already quite good. The love that she reported feeling for English when she first started buxiban lessons in Taipei, but lost in later years, had definitely returned. This is evidenced by the letter of introduction she wrote to me on the very first day of our first class that year – a letter that stood out from those of her classmates not only because of its greater length, but also the enthusiasm it displayed: I love learning languages. Every kind of language for me is beautiful. That’s because we communicate with people by languages. So it means if we know more languages then we can know more people from different countries. Learning languages to me is enjoying my life. Now I may not speak English or French very well, but I’d like to try my best. And I also

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hope you can give me more suggestions about learning English or you can suggest me some good English books. I want to know much more about English. Not only how to learn English well. Also I want to know the thoughts of Americans and their culture. It’ll help me to communicate with foreigners. And now I have some foreign friends. And talking to them is the most interesting thing in the world. I love speaking English very much!

From the start of that school year, Rachel’s very extroverted personality and obvious zeal for learning English instantly distinguished her from other students. Her grades were consistently in the top quarter of the class, and hardly a class went by that she didn’t ask multiple questions about some grammar point or vocabulary item. Her use of the returnee classmates as models had clearly served her well, for by that second year, she was every bit as outspoken in class as they were. She also told me that for group presentations during her first three years at Saint Agnes, the fact that she was not at all shy about speaking English caused her to always be designated group spokesperson. ‘I’m not afraid to speak in front of everyone. I was always doing the job like as a speaker, and other people prepare information,’ she recalled. Rachel told me though that, despite all her hard work and good grades, she never received any encouragement or recognition of a job well done from her mother, whose expectations for her always seemed impossible to achieve. As she told me Every time when I do something I am very happy with like in school from the first year to the third year, I do really good in my study. I do really good in my study, but it’s never enough for her. She never tells me I’m doing good.

Her mother’s impossibly high expectations and pressure were not restricted to academics or language learning though. Like any parent, Rachel’s mother wanted her daughter to be able to live a life free of hardship, and since so much of the hardship she herself had endured was inflicted by someone she relied on financially, her number one priority with Rachel was to make her strong and independent. In the following excerpt from our May 2009 interview, Rachel explained this at some length: Mark: So did your mother give you any kind of pressure to learn English? Rachel: My mother gave me not only the pressure to learn English – I mean, she gave me pressure more of life – economic independence, and uh – have good ability – not only English. Of

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course, because I took English as my major, and French, so she required lots from me, but not only for the skill, but also for life, personality, a lot of things. I think it’s because she didn’t have a good education when she was young, and she didn’t have a good experience with marriage, and she has no good experience with family, so she wants me to be very independent because she doesn’t want me to get hurt from all of these, and she thinks only being independent can be far away from the other people’s influence. That’s why she gives me a lot of pressure, and she doesn’t ever think I do well. For Rachel’s mother, it was vitally important for Rachel to gain marketable skills that would ensure her financial independence, but this alone was not enough. She wanted her daughter to also become emotionally strong enough that she never needed to rely on anyone else for anything – financial or otherwise. Rachel also identified another factor that could have contributed to her mother’s excessively high expectations for her – the fact that, for her mother, Rachel is the only remnant of her father’s legacy. She mused about this when I asked her if her mother might have once known happiness years ago before her father’s death: Mark: Of course you don’t remember at all, but do you think she had been happy with your father – before he died? Rachel: I think so. I think so. Before that she – they knew each other for a long time and they had just married and really unfortunately, they had been married four years and then my father passed away. She was really sad. Until now, I think she still feels sad. That’s why she put a lot of pressure on me – because she thinks I’m the only remain from my father. Yeah, I think she take it this way too. Rachel told me that, for many years, she deeply resented her mother’s pressure and lack of encouragement. One issue her mother was particularly quick to discourage was the prospect of Rachel ever being able to study abroad, or to take part in one of the homestay trips to foreign countries that Saint Agnes regularly organized for students during school breaks. She brought up this issue immediately after the previously reported statements about her mother never providing her with any encouragement: When you study at Saint Agnes, you like to go abroad to study. You like to – like other students, you know – go with school for two months or

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exchange student. I know I have the ability to do it – exchange student to France, to Venice or to New Zealand – whatever. But my mom say, ‘no money,’ so every time when I talk about this topic, she keep quiet and she is angry. She think that I don’t understand my situation. Why I still talk about this topic? She says it is never possible for her to afford me to go abroad.

Actually, well aware of her mother’s financial situation, Rachel told me she had not really been expecting her mother to pay for her to go abroad as much as simply get some hopeful words of encouragement from her – something akin to ‘Maybe one day you’ll be able to go somewhere like that.’ What she got instead, whenever the issue came up, was a blunt declaration that such a trip would never be possible for her. ‘This made me feel hurt,’ she recalled. ‘I just want to be like other students. I think it’s also a key point in my life – the attitude from my mother – she doesn’t encourage me.’ Rachel’s Dreams Come True

In our May 2009 interview, Rachel informed me that when she had written in her letter of introduction to me years before that she had some foreign friends (‘and talking to them is the most interesting thing in the world’), she was referring mostly to one particular French friend who was, at the time, working as a programmer at a company in the area and spoke very little Chinese. Their communication was, therefore, entirely in English. ‘In the beginning, when we hang out, I’d take an electronic dictionary, and I’d check it…It was really a good experience,’ she remembered. By the second semester of that year, they had become a couple, and with this new relationship, Rachel found her dreams of regular interaction with foreigners realized. ‘I always dreamt that one day I can hang out with foreigners and I can speak English,’ she told me. ‘And one day, after I knew my boyfriend for half a year, my dream has come true – because I keep speaking English every day…I really improve a lot in English.’ Indeed, the future self she had envisioned a year earlier had become a reality – she was speaking English to her boyfriend daily and becoming much more fluent. Her circle of foreign friends also grew as her boyfriend introduced her to some Canadians, Americans and other Frenchmen. ‘After I knew him, I knew some foreign friends and my life became different – change – became more social with foreigners,’ she said. Rachel told me that with daily practice using English, her fluency increased dramatically, and with that came increased confidence. ‘Afterwards, I have more confidence in myself too – to speak English, and uh – to do more,’ she explained. ‘I joined some activities and some contests

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too.’ Rachel was referring there to work she did on the organizational side of many activities during her third and fourth year at Saint Agnes. As a member of the school’s English Department Association, for example, she helped organize events sponsored by the English department, and during her fourth year, she became active in another organization that was responsible for orchestrating the reception of visitors to the campus. These visitors included representatives from the Ministry of Education, accreditation committees, and attendees of conferences held on the Saint Agnes campus. ‘I was the vice-leader of this group,’ Rachel informed me. ‘And in this organization, I really learned a lot and got a lot of resources.’ During the same time period, she also participated in many English speech contests, which she discusses in the following extract: Mark: You said you participated in contests also. What sort of contests? Rachel:  Contests – like English contests or something. Mark: Like speech contests? Rachel: Yeah yeah yeah. I did. I did. I just wanted to, you know, always train myself. Mark: Did you win anything? Rachel: No, nothing! But I would say I won the experience. And also, the uh, learning to be brave to speak in front of everyone – yes. As she relayed these experiences – particularly the bit about always training herself with the speech contest participation and winning ‘the experience,’ I was struck by the degree and intensity that Rachel embraced the neoliberal project of continuous self-development, and her recognition that the responsibility for directing this project of always training herself was hers alone. Although she still received some financial assistance from her mother, paternal grandparents and French boyfriend (who she lived with for her third and fourth year at Saint Agnes), Rachel did begin, during this period, to start working toward financial independence. In the first semester of her third year, she got a part-time job at an insurance company and worked at this job for about two months. After leaving the insurance company job, she started conducting private tutoring lessons – something she would continue doing off and on throughout her third and fourth year at Saint Agnes. ‘I just found the parents who wanted a tutor – English tutor,’ she told me. ‘And I went to their house.’ Another of Rachel’s dreams finally came true during the summer between her third and fourth year at Saint Agnes, when she was finally able, with her boyfriend’s financial assistance, to go abroad to France.

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Rachel spent the first month of her trip to France with her boyfriend and his family in the South of France, where they all stayed at houses of friends and relatives. At the end of this month, her boyfriend returned to his job in Taiwan, but Rachel remained in France for another month, attending language classes and staying with a French family in a homestay program. ‘It was a really good chance for me,’ she said, ‘because I always stayed with a French family…so I’m really in their lives.’ These two months in France proved to be a very significant experience for Rachel, as it was on this trip that she truly fell in love with the French language and culture. When I asked her what it was that affected her so much about French culture during this trip, she replied, ‘Many things, like the buildings, the art, and how the people live in France – the lifestyle, everything!’ She reported being especially impressed by the French practice of having leisurely late-night dinners with an aperitif beforehand. The aperitif, generally some light alcoholic drink served with cheese, was especially noteworthy for Rachel due to the relaxed conversation that accompanied it. ‘These things take like an hour, and we just keep talking, and we can be exchanging real thought – everything,’ she enthusiastically remembered. ‘I really like it. It seemed really relaxed – compared to Taiwan at least. We are always in rush.’ The following summer, between her fourth and fifth year at Saint Agnes, Rachel went to France again for another two months, and although she reported making huge strides in her French proficiency during both trips to France, she felt these gains she made during the first trip were quickly lost upon returning to Taiwan. ‘I think that language needs an environment to push it,’ she explained. At this point, she was living with her French boyfriend, but just as with Gigi and her Italian boyfriend, their communication continued to be mostly in English. In their community of two, the discourse norm of English communication had, after all, long since been firmly established, and attempts to change to French would no doubt have seemed forced and unnatural. Rachel reported experiencing relatively little French depreciation after returning from her second trip though and attributed this to finding an environment within Taiwan in which she could indeed ‘push’ her French skills. Shortly after returning from France and breaking up with her French boyfriend, she was able to land a job at an international investment company that employed quite a few people from France. ‘I need to know French,’ she told me. ‘The French people, they help me a lot in French…I mean coworker – French coworker…That’s why I could have a meeting in French. Before, no – maybe English only.’ French use played a major role in this workplace community. Mandarin Chinese and

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English were also used routinely, but English use was mostly restricted to email. Rachel also reported a bit of Tai-yü use at this workplace among Taiwanese coworkers. The influence of the French people in Rachel’s life had by no means been restricted to the enhancement and maintenance of her French language skills, for when I met her for our May 2009 interview, I instantly identified the accent she had when she spoke English as a French one. When I commented on this, she laughed and replied, ‘Some teachers say that. Yeah, I kind of got influence from French. It’s the influence of the French people.’ Since the most significant English interaction in her life had been with her former boyfriend from France, Rachel’s French accent should, I suppose, come as no surprise. I certainly hadn’t detected any hint of French influence in her pronunciation back in her second year at Saint Agnes, when she was just beginning her relationship with him. Interestingly, she reported that French friends and teachers find her French pronunciation to be surprisingly free of Chinese influence. ‘When I speak French, they say I don’t get too much accent – Chinese accent – when I speak,’ she informed me. When Rachel and I had our first interview in May of 2009, however, her job at the international investment company had just become a casualty of the global economic recession that was still, at that time, showing no signs of abating. The company had been forced to close and her French coworkers, who she considered friends, had returned to France. Without the regular workplace French interaction that she had grown accustomed to, she was then, once again, feeling that her French proficiency was slipping. ‘I think I’m losing it day by day,’ she told me. She was, at that time, still taking a few elective French courses at Saint Agnes – French film and French translation classes – and she reported that the instructor for one of these classes was giving her some helpful words of encouragement. ‘My French teacher says I still speak good, so he encourage me a lot,’ she told me. When I asked her if she generally felt good about her French abilities at that time, her response tellingly showcased the tendency in all of us to assess ourselves and our abilities relative to those around us. ‘Not really good, but fine,’ she told me. ‘Better than others, I can say.’ Unlike many of her Saint Agnes classmates, Rachel had no plans of returning to school in her immediate future – at least not to pursue another degree. One reason for this is that her financial situation would not permit such an endeavor. In addition, though, she felt that the best path for her ongoing self-development project was to gain as much practical on-the-job experience as possible. Rather than spend valuable time taking business courses that she thought may be of questionable value in the real business world, Rachel intended to immediately find another business-related job,

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preferably in international trade, and amass as much practical experience and product knowledge as she could. ‘I will try to have more and more [onthe-job experiences] because even if you do international trade, if you enter different company, there are many different things you need to know from the beginning,’ she said. ‘So, I want to have many variety of experience in international trade to know more about more products.’ Rachel here again displays her commitment to the enterprise culture project of upgrading her skills, expanding her flexibility and generally enhancing the ‘Rachel brand.’ By building her resume and stockpile of practical knowledge this way, she hoped to not only increase her marketability, but also position herself well to achieve her eventual goal, which she reveals in the following extract: Mark: For now, you’ll just work around Taiwan? Rachel: Um, I think for ten years – because I think that all the working experience is – I do this to help me to find a job in France – because I really want to live in France and work there. Then I hope, at the age of 30, I can go to France to have a better job, but before that, maybe I will try to find a company – maybe it’s a French company. It will make me feel I’m closer to France and have more chance to work in France. Once in France, 10 years or so in the future, Rachel envisioned herself in a position of some authority, leading and guiding subordinates. ‘I want to be a manager,’ she said. ‘I always want to be a manager. I think I have ability to be a leader and I want to do it. And I also like business trade, so I want to be a business trade manager – to have a team to work together, to organize a team, to achieve goals.’ With her use of such buzz phrases as ‘to achieve goals’ and her relentless desire to continuously ‘train’ herself, Rachel truly appeared poised for enterprise culture success, and as I expected she would, she reported being very comfortable with boldly promoting herself and her abilities in interview situations. But when I asked her if she did, in fact, plan on taking a bold self-promotion approach in her upcoming job interviews, she expressed some reservations, eventually concluding that she would just try to pick up on cues she got early on at each company and just play it by ear: Rachel: I’m still thinking out which way’s better for me because sometimes I’m really – I feel I did well on my resume. I’ve really learned a lot. I’m really proud of myself, but if I show too much, you know, with this, they think, ‘You are young. You don’t need to talk like this.’  – something like this. Some people, they think this way, so I think this depends on

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different culture from a different company because every company, they got their own culture. So, um – for me, the last job – international trade – it’s one that feels more traditional. They want people who can do a job good, but more quiet – I mean not showing off – yeah – something like that, but you need to show your ability – ability, but not too much. Mark: So interviewing for these companies, you would have to try to judge what kind of approach would be best? Rachel: Yeah, I’m always thinking about it because you will never know what business this company wants. Maybe they want people be very aggressive promoting themself. Maybe they want just stable young people that can work for a long time so they don’t always need to find other people – something like that. But I think even in some traditional Taiwanese company, they receive lots of Western culture, so they are willing to have an employee who is very aggressive – who is promoting themself. But my exboss, he receive more the Japanese style, and the Japanese style is more like this – more levels. Mark: Yeah, hierarchical. Rachel: Yeah, so it’s a different culture, so I think I decide what I want to say during the interview and talk to this person. I will try to ask some question then to the boss to get some idea of him, to know what else I can say, so I can know myself this way – yeah. And so, I think you need to learn by interview, not before. Rachel’s conclusion that she would ‘learn by…not before’ the interview represents her willingness to take risks – another one of the entrepreneurial self qualities highly valued in enterprise culture. Attempting to minimize risk by preparing a particular course of action would be seen by many as the safe plan. Rachel, in contrast, planned to wing it. Rachel related an earlier interview experience to me in which the modest approach she chose proved to be not at all what the interviewer was looking for. In this instance, it was not her business or foreign language abilities Rachel was being modest about though, but instead her Tai-yü proficiency. She explained: [The interviewer] was a Taiwanese, but she married a French, and they live in Taiwan. They opened a company to import the red wine and sell, and I had an interview there. This woman, she talked first in Chinese of course, and then French. After, she interviewed me in Taiwanese and she

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said, ‘Can you speak Taiwanese?’ I said yes, but I said ‘not so well,’ but she said, ‘You are Taiwanese. Why you cannot speak good Taiwanese?’

Rachel told me that she now totally agreed with this view. At a different point in our May 2009 interview, commenting on the necessity of knowing Tai-yü in the business world of Southern Taiwan, she had told me, ‘You need to speak Taiwanese, of course, for business.’ She was not at all confident, however, about her Tai-yü proficiency. She reported that for many years when she was younger, she was actually ashamed to speak Tai-yü, but that this attitude started to change after she met her French ex-boyfriend. As she explained Before that, I am really like other Taiwanese girls. I like foreign stuff. I like American movies, French stuff, and it’s just like following, and I lose my own culture. I feel Taiwan – not good. Taiwan – small island, you know. But after I knew my ex-boyfriend – knew more foreign friends – I feel that I need to respect myself. I need to respect my culture – own culture. Therefore, other people can respect me. They don’t like people that just follow their culture. You can like their culture, but you need to love your culture first, and I realized this is important for me.

Rachel told me that during her first trip to France, she found Tai-yü could also be used as a means of expressing her Taiwanese identity, distinguishing herself from PRC Chinese. As she explained after I started to ask how she would feel if she had no Tai-yü in her life: Mark: If there was no Taiwanese in your life, would you feel – Rachel: I would feel I’m same as China – the Chinese people, so – because the Taiwanese makes me – makes us different. Mark: So the Taiwanese does play an important role? Rachel: Yeah, a very important role in my life, and uh the national identity and the self-identity also because when I went to France, I really feel this is a way to introduce my country – to make people know that Taiwan is different from China. These are two different countries, so this is a way that I introduce myself. I will introduce both Taiwanese and Chinese – yeah – and I will make them to figure out the differences between Taiwanese and Chinese. Mark: So many people weren’t really aware – Rachel: No, they don’t really know that there is a political problem between these two. No, they don’t – but anyways it’s a way that I introduce myself.

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When traveling abroad, Tai-yü served to index Rachel’s Taiwanese identity – something she hadn’t felt much of a need to do in Taiwan even as she was coming to appreciate Taiwanese culture more, since displaying a distinctly Taiwanese identity in Southern Taiwan hardly distinguishes one from the masses there. In France, where she was likely to be seen as just another Chinese (or even more generally as just another Asian), the need to distinguish herself as Taiwanese took on a far greater significance, and she found that Tai-yü helped illustrate her distinctly Taiwanese identity to those she was meeting for the first time. Likening her own experience to that of her interviewer at the wine importing company, she said After I have been to France, I feel Taiwanese is really important. I think she got the same experience as me, so that’s why we think again the importance of Taiwanese. The interview was in Kaohsiung, but she married French, so I think people who have been to foreign country to live there or to have some experience like that, they will come back to Taiwan and they will take more importance of this Taiwanese culture.

As for English, it was her fluency that Rachel believed made her stand out in Taiwan, where the majority of young people, despite much English instruction, are very reluctant to speak. When I asked her about an instance in which her use of a foreign language made her feel good, she cited one occasion where her fluency was recognized, and she was able to subsequently position herself as an expert to dispense advice: One time I encouraged one girl. We were in a nightclub with my friends and she could not speak good English and we’re speaking English with foreign friends and we were chatting. And she came to us, and she said she feel it’s so good. She also wants to speak English like this, but she cannot, and me and my friend, we encourage her to speak more and to not be afraid to make mistakes.

Although French and English did both greatly affect the way she saw herself, the relationships and associations Rachel had in May of 2009 with these two languages were very different. She associated French very strongly with the country of France and its culture – practices she experienced and fell in love with while there, such as late-night leisurely dinners with aperitif. ‘When I speak French, I really feel I am in love with this language, this culture, this country,’ she told me. Her affiliation with English, in contrast, was, at this time, not associated with any particular country or culture. ‘I think English is more like an international language because everyone needs to learn it right now,’ she explained. ‘And so, for

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me, it’s more like necessity – worldwide. But French, not everyone needs to speak it.’ In contrast with French, Rachel stressed that in Taiwan today, English abilities are absolutely essential. ‘You must speak it in Taiwan. It’s the situation,’ she asserted. ‘For the young people – 20 or 30 – they need to have English skill. The situation requires them to do this.’ She maintained that in the Taiwanese job market, someone with little English proficiency would have very few opportunities. ‘I really feel that if you want to have a good job, you really need,’ she said. ‘It’s a requirement…so you cannot say anything. You need to accept it.’ For Rachel, English mastery was indeed a central aspect of her neoliberal self-improvement project, and any resistance to the pervasiveness of English in Taiwanese society would be certain to hinder one’s self-development and chances of success. Besides viewing English as important and necessary, Rachel also strongly associated the language with upward mobility. ‘Higher income,’ she stated when I asked her for additional English language associations. ‘I always think relative to economic – a good life.’ She acknowledged, however, that in a society where this view is shared by practically everyone and increasing numbers of people are becoming quite fluent in English, additional skills are necessary to truly stand out when competing for employment. Increasing her business expertise and her French, she was certain, would give her an advantage over her competition. ‘If you have a second language, or three languages, you’ll be fine,’ she told me, ‘because everyone right now, basically they can speak English.’ It definitely cannot be said, however, that everyone can basically speak French. The ability to speak any amount of French in Taiwan is, in fact, enough to make someone stand out, and Rachel considered her French to be better than that of most of her classmates. Like Audrey, she was often positioned as a French expert by classmates seeking her assistance with the language. ‘Of course, I have a lot of my classmates who I need to teach them French,’ she told me. Although it may not have been entirely conscious, her French-accented English also served to index her strong affiliation with the French language and culture, and she was not at all ashamed of it, in spite of the fact that it had cost her some opportunities. When I asked her to tell me about a time when her use of a foreign language made her feel not so good, she told me Rachel:  I don’t like to be compared to others when I speak. Mark: A kind of competition. Rachel: Yeah, I don’t like it. Taiwanese people really don’t understand. They like to judge other people’s language skill. It’s like they say I’ve got some strange accent. Why I need to be

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British accent? Why I need to be American accent? That’s why I’m not easy to get a job offered to teach English in a cram school – because they feel I’ve got some accent – not an American accent, not a British accent, but a strange accent for me. But Rachel’s love of all things French and dream of living in France was complicated by feelings of obligation to her mother. Although her mother may have felt that all the pressure she had exerted on Rachel as she was growing up had paid off, making her skilled and financially independent, Rachel reported in our May 2009 interview that she thought her mother had come to believe this had come at a cost. As she explained When I’ve really become what she wants, I think she feels she lost something. I feel everyone is like this – when you become what you want, but you lose something already. She feels she lost a daughter who can be home and who can care about her. But, you know, I have already become like this kind of person. I can’t really come back to an innocent daughter or something. Right now, I really – I have a good ability. I can be economically independent, but she thinks I’m selfish. She doesn’t think I care really a lot about family. I think more about me – to move to where and to work where.

Rachel, however, insisted that she really was constantly thinking about the well-being of her mother, who, at the time, had recently developed health problems and, having left her abusive husband, could not rely on him for financial support. Rachel told me that providing a better life for her mother had, in fact, been an important motivation for her ever since she long ago left her stepfather’s house, vowing never to return. ‘After that, I tell myself I need to be very strong and I need to be economically independent,’ she said. ‘Therefore, I can have a better life with my mom.’ She told me that she dreamed of a future where she would be able to provide a comfortable life for her mother – hence the 10-year delay before her plan to seek employment in France, allowing time to provide her mother with the financial resources that would keep her from returning to her abusive husband. Rachel made a point of stressing to me in May of 2009 that all the feelings of resentment that she relayed over her mother’s pressure and lack of encouragement were sentiments that she had held in the past, emphasizing that she had now set aside these feelings. She recalled Before, I could not forgive her – Why she give me so much pressure? But right now, I feel this is normal because she also got a lot of pressure.

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Sometimes she said that she hope – she also hope that I can have a normal life like other students who can study – just study, don’t need to work – don’t need to be concerned about economy, but our situation is not like that. Sometimes she say that. I don’t think it’s her fault. I don’t think it’s my family’s fault. I just think this is my life and everyone got a different life, so if my life is this, I need to face it and I need to overcome.

Rachel’s adoption of this more mature outlook is in keeping with her consistent presentation of herself as ‘the ideal neoliberal subject.’ Taking full responsibility for one’s predicaments in life is, after all, the trait that is perhaps most valued in enterprise culture. Rachel also reported that, for her, this new outlook came with the belief that despite the lack of encouraging words, her mother had ultimately come to respect her desires, dreams and independence. ‘I think if I decide anything, even if she does not really totally agree, I think she will respect me,’ Rachel said. Rachel’s Life after Saint Agnes Graduation

For our March 2010 interview, I met Rachel at a train station in the Taipei suburb in which she was by then living. We proceeded to a nearby café, where we conducted our interview over dinner and beyond, until staff members, eager to close the café, finally asked us to leave. Over the course of the previous 10 months, Rachel had experienced many changes in her life, one of which being, of course, the physical change of location from Kaohsiung to the Taipei area. Commenting on how our previous interview in May 2009 seemed like so long ago, Rachel told me, ‘Even though I just graduated like about a year, I feel I’m far off from school – for like many years already! You start to work, and then world change. It’s so different, and you are really in the society.’ Rachel had, of course, experienced the working world to some degree while also a student at Saint Agnes, but contrasted this experience with that of full-time employment, remarking It’s different because you both have a student life and your working life. But here, it’s full-time working. You care about money – everything, and you count everything. And in fact, I feel I learned a lot working – a lot of things that you would never learn in school.

And over the course of the next three hours, Rachel elaborated on all she had learned throughout the previous 10 months. When we met in May of 2009, Rachel had already sent her resume to numerous companies in Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung. Shortly after

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that, she was invited to interview at seven of these companies, and she was able to arrange for all these interviews to take place during the same week, with those in Taipei being conducted first, followed by interviews in Taichung and then finally returning to Kaohsiung for interviews there. Rachel reported that in each of these job interviews, she chose to boldly promote herself and her abilities: I always promote myself. You need to sell yourself to the company. That’s why I worked so hard in the school time. I always get – I want to get as much as I can – the experience – because I know one day – every time – when I’m fighting finding a good job, I need to sell myself.

When I reminded her that in May of 2009, just a few weeks before she had these job interviews, she had not been so certain that this would be the right approach to take in all interview situations, Rachel told me that her initial experiences in Taipei at the start of her week-long interview tour had served to convince her that aggressive self-promotion was indeed the way to go for subsequent interviews as well. She acknowledged that in Taichung and Kaohsiung, there were still companies that would take the traditional attitude of valuing modesty over entrepreneurial self qualities, but she asserted that this was not at all the case in Taipei. As she explained In Taipei, they focus more on uh – they don’t care – nobody care about your education. They all took my work experience as, like, hot point. But they want to see if this person is really aggressive, you know. And uh – how you more uh – perform – her or himself in front of an interviewer. If you are really comfortable speaking and very confident, they like it. Taipei company, they like it. Taipei is an international city. That’s why I think I’m more good in Taipei.

And Rachel’s aggressive self-promotion in these interviews really did prove to be the correct course of action, for doing so not only resulted in her landing one job. She was actually offered all seven of the positions she interviewed for! ‘I got them all!’ she proudly informed me. Rachel’s experiences with these interviews and her observation that her interviewers were far more interested in her work experience than her education not only illustrates how employers in Taiwan are embracing neoliberal values, but also suggests that, as they do so, they could be placing less emphasis on the prestige of the schools that applicants graduate from. Abelmann et  al. (2009) contend that university ranking

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is one factor that still plays a powerful role in determining success in Korean society, and Korean university students’ tendency to take full personal responsibility for their lot in life works to mask this structural inequality. While Saint Agnes is highly respected and renowned in Taiwan for its foreign language instruction, it by no means carries anywhere near the prestige of any of the high-ranking national universities. Saint Agnes’ place in the Taiwan college and university rankings is generally around mid-level, and Rachel only held a five-year junior college diploma (basically the equivalent of a two-year associate’s degree) rather than a bachelor’s degree. The fact that she was able, without graduating with a bachelor’s degree from a national university, to get seven offers for desirable jobs at the height of a recession when competition was likely to have been especially fierce, indicates that the situation in Taiwan (in Taipei anyway) may differ somewhat from that of South Korea. Rachel, then, had her choice of seven positions that all seemed quite attractive to her. Although all these positions involved international sales and marketing, only one of them was with a foreign (American) company. The other six were Taiwanese. All seven required the use of English. The offer she decided to accept was an account manager position with a renewable energy company. Even though this job actually did not pay as well as some of the others did, Rachel told me that she was attracted to the idea of working in a progressive industry like renewable energy. Since this company employed many Europeans and catered mostly to European clients, Rachel routinely used English at this job and she found this job enjoyable and rewarding, but she ended up working there for only two months – mostly due to her amorous boss. ‘I got some problem with my boss when I was there,’ she told me. ‘My boss kind of likes me or something, so I feel this is not a good place to stick with.’ Sexual harassment, of course, represents the sort of instance where gender can constrain the workplace success of even the most model neoliberal subjects. Rachel, however, was able to make the strength and flexibility of ‘Brand Rachel’ work to her advantage and quickly obtained new employment. Upon deciding to leave the renewable energy company, a coworker there introduced Rachel to an integrated circuit (IC) company. This newly founded company was based in China, but it was Taiwanese-owned and had a sales office in Taipei. Rachel was hired to work in the Taipei sales office selling electronic components. She did well at this job and even got to travel to the company’s headquarters in China, but ultimately ended up staying for only two months at this job as well, for she found a similar position with a higher salary. This was the job that Rachel was still holding when we had our March 2010 interview.

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At that point, she had been at this position, her third since moving to Taipei, for almost five months. Although the thought of bouncing from job to job as she had over the course of just a few months sounded quite nerve-wracking to me, Rachel insisted that the transitions had actually been quite smooth. ‘I didn’t really have a tough time,’ she commented. ‘I just changed and changed.’ Like Rachel’s second job in Taipei, the one she held at the time of our March 2010 interview was a Taiwanese company based in China with a sales office in Taipei. While this company was also part of the IC industry, it specialized in a particular component – thermal fans. Rachel told me she was quite happy with this job and planned to stick with it for at least two years if all went well. ‘It’s really challenging – a really challenging job,’ she reported. ‘And my manager gave me a not bad – a really not bad salary…for my age, quite high.’ She also reported being quite pleased with the amount of freedom this position granted her. ‘I got a lot of um – authority and free time to do what I want to do – I mean for the job,’ she told me. ‘I got my own idea and I can do something uh – I can do it in my own way for sales.’ This job then satisfied in Rachel the need that, according to Miller and Rose (1990: 27), the entrepreneurial self constantly craves – ‘to fulfil his or her potential through strivings for autonomy, creativity and responsibility.’ In addition to her full-time job selling thermal fans, Rachel had also taken on a part-time job. When Gigi quit her job teaching at the Taipei buxiban, she was asked to find a replacement to take over her teaching duties there, and when she told Rachel about this, Rachel immediately volunteered. When Gigi told me about this just the day before my March 2010 interview with Rachel, I was very surprised, not only because I knew Rachel shared Gigi’s distaste for grammar-focused language instruction, but also because Rachel, in all our email communication leading up to our March 2010 interview, had stressed how busy she was with her sales job. ‘I think she likes to be busy,’ Gigi had told me. Rachel, the next day, verified this, as is illustrated in the following interview excerpt in which she, brimming with enthusiasm over her new part-time teaching position, points out a number of motivations for taking on the job: Mark: I thought you were so busy and I thought, ‘How can she take something else on like that?’ and Gigi said, ‘I think she really wants to make herself really busy.’ Rachel: Yes, this is me. I’m at a point where I like to be busy – work – very busy. Sometimes I get home, I feel I’ve got nothing to do, you know. And I feel I’m just wasting my time.

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Mark: Okay, but Gigi said one thing that really bothered her about teaching this class was the focus on grammar, and how, you know, she hated that before, so she felt bad about actually teaching it that way herself. And you also – Rachel: I also, but I know I am not able to teach these little kids dance or to sing with them, so grammar would be a better choice for me. I thought it would be really awful for me, but from the first class, I think no. In fact, at first, when I want to get this job, I took it like a part-time job. I wanted to make extra money. But from the first class, I feel I like teaching! I do! And um – I think I still need to grab a grammar book. I want to make the lesson good and I want to improve my teaching skills – everything – English skill as well. And for teaching English, I can also improve my own English. You know, I prepare the grammar – I know my grammar is not good, so need to prepare because I don’t want to fail my students. I don’t like to take the job as just earning money. I like to put a real effort – I want to help the kids. So yeah, I feel, with this thing currently, you have an attitude, you won’t help these kids. So, um, you won’t be just like a job – okay, I start from 7:30 to 9:30, and I go at 10. You know – not like this. I’m doing something good, so I need to be really responsible, and I – you know, I think the attitude of my life – when I’m doing something, I really want to do as best – as good as I could. Rachel was thus able to justify her classroom focus on grammar by not only rationalizing that she was unable to employ the more engaging song and dance instructional methods she had found so appealing as a child, but also by conceptualizing grammar teaching preparation as part of her personal development project – a practice that would help her improve her own English grammar. She went on to tell me that another objective in filling her schedule to capacity was to test herself and see just how much pressure she could handle: Rachel: And also the other thing I want to know – I want to know how much pressure I can get. I need to know. Mark: So it’s like an experiment? Testing yourself? Rachel: Yeah, I need to test myself also cuz improve the way to deal with pressure – how much level I can have. Yeah, testing myself. Rachel’s original impetus for taking the teaching job, however, was money, and she admitted that she did indeed feel driven to take on more

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and more work to make as much money as she possibly could. Immediately after the previous comments, she added these remarks elaborating on her financial motivations: And also because of money. You know, I want to earn as much as I can when I am still young – yeah. Because what I know right now, the society – people can really live to be very old, but economic will be a big problem, so I want to earn as much as I can.

The main factor fueling Rachel’s drive to amass as much money as possible was the desire to provide financial assistance to her mother. In our May 2009 interview, Rachel had told me that her mother had left her abusive husband, but by March of 2010, she had returned to him. According to Rachel, this was a reoccurring pattern. Her mother had actually left her abusive situation many times over the years, but she had always returned. Rachel felt, however, that if her mother had a house of her own and could avoid relying on her husband financially, she might be able to finally leave him for good. Her goal was, therefore, to save enough money for a down payment on a house for her mother. By March of 2010, Rachel’s previous plan of moving to France when she was 30 had been revised slightly. She still hoped to eventually live and work in France, but this dream had been pushed back another five years in order to allow adequate time to set up her mother financially. Eight years or so, Rachel reasoned, should be enough time for her to save enough money for a down payment on a house and for her sister to become financially secure enough to co-sign on the loan. After buying the house, another seven years of saving money for her mother, she felt, would enable her to leave Taiwan confident that her mother was financially well-off. ‘I prefer to buy a house first before 30,’ she explained. ‘My sister will share the loan with me, so by the time – like seven years after – I can just go to France without worry, you see.’ Rachel’s Relationships with Her Languages

Rachel reported that since her thermal fan sales efforts were focused mostly on the domestic Taiwanese market, the majority of her workplace interactions were in Mandarin Chinese or occasionally Tai-yü. She did estimate, however, that about 10% of her time on the job was spent using English, mostly via email, with existing and prospective European and American customers. When I asked her if she had any French customers, she replied, ‘I don’t have a chance yet, but I’m creating the chance.’ She then explained to me that she had recently been exerting much effort gathering information on companies in France and other European

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countries, sending out emails to these companies introducing her company and products. ‘You cannot just sit here and wait for the inquiry,’ she asserted. ‘In Europe – all over the world, they use the thermal fan, so I just need to find it.’ These comments serve to further highlight the extent to which Rachel found it necessary to take personal responsibility for her own success and the achievement of her goals. Where her French abilities were concerned though, Rachel lamented in March of 2010, that she thought they had deteriorated. ‘You know, this kind of language stuff,’ she remarked. ‘If you don’t practice – if you don’t use in your life, you forget.’ She told me, however, that she had recently taken steps to try to halt her French attrition, enrolling in a French course at the Taipei Alliance Française (further contributing to her test of how much pressure she could withstand). This class was held every Sunday and had, at that point, met three times. Although she had just begun taking this course and it was still a bit soon for her to substantially regain her French abilities, she thought it was definitely helping. ‘A little bit come back,’ she told me. In the months leading up to our March 2010 interview, Rachel had, however, also gotten a bit of practice using French in Taipei with a Québécois restaurant owner. She first met this Canadian in his restaurant and struck up a conversation with him in French. ‘Because I can speak French – that’s why we start to know each other,’ she told me. The Québécois restaurant owner subsequently introduced Rachel to an American couple – two Californians who she quickly became much closer to than the Canadian. Just 10 months earlier, in our May 2009 interview, Rachel had stressed that she didn’t associate the English language with any particular culture, and she contrasted this with French, which was inextricably intertwined, in her mind, with French culture. In our March 2010 interview, however, she informed me this had completely changed due to the close friendship she had forged with the California couple. English, instead of having general international associations, had quickly come to be associated with American culture for Rachel. And she was quite enthusiastic about learning from her American cultural informants, as is evident in the following excerpt: Mark: For French, you said you had the association with the culture – Rachel: For English too now. My two good American friends, they are teaching me a lot about their culture, their living style, what they watch, what they do in America, how they say in this situation. So, I really like it. I really like it. I have total love of America – everything. Yes, I think I’m really American!

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Although ‘I think I’m really American!’ was said with a laugh and clearly intended to be a joke, the utterance illustrates the extent to which Rachel had embraced all things American. As she was telling me this, however, in March of 2010, her two close American friends were scheduled to soon leave Taiwan and return to Los Angeles. ‘Maybe I will go there next year – my first trip to America!’ she told me gleefully. A few months later, I received an email from Rachel in which she fondly reminisced about her time spent with the, by then, departed American friends: They were my best friends in Taipei…I really got into their life…We talked whatever about life, love, and sex. They taught me a lot about American culture and the world. They always asked me to come over and watched American old movies or series. They taught me English and the slang. They wouldn’t be angry if I didn’t understand what they said. They were always happy to explain to me. Therefore when I talked to them I always felt very free. The time with them was really the best moment in my life.

With her recent shift to associating English specifically with Americans and American culture, Rachel also noted a change in the way she approached learning the language. Describing her previous attitude as, regarding English ‘as a tool’ (just as Audrey had), she explained We just say ‘I take it as a tool.’ If you want to just use it as a tool – I mean for business trade or something, I think it’s no need to know how to speak with them [Americans or British] – because maybe you don’t use English to communicate with Americans, with British…they talk to Japanese, they talk to Europeans – yeah. So, if you want to just learn fast and um – quick and efficiently, you just take it as a tool. Yeah, so you just need to get a good skill. I think that will be enough.

Since she had developed an intense interest in communicating with Americans, however, this approach, Rachel asserted, was no longer appropriate for her. ‘I will focus on the culture things, for myself,’ she said. ‘For French and for English as well.’ And despite her newfound desire to focus on American culture, Rachel was adamant that neither Americans nor people of any other nationality could claim exclusive ownership of English. ‘I still think English is a world language,’ she stated. ‘It belongs to the world.’ When I asked her if she felt it belonged to her, she replied that it did. ‘It’s one of my languages. I would say that,’ she told me. She went on to explain that English and communication with foreigners

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in English was such an integral part of her world that she could not imagine otherwise: I think English is part of my life. It’s really part of it because I cannot imagine that I have no foreign friend. I always need to speak English. I always need to communicate with foreign people. Yeah, I think it’s just part of my life. I cannot imagine that I have not any foreign friends in Taiwan at all.

Unlike Gigi and Audrey, who were both hesitant to claim English ownership, arguing that they still lacked the expertise necessary to make such a claim, Rachel did not place such expertise restrictions on language ownership, arguing instead that a strong sense of affective belonging with a language was sufficient.1 She was, in fact, quick to claim some degree of ownership in French as well, even though she still regarded herself as very much a learner of the language. ‘French, it takes a big part of my life, so yeah. Yeah, I would say also one of mine [my languages],’ she explained. ‘That’s why I’m trying to put a lot of effort right now. I don’t want to stop it, you know – to own it.’ Rachel, in our March 2010 interview, also expressed an interest in learning Spanish for the purposes of making herself more marketable. ‘Maybe next year, I will start learning Spanish because Spanish is used a lot all over the world,’ she told me. Rachel had, in the various jobs she had held in the months prior to this interview, seen first-hand the practical benefits of speaking Spanish. ‘Some of my coworkers, they work with Spanish customers – Spanish-speaking customers,’ she explained. ‘So, I think it’s very useful.’ If one is looking at the global market and assessing the relative worth of languages in terms of numbers of potential customers, Spanish does, of course, seem a very attractive language to learn. And if Rachel were to gain any degree of proficiency in Spanish, she would indeed be tremendously marketable in the business world, for a speaker of English, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish would have the ability to communicate with a gargantuan portion of the world’s population. ‘Brand Rachel’ would be a highly flexible and marketable brand indeed. Conclusion to Rachel’s Story

Rachel’s boldness, along with other entrepreneurial self traits that she possesses in abundance, such as self-reliance, willingness to take risks and readiness to accept full responsibility for her own lot in life, make her a

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prime candidate for enterprise culture success. Indeed, with her obsessive desire to continuously ‘train’ herself, her need to test herself to see how much pressure she can withstand, and her insistence that she cannot just sit idly by and wait for opportunities to come to her, Rachel appears to be the ultimate personification of the neoliberal entrepreneurial self. Taiwanese employers, who seem to no longer value modesty as much as they once did, recognized this, rewarding Rachel’s aggressive self-promotion with offers of one position after the other, in spite of her lack of prestigious credentials. Clearly, her mother’s goal of producing a daughter who need not rely on others became a reality, and foreign languages have played a substantial role in this process. As Rachel trained and tested herself linguistically, her confidence in herself and her abilities increased dramatically – to the point that she felt she could claim ownership of both English and French. While this study’s other three focal participants came from families with ample financial resources, the financial situation for Rachel’s family was much more precarious. Her working-class mother could barely afford to send Rachel to Saint Agnes, and her two trips to France would certainly have been impossible without her boyfriend’s financial assistance. Hers then seems to be a (perhaps rare) case in which socioeconomic class has not constrained the upwardly mobile path she appears to be on. Her family’s financial circumstances, in fact, served as a powerful driver for her ambitious self-development project that she relentlessly pursued, with the dual objectives of providing a better life for her mother and achieving her eventual goal of living in France. Her language learning investments can thus be characterized as multiple – investment in English and French and her identities as an English speaker and French speaker, investment in her continuous ‘Brand Rachel’ self-improvement project, and investments in the futures she envisioned for herself and her mother. At one point when we met in March of 2010, Rachel viewed some of my family photos and told me that my family looked like a happy one. ‘Seeing good families always gives me a really good touch,’ she said, and then went on to explain that what she meant by this was that it filled her with optimism for her own future – reassurance that she too could someday live a happy and fulfilling life free of the hardships that had plagued her own family. While the neoliberal success that Rachel was already well on her way to achieving offered, of course, no guarantee of future happiness, I have no doubt that her quest for happiness will be carried out with the same relentless drive that has characterized her language learning and professional pursuits. And regardless of where her passions

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and ambitions lead her – to France, America or perhaps even Spain or Argentina – I am confident that she will aggressively seize all available opportunities, both personal and professional. Note (1) For a focused examination of the sense of English ownership (or lack thereof) felt by Gigi, Audrey, Rachel and Shannon, as well as two of the non-focal participants, Monica and Fiara, see Seilhamer (2015).

8 The Competitor – Shannon’s Story

With an abundance of high-stakes examinations and extreme pressure to achieve admittance to prestigious high schools and universities, competitiveness is pervasive in Taiwanese society. Shannon exemplifies this competitiveness, and this chapter highlights her obsession with achieving higher scores than her peers. For Shannon, however, this extreme competitiveness was reserved only for English since she disliked math and science, and because excelling in Chinese offers considerably less opportunity for truly differentiating oneself in Taiwan. The distinction provided by high English test scores served to propel Shannon’s language learning investment, and while other focal participants also invested heavily in cultivating the good at English aspects of their identities, this was truly an obsession for Shannon, for she was not satisfied with viewing herself as simply good at English. For Shannon, only being the best at English, relative to her peers, would suffice, and she constantly fought to claim and retain this aspect of her identity. Shannon’s story, however, also illustrates the dark side of extreme competitiveness in language learning, for when expectations of oneself are to be better than all others, failure to meet such heady aspirations can result in extreme frustration and a loss of confidence. Shannon’s Life before Saint Agnes

In her letter of introduction to me on the first day of class when I was her teacher at Saint Agnes, Shannon wrote that since she first started learning English, she has been in love with the language. In our May 2009 interview, conducted on the Saint Agnes campus early on a Saturday morning, she confirmed this statement written almost four years earlier, attributing her early love of English first to English Disney videos her mother exposed her to when she was a small child and secondly to a teacher for private group lessons that she had begun taking in third grade. According 144

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to Shannon, this teacher, who incidentally was Taiwanese and not a foreigner, displayed English proficiency Shannon thought to be exemplary and became her English role model. Referring to another statement Shannon had made in her introduction letter to me years before, I inquired about her early motivations to gain English proficiency, and this was when she elaborated on the influence of this teacher, who had instilled in Shannon strong associations between the English language and American affluence: Mark: So saying from that first time of your experience learning English, you set your goal there – you said, ‘I’m going to get proficient in this language’ – Shannon: Yes. Mark: What do you think it was that really motivated that kind of ambition so early on? Shannon: Um – well, I guess because my teacher – my English teacher, she’s very professional and she speaks English very well, so when I start learning English with her, I just wanted to be like her. And she always – in the class, she always introduced life in the United States – she owned a house and cars. Mark: So she lived there for a long time or something? Shannon: Yes yes, for – not really for a long time, but for a while, and she – she was rich at that time, so – yeah – she was always introducing life – luxury life there, so – um hmm. At that time, I was wanting to be like that in the future – yes. In both Shannon’s private group lessons and in the English classes at her Taipei elementary school, grammar had not been emphasized at all. It was instead vocabulary, pronunciation and some reading that these classes focused on. Shannon told me that she consistently excelled in both classes at the time, but the private group lessons were more advanced than those taught at her elementary school, so doing well there was a more significant accomplishment. ‘I thought my English ability was quite good because in that class, I belonged to the top student,’ she told me. ‘I had tests for almost a 100% – almost all correct – and I can memorize all the vocabulary in our articles.’ It was with this feeling of confident superiority regarding her English skills that Shannon went to Los Angeles for her first trip abroad with her family when she was twelve years old. At that point, she had just finished elementary school and had been studying English for three years. Having never had any opportunity to interact with foreigners before, she was

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quite excited about the prospect of using English for real communication in Los Angeles. Her first attempt at doing so, however, proved to not only be a very embarrassing experience that dampened her confidence in using English for the remainder of the trip, but indeed a very significant experience in her life, for this was the narrative that Shannon chose to highlight to me in response to my routine first question at that initial interview: Mark: To start with, could you just tell me about the most important events in your life – the key events in your life – the things that I would have to know about to be able to say that I really know YOU? Shannon:  Okay, um – significant stories – experience? Mark: Yes, significant experiences – you know – starting from childhood. Shannon: Okay, um – the most significant experience is that I went – the first time I went to the United States was when I was twelve years old. That was the first time I went to the United States and the first time I talked to a foreigner in real life. I went to the United States, and I feel excited because I have the real chance to talk to a foreigner, but, you know, the first time when I tried to talk to a foreigner, I made a very embarrassing story. That is when our family went to the McDonald’s, and my mom said I should try to order the meal by myself, and I was confident, but I had no opportunity before in Taiwan, so the first time, my mom ordered for me. And when the person delivered our meal, and I discovered there is an empty cup, and we don’t have to use it, and it’s extra. So, I told my mom that I would give the cup back to the clerk by myself, and my mom said, ‘Oh, that’s good. That’s good. You can practice your English.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ So, I went straight to the clerk in the McDonald’s, and I looked at him, and I said, ‘Zhe ge bei ze shi kong de’ – actually in Chinese, but I didn’t realize. Yes, but I thought actually I was talking in English, but the clerk looked at me and feel frustrated and confused because I’m not speaking English, but he didn’t understand at all. And I kept saying because I was too nervous, and I thought maybe because my pronunciation is not really clear, and so I lowered my speech and said again and again. Mark: Again in Chinese? Shannon:  Yes yes. Mark: You really didn’t know?

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Shannon: I really didn’t know – because I was too nervous. About maybe three – three or four times later, then my mom said, ‘What are you doing?’ you know – and the clerk is confused about everything. He didn’t know what to do, you know. Then my mom told me, ‘Do you know that you’re talking in Chinese?’ And I said, ‘No, actually no.’ Yes, so that’s the most embarrassing experience – yes – speaking English. After this experience, I was quite afraid of speaking English with people – yes. Mark: So for the rest of the trip, you were afraid? Shannon: Yes. And I never speak with a real person in English. I was confident, but after this experience, I was totally unconfident. If I was going to buy something or go somewhere, I would just tell my mom in Chinese and she would translate it. This embarrassing experience at the McDonald’s in Los Angeles was the first instance in Shannon’s life in which her identity of distinction – the image of herself as one who is good at English – had been threatened. The experience thus served to spur subsequent investment in English as she desperately attempted to ensure that no such incident would ever occur again, and it also served as a reference point that she related to other experiences later. Shannon told me that after returning from her Los Angeles trip and starting junior high school, she could no longer stay in the English class with the teacher she liked so much because that class was only for elementary school students. The teacher taught another class, however, in her home on Saturday mornings. This was a higher-level class and the other students there were all at least 16 years old and in high school. Although Shannon was only 13 years old at the time, her teacher was convinced that she could handle this higher-level class. ‘She thought that I was talented learning English – learning languages – so she recommended my mother to let me go to that class,’ Shannon recalled. Ultimately, taking this higher-level class with high school students would prove to be a very valuable experience for Shannon, but her entire first year of the class was truly traumatic. ‘It was a disaster for me!’ she exclaimed. One problem was that she detested these lessons’ focus on grammar. ‘When I was in the elementary school, I had never learned grammar,’ she told me. ‘So, after I entered in that class, I was frustrated because I hated grammar during that time, and every time when I am going to school, I cried a lot at home in the morning.’ In each lesson, students were given an article or story, which served as the basis for that class and a test the following week. ‘The teacher

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always asked us to discuss these articles with a partner and she would write down some questions to answer, and also she taught us the grammar,’ Shannon recalled. ‘The first time, I remember the article. It was too difficult for me…I just didn’t have any idea what the article was about.’ In the following extended excerpt from our interview, Shannon relates her struggle to compete against her older classmates and rise from the bottom to the top of her Saturday supplementary English class: Mark: So it’s kind of amazing that that experience didn’t ruin you for English. Shannon: Yes, but that made me feel that although I’m younger than them, I still have to get rid of this. I just want to be at the top. Mark: So you were determined? Shannon: Yes yes, so every – during the class, that teacher, she always gave a test before the class – every class, so – yes, that, I remember, was on Saturday morning at 9 o’clock, and she would have the test at 8:30, and for 30 minutes vocabulary, or like verb and preposition – yes – and also like articles – you have to memorize the articles – yes – and the first test, I remember, I got lower – I got 48, and that is the lowest grade I have ever had. Mark: 48%? Shannon: Yes, 48% only. And I thought it’s awful, so after three times of tests, I get a hundred – yes. Mark: After three weeks? Shannon:  Um hmm. Mark: You went from 48 to 100? Shannon: Yes. The second time is 56, and the third time, a hundred – yes. Mark: You improved that quickly! Shannon: Because I – I – I worked very hard every day. And I even like – on Friday, I even didn’t do my homework – just spent all night to memorize everything, because you would never know what vocabulary will appear, but it’s all included in the article that was given in the previous week. Mark: Oh, so you just had to really, really study that article. Shannon:  Yes, yes. So, I memorized every word in the article. Mark: That’s what you did – memorized every word? Shannon: Yes. And it’s also very hard to keep the record, because once you get a hundred, then the next time, you cannot – you know – get only 60 or 80. You still have to get 99 or 100.

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Mark: So it was actually only a very short time that you were crying before going to – Shannon: No, because when I was preparing for the test, I always cried, but I still got a hundred. Mark: So that kind of traumatic aspect of it lasted a while. Shannon:  Um hmm. For like a year. When I asked Shannon if her parents gave her any pressure throughout this extremely stressful year, she told me that her parents, while supportive, never exerted any pressure on her to excel academically in English or any other subject. ‘I only give the pressure to myself,’ she remarked, stressing the personal nature of her competitive drive and taking full responsibility for her ascent to the top of her class. The trauma of preparing for her weekly Saturday tests did ease after a year though. ‘The second year, the situation improved a lot,’ she told me. By this time, her vocabulary and grammar knowledge had progressed to the point that the unfamiliar material in the articles had become considerably less, so preparation became much less of an ordeal. This was fortunate, for Shannon soon had another source of stress to contend with – high school entrance exams, which would involve a great deal of math and science. The fierce competitiveness that Shannon displayed in her quest to be at the top in her English classes (and, to a lesser extent, Chinese classes as well) was completely absent when it came to math and science, for she struggled just to receive halfway respectable grades in these classes. During her preparation for high school entrance exams, Shannon got quite depressed at the prospect of having these subjects she so despised continuing to haunt her throughout the next three years of high school. ‘That’s not good for my health condition,’ she told me. ‘So, after that, my mom thought that it would be better to come here [Saint Agnes] to learn something that I am interested in.’ So just as it had done for other focal participants, choosing Saint Agnes in lieu of a normal high school allowed Shannon to avoid further math and science classes (except for one math class the first year). Saint Agnes also, of course, offered Shannon and the other participants the opportunity to intensely focus on language, which generally takes a back seat to math and science in normal Taiwanese high schools. ‘My mom thought I was talented in learning languages,’ Shannon informed me. ‘So, she wanted me to come here to learn English and French.’ These comments make it sound like the choice of attending Saint Agnes was made by Shannon’s mother, and that does indeed seem to have been the case. According to Shannon, however,

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she was herself quite enthusiastic about going to Saint Agnes, even though it required that she move to Southern Taiwan. ‘Staying in Taipei, I could enter some normal high school,’ she said. ‘But that is not what I want because I hate math and science.’ Shannon’s Struggle and Strategy at Saint Agnes

When I asked Shannon how she found the English learning experience once she started at Saint Agnes, she replied, ‘Oh, it’s quite good because I was still at the top in the class.’ And I do indeed recall her being one of the top students in her class when I was her teacher. Shannon didn’t speak much in class except when called upon specifically, but she often came to me with questions after class and consistently scored high grades on tests and written assignments – grades that were on a par even with those of the students who had spent years abroad in English-speaking countries. Like Gigi and Rachel, Shannon did report being intimidated by these students’ English proficiency. Whereas this intimidation for Gigi and Rachel basically ceased to be a problem after the first year though, Shannon’s competitive nature never allowed her to stop comparing her own abilities to those of these classmates. ‘Comparing! Oh yes, still,’ she told me. ‘Through the five years…because they are very good – no matter writing or speaking.’ Shannon told me that she hadn’t had any problem her first year adjusting to English being used as the sole medium of instruction at Saint Agnes and estimated that, at that time, she generally understood a least half of what instructors said.1 ‘I still could understand the main idea – what they’re doing, and what teacher asks us to do,’ she said. For the placement test that first year that determined what listening class she would be in the following year, Shannon’s score placed her in Class 2 – the second highest one. Her grades in that listening class the second year then allowed her to move up to the highest-level Class 1 group for her third year at Saint Agnes. In contrast to her fond memories of academic success in English classes at Saint Agnes, Shannon described her French study there as ‘a terrible experience.’ She explained that with English, she had been eased into the language, with three years of lessons before grammar was emphasized, and contrasted this gradual introduction to English grammar with the immediate introduction of grammar in French classes at Saint Agnes, telling me, ‘So I came to here, and I start learning French. The first thing I learn is grammar, so I cannot accept that.’ And French grammar, with its many verb conjugations and declensions, was a real struggle for Shannon. ‘I feel better about the pronunciation part because it is easy – for French pronunciation,’ she told me. ‘But for French grammar, it is too complicated for me.’

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Although she insisted that she had exerted an extraordinary amount of effort in studying French, just as she had in the English class with high school students when she was 13, all her efforts seemed to be for naught. ‘I work very hard like I worked on English before, but I cannot see any improvement,’ she lamented. ‘I think I could do it, but when the tests come, I still fail. I cannot.’ Shannon’s use of the word fail here is a bit of an exaggeration. She estimated that it was only about 7% of the French tests and quizzes that she actually received failing grades on, and she never had to re-take any of her French courses. The high standards she set for herself, however, caused her to view anything less than a 90% as failure – personal failure and failure relative to the grades of other students that she was accustomed to competing with. ‘For me, I think it’s fail,’ she proclaimed. ‘Because, you know, in Taiwan, the students’ competition is very tight, so every time when I have good grades on, like, Chinese subjects or English subjects, I always got the same level as Fiara or Becky, who are very good students in our class. But I only fail on the French subjects because sometimes they got 90%, but I only got 70…and I cannot compete with them in class.’ Besides her English use in class with classmates and teachers, Shannon reported having various performative opportunities to use English in her daily life that allowed her to be positioned as an English ‘expert’ by others. Some of these were face-to-face interactions and others computer-mediated communication. Her interlocutors in these interactions came from a variety of backgrounds – some were Taiwanese and some European, while others were family members living in the United States. Shannon’s most regular use of English outside of her classes was probably in a teaching capacity as an English tutor at two different jobs. One was at a language center on the Saint Agnes campus, and another was at a school off-campus where she tutored elementary school students in both English and Chinese. At the time of our first interview in May of 2009, Shannon had held the on-campus tutoring job for two years and the off-campus one for a year. At the Saint Agnes language center, her job designation was specifically helping students with their oral skills, such as pronunciation and conversation. This tutoring job, therefore, required much more actual verbal English interaction with students than one where grammar or writing is the focus. Describing these tutoring sessions, she told me, ‘People just make appointments, then they’ll come to you and we’ll have a discussion on the topic they appointed – maybe like entertainment or the life in school…discuss something in English – practice the oral skill.’ Shannon’s tutoring positions were not the only occasions in which she was positioned as an English ‘expert,’ for she reported also being

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positioned as such by her mother, who insisted that she speak only English with her younger brother. Shannon told me that this rule had been in place for two years, and it went into effect every time she came home during school vacations. ‘I think he’s a typical learner – English learner in Taiwan – because he only learns grammar,’ she told me. ‘He is very good at grammar…and so he has the English ability, but he don’t want to speak.’ Shannon deemed her mother’s strategy of requiring English interaction between her and her brother highly successful, for she felt her brother’s spoken English had improved dramatically. ‘He got the confidence, and before he thought he cannot,’ she told me. When I asked her if his improvement could have come from any source besides her speaking English to him, she replied, ‘Maybe not – because he doesn’t have any classes outside of school…and at school, the teacher only teaches grammar.’ Shannon obviously felt a great deal of gratification about the role she had played in improving her brother’s spoken English, but this story was not told in response to my standard inquiry about foreign language use making her feel good. When I did ask her, in our May 2009 interview, to tell me about any instance in which use of a foreign language made her feel good, Shannon, not so unsurprisingly, chose to highlight a test situation – an oral exam I had administered to her class (and long since forgotten myself) during her second year at Saint Agnes. Apparently, I had given her full marks on this oral exam, and this had indeed made her feel quite good. Shannon also reported that for a year she had been having regular Skype conversations – about twice a week – with a friend from Spain that she had met online, and that being able to communicate with this internet buddy had served to really make her feel good about her English abilities. ‘He speaks English, so that makes me feel really wonderful,’ she said. Reporting that she also occasionally communicated with French and Italian internet friends, she told me that the French friend was completely unaware that she had ever studied French, and she wanted to keep it that way. Like most of my other participants in this study, Shannon also used a considerable amount of English on Facebook. ‘We seldom use Chinese on that,’ she remarked. ‘I think it’s more interesting because maybe I guess that makes us special from other students.’ When I asked her if she could comment further on how English use on Facebook made her and her classmates feel special, Shannon replied, ‘I still have some other friends on Facebook from other high schools or other universities, but they don’t use English, so when I have English words on it, they say, “Okay, this is a Saint Agnes student,” you know.’ A quick look

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at Shannon’s Facebook page revealed that she actually did use a fair amount of Chinese, especially when commenting on friends’ Chinese status postings. Very common as well though were short English phrases and comments, such as ‘take care la,’ ‘i miss u,too!!!!!REALLY!!!,’ and even a comment that incorporated a bit of French – ‘Pas de problem!!!! Can’t wait to see u!!!’ Shannon also reported using English during her summer and winter vacations to communicate over the internet with her American-born cousins, who lived in Los Angeles. One of these cousins, who was about the same age as Shannon, spoke almost no Chinese, and the others were English-dominant English/Chinese bilinguals, so it was easier for all of them to converse with Shannon in English than in Chinese. She told me that the summer between her second and third year at Saint Agnes, she had visited these cousins in Los Angeles and reported speaking English exclusively with them then. ‘That time, during that period, I speak English all the time even though we were all Chinese,’ she told me. In addition to the English use already discussed, Shannon also, on occasion, created opportunities to performatively project her identity as an English speaker. She told me, for example, that she and her friends would sometimes go to Taiwanese public places like night markets and pretend to be English-speaking foreigners with no knowledge of Chinese. ‘In some situations, I’m with my friends. Like we’re going to night market or something, and we want to, you know, sometimes show off or something,’ she said. ‘And we will speak English. We will pretend that we are foreigners – this kind of joke. Yes, so interesting.’ When I asked her if she shared any of the apprehension many Taiwanese seem to have about using English in public out of fear of being accused of showing off (as she readily admitted she was doing), she replied ‘Not really,’ and went on to tell me another story about a similar sort of incident at a Taiwan High Speed Rail station when she was actually alone and not with friends. On this occasion, Shannon’s actions were prompted not only by a desire to show off and project her identity as an English speaker, but also her anger over being rejected for a job with the High Speed Rail company and her feeling that despite this rejection, their staff’s command of spoken English was insufficient for a company that caters to a large number of foreigners. As Shannon told me Shannon: I applied – an application to their company – and they refused me because they said they want somebody to be full-time – not only for part-time. And I feel unhappy about it because I think the people speaking English there is not really, you know – correct.

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Mark: The broadcasting voices? Shannon:  Yes, yes, before – like a year ago. Mark: To the best of my memory, it seemed okay when I – Shannon: Now – now it’s better, but on the first time when I heard it, it was terrible! Mark: So you thought, ‘I can do it better!’ Shannon: Yes! So – so, after they refused me, when I take the high-speed rail, I always repeat this memory, you know – they refused me, but their broadcast is not good – not really good. So, one day, I was going to take the High Speed Rail, and I saw a service man standing there to help people to pass or to have the tickets or something. Then I just have an idea that if I am speaking English and I pretend that I do not know Chinese at all, what will he do? Because in High Speed Rail, there’s a lot of foreigners. Mark: Sure. Shannon: So you have to have the English ability. So, I took my luggage – because my luggage was very big – and I entered in the gates, and I asked him, ‘Um, excuse me. Do you know where is the elevator?’ And he said, ‘Uhhhhhhhhh’ – right? And he didn’t understand at all. And I repeat again, ‘Elevator – do you know elevator?’ and he said ‘um’ and he said ‘That way’ in Chinese. I understand, but I said, ‘I’m sorry. I can only speak English. I don’t know Chinese’ and he’s also like the clerk in the McDonald’s. He’s confused and don’t know what to do. And I repeat again, ‘I want to know where is the elevator. Tell me – where is the elevator?’ And he said, ‘Okay – um – can you wait for a second? I’ll get somebody to help’ in Chinese. Mark: Um. Shannon: Yes, yes. funny. Eventually, the hapless railroad employee did return with someone who had a better grasp of English. Shannon kept up her ruse, asking where the elevator was. The woman told her, and Shannon went on her way, feeling vindicated and pleased that she had been able to highlight in some small way the inadequacy of the High Speed Rail staff’s spoken English proficiency. In her letter of introduction from the first day of her second year at Saint Agnes, Shannon had also written, ‘To graduate from the university in the U.S.A. is my dream. I really want to study in UCLA, but I know it’s very difficult.’ When I met her for our May 2009 interview almost four years later, she informed me that attending the University of California

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at Los Angeles was no longer a goal for her. ‘I would have this goal because of my friend because we were classmates and best friends in junior high school, and now she’s studying in UCLA,’ Shannon told me. ‘That’s kind of a promise made by us when we were in the junior high school.’ Although she no longer had her sights set on UCLA, she did still see American university study in her future – albeit not any time soon. Shannon’s more immediate goals involved her continued stay in Taiwan to work on a degree in translation and interpretation. ‘Doing an interpreting job was one of my dreams when I came to this school,’ she told me. ‘I remember the first year, the school gave us a form that we need to fill in. It asked about um – what’s your ideal job in the future? And I said I wanted to be an interpreter.’ Although she still intended to work to achieve this goal, she was under no illusions that doing so would be at all easy. She had, in fact, become somewhat discouraged by the difficulty of introductory interpretation classes she had already taken. ‘In these past two years, I have taken some interpreting classes,’ she informed me. ‘And that made me feel like – have some doubt with it – because it’s too difficult…it has a lot of challenge.’ Like many of her classmates, Shannon, at the time of our May 2009 interview, had just received her two-year college entrance exam results. She was certain that the score she received was adequate to grant her admission to the Saint Agnes Translation and Interpretation department, and this, she told me, would be her back-up plan. Her first choice, however, was to attend a highly prestigious national university in Taipei, and she had already submitted her application to this school. ‘I’m not sure whether I really can go there or not,’ she informed me. ‘It’s kind of one of the highest in Taipei, so it’s very difficult.’ Even after another two years of concentrated translation and interpretation study though, Shannon was quite sure that she would still not be adequately prepared to enter the interpreting profession. ‘That’s still not enough for interpreting,’ she said. ‘So, I’ll still have to get another degree.’ This is where Shannon’s long-time dream of studying in the United States found its place in her future plans. After graduating from either Saint Agnes or the national university in Taipei with a degree in Translation and Interpretation, she planned to work for a year or two (‘being a teacher or tutoring in a cram school or something like that’) in order to save money. She then hoped to go to the United States to study – but not at UCLA as she had once dreamed. ‘I would prefer to go, like, Washington more – Chicago or something like that,’ she told me. ‘Because I know Chicago – most of the people in Chicago speak pretty standard English.’ Being immersed in standardized American English, Shannon stressed, was a very important consideration for her,

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and she told me that upon completing her studies in Chicago, Washington or some other US destination where most of the English spoken is more or less standard, she intended to stay in the United States to live and work for an extended period of time. Life in America, it seems, had been on Shannon’s mind for as long as she could remember. ‘Before I went there, I still had a positive dream about it,’ she said. From early frequent exposure to Disney cartoons, to years of hearing her English teacher rhapsodize about the affluent life she had lived in the United States, Shannon’s positive impressions of American life had been continuously nurtured. Her two trips to Los Angeles – first between elementary and junior high school and then again between her second and third year at Saint Agnes – only served to reinforce these positive impressions. She told me that she imagined herself using English with almost everybody in her future life in the United States, and it was, therefore, Standard American English spoken with a standard American accent that she strove for. In her efforts to achieve this accent, she reported watching American TV shows – especially the show Friends. In the following interview excerpt, Shannon describes her use of this show for listening practice and exposure to standard American English pronunciation: Mark: So as far as media goes – TV shows, music, movies – have any of those influenced you at all or even used for listening practice or – Shannon:  Yes yes – like Friends. You know Friends? Mark: Oh, the TV show? Shannon: Yeah, the TV show. I watched it twice – the whole ten seasons. I watched it with my friends the first time, and I watched it with Chinese subtitles. Another time, I watched it totally in English subtitle or no subtitle, and the reason why I watch it again – because it’s almost all about practicing. Like listening, and like – I want to be – I want to have speech more like real Americans. Mark: So that’s your target as far as speaking style and pronunciation – American English? Shannon: Yes, American English. So, I think because they are all Americans in the TV shows, they can speak the real – the real American speech and pronunciation and intonation – something like that. So, I watch it to learn how to pronounce the words correctly, or the intonation or something.

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As could be expected, given all the disparaging comments she made about her study of French, Shannon didn’t see French as having any place in her future at all when we met in May of 2009. She characterized it as ‘annoying and unnecessary’ and told me, ‘I don’t want to learn it at all.’ She didn’t completely rule out the possibility of taking French up again in the future though, given the right circumstances. ‘Maybe in the future, maybe I will meet a friend who is from France or Europe,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll still have a passion for learning it because I’ll have a reason, but not in school.’ At the end of our May 2009 interview when I asked Shannon if she had anything additional to add on the record, she actually told me that she had recently been contemplating the reasons for her extreme passion for English in contrast to her total lack of passion for French, concluding that it was probably due to the manner in which French had been taught at Saint Agnes, with a focus on grammar, which was similar to the way English was taught in normal Taiwanese high schools – a practice that generally does not evoke much passion for English among Taiwanese students. She told me I started to think it’s the way of teaching English because in school, like in junior high school or in normal high school, they teach English, like, the teacher always teach grammar – like having multiple choices, and like this kind of thing, so the students in here learn a lot of grammar stuff, but they cannot even speak.

Despite her feeling that a focus on grammar had been detrimental to her embrace of French, Shannon went on to speculate about whether, if she were to be an English teacher in the not-so-distant future, she might want to provide more grammar-focused instruction than she herself had started out with as a child. Wondering aloud, she posed the following question: If I am being a teacher in here, teaching English, what should I do? Because I don’t like to teach students start from grammar, but, you know, my grammar is not good. It’s – it’s, well, you know – it’s average. I still make some mistakes – some errors – some small things. But for normal high school students, they get a very high score on that. And I started thinking whether that’s good or bad.

Even though Shannon’s spoken English proficiency and fluency was far beyond that of most Taiwanese students, it still bothered her that many could surpass her in the examination room – passing entrance exams to gain entrance to prestigious national universities, for instance.

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What she was failing to recognize, of course, is that the grammar expertise of typical Taiwanese high school students only serves them well on written exams, and while they may be able to excel at such exams that so often serve gatekeeping functions in Taiwan, their textbook knowledge of the intricacies of English grammar seldom allows them any real communicative proficiency. While high scores on entrance examinations will get students into prestigious universities, and possessing the academic capital of a degree from one of these universities does indeed help one in the job market, Taiwanese employers are increasingly insistent that the employees they hire have communicative proficiency in English. Shannon herself maintained in our May 2009 interview that in Taiwanese society today, English is ‘important and necessary.’ ‘Like the job opportunity in Taiwan,’ she explained. ‘They want the hired people to have English ability, so it’s required, I think.’ Like the other focal participants, Shannon firmly believed that English abilities were indispensable in Taiwanese society, and anyone that neglected to make English mastery a priority would surely be disadvantaged. Since competitive drive is indeed a key entrepreneurial self quality, Shannon would, at first glance, seem to be every bit the ideal neoliberal subject that I’ve depicted Rachel as. In addition to her strong competitiveness where English was concerned, Shannon also displayed a high degree of self-reliance in her quest ‘to be at the top,’ and the chutzpah displayed in performative activities like the ‘pretending to be a foreigner’ game can certainly be characterized as extreme boldness. Competitiveness, self-reliance and boldness alone, however, do not constitute the ideal enterprise culture subject. Also necessary is an insistence on shouldering all the responsibility for one’s circumstances and a total embrace of continuous self-development for the purposes of achieving maximum marketability. Shannon did take personal responsibility for her lack of English grammar mastery, but unlike a participant in the study by Abelmann et  al. (2009), who refused to critique the Korean entrance exam system despite repeatedly failing to achieve high scores and admitting hers was not a personality suited for exams, Shannon voiced utter disdain for entrance exams in Taiwan, which she saw as an obstacle to achieving her goals. Shannon’s personal development project was also not oriented toward achieving mastery in a wide variety of areas for maximum flexibility, as Rachel’s was. Instead, Shannon’s competitive nature caused her to focus only on one area in which she had consistently surpassed others (spoken English), while becoming discouraged and abandoning areas in which she saw no chance of being ‘at the top’ (French).

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Shannon’s Further Struggle and Strategy at Saint Agnes

After her graduation from the Saint Agnes five-year junior college program, Shannon’s life did not change drastically. She was not accepted into the Translation and Interpretation department at the university in Taipei that she had applied at, and therefore went with her back-up plan of remaining at Saint Agnes and entering the two-year Translation and Interpretation program there. Despite the fact that she remained at Saint Agnes, however, Shannon, over the course of the 10 months between our May 2009 and March 2010 interviews, did undergo an attitudinal transformation. About a month into her first semester in the Saint Agnes two-year Translation and Interpretation program, Shannon sent me an email in which she lamented, ‘My life has been soooo miserable…I had a loooot of translation homework to do. And the teachers in our department are so strict and always give us a bunch of difficult works and technical article to interpret.’ She ended the email on an optimistic note though, telling me, ‘I think it’s getting better and better now.’ The reason it gradually got ‘better and better,’ she told me later when we met in a student socialization area on the Saint Agnes campus for our March 2010 interview, was that she simply got better at time management. ‘I get used to the pattern because I adjust my life – my time schedule,’ she reported. ‘I have to arrange this period of time I’m doing homework and another period of time I’m reading because our translating and interpreting requires a lot of outside reading.’ Outside reading (mostly American news magazines such as Time and Newsweek) was especially important for a course she was taking entitled Sight Translation. In this course, students were presented with a Chinese article and given just five minutes to read it before being asked to provide an English interpretation of one paragraph from the article in front of the class. Shannon described this course as quite challenging and went on to tell me, ‘Those articles are like politics, economy. Most of them are economic issues like recession…That requires me to read other articles or to memorize some other specific vocabulary that will save my time on checking the dictionary all the time.’ Shannon also described as challenging her Simultaneous Interpreting course, which involved listening to a conversation or speech, taking notes, and then interpreting based on those notes. She reported having positive learning experiences in both the Simultaneous Interpreting class and Sight Translation classes, mostly because, in these courses, she received instant feedback on her work.

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In her Translation course, however, Shannon reported receiving almost no feedback on the work she did for the class. As she explained Every week, we’ll have four articles to translate – two in Chinese into English and another two in English to Chinese. Yes, and in the previous week, we have to have done those articles, and next week, we’ll have a kind of presentation. The teacher will just call one of the students to come up the stage and present the translation work. Yes, and then he will also call on someone to give a comment – make a comment. And then he will just, like, correct the translation work. But uh, but I think it’s not really good because every single class, only one student will be called, and everybody’s translation is different. So last semester, I only have one chance to be called. And others – for the rest of the work – I have to write it all myself and think about whether it is wrong or right.

For this class of 40 students, providing extensive feedback on every one of the four translations each student did weekly would, of course, have been an impossible undertaking for the teacher. At the same time, however, receiving minimal comments and corrections only once per semester was clearly unacceptable, and Shannon’s complaints, I felt, were valid. While students could certainly learn from paying attention to critiques of their classmates’ work, each student’s translation would likely have very different problems. ‘Mainly we don’t use the same words,’ Shannon said. ‘I don’t know whether it is appropriate to use these words in this situation.’ Alternate words from those used in a translation being critiqued could very well be valid choices, but they could just as easily be inappropriate. Explaining how important she considered specific feedback to be for learning translation, she told me, ‘Then we will know whether it is good or not, so we can make the improvements. But no, we don’t have that chance.’ Her teacher would undoubtedly argue that doing four article translations per week is valuable practice whether feedback is received or not. Shannon saw it instead as pointless busywork. ‘You just write for fun,’ she said with exasperation.2 Shannon went into her first semester in the Translation and Interpretation program with her highly competitive spirit fully intact and found herself amongst similarly competitive students there. She told me that teachers had, in fact, commented on her cohort, saying that they were the most competitive bunch they had ever encountered. To illustrate how competitive some of her classmates were, Shannon told me a story about one student’s behavior in the Sight Translation class:

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One of the students, I would consider she is the number one student in our class because she has very good English ability and other European language ability. And one day she got up on the stage to present and she just made one – only one single mistake. And after that she cried because she thought that she was humiliated.

As competitive as Shannon herself was, even she considered crying over a single mistake to be quite extreme. She reported, however, that for this classmate and several others who had recently returned from time spent abroad, the rivalry was truly cutthroat. Shannon considered the linguistic abilities of these students to be vastly superior to her own, but this did not trigger in her the same sort of determination she had displayed when she was a junior high school student in the class with older high school students. In her Sight Translation and Simultaneous Interpretation classes, she couldn’t see any way that her work could ever come close, much less surpass that of these classmates, and she thus reported being far less competitive with her translation and interpretation work than she had been in academic English pursuits when I had talked to her just 10 months earlier. For the Translation course in which she had had only one opportunity to showcase her work, Shannon saw even less point in exerting the effort to compete with others. ‘In the translation works, if I did very well, maybe I won’t have the chance to present it and it’s meaningless,’ she told me. ‘So, I don’t put a lot of effort.’ Shannon also didn’t feel the need to try very hard in some other required courses that she could probably have achieved perfect grades in, had she exerted just a little more effort. Commenting, for example, on a listening class that she considered ridiculously easy, she said, ‘I think it’s just wasting time because I cannot learn anything.’ She went on to express frustration over the fact that in this listening class, the teacher did not allow her to do work for other classes and compared this attitude with that of the teacher she had had the previous semester: Last semester we had another teacher. She didn’t have a very good preparation for the class, but I think it’s okay because she let us do something. If we don’t want to just pay attention on the class, then we can do something else – just be silent and doing some work. I think that’s better because I can still take the exams. I can still get like 80 or 90% on the exam. And I can also know what you’re saying and I can grab the idea of what you are talking about. And I can answer your questions if you ask me. But I still can do something that I need to do – because if it is too easy for me, then I can do something else.

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Shannon acknowledged that most teachers would not consider it unreasonable to expect students to pay attention to the content of a lesson, but she argued that she was simply trying to manage her time as best she could. ‘The material is easy,’ she stressed again. ‘I just want to save the time for doing the work that I have to do…I don’t know. It’s just from the student’s point of view.’ Shannon’s Further Relations with English and French

In our March 2010 interview, Shannon reported continuing to work at jobs that positioned her as an English ‘expert.’ She told me that after returning to Saint Agnes in September of 2009, she resumed the same tutoring job at the on-campus language learning center that she had held at the time of our May 2009 interview, having discussions with tutees on topics of their choosing for the purpose of practicing their spoken English. Although she was no longer tutoring children in English and Chinese at the school off-campus at the time of our March 2010 interview, she had acquired an additional on-campus tutoring job and had started to conduct private tutoring sessions for high school students. The additional on-campus job involved the same sort of conversation practice that she provided students at the language learning center, but for this job, her tutees were Saint Agnes teachers instead of students. ‘Some teachers – not in the English department. In National Affairs – some teachers there,’ she told me. ‘Maybe they have really good skills on English reading or something, but they don’t have really good skill in speaking.’ It was a result of holding these conversation sessions with teachers that Shannon started conducting her private tutorials. ‘One of the teachers asked me to tutor her daughter,’ she explained. In total, Shannon did conversation tutoring for six hours every week – two hours at the language learning center, two hours tutoring National Affairs teachers, and two hours of private tutoring. Shannon also told me that during the summer of 2009, between her graduation from the Saint Agnes five-year junior college program and her entrance into the two-year Translation and Interpretation program, she had worked as a volunteer receptionist at a hotel, catering to the needs of English-speaking VIP guests that were in town for the World Games. The foreign clientele at this particular hotel normally tended to be Japanese, and the hotel’s regular staff members’ foreign language proficiency reflected this. ‘Most of them are good in Japanese and Chinese – not very good in English,’ Shannon explained. For a month, she worked full-time hours at the hotel and was expected to go to great lengths to serve the

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hotel’s VIP guests, such as members of the World Games organizing committee. ‘When they arrive, we have to go downstairs to welcome them for the elevator and then send them to their rooms,’ she informed me. ‘It requires conversation – not just bore them,’ she added with a laugh. She described this temporary volunteer work as ‘kind of a good experience,’ explaining that ‘Working in a hotel is kind of boring because [the VIPs] went out very early and they came back late. So, during that period of time, we have nothing to do.’ When we conducted our March 2010 interview, Shannon had also just returned from a stint as a delegate at the World Model United Nations conference that had been held the week before in Taipei. Each school that participated in this conference was allowed a delegation of 20 people. Saint Agnes’ delegation was the English Debate Society, but since there were only 15 students in this club, Shannon and a few of her friends had been invited to come along as delegates. Delegates were assigned specific countries to represent, and for the conference, they were expected to research the international affairs of their assigned countries and the positions their countries took on international issues in the year 1940. Shannon’s assigned country was Nepal. She reported finding the experience extremely valuable, but also quite tiring. As she explained I was every day so tired because, well, of course I can speak English, but we have to speak English on many different issues or specific topics. That’s more difficult for me…People were representing different countries and people went on the stage and said, ‘Well, we support the ceasefire immediately’ – something like this. But well, um – for me, I think it’s just repeat and repeat again and again. I don’t want to just stand there and say the things that is just like the others, but I cannot think of others that I can say. Yes, so I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to speak last week.

When Shannon said she ‘didn’t have a lot of opportunity to speak,’ she was referring to making statements in her Model UN role as the Nepal delegate. ‘We have a lot of chance to speak with other delegates after the conference,’ she went on to clarify. Indeed, it was interaction with other conference delegates during social activities at the end of each day that seemed to be the highlight of the conference, not only for Shannon, but also for other Saint Agnes delegates that I spoke to. ‘We always talked in English no matter if it was in the conference or after the conference,’ she said. ‘Whether on Metrotrain or on the bus, we still talked in English no matter we were staying with Chinese or foreigners.’ She went on to

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tell me that everyone was basically in English mode for the entire week and it didn’t seem at all strange for her to use English with her fellow Taiwanese during this trip. ‘Maybe it’s because I consider that week as very special,’ she mused. Although Shannon had had some experience using English as an international lingua franca – with her European internet friends, for instance – and she had certainly been well aware, on an intellectual level anyway, of the potential of English as a means to communicate with the world, it was 1800 World Model UN delegates converging on a convention center in Taipei and her actual experience there, interacting in English with large numbers of students from all over the globe, that truly made the reality of English as an international lingua franca hit home for her. As she explained Knowing how to speak English is a very, very good thing. Last week, I was kind of surprised that actually we can communicate – we only speak Chinese or the official language of a country – then we cannot communicate and even have that conference, and we cannot share the ideas, have the discussion, and people are just isolated…Before, I talked to the Spanish guy, but this time, I think is very special because people from all around the world – like Venezuela and some – India, and the people that I have never met…a lot of German people and Spanish people and some people with accents that I cannot really understand…And it’s amazing!

Shannon summed up the impact her participation in this conference had on her and her view of English by calling it ‘the real experience of how important the language is.’ The World Model UN experience was, for Shannon, not an entirely positive one though, for during discussions in the committees and caucuses at the actual conference (as opposed to the social activities at the end of each day), she reported feeling painfully self-conscious about the content of what she was saying. She didn’t want to just repeat statements like, ‘I support the ceasefire’ that other delegates were making again and again, and she longed to make substantive comments, but couldn’t think of anything to say that she considered suitably meaningful or intellectual. Referring back to the story she had told me in our May 2009 interview about when she thought she was speaking to the McDonald’s employee in English, but was in fact so nervous that it was actually Chinese that was coming out of her mouth, she told me, ‘I consider this experience just like the embarrassing experience that I had in the United States’ and went on to explain

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When that experience happened, that makes me feel terrible and scared to speak English. And this time, it’s the same – not afraid of speaking English, but I’m afraid that I’m speaking something meaningless. It’s based on the content. Before, I’m afraid of talking in English, but now I’m not – no longer. I’m no longer afraid of speaking English, but I’m afraid of speaking something meaningless.

While Shannon reported having no such fear of saying something vacuous or superficial when using English to communicate in social situations, such as the Model UN social activities, ‘discussing on the specific issue and very, very serious issues,’ she maintained, was a very different matter. Having achieved a level of English proficiency that enabled her to participate as an active member in an imagined global community of English users (Ryan, 2006; Seilhamer, 2013, 2015), Shannon was now deeming this level of proficiency inadequate for confident participation in specific social fields that she perceived as having somewhat different valuations. Like Gigi, she was now striving for a higher level of proficiency that would allow her to communicate her thoughts eloquently on a wide variety of specific topics. All of her experiences at the World Model UN conference, Shannon told me, had served as a sort of wake-up call, reminding her to take full advantage of each and every learning opportunity that was available to her. Comparing her attitude before and after the conference, she explained Before, I just want to graduate as soon as possible, and I just don’t want to stay in here wasting my time doing something meaningless. But after I went to Taipei, now I think I still have a lot of chances to learn in school, so I should put some more effort on what I’m doing now – especially on the language learning.

Both the experience of seeing first-hand on a large scale the importance of English proficiency at the World Model UN conference and her perceived inability to express adequately meaningful thoughts on serious issues there, Shannon asserted, had served to push her harder – ‘Push me harder on reading, on studying, on focusing on my study,’ she proclaimed. And she vowed then in our March 2010 interview that she would indeed do her best to exert more effort in her remaining days at Saint Agnes, regardless of how remedial or meaningless she felt her lessons to be. Shannon told me in our March 2010 interview that she no longer talked with her internet friends from France and Italy, but she continued

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to maintain communication with her Spanish internet buddy. Her interaction with this Spanish friend, however, had been drastically reduced from the twice-per-week sessions she had reported in May of 2009. ‘He doesn’t have a lot of time to come on the internet, so maybe now once or twice a month,’ she explained. Even though she had never met this Spanish internet friend in person, Shannon told me that she had come to regard him as a good friend. And from her description of their conversations, the cyberspace interaction that the two of them engaged in did indeed seem quite different from the superficial small talk typical of much internet discussion. ‘We’ll always discuss some issue that is very serious,’ she told me. ‘Like recently, we have discussed Arab and Israel conflicts for quite a long time.’ Despite their political focus, these conversations, Shannon maintained, never got heated or angry. Both of them were simply seeking outside perspectives on political issues. ‘We just ask different aspects,’ she told me. ‘Like I’m in here. I receive messages from all the Taiwanese voices, but I still want to hear some other aspects from Europeans or Spanish people.’ Shannon also continued to use Facebook, and although fewer than 10% of her 300+ Facebook friends were foreigners, she still used a large amount of English on the site for her status postings and comments on friends’ photos and postings. These included short comments, such as ‘I hate my hair!!!!!’ and ‘Shame on ME!!!!,’ but also longer bits of English text, such as the following response to a friend asking how a class presentation went: Oh, thanx for asking. The presentation was great, but i was too nervous. I think Aaron liked it, so i guess it was not that bad lo.. BTW, we will meet very soon…and don’t remember the test…haha!!!3

Another one of Shannon’s Facebook status postings in English that really got my attention just days before our March 2010 interview was ‘I’m going to France for a whole year in the end of this year!!!!!!!!!!!!!’ Considering all the disparaging comments she had made about French just 10 months earlier, I was quite surprised to read this. In our interview a few days later, Shannon brought up the topic by saying, ‘I know I said I hate French,’ and added that she still considered her prior experience learning the language ‘terrible.’ She then informed me that she had applied for and received a place in an exchange student program with a university in France. Explaining her decision to apply for and accept this opportunity in spite of her still decidedly negative feelings regarding the French language, Shannon told me

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Maybe because I read too much news and articles about the recession and unemployment – the increasing unemployment. And so I think only English – to speak only English and Chinese is not enough, and there’s a lot of people in Taiwan can speak English. Maybe they don’t speak that well, but they can. So that made me feel like I shouldn’t waste the time that I put before learning French.

Shannon depicted her decision then as a pragmatic one – an attempt to make herself more marketable in an increasingly competitive job market. She also admitted, however, that her dissatisfaction with the Saint Agnes Translation and Interpretation program influenced her decision as well – at least the decision to apply for a year-long exchange program instead of one lasting only a single semester. ‘I just didn’t want to stay in this department!’ she remarked with a laugh. And taking part in this year-long program did indeed enable her to escape her Translation and Interpretation department, for upon returning to Taiwan after a year, all her requirements for graduation from Saint Agnes would be fulfilled. ‘Our department is not that strict,’ she told me. ‘If you take 25 credits there, you can cover it no matter what kind of class you take.’ Shannon was optimistic about her chances of gaining a far higher level of French proficiency in France than she had been able to achieve studying the language in Taiwan. She was fully expecting, however, to have a difficult time there, at least at the beginning. ‘I know the beginning will be very difficult because of the language problem,’ she told me. ‘I’m not very good in French, so maybe at the beginning, I’ll use English more than French, I guess – if I can.’ Although she acknowledged that she would surely have to endure French grammar instruction at the university’s French language school, she envisioned her experience learning French in France as far less stressful than her experience studying French in Taiwan – more like her introduction to English when she was in elementary school: Basically, I mentioned before that Taiwanese teachers always teaching grammar, and I hate that. So, I just want to go over there and, like, start from learning daily conversation and, like, what I learned with English. Um – like when I first learned English, I started from the daily conversation and the spelling and the pronunciation, and now I just want the same pattern as I learned English.

Shannon was fairly certain that she would be able to replicate this pattern with her French language learning in France. She would, of course,

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be able to focus on conversational French in informal social situations there. The extent to which the French instruction in her classrooms at the French language school would conform to the pattern she envisioned, however, was far less certain. Throughout our discussion of her impending experience in France, Shannon repeatedly reiterated how ironic it was that she was willingly subjecting herself to a whole year of French immersion. ‘I just didn’t want to have any relationship with French before!’ she remarked at one point. This plan, however, was actually not wholly inconsistent with what she had told me before. In our May 2009 interview, she had, after all, said that she could very well take up French study again one day if she had a good reason to do so. And while they had nothing to do with any warm feelings for France, the French people or the language itself, increasing her marketability in the job market and escaping a college program she was disillusioned with were, for Shannon, indeed very valid reasons. Shannon’s personal development project, while still nowhere near as ambitious as Rachel’s, had expanded to include French, and she appeared to be embracing the enterprise culture aspiration of greater flexibility in the job marketplace. In our March 2010 interview, Shannon told me that after returning from France, she still planned to work for a year or two to save money to study abroad. Instead of doing so with the definite intention of studying translation and interpretation, however, Shannon’s updated plan was to use that time that she is working and saving money to investigate other options. As she explained I would still work for a year and saving money for further studying, but not on translation and interpretation. No, I think that I should say not 100% sure, but maybe. I don’t know – because I want to use the whole year while I am working and also find some other field that I’m interested or I have to learn for – because in the college, we always learn English language, French and interpreting. Then I don’t have other time to think of what else that I’m interested in.

Just as she had not completely ruled out future study of French in our May 2009 interview, Shannon here did not absolutely discount the possibility that she might continue with translation and interpretation when she returns to school. Her time in the Translation and Interpretation program at Saint Agnes had indeed dampened her enthusiasm for the field considerably though, and she thought that there must certainly be some profession that she could be more passionate about. She did have several

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ideas in mind, such as public relations and advertising, that she planned to investigate, but her intention was to keep her options open. Conclusion to Shannon’s Story

From the start of her English learning experience at age nine, Shannon’s investment had been directly in the English language (or conceptualized slightly differently, in her identity as an English speaker). This direct investment was made with an eye toward the future she imagined for herself in the United States – an image that had been well-nurtured, with Disney videos when she was very young, her first English teacher’s images of a luxurious American lifestyle and the pact she and her junior high school friend made to attend UCLA together. Although she eventually abandoned her dream of attending UCLA, she continued to envision herself studying, living and later working in the United States, focusing her investment specifically on the image of herself interacting and using standardized American English with Americans in Washington or Chicago. Even with Shannon’s recent revelation about the international utility of English at the World Model UN conference, she still, at the time of our March 2010 interview, claimed to associate English most strongly with the United States, and acquiring American-accented English continued to be the goal she strove for – a goal that, in my opinion, she had already pretty much achieved, for her accent was remarkably similar to that of many young people in Southern California. While she didn’t use like as a discourse marker nearly as profusely as Audrey did, her language, throughout our interviews, was also peppered with this feature quite common in the speech of North American young people.4 Without a doubt, however, Shannon’s investment in English has been driven most relentlessly by her fierce competitiveness and desire to always ‘be at the top’ where English language proficiency was concerned. While other focal participants also invested directly in the language for the purpose of retaining the good at English aspects of their identities, this was truly an obsession for Shannon, for she was not satisfied with viewing herself as simply good at English. Until the final months of this study, when her competitiveness began to wane, it was being the best at English, relative to her peers, that fueled her investment in English as she constantly fought to claim and retain this aspect of her identity. Various experiences, such as her temporary hotel work assisting World Games VIP guests, being enlisted by her mother to speak English to her brother and her jobs tutoring not only children and fellow college students but also college professors in conversational English, all served to position

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her as an expert in spoken English, reinforcing her identity as someone with English abilities superior to others around her. Shannon’s story, however, is not exclusively one of triumphs and successful investments. In instances where her efforts seemed to be in vain and she saw no hope of outshining those around her, as was the case with her study of French and courses in the Saint Agnes Translation and Interpretation program, she greatly reduced her level of investment and came to regard these endeavors quite negatively. Her confidence also took a beating with university entrance exams, which tend to focus almost exclusively on the intricacies of English grammar and thus provided an arguably less than accurate assessment of her overall English expertise. Although she diligently began preparing for these exams well in advance, Shannon reported that her confidence waned with each practice exam she completed, and ultimately, she failed to achieve a score high enough to gain admittance to the prestigious national university she wanted to attend. Such an experience would, of course, not be good for anyone’s confidence, but for someone like Shannon, whose self-image relied so heavily on her superior English abilities (with spoken English anyway), it was devastating. It was this entrance exam experience and her resulting loss of confidence that served as the backdrop for our May 2009 interview, where she was considering a greater focus on grammar for English classes she might teach in the future, despite her frequently stated aversion to this pedagogical practice. In our March 2010 interview, she did, in fact, attribute such questioning to the fact that the May 2009 interview occurred just days after she took the university entrance exam – an experience that temporarily decimated her self-confidence. ‘Every time when I’m facing the exam, I feel terrible,’ she explained. Shannon happily reported during our March 2010 interview, however, that the diminished confidence she felt during the entrance exam period and her more recent lack of effort exerted in the Translation and Interpretation program had both been only temporary. ‘Before, I’m kind of losing confidence,’ she told me. ‘But now, I think it’s getting more and more after I have several experiences.’ When I asked her what specific experiences helped her to regain her confidence, she replied, ‘Like the World MUN [Model UN]. Yes, and working in the hotel and, like, in the future I go to France – like the experience that normally people won’t get.’ It was through focusing on these experiences that set her apart from others and the opportunity for such experiences in the future that helped Shannon overcome the blows that had been dealt to her confidence as an English user. Although some of her experiences at the World Model UN had alerted her to the fact that she still had a ways to go before she

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could confidently express herself when discussing some topics, it seemed that these World Model UN experiences, like her experience at the Los Angeles McDonald’s years earlier, were serving to fuel further investment rather than stifle it. The chance to study in France for a year is indeed an opportunity that many Taiwanese would not get. To start with, many families would not be able to afford the expense of sending a child abroad for a year.5 Shannon recognized her fortunate position and was wary of taking for granted her access to such opportunities. Thus, her self-improvement project intensified with her vow to take full advantage of her privileged situation. Shannon’s story vividly illustrates both the power and pitfalls of extreme competitiveness in language learning. All is well when intense investment in a language does result in perfect scores on tests and an image of oneself as superior to others where that language is concerned, but failure to meet such stellar expectations for oneself can result in overwhelming frustration and a debilitating loss of confidence. Throughout her narratives, Shannon showed acute awareness of her own competitive nature and the extent to which her sense of self relied on her English language abilities setting her apart from others, explicitly pointing out that her use of English on Facebook and practices like pretending to be a foreigner were indeed efforts to project her identity as an English speaker and distinguish her from others in Taiwanese society with decidedly lower levels of English proficiency. With Shannon ending her year of participation in this study with her departure for a year in France, I was left pondering a number of questions about what that year would bring for her. Would her English abilities continue to serve the function of differentiating her from others in France? To what extent would the French language skills she had already obtained in her courses at Saint Agnes enable her to effectively compete with others in her French-as-asecond-language classroom there? Could her expectation of acquiring French proficiency naturalistically through informal conversations, with little or no regard for grammar, actually come to pass? Could good at French possibly become an integral aspect of Shannon’s identity? I was sure that her year of French immersion would strengthen her French skills to the point that she would be more competitive on the job market, but the extent of the French proficiency she would obtain and the route she would take to get there were anything but certain. Just as she left the possibilities for her future career wide open, so too were the possible learning trajectories for Shannon as she set off to France for the next phase of her continuing quest ‘to be at the top.’

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Notes (1) Compared to Audrey’s lament that she only understood 40–50% of what teachers said that first year, Shannon’s positive evaluation of being able to understand half of what was said would certainly be a clear case of glass half-empty/half-full perspectives. (2) When I interviewed the faculty member in charge of curriculum development for the Translation and Interpretation department, I told him about the lack of feedback Shannon had reported for this class (without identifying the teacher by name), and he assured me that such pedagogical practices were not at all sanctioned by the department. He asked me to urge Shannon to come to him with her grievances, so the teacher could be identified and reprimanded. I did pass this message along to Shannon, but I don’t know if she contacted him. (3) When her Facebook addressee expressed confusion in a subsequent post about the test she had been instructed to not remember, Shannon quickly followed up with a correction, stating, ‘Haha…it should be “PLZ remember the dictation test” lo…’ Note: The ellipses here were included in Shannon’s original post and do not indicate excluded text. (4) Tagliamonte (2005: 1911) describes like, just and so (used as discourse markers) as ‘salient features of Toronto Youth English’ and notes that in her own study, use of like as a discourse marker declined as her informants approached the age of 20. Fuller (2003: 372), however, describes ‘the age boundaries for use of like’ as beginning with ‘speakers born in or after the late 1950’s’. (5) Saint Agnes did provide some financial assistance for students chosen to participate in its study abroad programs, but this did not begin to cover all the costs, and participation in these programs was still prohibitively expensive for many Saint Agnes students like Rachel, who came from families with more limited means.

9 Cross-Participant Analysis and Conclusions

Having delved into the lives of the four focal participants, chronicling their feelings and experiences in some detail with just a bit of analysis, I will now, in this final chapter, broaden the scope for some synthesis of my findings. Addressing the various theoretical issues discussed in Chapter 2, I will present a cross-participant analysis in which the main themes from the four focal participant stories will be discussed – with first a look at the capital conversion processes at play in their stories, followed by intersectional questioning that focuses mostly on the role of gender in these processes. I will then conclude with a discussion of the prospects for change with regard to inequalities, given the natural human desire for distinction. Capital Conversion

All four of the focal participants’ stories do indeed illustrate, to varying degrees, the efforts made by their parents to nurture practices that would increase the symbolic, cultural and social capital that could potentially be converted later to economic capital. Audrey’s parents, with an eye toward cultivating practices that accrue higher symbolic capital in the macro-Taiwan market, chose to address their children with Mandarin Chinese instead of Tai-yü, even though they used Tai-yü to converse with adult family members. For Gigi and Shannon, English abilities began to be nurtured early on with Gigi’s mother enlisting the services of her own buxiban’s pool of teachers to provide young Gigi with private tutoring and Shannon’s mother sourcing English language Disney videotapes for her daughter. The mothers of Gigi and Shannon were also both themselves fairly proficient English speakers, occasionally modeling English use for their daughters – especially Gigi’s mother, who taught English at her buxiban. But even in (the more typical) cases where parents 173

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lacked the skills that would allow them to carry out this sort of modeling, whatever economic capital they could muster was marshalled to the cause of cultivating the symbolic capital that English skills offered – through private supplementary English lessons at some point during participants’ childhoods. I readily admit that before interviewing participants for this study, I had a decidedly negative view of private supplementary education, for in addition to resenting the role it plays in exacerbating and maintaining social inequity, I considered it an unreasonable burden for children that deprived them of their childhoods and valuable play time. Several participants of this study, however, reported having marvelous experiences in buxiban and private group lessons during their elementary and junior high school years, crediting these experiences with instilling in them a passion for English. Shannon, in fact, gave this credit entirely to a single teacher. In her critical discourse analysis of Taiwanese buxiban advertising, Lin (2009: 9) asserts, ‘Private English education in Taiwan has been so rampant that it diminishes the role of public education.’ Price (2014) makes similar assertions. And judging from the narratives of this study’s participants, this does indeed appear to definitely be the case. All four focal participants had some form of supplementary English education during their childhoods, and these supplementary classes were often depicted as being vastly superior or considerably more challenging than their public school English classes. Shannon, for instance, spoke at length about her supplementary English education experiences, but had very little to say about her public elementary school English classes, even when I asked her about these specifically. She seemed to consider them quite inconsequential – hardly worth commenting on. Non-focal participant Fiara, who had not had any supplementary English education before elementary school English instruction began for her in the third grade, reported being at the other side of the English proficiency divide. ‘I was kind of shocked when I know that many people in my class, they have studied English earlier,’ she remembered, and went on to describe a particular classroom incident that was still etched in her memory: We played a game in class, and the game was like, we have cards and each card has a picture on it, and it’s rulers or pencils or something. Once you’re showed a card, you have to say out loud the name of the thing of the card. So, I, actually, I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know how to say ‘pencil,’ how to say ‘eraser,’ how to say ‘rulers.’ I felt very ashamed.

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Unwilling to accept the shame and intimidation she felt as a result of her classmates’ superior knowledge of English, Fiara requested that her parents enroll her in a cram school. They agreed to do so, and her English abilities soon surpassed those of classmates she had previously been intimidated by, allowing her to eventually achieve her own sense of English superiority. Shannon and Audrey clearly did not regard their supplementary English lessons as a burden, nor did Rachel when she was attending the buxiban lessons that she enjoyed in Taipei. Gigi may not have been terribly enthusiastic about her private tutoring as a young child, but definitely appreciated the advantage it gave her over her classmates later in public school English classes. Participants’ experiences with English supplementary education show that these lessons can indeed play a powerful role in not only establishing children’s linguistic capital from a young age, but also in helping to initially establish a passionate interest in the language, particularly when students are lucky enough to have a teacher they consider to be an ideal role model. With such stories of positive early experiences in buxiban and private lessons, it is easy to see why the English supplementary education industry in Taiwan is flourishing. These courses can go well beyond the basic instruction of the typical public elementary school classroom, often using more active participatory pedagogical approaches, appealing to the demands of parents and students alike. The societal inequality and proficiency divide in public school English classrooms that private supplementary courses exacerbate is, therefore, unlikely to subside, and the identities of those on both sides of the divide will be impacted – by having English abilities superior or inferior to that of their classmates. When participants started attending Saint Agnes, they entered a field that offered high amounts of ‘campus capital’ (Abelmann et al., 2009: 233) in the form of plentiful study abroad opportunities, and one where use of English and other foreign language resources had only positive indexicalities, with virtually no chance of interlocutors associating ‘snobbish’ indexicalities from the use of foreign language resources. In smaller fields within Saint Agnes, such as the English Debate Society, the positive valuation of English resources was even more pronounced, populated as it was with a large percentage of members who had previously lived overseas and, according to Gigi, regarded routine use of English for casual interactions as quite normal, even though all interlocutors were Taiwanese. These and other returnee students in my participants’ class served as models and competitors for my participants, and their presence at Saint Agnes increased the potential for social capital accumulation

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among my participants and other regular non-returnee Saint Agnes students, for they were just the sort of ‘vivid people’ that Gigi’s mother had led her to envision – personifications of Taiwanese competitiveness and internationalization. They would indeed be considered worthwhile connections to have, and while I’m not aware of any instances in which my participants have actually converted their social capital associations with these returnee classmates into economic capital, the potential for such future conversion does certainly exist. Audrey and Rachel’s characterization of English as a tool and Gigi’s as a ‘door to the world’ also highlight its function in their lives as a capital conversion tool – cultural capital that they managed to convert into social capital by using it to access foreign communities and establish relationships that would otherwise not have been available to them. The romantic relationships that English abilities made possible for Gigi, Audrey and Rachel provided these three with considerable social capital. Rachel accessing client communities as a result of her English and French abilities is an obvious case of conversion to economic capital since she did indeed benefit financially from her workplace interactions. Audrey’s community of foreign friends, Amedeo’s Italian friends, the American couple that Rachel befriended, and the World Model UN. community that Shannon participated in are just a few of the other groups and individuals that participants enjoyed significant interaction with throughout the course of this study. And through these interactions, participants acquired additional symbolic, cultural and social capital that not only further distinguished them from the Taiwanese masses, but also provided them with enhanced confidence in their linguistic abilities. Being positioned in some way as English experts was a common occurrence that aided their conversion of linguistic capital to symbolic capital. This positioning occurred with strangers, such as the girl at the nightclub who approached Rachel for advice on being able to speak English to foreigners, and also with family members and others close to participants. One example would be Shannon’s mother enlisting her as an English conversation partner for her brother, so that his spoken English could improve. Another would be non-focal participant Negra’s family members frequently asking her to translate the English ingredients or instructions on product packages when no Chinese translation was provided. Within various workplace fields as well, in both volunteer and paid positions that participants held, my participants were positioned as English experts, relative to the skills of the society as a whole. Shannon’s tutorials with college professors much older than herself likely had an

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especially strong impact on her view of herself as someone with superior English language abilities. As they positioned themselves in their capital conversion practices, participants largely reified the habitus norms of the fields they interacted in, indexing dominant language ideologies with their use of the linguistic resources at their disposal – looking, of course, to only index the positive elements of each indexical field. And the indexical field for English resources invariably included the notions of internationalization and competitiveness. All the participants voiced agreement with the language ideology, so prevalent in Taiwan and incessantly propagated in government discourse, that obtaining English proficiency was indeed a necessary first step to achieving internationalization, reiterating again and again the belief that English was essential for making one’s voice heard outside of Taiwan. This strong association between English and internationalization was emphasized most by Gigi, with her characterization of English as ‘a door to the world’ and her assertions that English ability could help alleviate the widespread ignorance that she felt afflicted Taiwan. All participants seemed quite steadfast in their belief that all young Taiwanese had to learn English to some degree, for if they failed to do so, they would surely be unemployable – casualties of globalization and (although they didn’t term it as such) neoliberalism. As Rachel bluntly stated, ‘It’s a requirement…so you cannot say anything. You need to accept it.’ And Taiwanese young people do, in fact, appear to unquestioningly accept the necessity of English learning. When another scholar conducting research with Saint Agnes students asked one of her participants if she ever asked herself why she was learning English, the participant replied, ‘Well, never. Everybody learns English. My classmates learn English, and so do I’ (Huang, 2016: 30). Performative indexing of international identities of distinction is best exemplified in the narratives of Shannon, who proclaimed unequivocally that she sometimes engaged in ‘jokes’ to show off her English abilities and distinguish herself from the majority of people in Taiwanese society, speaking English and pretending to be a foreigner with no Mandarin Chinese abilities in public places like night markets and the High Speed Rail station. Performatively projecting distinction through linguistic abilities, however, was more commonly seen online – especially on Facebook, where copious amounts of English use appeared to be the norm among participants and other Saint Agnes students. As Shannon remarked, ‘We seldom use Chinese on that [Facebook].’ She went on to proclaim that when students from other schools see English used in

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Facebook posts, they think ‘Okay, this is a Saint Agnes student,’ highlighting the role that Saint Agnes plays in the English ideological field in Taiwan and its association with discourses of competitiveness and internationalization. Use of French was occasionally used online as well to performatively index multilingual identities of distinction. Recall that when I asked Audrey about her use of French in Taiwan, she replied I guess my French is usually for the function of surprising people cuz not many people in Taiwan speak French…I guess it’s just to make myself different…I like the feeling when I surprise people by speaking French.

With her identified function of ‘surprising people,’ much of Audrey’s face-to-face French use in Taiwan could thus also be characterized as performative. In short, we can identify instance after instance of participants’ experiences largely falling in line with what Bourdieusian theory would predict – they accrued linguistic and other cultural capital, in part due to the resources their middle class families were able to provide, and were, by various means, able to convert this cultural capital to social and symbolic capital to achieve distinction in the Taiwanese fields they inhabited. The fact that Rachel’s family was decidedly working class rather than middle class complicates this storyline only slightly, for she was able to benefit from the same resources as the other participants (buxiban and a Saint Agnes education), even if her mother had to sacrifice more than other participants’ parents did to provide her with these resources. But Rachel’s case does not serve as validation for an argument that if parents of lesser means just scrimp, save and sacrifice in order to provide their children some of the same resources that middle class children enjoy, their children are sure to have employer after employer offering reasonably good jobs, as Rachel experienced. Not only was Rachel exceptionally extroverted and driven, but there were also other factors at play as well – factors that a class-focused Bourdieusian analysis sheds little light on. And that is why it is appropriate to apply some intersectional questioning here. Intersectional Questioning

The undeniable role that gender played in my participants’ language learning experiences necessitates here some intersectional questioning in which we probe this role - including the ways in which they employed gender capital in their quests for distinction. These women were remarkably

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successful in befriending foreigners, some of whom would become their boyfriends. The profits that resulted from their interactions with foreign men in both platonic and romantic relationships ranged from the increased speaking practice with Skype buddies to trips abroad paid for by boyfriends. And the role that foreign friends played in developing their secondary habitus dispositions was indeed substantial. Amedeo, for example, engaged in explicit pedagogy to convince Gigi that musicians’ works should be evaluated without regard to their personal lives or addictions and Audrey found, in the community of her new foreign friends living in Taiwan, a field in which she claimed she could actually be herself more. But regardless of the extent of the benefits of my participants’ interactions with foreign friends, their success in establishing these contacts demands a closer look at some of the field dynamics – the contextual circumstances that structured their success and constrained it. In the first chapter of this book, I noted that some of the same ‘intersecting vectors’ identified by Kelsky (2001: 25-26) as characterizing Japanese women’s transnational cosmopolitanism – ‘(domestic) economic disenfranchisement and (global) economic privilege, gendered discrimination and gendered opportunity, racial belonging and racial exclusions, sexual objectification and erotic desire’ – were also relevant to my Taiwanese participants’ gendered experiences, and I shall here examine some of these intersecting vectors. The fact that my participants were all young and physically attractive (by Taiwanese criteria as well as the criteria of the relevant foreign cultures) certainly contributed to their success in attracting the foreign friends that would aid their distinction endeavors. While personality variables, such as extreme extroversion, could serve to compensate for or override physical imperfections like being overweight or having a bad complexion, for my participants, it didn’t need to. Even for Shannon, who had considerably less in-person contact with foreigners than the other participants and no romantic relationship with a foreigner throughout the course of the study, being physically attractive in a way that is considered feminine (feminine capital), or perhaps the female capital advantage of simply having a female body (Huppatz, 2009) likely facilitated her success in finding European Skype friends. I’m not suggesting here that my participants were consciously attempting to deploy their good looks for the advantages that doing so could achieve, and I’m quite certain that they would all vigorously deny consciously doing that. Their physical attractiveness though surely played a role not only in their success at acquiring friends and romantic attachments, but also other endeavors, such as securing employment. Of course, physical

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attractiveness could also disadvantage individuals in some workplace fields or perhaps have little influence. As previously stated, at the intersections, it’s often difficult or impossible to determine what factors, or combination of factors, are to credit or blame for outcomes. But while physical attractiveness can serve as gender capital in endeavors like securing employment or making friends online, the benefits to be had can also come at a cost, as Rachel found out from her experience with sexual harassment from her amorous boss at the renewable energy company and Gigi discovered with ‘perverts’ on Skype. Physical attractiveness also generally has a shelf life as far as its potential to serve as gender capital goes, with older individuals likely accruing fewer benefits from it than my 20 and 21-year-old participants did. Of course, it’s no surprise to anyone that those considered attractive will generally have an easier time succeeding in any endeavor than those who are not, and this is by no means a gendered phenomenon. Attractive Taiwanese men would similarly have advantages over those considered unattractive in endeavors like getting jobs and meeting foreigners that might further their foreign language proficiency. Just as Kelsky (2001) reveals to be the case in Japan though, in Taiwan, the scenario of local men attracting foreign women is not a common one. Although foreign women (predominantly Canadians) are represented in the foreign (mostly English teacher) populations of Kaohsiung and Taipei, I seldom observed these women interacting socially with Taiwanese men – much less engaged in romantic relationships with them. Kelsky (2001: 239) highlights an ‘unspoken code of Tokyo social life’ – that due to perceptions of Japanese men as closed-minded, traditional and emasculated, and white women as mannish and aggressive, ‘[w]hite men and Japanese women belonged together; white women and Japanese men did not.’ The relative scarcity of white female/Taiwanese male coupledom in Taiwan compared to the commonplace occurrence of Taiwanese female/white male couples indicates that such an ‘unspoken code’ is in effect in Taiwan to some degree as well. It is Taiwanese women’s attraction to (but simultaneous ambivalence toward) Western men that Moskowitz (2008) discusses in his ethnographic work examining the cultures of Western-style nightclubs in Taipei that, like the club in Kaohsiung in which Audrey first began establishing her network of foreign friends, cater to both a foreign and Taiwanese clientele. As Audrey pointed out, ‘clubbing stuff for Taiwanese, it’s still something bad,’ and Moskowitz (2008: 331) explains why this is the case, highlighting the reputation of one particular Taipei ‘foreign club,’ Laowai, as a ‘crass meat market’ that serves to confirm dominant Taiwanese perceptions of Westerners as free and sexually

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decadent. This is a perception that is reinforced by images Taiwanese see in Western media and by the behavior of so many young Westerners who come to Taiwan for just a year or two immediately after graduating from university, enthusiastically embracing the hedonistic image the Taiwanese public expects of them. Noting that although his focus is on Laowai, the same observations apply to similar establishments, Moskowitz (2008: 330) points out that the club’s appeal ‘arises precisely from its bad reputation…Working with Taiwanese premises about Western thought and behavior, both Taiwanese and Westerners, women and men, act more aggressively than they ever would dream of doing outside the confines of the club.’ He goes on to highlight the fact that for those there to engage in behavior that would be deemed decadent by the vast majority of Taiwanese, as well as for those simply there to observe the action,1 ‘“foreign clubs” such as Laowai provide an affordable setting to explore alternative lifestyles and identities’ (Moskowitz, 2008: 332). Indeed, the sheer diversity of lifestyles on display at these clubs is unlikely to be encountered elsewhere in Taiwan. As Moskowitz (2008: 330) points out, ‘[W]here else in Taiwan can one find several college co-eds voluntarily dancing on a bar counter, squeezed between a gay couple and a 75-year-old man, all of whom are flanked by men and women from countries spanning the globe?’ While Gigi and Rachel were nowhere near as immersed in Taiwan’s ‘foreign club’ culture as Audrey was, the diverse and international environments these establishments offer appealed to them and both told me that they go to them from time to time. In my first interview with her, Gigi commented on young Taiwanese being attracted to the ‘exotic’ international environment: There are lots of foreigners – customers there, and, you see, everybody – especially young people – they want to go to this kind of place. They want to go to uh – exotic place, I would say – that people there are foreigners and English-speaking people. And then they feel like – they feel good.

One of Moskowitz’s informants, focusing on the foreign music played in these clubs, voices similar sentiments: If you go to clubs the music is all in English because people like foreigners. If you go to a bar or club you want to listen to foreign music because you feel superior – if you go to a club and they are playing Chinese music you would just walk out. Club culture is just more foreign. That’s part of the reason people like to go, because it is foreign. Young people go to

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clubs and young people like US culture, so listening to Chinese songs in this context is not fashionable. (Moskowitz, 2008: 333)

Interrogating Moskowitz’s informant’s statement about young people in Taiwan liking US culture is in order here. Extremely pro-American attitudes have been cultivated since the Cold War times of KMT-imposed martial law, when two of the main canons of KMT ideological appeal were anti-communism and pro-Americanism (Lee & Yang, 2006). Lin (2015: 8) comments on the prolonged Taiwanese obsession with the United States, stating that ‘For a long time, Taiwanese indulged themselves in US imperialism, the belief that everything about the US should be the model for Taiwan to learn from, and that included the total package of capitalism, the free market and the pattern of political disputes.’ But the politically motivated KMT-orchestrated embrace of America has not been limited to political and economic issues. As K.H. Chen (2010: 186-187) emphasizes, it has extended very much into the realm of popular culture: Taiwan’s popular culture has a long tradition of Japanophilia; the Korean Wave (Korean popular culture circulated widely during the last decade) that swept through Asia has created its share of Taiwanese Korea-philes; and there are even groups of Taiwanese Shanghai-philes. But no one speaks of Americaphilia. The desire for America is so deep that we have no easy way of addressing it.

Moskowitz (2008: 333) points out, however, that ‘[i]n much of East Asia, images of the West have never evinced pure admiration or envy. Rather, they have always been laced with ambivalence about the other and the self, as well as the ambiguous power relations between the two.’ He goes on to liken Taiwanese women’s involvement with Western men to the cases that Kelsky (2001) observed in Japan – not a stereotypical scenario of Asian women being exploited by Western men, but instead Taiwanese women exerting active agency in pursuit of transnational identities. I believe this to be the case with my participants as well. It should be noted here, before I go on, that Gigi, Audrey and Rachel all vehemently objected to the notion that desire to practice English or fascination with the West affected their choice of boyfriends, insisting in each case that getting together with a foreign love interest was pure happenstance – a chance occurrence that they welcomed, but did not actively seek out. Regardless of whether they initially sought out relationships specifically with foreigners though, they did truly relish the way these

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relationships contributed to the construction of their transnational identities of distinction. With Taiwan’s present-day status as highly developed and cosmopolitan – a leading world economy, the power differential between Taiwanese women and Western men where economic matters are concerned is arguably negligible in most cases, as I believe it was for Gigi and Amedeo and for Audrey and Greg. For Rachel’s case with her French boyfriend, however, there clearly was a power differential – not only in terms of money matters, with him paying for the bulk of their expenses when they lived together and also funding the majority of the costs for her two trips to France, but also in terms of age. When they initially got together, after all, he was an older man (in his mid-twenties, I believe) pursuing a relationship with a girl who was barely 16 years old. That said, Rachel, even at 16, was not one to passively acquiesce to anyone and I suspect that she, more often than not, had the upper hand in her relationship with this older Frenchman. It should also be noted that Gigi, Audrey and Rachel’s relationships with foreigners all had the blessings of their respective families. This is significant because Taiwanese society, in general, is not entirely accepting of romantic relationships between Taiwanese women and Western men. As previously mentioned, societal perceptions of Western men are marked by both admiration and ambivalence. After identifying coexisting positive and negative Taiwanese media representations of Western males (both as a gentlemanly Prince Charming and as an immoral and uncivilized threat to traditional values), Moskowitz (2008: 342) highlights a widespread belief: …that one should be wary of marrying westerners because of their famed moral shortcomings – they are too selfish, too unreliable, and too immoral to be taken seriously as marriage prospects. Of course this might be exactly what one wants from a short-term tryst, but actual marriage to foreign men is often viewed with suspicion and can label women marrying them as promiscuous. Thus, marrying a westerner paradoxically brings both status and shame.

Given such societal attitudes toward relationships between Taiwanese women and Western men, the ready acceptance of my participants’ foreign boyfriends by their parents is somewhat surprising. Commenting on her parents’ acceptance of Greg, Audrey reported, ‘My family loves him. Like, everybody’s cool with it.’ When I asked Rachel how her French boyfriend got along with her mother, she replied, ‘They got really a

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good relationship.’ Gigi’s parents apparently had no problem with her and Amedeo cohabitating in a short-term lease apartment in Taipei before Gigi started her first semester at the university there and always welcomed him into their home when he visited from Italy. In the following extended interview excerpt, she contrasts her parents’ acceptance though with some of the comments and impressions she got from neighbors and other relatives: Gigi: My parents are already much more open-minded to the relationship – like me and my boyfriend. When my boyfriend came here, he always stayed in my house, and then, like, our neighbors, when they see him, they think, ‘Oh, you are still not married, but you already brought your boyfriend back home? Why he happen to be a foreigner? Why you are not being with Chinese?’ Mark:  So they thought you should stay at a hotel or something? Gigi: No, we should sleep separately (laughing). Mark: So your parents are much more open-minded than any of the people around them? Gigi: Yeah, especially in the countryside. And also, he’s a foreigner, and in the countryside, they never saw any foreigner there. He says he feels he is discriminated (laughing). Mark:  He felt it? Gigi: He felt it! Like, mostly because of what I told him about my feeling when people – when my relatives were speaking, ‘Oh, you should find a Taiwanese boyfriend.’ Mark:  So this is not your parents, but some other relatives? Gigi: Yeah – mostly relatives. Also, in the beginning, the first time that he came here and I, when I heard about my relatives opinion about my boyfriend being a foreigner, I was very upset. And also I was kind of emotionally offended by them. Why can’t I be with a foreigner? Why being with a foreigner means I don’t like my country? Mark:  Did they actually say that? Gigi: They didn’t actually – I feel that. And also – and then after all, I feel it’s just their opinion. I don’t need to take it so seriously. Mark:  But you wanted their approval. Gigi: Yeah, I wanted their approval. Right now they don’t say it anymore, but I could still – like sometimes my auntie will say, ‘Let me introduce you to someone’s son,’ and like, ‘Why don’t you go out with some friends.’ But I think it’s not because he is a foreigner, but because if I am going to marry him, I will move abroad.

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Mark: Ohh – take our Gigi away. But you might anyway even if you hadn’t met him. Gigi: Yeah, and also I think they wish me to marry to someone that is rich (laughs). So, in spite of the fact that participants’ parents had no objections to their relationships with foreigners, the comments and perceived sentiments of Gigi’s relatives and neighbors highlighted here provide us with some indication of the less than enthusiastic societal reaction to such relationships. The benefits that these relationships provided in terms of furthering multilingual proficiency and transnational identity construction were surely offset to some degree by societal disapproval, which as Gigi’s previous comments highlight, can be felt even when not vocalized. Audrey was clearly subjected to the same sort of societal disapproval for her involvement in the Kaohsiung community of foreigners that revolved around nightclub events, with statements like her roommate telling me ‘Audrey seems like a girl that is not proud of her Taiwanese heritage and likes all things foreign’ apparently being something she frequently had to contend with. Audrey’s comments about excluding her Taiwanese female friends from her parallel life in the world of foreigners and clubbing reveal an acute awareness of the societal disapproval that can come with associations with this world. By not inviting her Taiwanese female friends to club events because ‘clubbing stuff for Taiwanese, it’s still something bad,’ Audrey was attempting to shield her friends from societal disapproval, but also perhaps attempting, to some degree, to shield herself from disapproval by these Taiwanese female friends. For my participants then, gender intersected with their relatively privileged socio-economic class positions in a number of ways that both advantaged and disadvantaged them. Their efforts to achieve distinction were turbo-charged by their connections with various foreigners and this was surely facilitated, whether consciously or not, by gender capital deployment. Of course, I can’t say to what extent my participants’ gender and physical appearance impacted their acceptance by foreigners and groups of foreigners. Even if they had been considerably less attractive, they may have been readily accepted and accepted as legitimate members of the various communities and had their voices respected due to the particular field conditions. The fact that their spoken English was generally not flawless by the standards of many of their foreign interlocutors was largely irrelevant, for it is the conditions of particular spaces that dictate interlocutors’ judgments. On a scalar ranking, my participants’ English

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skills were vastly superior to most others in Taiwanese spaces, and this was the yardstick against which their abilities were assessed. Participants were very fortunate that this was the case even in the communicative spaces they shared with English speakers from Canada, the United States and South Africa. In such situations, it seemed that these interlocutors, no doubt grateful to be able to converse in English at all, positioned participants as equals in English interactions, enabling rather than constraining deployment of their English abilities. This is an important point to dwell on since ‘the power to impose reception’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 75) is central to Norton Peirce’s (1995) notion of investment, in which the amount of cultural capital to be gained from investment in a language (or identity as a community member) relies on the extent to which one’s contributions to the community are valued by fellow members. My participants’ contributions being valued and respected – thus enabling further investment – might not have been the case if they had been interacting with some of the same interlocutors in a different space – Canada, for instance. As Blommaert et al. (2005: 203, italics in original) note, ‘space does something to people.’ Looking at how race/ethnicity might figure into the intersections, the fact that the spaces where most of the interactions highlighted in participants’ narratives took place were within Taiwan, where Han Chinese are in the majority, clearly impacted the role that race/ethnicity played in determining outcomes with foreigners. In the Taiwan context, the Caucasian foreigners were themselves the minority group, and this fact surely reduced the likelihood of negative assessments of my Han Chinese participants on the basis of their ethnicity. Foreigners with negative racist sentiments toward Chinese or Asians more generally would have been unlikely to have chosen to live in Taiwan in the first place. These Caucasian foreigners could have held racialized stereotype images of Asian women as passive and such images could have influenced initial interactions, but they all no doubt quickly realized that these particular Taiwanese women did not adhere at all to that stereotype. In the spaces outside of Taiwan, negative assessments of my participants by non-Taiwanese based on ethnicity would have been more likely than with non-Taiwanese within Taiwan. Gigi did not report feeling anything of the sort from Amedeo’s friends in Italy though, and perhaps the fact that she was introduced to them by Amedeo contributed to this being the case. In Rachel’s interactions with non-Taiwanese in France, she recognized the fact that she was likely to be assessed (perhaps negatively) as generically Asian or more particularly PRC Chinese, and actively addressed this by utilizing her Tai-yü abilities to illustrate a

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uniquely Taiwanese culture distinct from the PRC and foreground her Taiwanese identity. The ethnic divisions within Taiwan between Han Chinese with local (‘Taiwanese’) and Mainlander family backgrounds did not seem to significantly impact the outcomes of any of my participants’ endeavors. The only instance in my data where this could even remotely be the case would be when Rachel was too modest about her Tai-yü abilities in the interview with the wine importer. When interviewing in Taipei, where her interviewers were more likely to have Mainlander family backgrounds, Rachel, of course, would certainly not have done anything to index her local Tai-yü-speaking background. For Shannon, the only participant with an entirely Mainlander ancestry,2 the only negative experiences reported in Southern Taiwan (where Mainlanders are relatively few) was occasional exclusion and friendly teasing from friends about her limited Tai-yü abilities. Another issue we can question here is the distinction between primary and secondary habitus for my participants. All four participants seem to possess a high degree of habitus permeability as they appear to eagerly accept the norms and valuations of new fields they come into contact with. This ready acceptance is especially apparent when we contrast their acceptance of ‘foreign’ field norms with the dispositions of some of their parents. Audrey’s mother, for example, was unable to accept the fact that Audrey had chosen to move out of her mother’s house prior to marriage (without a practical reason, such as moving to another city for work). For Audrey, however, after being immersed in the field comprised of her foreign (mostly Canadian) friends, this option seemed normal and desirable. Rachel’s mother’s insistence that a study abroad trip was just not in the cards for her nicely illustrates Bourdieu’s (1990: 64) point about habitus predisposing actors to form ‘concrete indices of the accessible and the inaccessible, of what is and is not “for us.”’ Rachel, while insisting that she was well-aware of her family’s financial situation, depicted herself as not inclined to accept this sort of classed predetermination, maintaining a hopeful attitude that such an experience might someday somehow be possible for her – a disposition she likely picked up as a secondary habitus rather than the primary habitus acquired in early childhood. But could much of my participants’ willingness to embrace ‘foreign’ norms and values, actually be attributed to their early primary socialization – due to the aforementioned ‘desire for America…so deep that [Taiwanese] have no easy way of addressing it’ (K.H. Chen, 2010: 187)? It does indeed seem that an inclination to favorably view all things North American or European was cultivated among participants quite early in

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life. For Shannon, a potent brew of English language Disney videos, the influence of her American-born cousins and her childhood English teacher’s reminiscing about the high-class lifestyle she had lived in the United States served to instill in her an enduring obsession with America. Gigi, Audrey and Rachel all mentioned having romantic images of France and French culture prior to enrolling at Saint Agnes, and Gigi was nursing a budding obsession with Italian culture before she met Amedeo online. Rachel also mentioned that before she met her French boyfriend, she liked ‘foreign stuff…American movies, French stuff’ and felt ‘Taiwan – not good. Taiwan – small island.’ A desire for ‘the West’ – and especially the United States – does indeed seem to be quite pervasive among Taiwanese, despite the coexisting ambivalence that Moskowitz (2008) highlights, and perhaps this desire has intensified with increased connectivity with the world outside Taiwan and each successive generation transmitting more and more favorable attitudes in the course of their children’s primary habitus formation. Given this profoundly positive orientation toward American cultural norms and Western norms more generally, characterizing my participants’ habitus permeability as ‘highly permeable’ where their acceptance of Western norms is concerned might be somewhat problematic. It’s quite possible that to some degree, their primary habituses had primed them for this acceptance and that, for Gigi, Audrey and Rachel, a fascination with and ‘desire’ for the West could have at least subconsciously impacted their love lives. The fact that Gigi, Audrey and Rachel’s relationships with foreigners all had the blessings of their respective families is a further indication that a positive orientation to Western norms might have been a key feature of their primary socialization during childhood. And there is yet another aspect of my participants’ stories in which gender is very much implicated. Of particular relevance to their stories is a gendered language ideology that has widespread currency in T ­ aiwan – the belief that females are predisposed to be good language learners, and that males, in contrast, are just no good at learning languages. The extent to which this ideology is regarded as commonsensical is reflected in the extremely limited representation by male students at Saint Agnes – roughly just 10% of the total student population. In my first interview with Gigi, she acknowledged that the disproportionate gender ratio at Saint Agnes had something to do with societal expectations differentiated by gender, telling me, ‘The parents, they think girls should study language, and the guys should study uh – science or engineering.’ Her further comments on the issue, however, revealed a belief that this societal expectation was motivated by a female biological predilection for language learning that males were not privy to:

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I also think biologically, girls learn a foreign language faster than guys. Lots of my friends, they never went abroad, but they speak English with quite a good accent. Guys – I think um – so far, I never heard any – even teachers, Taiwanese teachers – that speak English without Taiwanese accent.

Given this ideological gendering, foreign language skills, in the Taiwan context then, could be regarded as not just cultural capital, but gendered cultural capital, much like the skills or attributes associated with nurturing, mothering and caring (Huppatz, 2009). Although official discourses of competitiveness and internationalization encourage English proficiency for all Taiwanese and not just females, in practice, males are, as Gigi pointed out, encouraged to focus on mathematics and science – not English or any other foreign languages. Males are expected to meet certain minimum English proficiency requirements to graduate from universities and qualify for quite a few positions (Pan, 2009), but if their English proficiency never gets beyond this minimally acceptable level, this is generally regarded as normal and natural due to the belief that language learning is simply not something the male brain can do well. Since females, in contrast, are believed to have brains specifically wired for language learning, they are encouraged to study language subjects and to pursue occupations in which they can put their multilingualism to work, such as sales, marketing, public relations and interpreting. These are just the sort of occupations my participants ended up in, at least for a while, in the years following this study. Given the extent to which English skills are emphasized, and indeed valorized, in the official competitiveness and internationalization discourses, I expected that Taiwanese with bilingual or multilingual skills would be the ones truly poised for success in neoliberal Taiwan. And since the only females are good at languages ideology has seen to it that males are not at all well-represented in this pool of linguistically talented individuals capable of driving the nation’s competitiveness and internationalization, I envisioned a Taiwan in the not-so-distant future in which the traditional gendered power balance was turned on its head – a Taiwan in which most males, due to their inadequate language skills, would have no choice but work low-level menial jobs, while it would be largely women who would be calling the shots since they were the ones responsible for any degree of competitiveness and internationalization that Taiwan had achieved. On a trip to Taiwan in March of 2013, I met with Gigi and Rachel, who by then were working in sales and marketing at the same company. And when I presented them with the musings I outlined in the previous

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paragraph, they disregarded my prediction as an unrealistic fantasy that would never come to pass in Taiwan. Using the example of their boss, who was competent in reading and writing English, but not spoken English communication, and simply delegated any work requiring spoken language use to Gigi, Rachel and other multilingual female employees under him, they told me that regardless of how vast the linguistic capital differential is between women and men in Taiwan, males would surely find a way to maintain the traditional gendered balance of power in workplaces by treating tasks requiring spoken foreign language skills as ‘the superficial part’ (as Gigi put it) that could simply be delegated to lower level female employees – gendered linguistic grunt work that is below them. If this assessment of the situation from Gigi and Rachel, informed by their on-the-ground lived experience, is at all accurate, this places real limits on the capacity of women to convert all the cultural and symbolic capital – including gender capital – that they manage to accumulate. Copious amounts of linguistic capital, facilitated by classed resources and, in some cases, gender capital, may result in a considerable amount of societal distinction through conversion to symbolic capital, but the potential to convert the linguistic, gender and symbolic capital to economic capital (as well as the further symbolic capital that comes with occupational status) will ultimately be very limited in Taiwanese workplaces if Gigi and Rachel’s assessment of the situation is indeed accurate. Females’ deployment of their linguistic skills will generally be restricted to specific low-level gendered positions with limited chance of advancement, and since there would be no lack of Taiwanese females with high amounts of linguistic capital, they will be easily replaceable. Language work will (and, in fact, already has, according to Gigi and Rachel) take on a place in society like nursing and the other gendered ‘caring’ professions discussed by Huppatz (2009) – generally respected and recognized as a valuable service, but lacking any sort of prestige, status or substantial remuneration. Exceptionally charismatic women like Rachel may, over the course of their careers, manage to benefit to some degree with strategic deployment of gender capital in particular situations, but as Ross-Smith and Huppatz (2010: 562) remind us, ‘women’s gender capital may only manipulate constraints rather than overturn power.’ As more and more Taiwanese (particularly Taiwanese females) acquire English skills, competition is increasingly fierce for even gendered linguistic grunt work. Highlighting the continuous nature of the struggle for distinction was the fact that in my participants’ narratives amidst all the repeated reports of attempting to stand out through English use, there

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was much anxiety expressed over the prospect of English distinguishing them to a lesser degree than it did in the past. This was particularly evident when participants were discussing their employment prospects. Non-focal participant Monica, for example, told me Everybody says, ‘Oh, you know English! You can apply to many jobs because many jobs need you to speak English.’ But nowadays most of the people know English – maybe not very good, but good enough to communicate with others, so we are less needed by the companies.

Since all the participants already had some French proficiency as a result of studying it as a minor for at least three years, most saw continued French study as a very practical course of action. Even Shannon, who had struggled with French throughout her time at Saint Agnes and had previously characterized it as ‘annoying and unnecessary,’ eventually decided that continued study of the language would be a wise move. The fear, expressed by Monica, Shannon and other participants that English alone would fail to distinguish them from competitors in a world where English proficiency is increasingly commonplace is indeed a valid concern, for as Park and Lo (2012: 159) point out, ‘Since capital is only valuable by virtue of its rarity, newly acquired elite bilingualism becomes less valuable as growing numbers of families invest in English education.’ In today’s neoliberal employment fields, the necessary criteria for achieving distinction (and subsequent employment) is constantly shifting to accommodate the need for selectivity in the face of growing numbers of people having met existing criteria. It is such shifting criteria that Park (2011) highlights in his discussion of how, for a decade, South Korean employers regarded high scores on the TOEIC exam to be a necessary criterion for selection, but when the TOEIC’s discriminatory power began to wane, these employers ceased privileging TOEIC scores, claiming that, as a written test, its validity as a measure of communicative competence was negligible. And despite such efforts to raise the English proficiency bar for gatekeeping purposes, English may still be used only in brief emails or be far less valuable in international work assignments than knowledge of local languages (Kubota, 2011, 2013). As Grin (2001: 75) points out, ‘the rewards for speaking English will be less and less, and other skills will be required to achieve socio-economic success. First and foremost among those skills are languages other than English.’ With these realities in mind, my participants’ seeking to acquire proficiency in additional languages to increase their competitiveness appears to be a good strategy, even if it does only increase their competitiveness for doing the gendered linguistic grunt work.

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Conclusions

This examination of how a small group of Taiwanese young women have struggled to acquire, maintain and improve their proficiency with particular linguistic resources, continuously striving to convert their acquired linguistic proficiency into the capital necessary to acquire and maintain identities of distinction is generalizable to the extent that, as a multi-case study, the perspectives and experiences of the handful of participants discussed here represent particular cases of a larger phenomenon. As Blommaert and Dong (2010: 13) point out, for inductive ethnographic research, generalisation is perfectly possible, because your data instantiate a case, and such 1a case belongs to a larger category of cases. The unique and situated events you have witnessed can and do reveal a lot about the very big things in society.

Further case studies of other Taiwanese young people with comparable English abilities may reveal similarly constructed identities of distinction and similar struggles to maintain these identities. It is, after all, human nature to construct our identities around abilities that distinguish us from others. As Mead (1934: 208) long ago pointed out, distinguishing ourselves from others ‘is a means for the preservation of the self. We have to distinguish ourselves from other people, and this is accomplished by doing something which other people cannot do, or cannot do as well.’ The late John Gumperz (1982: 6) asserts that ‘Language differences play an important positive role in signalling information as well as in creating and maintaining the subtle boundaries of power, status, role and occupational specialization that make up the fabric of social life.’ In this book I’ve focused on how the use of linguistic resources indexing particular ideologies can create boundaries that are actually not at all subtle. The role English resources are playing here is also arguably not a positive one since what is being perpetuated is social stratification. It is, however, only by understanding the particularities of how this distinction ‘game’ is played that we can even begin to address the various issues related to the role of linguistic abilities in maintaining social stratification. My hope is that through my participants’ depictions of their struggles, further light has been shed on numerous aspects of the distinction game in Taiwan, and that these chronicles, in addition to complementing Price’s (2014) ethnographic work looking at the detrimental effects of neoliberalism on educational equality in Taiwan, will contribute to the growing body of literature examining the impact of neoliberalism on language learning

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and use in particular Asian contexts – for example, Japan (Kubota, 2011), South Korea (Cho, 2015; Park, 2009; Piller & Cho, 2013) and Indonesia (Lamb & Coleman, 2008). But even with our knowledge of how the distinction game is played, ways to address the perpetuation of a language-based class divide still seem elusive. We can’t, after all, expect relatively privileged individuals like the participants of this study to act against their own self-interest for the sake of achieving a more equitable society, and the vast majority of parents will always aspire to provide their offspring with as much convertible capital as their resources will allow. There are arguably measures that could be taken by policymakers to help level the uneven playing field that the private supplementary education industry exacerbates – greater resource allocation to public schools in rural areas, for example. A lesson to be gleaned from South Korea’s experience, however, is that policy measures intended to lessen the negative societal impacts of private supplementary education are bound to be ineffective if these measures are not in line with the dominant ideologies held by the populace. Lee et al. (2010) outline such policy attempts by the South Korean government, starting with the abolishment of middle school entrance exams in 1968, up to more recent efforts to improve the public schools and provide additional after school and online tutoring support for disadvantaged students. Lee et  al. note that the school improvement and supplementary tutoring measures are too recent to evaluate, but they conclude that earlier efforts to directly regulate and minimize demand for the supplementary education industry resulted in failure to achieve intended goals. Policymakers felt, for example, that eliminating high school entrance exams and randomizing student assignment to particular high schools would serve to create a public perception that all schools were of more or less equal quality, thus reducing the sense of cutthroat competition and the demand for supplementary education. Abolishing the high school entrance exams only served, however, to prompt parents to expend greater resources to prepare their children for university entrance exams and the supplementary education industry in Korea subsequently expanded. Applying these insights to the Taiwanese context, Courtenay (2013: 182) identifies high-stakes examinations as merely ‘surface issues’ masking the root causes of the problem: [B]oth for senior high school and university admission, there is an underlying social or cultural dimension which is arguably the main driver for the competitive environment. The combination of Confucian values concerning education and educational achievement are strongly held,

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and the widely held perception of a competitive education system, along with other social and economic factors affecting parents and families, contributes to a strong demand for supplementary education in Taiwan. However, if only the surface issues of competitive high-stakes tests in the education system are addressed by policy makers, while social and cultural forces are ignored, then the results of policy change will very likely be very limited in their effectiveness.

As the Saint Agnes teacher, Idelle, so aptly expressed in my interview with her, ‘We have to reform our ideology before we can reform anything!’ I acknowledge that the prospects seem bleak for being able to substantially ‘reform’ or alter the societal and cultural forces that have conspired to create the present ideological landscape in Taiwan. After centuries of cultivation, attitudes regarding education, after all, are thoroughly entrenched, and with the DPP government now striving to diversify Taiwan’s export business (to ween it off of economic reliance on PRC markets), the promotion of ideologies of competitiveness and internationalization is likely to only intensify. Are we then able to do nothing? Is any struggle for a more equitable society a hopelessly naïve endeavor? I would say the struggle is not an entirely hopeless one. Policy efforts to make resource allocation more equitable, improve public education (especially in rural areas) and provide online and after school learning support for disadvantaged students can only help, albeit within the status quo structural environment that pits public schools in direct competition against private enterprise. But these efforts, while they have the potential to bring about positive change, do not address the ideological roots of the problem. The only real hope for addressing ideologies, I contend, lies in practice. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, every little act that an individual engages in has the potential to impact the field and the habituses of all in the field in some small way. While they may not seem terribly consequential in and of themselves, the practices that do not serve to reinforce and maintain status quo ideologies collectively can make a difference. One example of practice that can play a role in shifting dominant ideologies is the display of ‘linguistic chutzpah’ – ‘confidence that is backed up by metalinguistic awareness and linguistic sophistication, giving the speaker the ability to articulate, where necessary, rationales for his/her language decisions’ (Wee, 2014: 85). If enough speakers with proficient, but strongly Taiwanese-accented, English proudly, and even audaciously, assert the legitimacy of their English usage rather than apologizing for it, this could effectively put a dent in ideologies privileging North

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American-accented English and inspire many Taiwanese who might otherwise be too self-conscious to speak, despite having accumulated an encyclopedic knowledge of English grammar in Taiwanese schools. Moving up from the level of individual practice, institutions, as well, can impact the habitus through their curriculum decisions and hiring practices. Saint Agnes, in fact, provides a perfect example of this sort of institutional linguistic chutzpah. While acknowledging ideologies privileging an American orientation toward English in Taiwan, the faculty of the Saint Agnes English department were clearly committed to fostering in students a more international orientation – one in which English was depicted as a tool for interacting with and gaining a better understanding of a wide variety of people and cultures. And this included Taiwanese culture, for several of the teacher/curriculum developers I interviewed had, in fact, recently published their own textbook in which a content-based approach was utilized, combining English language instruction with content knowledge of Taiwan’s culture, history, ecology and geography. This text, which was used in an elective course entitled Introduction to Taiwanese Culture, includes some authentic source materials, such as a Taiwan disembarkation card and, in the CD supplement, English announcements from the Taiwan High Speed Rail trains (presumably recorded after Shannon was denied a job recording these announcements and the announcements got ‘better’). One of the Saint Agnes authors stressed to me that, when editing the book, great pains were taken to emphasize its Taiwanese content and avoid extensive use of idiomatic language typical of ‘native speaker’ English usage. As he explained, In our textbook, of course we would like to use ‘correct’ English, but maybe not very, very standardized English or the kind of idioms or phrases that English people – English speaking people would likely use. But I would say the language that we put in our textbook would be very, very useful for them to introduce themselves or introduce the Taiwanese culture to the foreigners.

He went on to extol the virtues of content-based instruction, telling me, ‘With more ideas like this, I guess the students would be able to find more confidence in using the language as a media instead of considering the language as some kind of academic discipline that they should acquire from school.’ This teacher/curriculum developer also told me that he was encouraging a faculty member from Poland to develop a content-based course introducing Poland and Polish culture to students in English. The department’s willingness to offer such a course shows

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its willingness to decouple English from associations with traditionally English-speaking cultures, and the fact that this Polish faculty member was hired in the first place indicates that, in its hiring practices as well, the Saint Agnes English department, in contrast to the many Taiwanese educational institutions that advertise English teaching positions only open to ‘native speakers,’ values expertise over inheritance (Rampton, 1990). But while such laudable institutional practices can and do impact the habitus, if Saint Agnes were to ramp up the linguistic chutzpah by actually proudly broadcasting its counter-hegemonic practices – actually highlighting them in advertising, for example – the effects on the field and the habituses of its inhabitants would be even more impactful. Individual teachers and institutions can also be agents of habitus change by raising students’ awareness of how neoliberal ideologies have insidiously come to be regarded as commonsensical and the particular ways in which the ‘“English for all” ethos’ (Price, 2014: 573) serves to empower a select few and disenfranchise the rest. Through the explicit unpacking of taken for granted neoliberal ideologies in classrooms, students on the disadvantaged side of the linguistic divide will be more able to identify the structural and ideological obstructions to their societal advancement, rather than take full responsibility for their own failures in a game where the odds are stacked against them. While this may be seen by some as sanctioning students’ blaming the system for their own lack of effort, the harsh reality is that structural inequalities do, in fact, deprive a great many students of opportunity to exert any effort in the first place, and through conscious awareness of this, the affected individuals can adopt ideologies that might be more in line with their interests. For students like Gigi, Audrey, Rachel and Shannon, who benefit from access to the sorts of resources that prime them for (relative) neoliberal success, raising awareness of the structural forces that work in their favor will help eliminate a sense of entitlement that some elite students might feel and bring about a newfound appreciation for the opportunities they enjoy – the sort of appreciation that jolted Shannon out of the funk she was in near the end of this study and prompted her to embrace her upcoming French exchange student opportunity. It may seem like the neoliberal ideologies that enable distinction by a few and patriarchal systems relegating women to gendered ‘language work’ at lower rungs of the workplace power structures are so firmly established in Taiwan that they would be quite impervious to the kind of practices by individuals and institutions that I’m advocating here. That may well be the case, but we shouldn’t underestimate the potential for bottom-up practices to impact the habitus in substantial ways. The recent

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shift in the public’s traditional tolerance of workplace sexual harassment serves as one example. Activist Tarana Burke started the Me Too movement on MySpace in 2006 to let survivors of sexual harassment and assault know that they are not alone and had been tirelessly expressing empathy to survivors and raising awareness of the pervasiveness of the problem for over a decade when, following multiple sexual assault allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein in 2017, a handful of celebrities, such as Alyssa Milano, started posting #metoo as a Twitter-based awareness campaign, which quickly went viral, resulting in millions of women tweeting ‘#metoo’. Ohlheiser (2017: para. 26) characterizes #MeToo as having produced ‘a kind of unity by volume’ and I believe it has indeed made a tremendous impact, not only in raising awareness of the issue, but also serving to jolt many men into recognizing as sexual harassment behaviors that they previously accepted as commonplace – just ‘men being men.’ It all started though with Tarana Burke’s low-profile MySpace site and work within individual communities. As Yang (2014: 1536) points out It is very likely to be true that, in certain fields, the ‘interrupters’ may not be able to overtake those who traditionally rule that field in the near future, but they bring in a new dynamic. When the deviations are no longer the minority, they will become a trajectory.

For an example of impactful bottom-up practices by individuals being effective in altering neoliberal ideologies, we have the Occupy Wall Street protests. In the United States, arguably the ultimate bastion of neoliberalism, capitalism and the supremacy of the free market have been valorized to such a degree that just a few years ago, aligning oneself with socialism would have, without a doubt, meant instant campaign death for any political candidate. Obama’s political opponents declared him a socialist, considering that the quintessential repulsive slur, and attempted to vilify his Obamacare healthcare reform by dubbing it ‘socialized medicine.’ Then came the Occupy movement, which began with the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011 and subsequently spread to other American cities and around the world, very explicitly highlighting the startling inequity that neoliberal veneration of unfettered free markets has wrought. Millions of Americans who had previously not thought to question the reverence afforded to capitalism were confronted with the ‘We are the 99%’ message disseminated by Occupy protesters, spotlighting the fact that the vast majority of the world’s wealth is held and controlled by a mere 1% of its population. Many seem to have been prompted to question the

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extent to which they have actually benefited from the neoliberal world order and reconsider the previously taboo socialist alternative, for Bernie Sanders, a presidential candidate with the audacity to declare war on Wall Street and proudly label himself a socialist, did indeed emerge as a viable candidate who seemed to be the favorite among younger voters. Sanders, of course, did not get the Democratic nomination, but the fact that his campaign had the kind of popular support previously thought to be unthinkable for a candidate identifying as socialist speaks volumes for the potential of bottom-up practice to impact the habitus, as does the eventual triumph of Donald Trump in that US election, albeit an impact resulting from different anti-status quo bottom-up efforts that appealed to an audience very different from those that embraced Sanders’ socialist message. And the same sort of habitus change targeting neoliberal ideologies via the practices of individuals could very well occur in Taiwan. Taiwan has, after all, recently had its own Occupy movement, albeit one that aimed its ire at PRC-friendly policies more pointedly than at an economic elite. But Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement, a 2014 university student-led occupation of the Legislative Yuan chambers, can indeed be viewed as a denunciation of neoliberal values. The young Taiwanese involved blamed free trade with the PRC for their gloomy economic prospects and their protest did indeed focus on a particular free trade deal with the PRC. Public debates that emerged in the wake of the Sunflower Movement occupation, however, revealed discontent among Taiwanese young people with free market neoliberal policies more generally (Huang, 2014). As Tao (2015: para. 5) reports, ‘At first glance, the Sunflower Movement may have seemed like an “Anti-China” movement, but it is part of a larger post-democratization trend. Many marginalized young students have joined in protests, highlighting the class and generational elements of the movement.’ And these marginalized young people do indeed seem to comprise a formidable force with the power to provoke change, for they were not only able to keep the free trade deal with the PRC from being enacted, but also surely influenced the 2014 ‘nine-in-one’ election of county commissioners, city mayors and municipality mayors, in which voters overwhelmingly voted in candidates that advocated local management of economic issues (Huang, 2014). The disenfranchised young people that supported the Sunflower Movement also no doubt played a large role in the DPP’s 2016 landslide win of both the presidency and the majority of legislative seats. Lin (2015: 8), after pointing out Taiwan’s longstanding embrace of American neoliberal values, goes on to discuss signs of change, with the recent advocacy for social justice among

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Taiwan’s younger generation, arguing that ‘if the recent evidence of protest by young people, new reform movements, electoral disillusion as expressed in last year’s nine-in-one elections and the rise of independence can be collectively seen as problems by any one political party, they can with more optimism also be seen as mechanisms for change.’ I couldn’t agree more. Notes (1) Going to such establishments just to people watch is very common. As Moskowitz (2008: 334) describes, ‘In this setting they can gaze at the fetishized Western male as well as the equally fetishized Taiwanese female and laugh at the behavior of both groups as they interact.’ (2) Interestingly, Shannon, the only one of my participants with Mainlander ancestry on both her mother’s and father’s sides, was the only one to claim a ‘Chinese’ identity. The other participants, while acknowledging their Chinese ethnicity, insisted that they viewed themselves as ‘Taiwanese’ rather than ‘Chinese.’

10  Postscript: Where Are They Now?

Since wrapping up the 2009/2010 study discussed here, I have returned to Taiwan twice – once in March 2013 and again in May 2014. During these visits, I met with participants and they updated me on their lives and changing perspectives. I have also, throughout the past eight years, maintained contact with them all through email, periodic Skype conversations, and, with Gigi, WhatsApp messages. Most recently, I emailed Gigi, Audrey, Rachel and Shannon their revised chapters for this book, and they all informed me that looking back at these narratives from the people they had been back in 2009 and 2010, while not an entirely comfortable experience, had served to remind them of how much they had grown in the intervening years. During my March 2013 visit to Taiwan, I met with Gigi and Rachel together, for they were, as mentioned in the previous chapter, both working for the same company at the time. Gigi did eventually manage to graduate with her degree in interior design, and she had started doing part-time work with Rachel’s company (not the company she was with when the study concluded, but a different one that offered more opportunity to deal with European clients) designing their catalogue, but this part-time design work somehow morphed into a full-time sales job with the company. So, Gigi worked alongside Rachel in the office by day, and at night, the two of them ran their own small entrepreneurial enterprise, selling scarves and jewelry at a street stand they set up in a Taipei neighborhood alongside many other such street hawkers. And partly through participation in this street hawker community, Gigi had come to revise her perception of Taiwanese as superficial and ignorant. She characterized their fellow street hawkers as ‘real philosophers who know a lot about life’ and asserted, ‘We learn lots of things from the other vendors.’ Reflecting on the year of her life that was the focus of this study, she told me that she thought her perceptions at that time were largely due 200

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to the fact that most of her interactions in Taiwan then were with other students and informed me that these perceptions had now changed due to exposure to a wider variety of interlocutors. ‘Since I’ve started work, I’ve seen many different people, so I don’t feel Ah! Try to be different! Want to be special!’ she told me. ‘I don’t feel that anymore. I just want to reach a better level above what I am right now.’ Rachel, when I met her together with Gigi in March 2013, was feeling as if her life was in a rut, despite the entrepreneurial evening enterprise with Gigi and the frequent opportunities her job offered her to travel and attend trade shows in the United States and Europe. ‘I think I got lost,’ she told me. ‘I feel like I’m really bored about my life.’ She then mused about the possibility of starting her own small bed & breakfast in a beach town, informing me, ‘I just don’t want to be an employee all my life. I want to be an owner.’ When I returned to Taiwan again in May 2014, Gigi and Amedeo were no longer a couple. Their split was an amicable one. It seems they just finally realized that their long-distance relationship was unsustainable. Around the same time that she split up with Amedeo, Gigi also quit the job she worked at with Rachel and moved back to Southern Taiwan, where she started teaching English at several buxibans – her mother’s and others. Since my May 2014 trip was restricted to Taipei, I did not meet with Gigi then, but I did meet with Rachel, who was still working for the same company and still looking for a change. By the time I next spoke to Rachel (via Skype) in March 2016, her life had indeed changed in a number of ways. Rachel’s relationship with her stepfather – the same man she had unequivocally declared she hated back in our first interview – had taken an unexpected turn. Rachel’s stepfather had recently succumbed to liver cancer, but before his death, he and Rachel had not only made peace, but had actually grown close. As she explained it We start to build up the father and daughter relationship. And unfortunately when I start to accept him, he got cancer. But still, you know, I feel like this is something at least I complete before he passed away. It’s like I never had a father, but the two years with him, I found that – having a father.

Establishing this new relationship with her stepfather before he passed away not only provided Rachel with closure where her previously tumultuous family situation was concerned, but also served as the impetus for her to make a big life-changing move – to quit the job she was unhappy

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with and start her own company. ‘I wasn’t happy in that job, even though I flew very often to other countries. But still, I thought I need to do something different. I need to do something with my life,’ she told me. ‘My stepfather’s death just helped me make up my decision to leave the company and try something new.’ Rachel had originally conceptualized her trying ‘something new’ as simply finding a new job in a different field, but then the designer/manufacturer of her previous company’s product cut all ties with that company and approached Rachel with the idea of her starting her own business to distribute his wares. And this is just what Rachel did, putting herself in direct competition with her former company. ‘They were not very happy about that,’ she commented with a laugh. Many of Rachel’s clients for her new company were in France, so her ambition to do business in France and use her French had been realized. She also had taken some Spanish classes, so although she was still nowhere near proficient in Spanish, with Mandarin Chinese, English, French and a bit of Spanish, she was indeed poised to do business with a massive chunk of the world’s population. Throughout our March 2016 Skype conversation though, Rachel repeatedly expressed disbelief that she was actually running her own business. She was, however, I think the only one who was surprised by this entrepreneurial endeavor. When I talked to Audrey a few days later and told her that Rachel had started her own company in competition with her former employer, Audrey replied Wow! That feels exactly like what she would have done! She’s the kind of person that, if you piss her off, she’s going to piss you off, so she probably got pissed off! Yeah, she has always been very aggressive, and yeah, there are a couple of the classmates that I feel like I kind of just had that feeling that they were going to do something. Yeah, and then it turns out that they do. Yeah, Rachel is definitely one of them.

I’m not sure whether Audrey would have also included Gigi in that group of classmates who ‘were going to do something,’ but Gigi did, in fact, end up the proud owner of her own business as well. She now owns and teaches at her own buxiban in Southern Taiwan. After reading her revised chapter for this book, Gigi told me in an email message, ‘I definitely sounded like one of the students I am teaching right now – confused and too self-conscious.’ While Gigi does still strive to constantly enrich herself intellectually by reading a lot and attending a weekly philosophy discussion group, I get the sense that ‘The Intellectual’ is nowhere near

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as integral an aspect of her identity as it once was. She told me that she no longer viewed Taiwanese society as shallow or superficial, explaining, ‘Along with my work experience and people I met after school, some changes in reasoning occur spontaneously and led me to think in a more positive and modest way.’ For both my March 2013 and May 2014 visits to Taiwan, I managed to miss Audrey. When I was there in 2013, Audrey was in Vancouver attending that year’s World Model United Nations conference. Audrey hadn’t attended the 2010 World Model UN conference in Taipei with Shannon, but discovered the organization in subsequent years, and it proved to be even more impactful for her than it had been for Shannon. During the course of my 2009/2010 study, Audrey had displayed some interest in issues related to politics and international relations, but her involvement with the World Model UN really served to bring these interests to the fore. She subsequently moved to Taipei and started working on a political science degree at a university there. When I visited Taipei in 2014, Audrey was in France as part of an exchange program, but I did have a Skype conversation with her while she was in France. In this conversation, she explained to me that as a university student in Taipei, she was maintaining her ‘social butterfly’ status, and just as had been the case throughout the course of my study, her employment (in a Taipei ‘foreign club’) was encouraging this. In a March 2016 Skype conversation with Audrey after she had graduated with her political science degree and had been working for some time as a businessman’s personal assistant, Audrey informed me though that she didn’t go out much at all anymore, explaining, I do appreciate what I had before – you know, as the social butterfly. And that kind of builds me with a good social skill of talking to people. That really benefits me in a lot of ways, I think, in terms of working, in terms of my personal life. But now, I feel like I’ve found that direction. Now I want to shape into something that’s gonna fit me and make me feel most comfortable.

In this 2016 Skype conversation, Audrey, after reviewing her revised chapter for this book, again commented on how much she had used like as a discourse marker in her 2009/2010 interviews. When I observed that her speech was no longer strewn with likes, she replied, ‘No – because I realized that I was doing it, so I was determined to get rid of it. That’s how the teenagers talk. And I remember thinking at that time “That’s cool. I’m going to talk like that.” And then you realize it’s not cool.’

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Finally, I was able to meet with Shannon both in March 2013 and May 2014. Shannon did go to France for her year-long Saint Agnes exchange, and this experience did indeed bring about monumental changes – not only with her orientation toward the French language, but also to her general worldview. Just as Shannon had predicted, her acquisition of French proceeded smoothly when she was using it in naturalistic situations and not focused so much on scores and classroom competition. When we met in March 2013, Shannon, in fact, characterized her French as being more fluent than her English. As for changes to her general worldview, it seemed that her experiences in France brought about in Shannon much the same sort of questioning of Taiwanese sociocultural norms that Gigi had experienced as a result of discussions with Amedeo and his friends. Explaining this to me, she stressed her realization that the habitus norms from her primary socialization were not universally applicable: There are so many different things that I had never seen before that I had never known. And so I started to respect people – their way of living. It’s not what I thought before when I was in Taiwan. Because I always think ‘to do this is right, to do that is wrong.’ But actually, I think for different people in different countries, there’s not a rule.

Shannon’s experience in France was, in fact, such an amazing one for her that after returning to Taiwan after a year and graduating from Saint Agnes with a degree in Translation and Interpretation, she immediately began making plans to return to France for further French study. She went back to France for another six months, which was as long as her finances would allow, and then had no choice but to return to Taiwan and enter the workforce. Shannon obtained an entry-level executive assistant position at a mid-sized Taiwanese importing firm and, when I met her in March 2013, she had been at this job for about seven months. She characterized her work as ‘boring’ and ‘stable,’ telling me, ‘I don’t have to take responsibility. And that’s acceptable, but it’s not challenging enough, I guess.’ By the time I returned to Taiwan in May 2014, however, Shannon’s employers had realized the extent to which her English abilities were indeed an asset to the company and had increased her responsibilities accordingly. She had recently been promoted to a position that involved her translating for executives in business meetings and assessing applicants’ English abilities (moving slightly beyond typical gendered linguistic grunt work perhaps). Her company had also recently rewarded about 30 of

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its employees with a leisure trip to Paris, and on this trip, Shannon did indeed feel needed and ‘special,’ for she was the only employee with any proficiency in French. ‘I felt kind of special and different from them,’ she commented. ‘Even our tour guide, he cannot really speak French. He can only speak in English. It was a very exhausting trip, but I enjoyed it.’ Shannon further updated me in a March 2016 email message, informing me that her language skills had brought her further recognition within her company. She had recently been sent on several business trips to negotiate with suppliers. Apparently the first female in this company ever allowed to do so, she attributed this entirely to her language skills. Despite feeling pleased about these workplace promotions and increased responsibility, Shannon did not seem to be operating with the same competitive zeal she once displayed. When we met in 2013, she had told me that her work environment was not an especially competitive one. She said that if she were working for a different sort of company that encouraged more competition among employees, her old competitive drive would likely reemerge, but at that moment, she didn’t feel the urge to compete. In 2014, her competitive urges were still relatively subdued, and she then informed me of her realization that the competition is always going to be one in which the odds favor individuals with particular backgrounds: I think I don’t know whether I’ve lost some passion on competing – maybe because I think about the chances. If we’re born in different families, we have different opportunities to learn – like some of my classmates, they were born outside Taiwan, like maybe in UK, in US. They have a better opportunity before to learn – to learn English – so they can speak better. And now I see that, so I think I’m treating myself less harsh.

Shannon (and the other four focal participants as well) had indeed grown up and adopted a more mature outlook. But with this more mature outlook, the desire to distinguish herself from others was still very much in effect. In May 2014, she told me about her recent instances of performativity, making a point of speaking French at any opportunity while with her work colleagues in Paris to highlight her abilities and show both her colleagues and strangers on the street that she was ‘not a tourist’ (or at least not a typical Taiwanese tourist). She felt the need to performatively index her history and close affiliation with France. In Taiwan years earlier, Shannon had utilized performativity at the High Speed Rail Station, pretending to be a tourist to achieve a sense of distinction, and in France, she was performatively highlighting her non-tourist identity for much the same purpose, but in a context where different resources with different

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valuations were involved. And when I asked Shannon in 2014 if, looking back on her performativity at the Taiwan High Speed Rail station, she would do the same thing again, she laughed and replied, ‘Yeah, I think I would. Yeah.’ My participants had grown up, but the desire to distinguish oneself from others is a very basic one that, for most of us, endures for life.

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Index

Page numbers followed by n refer to notes with their numbers. Female capital, 19, 21n4, 179 Feminine capital, 19–20, 21n4, 179 Gender capital, 19–20, 178, 180, 185, 189–190 Gendered cultural capital, 189 Linguistic capital, 9, 21, 175–176, 190 Social capital, 13, 173, 175–176 Symbolic capital, 1–3, 13, 67, 173– 174, 176, 178, 190 Capital conversion, 4, 13–15, 21n1, 32, 173, 176–177, 190, 192–193 Capitalism, 23, 43–44, 182, 197 Caring professions, 20, 189–190 Challenge 2008 National Development Plan (2002–2007), 41, 43, 45 Chen Shui-bian, 40 Chiang Ching-kuo, 6–7 Chiang Kai-shek, 5–6 Class (socio-economic), 1–3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 19–21, 59, 117, 142, 178, 185, 187–188, 190, 193, 198 Comedy troupe, 110–111 Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), 9–10 Communism, 5, 85, 182 Competitiveness, 7, 29, 31–32, 35, 38– 46, 47n9, 52, 76, 78, 81, 90n3, 95, 107, 131, 135, 144, 149–151, 158, 160–161, 167, 169, 171, 175–178, 189–191, 193–194, 202, 204–205 Confidence, 10, 69–71, 73, 76–79, 83, 90n2, 91, 95, 104, 123, 129, 134,

Abelmann, Nancy, 42, 48n17, 116, 134, 158, 175 Accent, 63n10, 109, 126, 131–132, 156, 164, 169, 189, 194–195 Adequation, 112 Americaphilia, 182, 187–188 Audrey (focal participant), 51, 55, 57, 91–115, 119, 131, 140–141, 143n1, 169, 172n1, 173, 175–176, 178– 183, 185, 187–188, 196, 198–200, 202–203 Blommaert, Jan, 3, 14, 186, 192 Bourdieu, Pierre, 1–3, 12–20, 21n1–3, 32, 48n19, 60, 178, 186–187 Bucholtz, Mary, 45–46, 51, 104, 112 Burke, Tarana, 197 Buxiban (also see ‘Cram school’), 43–45, 66, 83, 93, 107, 114, 116–117, 120, 136, 173, 174–175, 178, 201–202 Capital (Bourdieusian capital) Academic capital, 13, 158 Beauty capital, 19 Campus capital, 175 Capital in a general sense (no particular type identified), 3–4, 12–14, 18–19, 23, 43, 191–193 Cultural capital, 2, 13–14, 19, 43, 116, 173, 176, 178, 186, 189 Economic capital, 3, 13, 43–44, 173–174, 176, 190 216

Index 

138, 142–147, 152, 165, 170–171, 176, 194–195 Confucius, 2–3, 90n3, 193 Container metaphor, 114 Cram school (also see ‘Buxiban’), 32, 37, 43, 48n18, 65, 77, 84, 93, 107– 109, 117–118, 132, 155, 175 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 20–21 De Fina, Anna, 52–53 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), 7, 40, 194, 198 Denaturalization, 104 Disney videos, 144, 156, 169, 173, 188 Distinction, 1–4, 6–10, 12, 14–15, 18–19, 21, 23, 45–46, 58, 65–67, 76, 88, 103, 112, 144, 147, 173, 177–179, 183, 185, 187, 190–193, 196, 205 Door metaphor, 84–85, 88, 112–113, 176–177 Eckert, Penelope, 46, 48n19 Employment, 3–4, 17, 19, 31–32, 37, 42, 45, 47n6, 58, 60–61, 66–68, 76–78, 83–84, 89, 90n3, 92–93, 98–99, 102, 104–110, 112–114, 121, 123–129, 131–138, 141–142, 151, 153–156, 158, 162–163, 167–171, 176–178, 180, 187, 189–192, 195– 197, 200–205 English as a medium of instruction, 9–10, 94, 96, 107–108, 119–120, 150, 172n1, 195 English as a quasi-official language, 40, 42 English Debate Society, 58, 71–72, 75–76, 163, 175 English language, 3–4, 7–10, 23, 30, 35, 38–46, 48n14–16, 54, 56–59, 61– 62, 63n7n11, 65–77, 79–81, 83–85, 88–89, 93–103, 107–114, 117–126, 130–132, 135, 137–142, 143n1, 144–189, 180–182, 185–186, 188– 192, 194–196, 201–202, 204–205

217

Enterprise culture, 24–25, 42, 116, 127– 128, 133, 142, 158, 168 Entrepreneurial self, 52, 116, 128, 134, 136, 141–142, 158 Ethnicity, 4, 6, 8–9, 20–21, 59, 186–187, 199n2 Exams, 3, 30–31, 36–38, 42, 45, 47n10, 48n18, 54, 69, 78, 80–82, 90n2, 93, 105, 107, 119, 144, 149, 152, 155, 157–158, 161, 170, 191, 193 Expertise, 62, 62–63n5, 71, 96, 130–131, 141, 151–152, 158, 162, 170, 176, 196 Facebook, 10, 55, 58–59, 63n9, 66–67, 75–76, 80, 91, 99–101, 108, 112, 114, 152–153, 166, 171, 172n3, 177–178 Fiara (non-focal participant), 57, 143n1, 151, 174–175 Field (Bourdieusian field), 12–18, 20, 21n1, 46, 48n19, 67, 77, 114, 165, 175–180, 185, 187, 191, 194, 196–197, 202 Five-year junior college, 30–31, 35–37, 54–56, 63n6, 67, 135, 159, 162 French culture, 125, 130–131, 139, 179, 188 French language, 35, 48n14, 54, 56–58, 60, 68, 74–76, 95–96, 99–100, 103–105, 108–109, 113–114, 119–120, 122, 125–126, 130–131, 139–142, 149–153, 157–158, 162, 166–168, 170–171, 176, 178, 183, 191, 202, 204–205 Gender, 4, 8–9, 12, 17–21, 21n4, 135, 173, 178–185, 188–191, 196, 204 Gendered linguistic grunt work, 190– 191, 204 Giddens, Anthony, 51 Gigi (focal participant), 51, 57, 64–89, 90n2–3 91, 94–95, 104, 106, 113, 119, 125, 136–137, 141, 143n1,

218 Index

150, 165, 173, 175–177, 179–186, 188–190, 196, 200–202, 204 Grammar, 10, 68, 74, 84, 93, 96, 118, 120–121, 136–137, 145, 147–152, 157–158, 167, 170–171, 195 Habitus, 12–18, 60, 177, 179, 187–188, 194–196, 198, 204 Habitus permeability, 17–18, 60, 187–188 Hall, Kira, 45–46, 51, 104, 112 Harvey, David, 23–26, 46n1 High Speed Rail, 153–154, 177, 195, 205–206 Identity as self-presentation, 51–53, 64, 76, 83, 88, 91, 116, 133 Ideology Ideological indexical field, 46, 178 Ideologies of competitiveness and internationalization, 177, 194 Ideologies privileging American orientation to English, 195 Ideologies valorizing English abilities, 7, 45 Ideologies valorizing scholarly endeavors, 34–35, 37, 90n3 Ideology in a general sense (without identifying particular ideologies), 3, 7, 46, 48n15, 114, 177, 192–194, 196 KMT ideology, 182 ‘Native speaker’ ideology, 44, 196 Neoliberalism as an ideology, 12, 23–25, 34–35, 37, 46, 62–63n5, 196–198 Only females are good at languages ideology, 188–189 Tai-yü ideology, 101 Younger-the-better ideology, 43 Indexical field, 46, 48n19, 67, 177 Indexicality, 39, 46, 67, 101, 114, 119, 175, 177 Institutes of Technology, 35

Internationalization, 4, 29, 38, 42–43, 45–46, 85, 176–178, 189, 194 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 25–26, 46n2, 47n3n5 Intersectionality, 20–21, 22n5 Intersectional questioning, 21, 173, 178–191 Intersections, 6, 8–9, 12, 20–21, 23, 178–186 Investment (in languages/identities), 14, 89, 113, 142, 144, 147, 169–171, 186 Italian language, 75–76, 80–82, 85, 88, 104 Japanese colonization, 5–6 Japanese language, 5, 11n1, 35, 48n14, 54, 61–62, 119, 162 Japanophilia, 6, 182 Kanno, Yasuko, 50, 53, 58 Kelsky, Karen, 8, 179–180, 182 Klein, Naomi, 23, 25–26, 29, 46n2 Kubota, Ryuko, 191, 193 Kuomintang (KMT), 5–7, 40, 182 Language mixing, 97–103, 114 Language ownership, 8, 56, 140– 142,143n1 Lee Teng-hui, 5 Linde, Charlotte, 51–53, 56, 62–63n4–5 Linguistic chutzpah, 158, 194–196 Mandarin Chinese, 4–5, 7–8, 11n1, 30, 39–43, 56–57, 63n11, 65–67, 72– 73, 75–76, 80–81, 88, 92–93, 96– 103, 108–112, 114, 123, 125–126, 128–129, 138, 141, 144, 146–147, 149, 151–154, 156, 159–160, 162, 164, 167, 173, 176–177, 202 Martial law, 5, 7, 30, 182 Ma Ying-jeou, 48n16 McDonald’s, 146–147, 154, 164, 171 Me Too movement, 197

Index 

Ministry of Education (MOE), 32, 38, 40, 42, 44, 107, 124 Modesty, 78, 128, 134, 187, 203 Monica (non-focal participant), 57, 143n1, 191 Moskowitz, Marc, 180–183, 188, 199n1 Narrative, 8–11, 11n1, 20, 24, 49–53, 56–59, 61–62, 62n1–3, 113, 146, 171, 174, 177, 186, 190, 200 Narrative coherence, 51–52, 61, 62–63n5 Negra (non-focal participant), 57, 176 Neoliberalism, 7, 9–10, 12, 17, 21, 23– 46, 46n1, 51–52, 62–63n5, 79, 116, 124, 131, 133–135, 141–142, 158, 177, 189–194, 196–198 Nested nodes, 9, 21 Neutrality of English, 39–40, 48n15 Nightclubs, 91, 98–99, 103, 108–110, 130, 176, 180–182, 185, 199n1, 203 Night market, 153, 177 Occupy movement, 197–198 Park, Joseph Sung-yul, 3, 14, 18, 191, 193 People’s Republic of China (PRC), 3, 7, 11n2, 27–29, 47n8, 85, 129, 186–187, 194, 198 Performativity, 28, 46, 76, 104, 151, 153, 158, 177–178, 205–206 Positioning, 5–6, 25, 46, 51, 53–54, 96, 112, 127, 130–131, 151–152, 162, 170, 176–177, 186 Practice (Bourdieu’s theory of), 12–16, 18, 21n1–2, 46, 173, 177, 194–198 Price, Gareth, 7, 39, 43–45, 174, 192, 196 Rachel (focal participant), 52, 57, 116– 143, 143n1, 150, 158, 168, 172n5, 175–178, 180–183, 186–190, 196, 200–202

219

Rampton, Ben, 59–60, 196 Reflexive habitus, 17 Scale, 4, 12, 14, 18, 24–25, 47n6, 165 Self-development, 37, 42, 48n17, 79, 88, 116, 124, 126–127, 131, 136–137, 142, 158 Self-improvement, 17, 25, 44, 95, 116, 127, 131, 136–137, 142, 171 Self-promotion, 78–79, 90n2, 104, 109, 127–128, 134 Self-reliance, 17, 24, 29, 52, 116, 141– 142, 158 Shannon (focal participant), 52, 57, 143n1, 144–171, 172n1–3, 173– 177, 179, 187–188, 191, 195–196, 199n2, 200, 203–206 Showing off, 128, 153–154, 177–178 Situated generalizability, 192 Skype, 10, 59, 74–76, 152, 179–180, 200–203 Splendeur, 99 Street hawker community, 200 Sunflower movement, 198 Superiority, 29, 31, 37, 44, 66, 77, 145, 161, 170–171, 174–175, 177, 181, 186 Taiwan culture, 34, 74–75, 112, 129– 130, 179–182, 187, 195 Taiwanese kindness, 28 Tai-yü, 6, 11n1, 39–40, 65–67, 92, 101, 112, 117, 126, 128–130, 138, 173, 186–187 Tool metaphor, 4, 112–114, 140, 176, 195 Transcription, 58, 94–95 Translation and interpretation, 19, 35, 46, 48n16, 56, 59, 79, 96, 98, 112–114, 126, 147, 155, 159–162, 167–168, 170, 172n2, 176, 189, 204 Tsai Ing-wen, 7

220 Index

US culture, 62n1, 121, 139–140, 179,182, 187–188 Wee, Lionel, 14, 18, 63n11, 194 World Bank, 25, 46n2

World Games, 79, 162–163, 169 World Model United Nations, 163–165, 169–171, 176, 203 World Trade Organization (WTO), 27–28, 47n3n8