Life and Learning Between Hong Kong and Toronto: An Intercultural Narrative Inquiry (Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education) 3030800512, 9783030800512

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INTERCULTURAL RECIPROCAL LEARNING IN CHINESE AND WESTERN EDUCATION

Life and Learning between Hong Kong and Toronto An Intercultural Narrative Inquiry

Chun-Kwok Lau

Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education Series Editors Michael Connelly University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada Shijing Xu Faculty of Education University of Windsor Windsor, ON, Canada

This book series grows out of the current global interest and turmoil over comparative education and its role in international competition. The specific series grows out of two ongoing educational programs which are integrated in the partnership, the University of Windsor-Southwest University Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Program and the Shanghai-Toronto-Beijing Sister School Network. These programs provide a comprehensive educational approach ranging from preschool to teacher education programs. This framework provides a structure for a set of ongoing Canada-China research teams in school curriculum and teacher education areas. The overall aim of the Partnership program, and therefore of the proposed book series, is to draw on school and university educational programs to create a comprehensive cross-cultural knowledge base and understanding of school education, teacher education and the cultural contexts for education in China and the West. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15114

Chun-Kwok Lau

Life and Learning Between Hong Kong and Toronto An Intercultural Narrative Inquiry

Chun-Kwok Lau Department of Curriculum and Instruction The Education University of Hong Kong Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong

Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education ISBN 978-3-030-80051-2    ISBN 978-3-030-80052-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80052-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Joe Chen Photography / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my mom, Lan Hing 蘭馨 The fragrance of an orchid

Series Foreword

The Series and East-West Contrasting Educational Narratives This book series focuses on Chinese and Western education for the purpose of mutual understanding and reciprocal learning between the East and the West. The East has been a puzzle for the West, romanticized or demonized depending on the times. East-West relations have a long history of inquiry, and action has often been framed in competitive, ideological, and colonialist terms. In 1926 Dewey complained that “As far as we have gone at all, we have gone in loco parentis, with advice, with instruction, with example and precept. Like a good parent we would have brought up China in the way in which she should go.” (p. 188). This “paternal” attitude, as Dewey called it, has not always been so benign. Economic, cultural and intellectual matters have often been in the forefront since the Opium Wars of the 19th Century. Intellectually the East-West dynamic is equally dramatic as found in works by authors such as Said (1978), Tu Wei-ming (1993), Hall and Ames (1999), Hayhoe and Pan (2001) and many others. These writers are part of a rich conceptual knowledge across cultures literature on the historical, philosophical, cultural and educational differences of the East and West. Education is a vital topic of international discussion and essential component part of our global consciousness. Global discussions of economics, national and regional competition, and national and regional futures often turn to education. Meanwhile local educational discussions take place in social environments discourse of international awareness. ‘How are our international neighbours doing?’ ‘How do they teach values?’ ‘We have to vii

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catch up.’ These matters are vitally important. But they are not new. Higher education in universities and other forms of postsecondary education has occupied most of the attention. What is new, and what, in our view, is likely to have far-reaching impact, is the focus on school education and early childhood education as well as pre-service teacher education. For several reasons, not the least of which is national competition, the focus on school education has been driven by comparative achievement studies. When Shanghai school students topped the chart in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) studies the information was broadcast worldwide and generated ferocious discussion. One of the positive outcomes of this discussion is comparative research interest, the process of comparing educational similarities and differences in school practices, official policies, and social cultural influences. This comparative interest is all to the good and should help frame potential positive comparative futures. But comparative research on similarity and difference is not enough. We believe we need to reach beyond the study of similarities and differences and to explore life filled school practices of people in different cultures coming together and learning from one another. In this postmodern world of instant worldwide communication we need to go beyond comparative premises. Ideas, thoughts, images, research, knowledge, plans and policies are in constant interaction. This book series hopes to move our international educational research onto this collaborative and interactive educational landscape of schools, parents, communities, policy and international trends and forces.

Series Objectives and Contribution to Knowledge The book series grew out of our seven-year Canada-China partnership study on reciprocal educational learning between Canada and China (Xu & Connelly, 2013–2020). The partnership developed from the current global interest and turmoil over comparative education and its role in international competition. The specific series grows out of two ongoing educational programs which are integrated in the partnership, the University of WindsorSouthwest University Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Program and the Shanghai-Toronto-Beijing Sister School Network. These programs provide a comprehensive educational approach ranging from preschool to teacher education programs. This framework provides a structure for a set of ongoing Canada-China research teams in school curriculum and teacher education areas. The overall aim of the Partnership program, and therefore of the proposed book series, is to draw on school and university educational programs to create a comprehensive cross-cultural knowledge base and

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understanding of school education, teacher education and the cultural contexts for education in China and the West. The first few books in the series will be direct outgrowths of our partnershipstudy. But because of current global conditions, there is a great deal of important related work underway throughout the world. We encourage submissions to the series and expect the series to become a home for collaborative reciprocal learning educational work between the East and the West. The starting point in our Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Partnership’s is the idea of a global community in which ideas, things, and people flow between countries and cultures (Xu & Connelly, 2013). There is intense public discussion in Canada over international relations with China. The publication of international student achievement scores that rank China at the top has resulted in growing scholarly and public discussion on the differences in our educational systems. The discussion tends to focus on economic and trade relations while educational reciprocity and reciprocal learning are often absent from educational discourse. Given that the Chinese are Canada’s and Ontario’s largest immigrant group and that Chinese students have statistically shown academic excellence, it is critical to explore what we can learn from Chinese philosophies of education and its educational system, and what Canada can offer China in return. The Partnership’s overall goal is to compare and contrast Canadian and Chinese education in such a way that the cultural narratives of each provide frameworks for understanding and appreciating educational similarities and differences. We expect other work generated outside our partnership Grant to have different starting points and socially relevant arguments. But we do expect all series works to share the twin goals of mutual understanding and reciprocal learning. Built on these twin goals the purpose of the book series is to create and assemble the definitive collection of educational writings on the similarities, differences and reciprocal learnings between education in the East and the West. Drawing on the work of partnership oriented researchers throughout the world, the series is designed to: • build educational knowledge and understanding from a cross-cultural perspective; • support new approaches to research on curriculum, teaching and learning in schools and teacher education programs in response to change brought on by heightened global awareness;

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• provide a compelling theoretical frame for conceptualizing the philosophical and narrative historical trajectories of these two compelling worldviews on education, society and culture; • Provide state of the art reviews of the comparative Chinese and English language literature on school curriculum and teacher education; • Model, sustainable, school to school structures and methods of communication and educational sharing between Canada, other English speaking countries and China; • Model, sustainable, structures and methods of initial teacher training in cross-cultural understanding; • Contribute to a documented knowledge base of similarities, differences, comparisons and reciprocal learnings in elementary and secondary school teaching and learning curricula. Professor Emeritus Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada Professor Canada Research Chair Faculty of Education University of Windsor Windsor, Canada

Michael Connelly

Dr. Shijing Xu

References Dewey, J. (1926). America and the Far East. Survey, 1 May, 1926, 188. Later published in: John Dewey, The Later works, 1925–1953, (1984). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Volume 2: 1925–1927, pp. 1173–1175. Hayhoe, R., & Pan, J. (Eds.). (2001). Knowledge across cultures: A contribution to dialogue among civilizations. Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong. Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Tu, W. (1993). Way, learning, and politics: Essays on the Confucian intellectual. Albany: State University of New York Press. Xu, S., & Connelly F.M. (Project Directors) (2013). Reciprocal learning in teacher education and school education between Canada and China. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) 2013–2020 [Grant 895-2012-1011].

Foreword: What Is in a Name?

This book is a must-read volume. It probes fascinating intercultural exchanges between lives lived in Canada and lives lived in Hong Kong, but also lives lived in Hong Kong as a British colony in the decades leading to its return to mainland China in 1997. This provides useful background to comprehend the ongoing, drastic changes in Hong Kong in recent years. The prologue fittingly begins with a provocative discussion of names. I, too, will begin with names because they define reality. Names not only help to set context; they distinguish one place from another and one individual from another. People know places through naming locations. People also identify themselves with a given name; they furthermore answer to the names they are called. Hence, names unavoidably are part of people’s identities and central to how they physically locate themselves in the world. They form part of the backdrop of human interactions. This book’s Prologue keenly contrasts how Chinese and Western cultures use names. For CK Lau, this book’s author, how he answers to his name is complicated. How he responds has to do with the meaning in his given name, and whether he is interacting in a Chinese backdrop or whether he is in a Western backdrop (i.e., United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States). In the Chinese context, his family name (his surname) comes first. In Western culture, his given name leads the way with his family name trailing behind. However, we also learned that those with Chinese origin names sometimes adopt Western names for the ease of the Westerners with whom they interact. For example, CK Lau is the name attached to the authorship of this book—CK’s chosen Western xi

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name—not his Chinese name, which was given to him at birth. As readers can see, a great deal goes on with names. This provoked a flurry of thought in me and in the personal narrative I bring to the writing of this Foreword for CK Lau’s book (this volume). First, I remembered my father who detested the name given to him at birth and went by his middle name for his entire life (a Western quirk). Second, I recalled my mother who was given an upper-crust British name. She wore it with pride and, more often than not, used it as a conversation piece. Third, there is me. I had a family name (surname) with an unsavoury ring to it. Hence, I was more than ready to take my partner’s surname in marriage to avoid the perennial challenge accompanying my original family name. Fourth, I was reminded of one of my Chinese-born doctoral students. He used his pre-arranged birth name (first name followed by his family name) in the U.S. with his professors and doctoral peers while simultaneously using his self-selected American name in his interactions with research participants. Fifth, I had another Chinese graduate student, a female, who resisted the name assigned to her by her English professor. She riled against the arbitrary change of her name for others’ purposes. She said she liked her name, which was “very special and unique” in Mandarin, but had “absolutely no meaning whatsoever when translated into English” (Personal communication, 2021). Then, a sixth pertinent scenario came to mind. That situation relates to CK Lau’s research method, which connects him to F. Michael Connelly (who intriguingly uses his second name like my father), and to John Dewey whose theory of experience forms the foundation of CK Lau’s research. It also links him (and me!) to the origins of narrative inquiry and to shared research roots, which through Michael Connelly directly connects with Joseph Schwab at the University of Chicago and ultimately to John Dewey himself. After that, a seventh association bubbled to the fore. While writing my book Curriculum Making, Reciprocal Learning and the Best Loved Self, which is in this same Palgrave series (Craig, 2020) as this volume, I read about Dewey’s groundbreaking work in China where he became known as ‘the second Confucius’ (Bu & Han, 2019; Grange, 2004; Qi, 2005) — ‘the Western Confucius’ — in China (Han & Feng, 2013). This “yok[ing of] the twentieth century philosopher [Dewey] with the found[ing] of the [Chinese] cultural outlook…” (Grange, 2004, p. xiv) was immensely important to the development of Chinese education. Here we further learn that Eastern-Western exchanges have been ongoing and that they

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ultimately trace to the meeting of the Eastern and Western worlds and specifically to the Silk Road where Western and Eastern commercial exchanges shared not only names, but also culture, cultural artefacts, and food preferences, as well as every other aspect of associated human living. Probing more deeply into Dewey’s work in China, I found one other name-related consideration, which provides important backdrop to this book. When Dewey visited China for the first time in the 1920s, he delivered over 200 lectures—with some talks being on the same day. I also came to know that Dewey had three famous Chinese students: Hu Shih, Chiang Monlin and Tao Xingzhi. Each helped spread Dewey’s experiential philosophy in the eastern hemisphere (Wen & Xie, 2017). In fact, Tao Xingzhi held John Dewey in such high esteem that he changed his name from Zhixing (知行), in which the Chinese character for knowing (知) comes before acting (行) to Xingzhi (行知), meaning “act[ing] before knowing,” which more suitably reflected Dewey’s theory of experience (Han, 2020). Here, something more—something critically important—about Chinese names comes to light. Chinese names bear meaning. They are not graphic sounds as is the case in the West. Chinese characters are units of meaning; they are not meaningless symbols lined up one after the other. The complexities of names and naming within and across cultures form the tip of the proverbial iceberg—because sitting behind names are so many other points of comparison and meaning. CK Lau spearheaded his discussion with names. I have followed his lead. CK directs us to so many rich cultural and educational considerations in his transitioning back and forth between Toronto, Canada and Hong Kong. In this book, CK Lau invites us to rethink some fundamental issues in life and learning through a narrative of his family’s lived experiences in different times and places. This book is richly detailed and deeply introspective. I commend it to your reading. It conveys intercultural learning at its finest. College Station, TX, USA Cheryl J. Craig

References Bu, Y., & Han, X. (2019). Promoting the development of backbone teachers through university-school collaborative research: The case of new basic education (NBE) reform in China. Teachers and Teaching, 25(2), 200–219. Craig, C. (2020). Curriculum making, reciprocal learning and the best-­loved self. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Grange, J. (2004). John Dewey, Confucius, and global philosophy. SUNY Press. Han, X. (2020). Bridging the East and the West: Reflections on learning, leading and life. In C.  Craig, L.  Turchi & D.  McDonald (Eds.), Cross-­disciplinary, cross-institutional collaboration in teacher education: Cases of learning and leading (pp. 135–147). Palgrave Macmillan. Han, X., & Feng, Z. (2013). School-based instructional Research (SBIR): An approach to teacher professional development in China. Advances in Research on Teaching, 19(2), 503–525. Qi, J. (2005). A history of the present: Chinese intellectuals, Confucianism and pragmatism. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), In Inventing the modern self and John Dewey (pp. 255–277). Palgrave Macmillan. Wen, W., & Xie, W. (2017). The development and characteristics of educational studies in China. In G. Whitty & J. Furlong (Eds.), Knowledge and the study of education: An international exploration (pp. 145–160). Symposium Books.

Preface

This book is based on my dissertation completed almost 20  years ago originally submitted as part of my doctoral study at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. While the basic structure, stories, and arguments largely remain, the whole work has been reconceived and rewritten substantially for this publication. When I was asked to join this series, the first questions that came up in my mind were: why now? why me? what for? I will try to address these questions in this Preface. Why now? Twenty years is perhaps long enough to distil the essential from fleeting ideas, both with hindsight and the advantage of being able to look back from a wider perspective. The specific events and circumstances were obviously dated but the lessons learned from reflections on such lived experiences are not. Indeed, the most valuable learnings endure. Much of the stories and reflections in this book is about people travelling across boundaries and negotiating challenges in different cultural and educational landscapes in an interconnected world. Similar challenges and excitements might still emerge today for people in different times and places. Maybe increasing so is the escalating trend in the global movement of people and ideas across different cultures today. Why me? When I first came to Toronto in August 1999 to start my residency year, I was invited by my supervisor Prof. Michael Connelly, or Mick as he likes to be affectionally addressed, to join his ongoing research project in Bay Street School. The project was started and led by Mick with Jean Clandinin, a doctoral student of Mick at that time in the early 1980s. xv

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When Mick and Jean pioneered the experiential, biographical and historical interpretive orientation in their field research and later developed the groundbreaking narrative inquiry approach for educational studies, crosscultural educational research was just emerging on the horizon. The research site, Bay Street School, was an Inner-City school located in a relatively worn-out area near Chinatown in Toronto. According to an earliest report, it had 47 staff members and about 750 students of ethnically diverse backgrounds. Approximately one-third of the students were oriental, one-third were Portuguese, one-fifth were Black, and the remaining students were of many ethnic origins (Connelly & Clandinin, 1982). When I first arrived at Bay Street School on my own in September 1999, I was completely dazed. The classroom dynamics and school environment had turned my experience of schooling upside down  – classrooms were busy and noisy, the teacher was moving around to attend to the needs of different students, occasionally some parents or grandparents might sit in the classrooms with their children or grandchildren. It seemed chaotic to me but the teacher was at ease. When she called for attention, the students would quickly gather and sit on the floor near the front of classroom, eager to listen to their teacher and interacting with her during the story time. Disruptions and conflicts among students were not uncommon in class but were generally handled by the teacher through engaging different parties in the conversations. The student population was more diverse than it was in the early 1980s. As I walked around the school building, posters celebrating different cultural festivals and traditions were abound. School notices and circulars to parents were printed in at least six different languages, which were completely strangers to me, except English and Chinese. In order to comprehend the cultural shocks and puzzlements I encountered in Bay Street School, I was gradually drawn into the cross-cultural literature by Margaret Mead, Mary C. Bateson, Maxine Greene, and later Martha C. Nussbaum. It was a time when my learning experience of narrative inquiry was getting started and the above scholars loomed large in my intellectual horizon. Reading the vast and rich literature from these intellectual mentors in parallel with the narrative inquiry works had shed light and guided me in understanding the learning journey my family experienced in the following years. In effect, they shifted my understanding of aspects of cultures to thinking about what interacting cultures offer

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one another educationally, a process later named reciprocal learning in this book series. As I think over my experience of life in Canada and Hong Kong, I have come to think of it in reciprocal learning terms. Cultures emerge and develop in different circumstances and excel in different ways, resulting in each having much to offer to and learn from one another. It is true not only on the grand scheme of things on the national and international levels but also in the lived experiences of every school, family, and society. What for? As we witnessed the escalating technological changes, financial crises, environmental disasters, regional and international conflicts in different parts of the world in recent years, and especially the global pandemic the whole world is facing at the moment, the need for global cooperation based on mutual understanding and reciprocal learning is more pressing now than ever. While practical political negotiations are often clouded with interests and power relationships beyond the reach of common people, we could and should start with ourselves with genuine dialogue from the grassroots on our shared predicaments and opportunities. We need to take whatever actions we deem worthwhile in educating the children in our families and schools, reimagining and rebuilding our neighbourhood. No one else can do this for us or take away our responsibility in this. The challenges ahead are never easy but this is when and why we must hold fast to our hopes and dreams. The perennial concern of the inquiry in this book is to invite rethinking of our core values in life, and the connections between family, school and community in the endeavour of building a better world for tomorrow. To this end, together with other works in this book series with our shared notion of cross-cultural reciprocal learning, this book is a humble invitation for all readers who share this dream. We need our voices to be heard. Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong

Chun-Kwok Lau

Reference Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1982). Personal practical knowledge at Bay Street School (ED 222978). ERIC. https://eric.ed. gov/?id=ED222978

Praise for Life and Learning Between Hong Kong and Toronto “A riveting account of a young Hong Kong family settling for a year in Canada. Vivid depictions of the children’s school experiences highlight the benefits of intercultural learning and demonstrate the value of narrative inquiry as an approach to educational research and cross-cultural understanding. A book that is both highly readable and deeply engaging!” —Ruth Hayhoe, Professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada, and President Emerita, The Education University of Hong Kong “The identity of rich intercultural encounters of his home city makes the personal narrative of CK’s family unique, inspiring, and educative. Their journey to cultural discovery has epitomized the latest chapter of the grand narrative of the Hongkongers who are still learning and benefiting from inter-cultural flows, with their experiences in Toronto, the host city, as a case study.” —Francis Chan, Associate Professor, Caritas Institute of Higher Education, Hong Kong “Drawing on his personal experiences as a father and husband in a family that needed to move back and forth between Hong Kong and Toronto, CK is able to take the complex discussion about acculturation and weave it into everyday stories that are familiar and close to everyone. This is an indispensable book and timely reference for parents, teachers, narrative researchers, and all those who are interested in education for this generation of people with ever-increasing mobility.” —YU Wai Ming, Senior Lecturer, The Education University of Hong Kong

Acknowledgements

Writing the acknowledgments is perhaps the most difficult part of my long journey of writing a thesis and then transforming it into a book. How could I express my heartfelt gratitude to all the people who have made this inquiry such a rewarding experience? No, no words will suffice. Yet try I must, knowing that these words could only convey a tiny fraction of my gratitude to them. Michael Connelly, through the numerous thesis supervision sessions either in your office or over the telephone line across the ocean, you taught me how to go about an inquiry and write it well. But Mick, you are so much more than an academic supervisor to me. Did you know every time I flew to Toronto and arrived at your office, I could feel your warmth in your forceful hugs? And did you know every time I left for Hong Kong, I needed to hold back tears as you gave me the goodbye hugs? No other person has been able to do what you have done for me. Ruth Hayhoe, your comments and advice to my work are both thought-­ provoking and action-prompting for me. You urged me to think hard about how teachers and principals could benefit from our scholarship. You are a rare exemplar in fusing outstanding scholarship and practical endeavours that bring about changes in schools across different parts of the world. Through your genuine passion in people, unbounded energy, strong vision, and integrity, you never fail to inspire. Jim Cummins, I learned much more than theories of critical pedagogy and issues of language and identity in your class. You showed such great respect for your students who came from different corners of the world. xxi

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

You created a stimulating space for us to learn from each other in a culturally diverse society. Bill Ayers, your writings have inspired me greatly. In you, I see a passionate and determined fighter for peace and justice. Thank you so much for reading my work and giving me your insightful observations and appraisal. To all my mentors who have taught me in different ways, I could only repay by joining you in the continual effort in creating a better world, starting from where we are now. Many other friends and colleagues have been crucial in my thesis journey. On the Toronto side, I would especially like to thank Ming Fang He, JoAnn Phillion, Carmen Maggisano, and Deirdre DeCarion who kindly offered their time to read and comment on my writings when I was only beginning to learn the craft. You strengthened my belief that true friendships could brighten up our lives. On the Hong Kong side, the whole OISE/HKIEd cohort has been extremely supportive. In particular, I would like to thank Francis Chan and Flora Yu who offered me insights and strong support in my professional and personal challenges throughout these years. I am also deeply grateful to Cheryl Craig who agreed to write the Foreword and an anonymous reviewer who gave me useful comments and suggestions at an early stage of this book project. Lastly, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my family, without whom this book would not have existed. Our experience of living and learning together in Toronto has profoundly changed our lives, preparing us for all the ups and downs that we sailed through all these years, and many more years to come. A big hug to you all.

Contents

1 Prologue: I’ve Got a Name  1 References   4 2 Introduction  5 Overview of the Book   8 References   9 3 Autobiographical and Social Background to My Inquiry 11 The Duster Story  11 My Early Family Experiences  13 My Primary School Years  16 The Boarding Years  17 Who Are We? Hong Kong Chinese? Hongkonger?  18 June 4, 1989  21 Life and Death: When They Come so Close  22 The SARS Reflections  25 References  28 4 Early Experience of Toronto and the Initial Transition 31 You Must Be Joking!  31 Preparing for the Move  34 Changing the Landscapes: Hong Kong, Downtown Toronto, and North York  35

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Changing Schools  37 Our Experiences as a Family of New Arrival in Toronto  38 Reference  40 5 Education and School Life in Toronto 41 The Start of the School Year  42 “Oh Fanny, I Know You! I Remember Your Face!”  43 The Main Course on the Menu  44 Peer Relationships Outside the Classroom  45 A Place in the Classroom  46 Birthday Party in Class  48 Smile and Recess, Music and Work  49 Andy’s Troubles with His Homework  50 Evaluating Students – Andy’s Report Card  51 Fanny’s Story: A Lesson in Black History for Her Father  53 Learning, Achievement, and Awards  55 Summary  58 References  61 6 Leaving Canada and Returning to Hong Kong 63 Part 1: Leaving Canada  64 A Time and Place in Between  64 “Bye Little Acorn. Bye everything. Bye everything in Canada”  65 “I didn’t realise that I wasn’t coming back on Monday”  67 Crying, but Not the Same Tears  70 Part 2: Returning to Hong Kong  72 Andy’s Dream  72 Allocating Classes: Are You an Elite, or Not?  73 Friendships and Sports  74 Coping with School Work  76 References  81 7 Experiencing the Cultural Landscape 83 Letter 1: Three Accounts of Reading Culture  84 Account 1: The Library  89 Account 2: Reading at Home  90 Account 3: A Small Book that Made a Big Difference  91 How Do We Make Sense of These Three Accounts?  93

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Letter 2: Four Images  95 Image 1: A Little Coin Box Beside a Printer in the Children’s Section of a Public Library  95 Image 2: A Middle-Aged Man with a Ponytail Sitting Beside a Fare Box in a Subway Station  96 Image 3: A Little Boy Holding a Door Open for His Schoolmates  96 Image 4: A Bus Driver Pulling over the Side of the Road  96 What Lessons Do I Learn from These Images?  97 8 Life and Learning in a Multicultural World 99 Personal Experiences, Social Significances 100 Changing People, Changing Places 102 People in Motion 103 People Encountering Differences 106 Life and Learning in Changing World—An Unfinished Conversation 106 Notions of Learning and Education in Different Landscapes 108 The Uses of Textbooks: Teacher-Proof Packages or Teachers as Curriculum Planners 108 School as the Sole Centre or as One of the Partners in the Education of Children 110 Learning and Education in a Multicultural World 113 References 115 9 Epilogue: A Fictional Conversation Between Father and Daughter117 Index123

List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 6.1

The seating puzzle Certificate from Fanny’s school in Toronto (with identifcation details blurred) Certificate from Fanny’s school in Hong Kong (with identifcation details blurred) Samples and progress of Andy’s spelling tests in Toronto Andy winning a gold medal in the Sports Day

47 56 57 58 75

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CHAPTER 1

Prologue: I’ve Got a Name

“My name is Yang Yingtao,” I introduced myself. Then I remembered that in America people said their family name last and their given name first. “Yingtao is my last name,” I told him. “Except that in America my last name is really my first name and my first name is my last name. So I’m Yang Yingtao in China and Yingtao Yang in America.” The boy looked confused. Just then the bell rang. “I’m Matthew Conner,” he said quickly. “See you around!” (Namioka, 1992, pp. 22–23)

I’ve got a name. My name in Chinese is 劉振國. The three characters are written in the traditional form. This form was basically established in the Qin Dynasty (221 to 207 BC) in China and has been used for thousands of years by the government officials, literati, and commoners alike, until a simplified form was promoted and made official in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. Taiwan and Hong Kong are the only two places in the world today where the traditional written Chinese is still learned in schools and used officially in the society. I was born and brought up in Hong Kong when it was still a British colony. The English name shown on my birth certificate is “Lau ChunKwok” as how it is pronounced in Cantonese, a major dialect used in a southern province of China. “Lau” is my family name. “Chun-Kwok” is my given name. In Chinese convention, a person’s family name comes © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. K. Lau, Life and Learning Between Hong Kong and Toronto, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80052-9_1

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before his or her given name. This often causes confusion in Western countries where the family name usually comes last. Sometimes Chinese people adopt the Western style and change the order of the presentation of their names to avoid confusion in some occasions. In that case, my name would become Chun-Kwok Lau. In Chinese tradition, a child’s given name is often bestowed with the expectation of the parents on the newborn child. Every character in Chinese carries a distinct meaning. Literally my given name means “strengthen and revive the country”. I do not know who decided on this name for me. This literal meaning is somewhat embarrassing and seems more like a joke to me: Who am I to strengthen the country? Which country do I belong to? Why do I have to shoulder this heavy duty? Anyway, in reality, I seldom gave serious thought to these questions when I was young. At about 11 years old, I began studying in a boarding school run by a Catholic missionary society. All students learned the Bible and most were baptized in the school within a few years. For that occasion, I had a chance to choose a Christian name for myself. One day, I scanned through a book found in the chapel to look for some suggestions. I chose Francis. I used Francis as my English name for several years, until I gradually dropped my religious belief after finishing high school. Many years later, when I began my doctoral programme at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in Toronto, I chose another name. Among my OISE friends and teachers, I was known by the name CK. It began in the summer of 1998. We were in the first session of the first course of our programme. There were about 20 students sitting around a circle in the classroom, plus two instructors. We were asked to introduce ourselves. I was sitting near the end of the round. As nobody in the room knew me before, I decided to choose a new identity for my doctoral journey. I was thinking hard on the spot what name I should use: Francis, or James, or Alan, or Chun-Kwok? No, no, no, none of these names sounded right to me. “Hurry up!” I told myself. Minutes passed. When it finally came to my turn, I announced, “I am CK – CK Lau”. This is the English name I adopted for myself since that day. I did not want to choose another Christian name, which made no sense to me anymore. I did not want to use the English sounds of my Chinese name, which might bring difficulty to my foreign friends. Plus, these sounds lose all the senses and flavours of the original meaning embedded in my Chinese name, though I did not care about them. * * *

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Why make a fuss over these trivial matters? You might be asking. Well, for those who were born with the convenience of an English name, this might not be an issue. But then you might need to stretch your imagination harder enough to understand the agony and frustrations of Eva Hoffman (1989) or Richard Rodriguez (1983) who were assigned by their school teachers a more “proper” name different from the one they had been using intimately since they were born – because their original names, Ewa or Ricardo, did not look right or sound right in their new host countries. The renaming of Ewa to Eva and Ricardo to Richard took place in the social contexts of their times and also cut deeply into their innermost identities, a hurt that their teachers might not aware of. Eva was born Ewa Wydra shortly after World War II in Poland when her Jewish parents survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Ukraine. In 1959, the 13-year-old Ewa emigrated with her family to Vancouver, where her name was changed to Eva. After graduating with a PhD from Harvard in 1975, she worked as a writer and editor, and also taught literature and creative writing at various universities. Though she had become an internationally acclaimed writer and academic, she was still struggling with her teenage experience as a new immigrant, as she documented in her memoir Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (Hoffman, 1989). Ricardo was born into a Mexican immigrant family in San Francisco. He spoke only Spanish until he went to a Catholic school when he was 6 years old, knowing only “some fifty stray English words” (Rodriguez, 1983, p. 11). His memoir, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, was an account of his journey from being a socially disadvantaged child to becoming a fully assimilated American, an acclaimed writer and international journalist. In the memoir, Richard lamented how his American identity was achieved only after a painful separation from his past, his family, and his culture. * * * In Hong Kong, most people do not experience the agony of Ewa or Ricardo because they often voluntarily adopt an English name for themselves. In effect, many young people prefer to use their English names outside the family. Once I had a student who stood up and voiced out seriously in the class that she would not respond to anyone calling her by her Chinese name. She said that she hated her Chinese name because she considered it embarrassing and old fashioned.

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These stories of personal names in Hong Kong are connected to a bigger social backdrop. Since 1842, Hong Kong had been a British colony for over 150 years. Over half of the schools here, especially the more prestigious and historical ones, are run by the Christian churches (Chan, 2002; Kwong, 2000). English is used as the main medium of instruction in most of these schools. English names are widely used among the students and teachers. English is the preferred common language in the business corporations, especially those dealing with international clients. It was also the only official language in the government until the 1970s. Adopting an English name seems to be a preferred practice for Hong Kong people. When I met other Chinese scholars in overseas conferences, I found that most Chinese from the mainland China and Taiwan preferred to use their Chinese names in Romanized spelling. To complicate the situation further among Chinese people, there are substantial variations in both the written and spoken forms as used in different Chinese communities, so we are not using exactly the same language, strictly speaking. This sometimes stirred up a bit of emotions with political implications. These “small stories” of names are more than merely personal. They often appear in the cracks and spaces of the “meganarratives” or “grand stories” of a particular time and place (Olson & Craig, 2009). These stories often carry the ambiguous feeling of our belongings and our puzzling sense of identity. The personal and the social are closely connected in our storied lives, and lived on particular storied places (Craig, 2003).

References Chan, S. H. (2002). A carnival of gods: Studies of religions in Hong Kong. Oxford University Press. Craig, C. (2003). Narrative inquiries of school reform: Storied lives, storied landscapes, storied metaphors. IAP. Hoffman, E. (1989). Lost in translation: A life in a new language. Penguin. Kwong, C. W. (2000). Hong Kong’s religions in transition. Tao Foundation. Namioka, L. (1992). Yang the youngest and his terrible ear. Bantam Doubleday Dell. Olson, M., & Craig, C. (2009). “Small” stories and meganarratives: Accountability in balance. Teachers College Record, 111(2), 547–572. Rodriguez, R. (1983). Hunger of memory: The education of Richard Rodriguez. Bantam Books.

CHAPTER 2

Introduction

This book is a first-person account of my family’s lived experience in Hong Kong and Toronto. The inquiry focused on our educational experience when we moved back and forth between the two places within a few years. Faced with the strangeness we experienced both abroad and at home, we often found ourselves in novel situations and uncertainties. As we tried to improvise and adapt in these situations, we learned worthwhile lessons along the way (Bateson, 1994). People encounter various challenges as they negotiate among different linguistic, educational, and cultural landscapes (He, 2003; Hoffman, 1989; Rodriguez, 1983). My family’s lived experience of studying and living in different places prompted me to rethink the different notions of life and learning in order to understand the otherwise chaotic and sometimes contradictory phenomena in different landscapes. In a sense, we all live in a multicultural world even though we are not travelling abroad. Whether we are in Hong Kong or Toronto or any other places in the world, we often live alongside people with different religious or political faiths. We might go to school and work with people from diverse educational and cultural backgrounds. After all, we live with our loved ones, our siblings, our children or parents of different genders and different ages at home. In Full Circles, Overlapping Lives, cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson (2000) reminded us that we just need to look at the different characters in a family to find different cultures: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. K. Lau, Life and Learning Between Hong Kong and Toronto, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80052-9_2

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We live with strangers. Those we love most, with whom we share a shelter, a table, a bed, remain mysterious. Wherever lives overlap and flow together, there are depths of unknowing. Parents and children, partners, siblings, and friends repeatedly surprise us, revealing the need to learn where we are most at home. (p. 3)

People and ideas travel across countries in a much faster pace than we could imagine decades earlier. We live in a closely connected world in social, cultural, political, and economic senses in the twenty-first century. Accordingly, we need to live with and learn from the differences among people, or try to resolve conflicts when tensions arise. To prepare our children to live and learn in this world, we need to reflect on and examine the basic values, purposes, and practices in our family, school, and the society. Our personal stories are situated in the broader social and historical milieu. With my family’s lived experience as the focal point of the narrative, I explore how the different ideas of life and learning are connected to our daily practices in the school, in the family, and in the society. In August 1999, my family came to Canada and stayed in Toronto for one full year. We went back to Hong Kong in August 2000. Before that, we had never been exposed to other educational systems or had lived in other places except for some short periods of travel as tourists. During the one-year stay, my two children attended a public elementary school in Toronto while I was studying for my doctoral degree at OISE. My wife was taking a one-year break in the midst of her teaching career and took care of all household duties in the family. As we were trying to settle in and adapt to our new life in Toronto, we experienced endless excitements and frustrations, puzzles and tensions which could be described as a “rhythm of loss of integration with environment” (Dewey, 1934, p. 15). Encounters with novelty and uncertainty in our daily life often prompted us to see things anew and to reconsider the deep-rooted values and practices we took for granted for years. Occasionally we were thrown into discord which became “the occasion that induces reflection” (Dewey, 1934, p. 15). We always learn from, and are shaped by, our daily experiences. In an unfamiliar environment, this kind of learning is accentuated. This book is a narrative account of our experiences of moving back and forth between different places and, based on that, my attempt to make sense of such experiences. While my family experiences are essentially contextualized and located in particular times and places, I hope that insights into broad issues can be gained through looking attentively into the

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nuances in our daily lives, as the English poet, painter, and engraver William Blake (1757–1827) wrote in his “Auguries of Innocence” (Erdman, 2008): To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour

While the schools my children attended and the daily lived experiences we had in Hong Kong and Toronto did show some significant educational and cultural contrasts, this book is not a generalized study about schooling and culture in these two places. The school my children attended in Toronto was one unique school with its own specific history and location. The classes they went into, and the teachers, classmates, and friends they happened to know, were also unique and incidental. These incidental circumstances shaped, for better or worse, my children’s experience of Canadian education. The place we happened to stay in during the year in Toronto also determined the people we were likely to meet, the places we were likely to visit, the shops and restaurants we were likely to shop and dine in. This is also true about our experiences in Hong Kong. All these life accidentalities fuelled our lives in Canada, and Hong Kong, or elsewhere. Geertz (1995) used “parade” as a metaphor to describe the change over time in the world and in our lives. Imagine ourselves joining a procession or parade. We know what we know because of our position in the parade. What we know at one point in time also shifts as the parade moves temporally forward to another point in time. Our seeing and understanding of the landscapes are continuously shifting and changing as a result of our participating and moving in the procession. In our case, we came to Toronto with our educational and life history from Hong Kong. We moved back to Hong Kong with our experience of studying and living for a year in Toronto. Joining and leaving the parades at different times and in different places brought us lots of excitements, funs, pains, and puzzles. The concrete and nuanced lived experiences as we moved along are inevitably “filled with narrative fragments, enacted in storied moments of time and space, and reflected upon and understood in terms of narrative unities and discontinuities” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 17). What we could expect to learn from such reflections are not generalized, universal, and

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timeless propositions or solutions to problems but unfolding insights that are necessarily tied to our complex lived contexts and to temporality. My humble purpose is to invite conversations with the readers to raise their own questions and think about some of our shared puzzles and concerns in life and learning in this connected world.

Overview of the Book In the Prologue that came before this chapter, I mused on some poignant thoughts and stories around my perplexities on identity. Through the confounding puzzles I have on my name and the names of my students and friends, I opened up this inquiry into our personal family experiences within the social contexts of our time. In this chapter, I start with my puzzle and inquiry phenomenon. I position my inquiry in the discussion of the notions of life and learning in a rapidly changing world, followed by the background contexts and methods of my inquiry. In Chap. 3, I recount an incident I had when I was a novice teacher in my first year of teaching. In my attempt to understand the incident, I revisit my growing-up stories situated in the broader social history of Hong Kong. I propose that this process of living and telling, retelling, and reliving these stories helps to underpin the intertwined connections between life and learning. In Chap. 4, I recall how we prepared for moving to Toronto amid many uncertainties. Within the a few days of our arrival at Toronto, we had to abandon our original plans about our accommodation and the school our children attended. Things changed abruptly and unexpectedly. We began to learn to live with the fact that things seldom worked out as we planned. In Chap. 5, I try to make sense of the stories of my children in the different educational landscapes. Hong Kong and Toronto keep shifting their foreground and background in my telling. Centred on my children’s experiences, different stories of teaching and learning were highlighted, demonstrating the close connection of lives in school, family, and the society. In Chap. 6, I tell our experiences of returning to Hong Kong after our one-year stay in Toronto. The shock and difficulties in our return showed that our values and outlooks often changed drastically after going through new experiences in different places. This chapter also brings out the

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contrasts between the underlying ideas and practices of life and learning in two places. In Chap. 7, I narrate the experience of our lives in the different social and cultural landscapes. With different stories of Hong Kong and Toronto intercepting with each other, I ponder on the key questions and puzzles arising from our simple everyday experiences: why do people do things differently? What are the meanings of these differences? What do we want in our lives? What kinds of society do we want to live in? In Chap. 8, I draw the stories in the previous chapters together to highlight and discuss the different notions of life and learning in the context of people experiencing a rapidly changing world. I also argue for the relevance of personal stories for understanding public issues in the bigger social context. Finally, in the Epilogue, I return to the puzzle I set out in the Prologue. I create a fictional conversation between my daughter and I, in which I deliberate how we are trying to construct our fluid identities in this multicultural world through our life experience, or in another term, our education.

References Bateson, M. C. (1994). Peripheral visions: Learning along the way. HarperCollins. Bateson, M. C. (2000). Full circles, overlapping lives: Culture and generation in transition. Ballantine. Clandinin, D.  J., & Connelly, F.  M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. Perigee. Erdman, D.  V. (Ed.). (2008). The complete poetry and prose of William Blake. University of California Press. Geertz, C. (1995). After the fact: Two countries, four decades, one anthropologist. Harvard University Press. He, M. F. (2003). A river forever flowing: Cross-cultural lives and identities in the multicultural landscape. Information Age Publishing. Hoffman, E. (1989). Lost in translation: A life in a new language. Penguin. Rodriguez, R. (1983). Hunger of memory: The education of Richard Rodriguez. Bantam Books.

CHAPTER 3

Autobiographical and Social Background to My Inquiry

In this chapter, I start with a classroom incident that happened when I was a novice teacher many years ago. Attempts to recall and unpack the meaning of this story led me back to my earlier childhood experiences, which were contextualized in the social and political history of Hong Kong. The personal and social narratives are knotted together but sometimes shift their foreground and background in my retelling. These narratives provide an essential backdrop to the central concerns in my inquiry in this book  – the intertwined connections between life and learning; and between the personal and the social.

The Duster Story If one remembered something with passion, then it was important to one’s education though one might not know the reasons why. If something affected one profoundly, it was of educational importance. (Connelly & Clandinin, 1995, p. 74) It was 1983. I was in my first year of teaching. Kenny was sitting at the front row near the teacher’s desk. He kept talking back and making funny noises while I was teaching. I warned him several times but was not successful. I was annoyed but took no action. I went on teaching and writing on the chalkboard. Then up to a point I could tolerate no more. I turned from the chalkboard sud-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. K. Lau, Life and Learning Between Hong Kong and Toronto, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80052-9_3

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denly, holding a duster in my hand and slapped the duster right on Kenny’s face. He was wearing no glasses. I could see the chalk mark of the duster on his face. Chalk dust was flying in the sunlight coming from the windows beside him. Absolute silence. Everybody in the classroom was dumbfounded by my sudden outburst. Dead air. No one dared to utter a word. No one knew what I was going to do next. I did not know either. I could feel my heart striking heavily. I knew I had done something unacceptable of a teacher. What should I do next? What should be the next words I say to the class? I could choose to defend my teacher authority, went on to tell the class how naughty Kenny was and that he had received the punishment he deserved. I could warn them that anybody who dared to break the classroom rules again would receive the same punishment. I knew I could gain control in this way. My words were backed up by my shocking action and the boys were just a class of 12 years old anyway. Another line of action running parallel in my mind was to admit that I was wrong, say sorry to the poor boy and apologize for what I had done. I did not know what to do next. I kept pondering in these two eternal minutes of absolute silence. My mind kept struggling to choose between these two opposite lines of actions. I finally made up my mind. I told the class that although Kenny’s behavior in the class was unruly, he did not deserve such a punishment from the teacher, which was a violent action. And violence could never solve problems. Then, in front of the whole class, I asked Kenny to accept my apology. I asked him to go to washroom to clean his face and come back for the lesson. After this incident, l found that instead of losing face in front of my students, I seemed to gain their respect and had better relationships with them instead. And more importantly, I learned to respect my students, no matter how they behave in class. One year later, Kenny left the school and emigrated with his family to the United States. I received Christmas cards from him for a few more years. (Personal experiential paper, 1998)

I often shared this story as a convenient example when I was teaching courses like “classroom management” or “teacher-pupil relationships” in the teacher college. Somehow when I was telling and retelling this story to my students and friends in different occasions over the years, I gradually unearthed a deeper meaning in the story. It was a story of a novice teacher who did not know how to properly express his feelings and needs. I found that this teacher story might have its root in the boyhood stories of the teacher, or even before he was born. Before I unfold these stories, I have to caution the readers that this tentative retelling is only one of the many

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possible configurations, as there are always “multiple possible interpretations from multiple perspectives for an event” (Olson & Craig, 2009, p. 550).

My Early Family Experiences My grandfather had three wives. My father had two. And I have one. I only have faint memories of two of my grandmothers. I still keep a black-­ and-­white photo taken with one of them. It was taken in a park on a sunny day when I was about six months old. She passed away when I was about two years old. She was good to my mother, as I was told. The other grandmother died when I was about eight. We lived together for some years but I could not remember many details about her. I had no photos taken with her. My only image of her was an old woman in dark clothes and sitting in a lower bunk bed. We were living on a single floor of an old building together with two or three other families plus three or four men who could only afford to rent a single bed space along a long corridor. It was not an unusual living environment for the poor in Hong Kong in the 1960s. The third grandmother I had never seen. She probably never came to Hong Kong. I am not sure. My grandfather and my father probably came to Hong Kong from mainland China in the 1930s and 1940s, separately. It was a time when China was facing great challenges  – economic, political, and social. Decades of wars, famine, and starvation devastated millions of people in vast regions while Hong Kong was relatively unaffected and being sheltered as a British colony. During those years, thousands of people fled the mainland and came to Hong Kong for survival. There was no strict border control at that time and so people could conveniently travel back and forth between Hong Kong and mainland China. The actual journey was not easy though. Some had to walk for days or even weeks on foot and survived on tree bark, insects, and even rats found on the way. Of course, I had no personal knowledge of these things when I was a child. They came only from my readings much later. Ruth Hayhoe, an eminent comparative education scholar, had the following description of this city when she first arrived as a young teacher from Canada (2004, pp. 38–39): Hong Kong was a city in crisis when I arrived in June of 1967. There were bus and ferry strikes by protesters opposing the fare rises, and a good deal of unrest,

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which was closely related to the escalating Cultural Revolution in mainland China. … Hong Kong was also a city of refugees – layers of them, including those who had come in the fifties, those escaping during the great famine of the early sixties and those finding their way out during the grim days of the Cultural Revolution – often by the desperate gamble of swimming across the waters separating Hong Kong’s New Territories from the Mainland. Many of the hillsides on both Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were covered with refugee shacks hastily put together by these families, and there were also extensive squatter areas in the city itself. The first resettlement estates built by government were seven story concrete buildings, with no elevators, communal bathrooms on each floor and one room allocated to each family, with a shared outside balcony which doubled as a kitchen and walkway. The roofs of these resettlement estates were given over to schools for refugee children, established by various missionary and charitable groups.

When my father left mainland China, he left behind his wife (my mother) and my eldest sister and two elder brothers in the Canton Province. I am not sure how often my father returned to visit his family in China. These things happened before I was born. The fragments of stories here were only the partial recollections of my aged mother many years later. She was staying in the nursing home when I lured her to tell me these untold stories. My father found a job and married another woman after arriving Hong Kong. They gave birth to a girl and then a boy (my half-sister and half-­ brother). My mother came to Hong Kong in 1957 and I was born a year later. My eldest sister and two elder brothers came to Hong Kong in different years (1958, 1956, 1957 respectively). When I was born, my eldest sister was about 11  years old. My second brother was 10 and my third brother was 8. I was the youngest of my mother’s children and the only one that was born in Hong Kong. My father and his second wife gave birth to one more boy and one more girl a few years after me. So, my father had eight children in total, four on one side and four on the other. Ever since I was born, my father was not living with me. He lived with the other family in the Kowloon area, which was quite far away given the transport at that time. I lived on the Hong Kong Island with my grandfather, my mother, my eldest sister, second brother, and third brother. In my childhood memory, my father only visited us several times a year, usually stayed for less than half an hour and then disappeared suddenly. He only stayed for dinner together with us on some rare occasions: my

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grandfather’s birthday and the Chinese New Year. Other than that, my father was practically absent in my childhood. Even when he came home, he did not talk much and he would often leave unexpectedly. He was a kind of accidental visitor to me when I was a child. Though my family background seemed a bit complicated and less than completed, I did not feel like I missed anything at all since I had never had it in the first place. Looking back from now, I understand that my father’s life, like everyone else, was bounded by the circumstances, and maybe unfortunately so during time of dislocation in China in his days. Similar to other traditional Chinese families, the family climate in my childhood was largely determined by the most senior man in the family – my grandfather. He was a tall and stern man and seldom talked with us. We seemed to have an unspoken family rule that we could make noises at home only when my grandfather went outside. When he returned home, everyone would quickly get back to silence. In my memory, my grandfather seldom talked during dinner; and the others never made any noise. Casual family chat was not something I experienced at home during my childhood. We appeared to have learned and practised this Chinese saying since I was very young: “Do not speak while eating. Do not speak while sleeping” (食不言,寢不語). As I learned from my mother years later, my great grandfather was originally a highly respected Chinese medicine practitioner in his hometown and my grandfather had learned after him for some years, planning to follow his father’s footsteps. However, everything changed when he had to flee to Hong Kong alone due to the volatile upheavals in China. That might explain why he became so frustrated and disappointed in Hong Kong. For some reasons unknown to me, the relationship between my father and grandfather had always been tense and distant. They did not get along well with each other. Growing up in this family, I could imagine how I became a quiet and shy boy with strong self-restraint, hiding feelings within myself. I did not learn to express my needs and feelings and was untactful in initiating or responding to social relations. While I lacked these social skills when I was small, I was not aware of my inadequacy since everybody else in my family behaved the same. It was the norm in my family. I have another critical childhood incident in my memory. One day, when I was about 4 or 5 years old, I felt annoyed by a boy of similar age in my neighbourhood. We were standing together against a wall near my home. He stood very close to me and repeatedly called my name, and

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poked me lightly on my belly again and again. Maybe he just wanted to play with me. I did not know how to respond until a breaking point: I hit him back hard in his stomach. He was shocked, cried and ran away. This incident found its reverberation 20 years later in a classroom of a young teacher – the Duster Story at the beginning of this chapter.

My Primary School Years The 1960s was a challenging decade for most people in Hong Kong. Most families were trying hard to make ends meet. My eldest sister and second brother quitted school and started working to support the family when they were just about 12 or 13 years old. My mother told me that my second brother was actually doing fairly well at school. He had once won a Chinese calligraphy competition in school and was awarded a pair of ivory chopsticks from his teacher, which was quite an expensive gift at that time. However, as he had just come to Hong Kong from the mainland, he had no foundation in English at all and failed badly in this major subject. During those difficult years, my mother worked for long hours but still could not earn enough money to buy my brother a pair of shoes for going to school. Seeing the hardship in the family, my brother decided to quit school and started working as a car-repairing apprentice. My eldest sister also started working in a garment factory around the same time. They both gave up their chance to stay in school for their two younger brothers. Things went uneventfully in my primary school days until the end of Primary 4. The old building in which we were living on the Hong Kong Island was found to be structurally dangerous and had to be demolished by the government. We had to move to a new resettlement housing project in Kowloon, on the other side of the harbour, far away from my school and the place where I was living. Consequently, I had to change school and parted with my childhood friends rather reluctantly. At the age of 10, I felt upset but I did not know how to tell my classmates about this news, until the very last day before I left the school. I did not know how to handle my feelings in the departure. This was the first time I had to part with my childhood friends, unwillingly and abruptly, leaving a dent in my heart forever.

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The Boarding Years After departing with my classmates and teachers whom I had known for 4  years, I changed to a boarding school run by a religious society and began living a collective and disciplined school life at the age of 11. We stayed in the school 24 hours a day and went home only once a month. On a typical school day, we got up and went to bed at exactly the same hours. We attended daily Mass in the school chapel early in the morning. We studied, had meals, and exercised at exactly the same time every day. I studied diligently in the school and got fairly good results in the public examination when I finished high school. Since our school was a vocational school offering mainly science and technical subjects, most of my classmates went on to study Engineering in the Hong Kong Polytechnic College (later renamed Polytechnic University) after graduating from the school. I was one of the few who chose to study for two more years in another school, preparing for the university stream.1 This was the second time when I took a separate path from my close friends. I had to reset and rebuild my friendship circles, which was not an easy task for me. In retrospect, when I reflect on my early family stories, I find that these seemingly eccentric family stories would be more comprehensible when situated in the history of China in the past century. This history provided the context for the disruptions and upheavals in the society and in the lives of hundreds and thousands of families in China. This social history also created the unique history of Hong Kong as a British colony. Had history taken a different path, Hong Kong would remain as a rural or fishing village or just another coastal city of China. With a different social history, my family might not have moved to Hong Kong. Like my elder sister and brothers, I could have been raised in a small village in China. But that did not happen. It was a totally different and imaginary story line. The history of China in the past century tied a knot on the future of Hong Kong – the issue of 1997. On one level, it was a political and sovereignty issue to be resolved by the Chinese and the British governments. On another level, it has immensely affected the family life and identity of each and every person in Hong Kong. In the next section, I will briefly go over the social background and the puzzling issue of the identity of people in this small city.

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Who Are We? Hong Kong Chinese? Hongkonger? From 1842 to 1997, Hong Kong had been a British colony for more than 150 years.2 This fact shaped the unique history of this city and its people. Under the British colonial government, Hong Kong was politically separated from the mainland China and developed itself into one of the major financial centres in the world and a vibrant international city with a unique blend of Eastern and Western cultures. From a small population of about 6 to 7 thousand people, most of whom were farmers or fishermen in the early days, it is now home to 7.5 million people on a land area of a little more than 1100 square kilometres. Situated at the southern coast of China, it has been in constant contact with Western ideas and lifestyles while preserving and practising many Chinese traditions at the same time. Due to its particular status as a British colony, Hong Kong had often been a shelter for people from the mainland during social unrest and political turmoil in China. Successive waves of people from mainland China came to Hong Kong in the period after the World War II, during the Great Chinese Famine (1959–1961), and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). From a population of about 1,500,000 in 1946, it doubled in 15 years to more than 3,100,000 in 1961. From 1963 to 1974, about 10,000 immigrants entered Hong Kong each year. From 1977 to 1980, massive legal and illegal immigrants came from mainland, bringing the population to over 5,000,000 in 1980 (Census and Statistics Department, 1993; Commissioner for Census and Statistics, 1969). Hong Kong population has always been in flux. When the political uncertainty became an issue for Hong Kong itself in the years approaching 1997, many Hong Kong people decided to migrate to other countries. Migration soared from 22,400 in 1980 to a high of 66,000  in 1992 (Sussman, 2011). Demographer Ronald Skeldon suggested that the government figure underestimated the emigration by 10–15%. He estimated that total outflow of Hong Kongers from 1987 to 1992 was more than 300,000 (Skeldon, 1994). The root of the uncertainty was the doubts and worries of how a capitalist city ruled by the British government for over 150  years could be handed over to the Communist Chinese government that practised vastly different legal, social, economic systems. After several years of negotiation between the British and the Chinese Governments in the early 1980s, an agreement was finally reached in 1984 regarding the future of Hong Kong with the promise that Hong Kong’s

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basic social systems and lifestyle be practised and remained unchanged for 50  years, under the concept of “One Country, Two Systems”, and the principle of “Hong Kong People ruling Hong Kong” with “a high degree of autonomy”. On July 1, 1997, China resumed the sovereignty of Hong Kong and it became a Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People’s Republic of China. The movement of people in and out of the city is not merely a change in figures in population statistics. It is deeply connected to the sense of belonging, identity, and cultural roots of Hong Kong people. In some cases, it could also trigger a breaking up of family relations by creating many “astronaut families” (Sheppard, 1998). “Astronaut” is a play on words, as the Chinese term for “astronaut” is the same as 太空人, which means “a man without a wife”. It is used to describe an odd phenomenon for many Hong Kong families in the 1980s and 1990s. After settling the mothers and children in an emigrant country, the fathers would return to Hong Kong to earn incomes. They frequently flew back and forth between Hong Kong and another country to visit their wives and kids several times a year. Some more wealthy businessmen could head towards the airport after work on Friday evening, took a flight to Sydney or Vancouver to spend a weekend with their families, and went back to Hong Kong for work on Monday morning. A Canadian journalist who has lived in Hong Kong for many years has wittily described such trips between Hong Kong and Canada in those years as “the longest commute” (DeWolf, 2018). Obviously, such funny arrangements were not without unfortunate costs in some families, including breakup of couple or family relationships, whose stories might not be revealed in statistics. Hong Kong has undergone unusual history in the past few decades. In many aspects, the “Hong Kong Chinese” or “HongKonger” are different from the Chinese in mainland China or in Taiwan, each with its unique historical, political, and cultural makeup. One example is in the languages we use. Under the British colonial government, English was the only official language in Hong Kong for a long time. It was not until 1974 when Chinese was accepted as another official language and became more widely used in the government and the business sector. The language complication for Chinese people is that the majority of Hong Kong people speak mainly Cantonese – a dialect in a southern province in China, and write in traditional Chinese characters. Putonghua (or Mandarin) is spoken in mainland China and Taiwan. Simplified Chinese characters are used in the mainland since the 1950s while traditional Chinese characters are used in

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Hong Kong and Taiwan. As a result, when Chinese people from different places (Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China) meet overseas, they might find themselves unable to communicate in their mother tongues and have to converse in English. Language is not only a communication tool but closely intertwined with our identity and culture (Cummins, 1996; Nieto, 1992; Rodriguez, 1983). The baffled way the Chinese use their languages is only a tip of the iceberg that signals the underlying identity and cultural confusion of Hong Kong people: Who are we? Are we Chinese? Are we Hong Kong Chinese? Are we Hongkonger? British National (Overseas)? What are the meanings and implications of these labels? Do we have a unique culture of our own? Or do we share a common Chinese culture? If so, what is the core of this culture? Is it Confucianism or Communism? Indeed, our identity is not a fixed but fluid and contested concept. For many people of my generation who were born in Hong Kong in the late 1950s and grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, these issues of identity and culture have been buried silently in the backyard under the British rule. In my observation, except for some enlightened few, most people in Hong Kong were generally politically apathetic. We seldom needed to think about our political or cultural identity. Under the elite educational system and undemocratic social structure, many people in Hong Kong developed a pragmatic, practical, parochial, and materialistic outlook in life. In a few decades after the World War II, Hong Kong grew from a little trading port to a key international financial centre in the world. However, we had a price to pay for its economic success. Over the years, Hong Kong has been portrayed as the goose that lays the golden egg; as Suzie Wong; as a wayward child, yellow on the outside, white on the inside, brought up under the influence of a ruthless and indifferent guardian; as the prodigal son about to return to the embrace of his father, who is kind and tolerant enough to allow him carry on with his way of life (Cheung, 1998). The political indifference and cultural ignorance of at least some Hong Kong people of my generation can be partly illustrated in my own history. When the Cultural Revolution was causing upheavals in the mainland China from 1966–1976, I was completely ignorant about what was happening across the border. No one had told me anything about it, not by my teachers or my parents. In the boarding school that I attended during those years, I learned more biblical stories than stories from Chinese culture and history. We had practically nil access to current affairs from the

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newspapers. Perhaps the priests and the teachers in the boarding school thought that such affairs were not the proper concerns of the schoolboys. It was only years later when I entered the university that I first came across the term “Cultural Revolution”. I was totally ignorant about this significant part of contemporary Chinese history. In my schooldays, we used English textbooks. I still remember a textbook in Economic and Public Affairs when I was in junior secondary school. The chapter on the history of Hong Kong started with something like: “Hong Kong is a British Colony.” This was the official history. We were taught that Hong Kong was a part of United Kingdom. Our connection with China had ended and stayed in the past. This history, obviously, was written from the British perspective. At that time, all books used in the schools had to be approved by the colonial government and no teachers were allowed to discuss politics with students in school. Our Chinese roots and connections were downplayed and we learned that we were living in a “free and modern city” benevolently ruled by the British. However, these issues were nothing important for an ordinary schoolboy like me. All this book knowledge was just information to be recycled in examination. These issues were not the concerns of ordinary families either. During those years, my mother had to work for more than 15 hours a day in front of a sewing machine at home as an outsource worker, earning barely enough money for the meek survival of the family. We never talked about the happenings in China or Hong Kong society. My elder sister and brother had to quit schooling and started working in their early teens. The only task for their luckier younger brothers was to study hard, behave well, and stay out of trouble.

June 4, 1989 It is only when we had to confront our “Chineseness” that we realized how connected we were with our home country and at the same time how hollow and shallow we were in our cultural root. In 1989, we cried when watching the news on television showing the students in the Tiananmen Square staging a hunger strike for weeks. We were shocked and angry when these young people were driven off by the tanks and troops sent by the Beijing government. For many people in Hong Kong, it was the first time they felt so close to the people and events in mainland. Over one million people took to the streets in the Central Business District on the Hong Kong Island to protest against the brutal acts of the Beijing

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government. Slogans were shouted. Patriotic songs were sung in Putonghua when we were marching on the streets. However, months after the awful events in 1989, many Hong Kong people were frantically seeking refuge and passports from other countries. Thousands of families decided to leave Hong Kong and migrated to a foreign country in the following years. Social and historical events had once again altered the life paths of many families and individuals in Hong Kong. Canada was one of the countries that accepted a lot of Hong Kong migrants. Many of them uprooted themselves from Hong Kong and struggled to settle a new life in an unfamiliar country in the 1990s. With this social history as a backdrop, I now return to my autobiographical story to end this chapter. In the next section, I try to understand the root of the central concern in my inquiry – the connection between life and learning – from my own life experiences.

Life and Death: When They Come so Close Between life and death, there is experience. In experience, there is education. I graduated from the university in 1983 and started looking for jobs. One day in mid-August, the principal of my former secondary school invited me to fill up an immediate vacancy in the school. Details in my memory faded. I could not remember why he contacted me. Though I had not thought of being a teacher before and had never sent job applications to any school in that year, this was the unplanned beginning of my lifelong teaching career. It was a strange experience going back to teach in the school where I had been a student before for several years. The school was familiar and strange to me at the same time. There I met my former teachers as colleagues in my new position. I found that some of them would habitually tell dirty jokes inside the staffroom and humiliated the students in their casual talks – facets of them I had never imagined before. It was the school where the Duster Story happened. After two years of teaching in this school, I got married and changed to work in another school. In early 1989, my daughter Fanny was born. In the same year, I started studying for my Master’s degree. As the classes were mostly scheduled in the evening, I decided to take care of my baby daughter during the day and went to classes after my wife returned home from work. I became a full-time father and a part-time student until she started going to a nursery

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school. I took care of my daughter’s daily needs, taught her to speak the first sentences, and watched her exploring the world. Oftentimes when I tried to lure her to afternoon laps, she would try instead to climb up the packages of diapers put at the corner of the bedroom, as if she was conquering a huge mountain; sometimes a towel hanging over a table could turn into a running tap water tap in her imaginary play. These daily life observations often complemented or even superseded what I learned about child development in my graduate school. In December 1991, my son Andy was born. The next year, I completed my Master’s degree study. I joined the teacher college in 1992. In the same year, my grandfather passed away in summer, at the age of 94. In November 1992, my son got a weird disease a month before his first birthday. He had high fever for several days for unknown reasons. He had to stay in the hospital. His temperature did not go down with the usual treatments. Only after several days of various testing, the doctors discovered that it was a very rare disease called Kawasaki. We were told that there were fewer than 20 cases a year in Hong Kong. After proper diagnosis, Andy received treatment in hospital for more than ten days. It was a terrifying experience for me and my wife. During the day, we went to work. When we were off from our schools, we hurried to the hospital and sat beside his bed in the hospital ward, watching our helpless baby who was not yet able to express himself in words. We just knew that it could be a killing disease if not properly diagnosed and treated. Very luckily and thanks to the caring doctors and nurses, he was resilient and became well and healthy again. The next year, in September 1993, my son got a high fever one night and was admitted to hospital again. He was unconscious and could not utter a single word for one and a half day. After a few days, he was diagnosed having meningitis – another rare and dangerous disease. We were deeply worried again. We could only keep our fingers crossed that he could be lucky again one more time. He was. After ten more days in hospital, he recovered and returned home again. In 1994, my elder half-sister was diagnosed with cancer and died a year later at the age of 39. She was a devoted Christian, a university teacher, and was well loved and respected by her students, family, and friends. In the same year, my eldest sister was also diagnosed as having breast cancer. She fought against the disease with high hope and always kept an uplifted spirit, even though the treatment effects were fluctuating and the

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side effects were so damaging. When we had family gatherings during the Chinese New Year, she wore a woollen hat to cover her losing hair. She did not want her mother to worry and so she kept this secret from her for nearly two years until the last couple of months. Her condition deteriorated quickly and she suffered a lot in her last few months. On June 4th 1997, while I was attending a conference in Singapore, I received a fax from my third brother, telling me that our sister had passed away. I flew back to Hong Kong immediately to attend her funeral. In the funeral, my mother stayed strong and survived the pain. My brothers cried their hearts out, a scene that I had never seen before. Two months after the passing away of my sister, my second brother felt an acute pain in his abdomen. He went to see the doctor immediately and was diagnosed having liver cancer. During the next few months, I accompanied him for medical appointments at the hospital. After about several consultations, the doctors pronounced their verdict. They told him frankly that the diagnosis showed he was in the final stage and there was little hope of recovery. My brother’s condition became worse and he had to stay in hospital. Since I did not have to go to work at that time,3 I often stayed with him in the hospital for a whole morning or an afternoon. I sat quietly beside his bed and chatted with him when he had enough strength. He never grumbled. Even when he was ill, he cared about his family and friends more than himself and talked about some arrangements that he wanted me to know. He joked with my son and daughter when they came to visit him in the hospital. One morning, I helped him raise from his bed and walked to the washroom, slowly. The short distance of a few metres from his bed to the washroom in the ward took us more than 10  minutes. When he finally managed to return to his bed, he held my hand tightly and said, “Ah Kwok, it is lucky that you are here. Otherwise, I don’t know how I could make it.” With our common upbringing in the same family, I had never been so close to my brother, both physically and emotionally. We seldom expressed our affection to each other. I could not remember what I said in reply to his words on that day. I only know it still hurts when I am typing these words on my keyboard. The next day, at about 4 a.m., I received a phone call from my third brother. The hospital called and told him that our brother was in critical condition. After hanging up the phone, I woke up my wife and told her

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that I needed to rush to the hospital immediately. I remember that when I was driving off from the parking lot of my residential area, the security guard stopped me and checked my identity. I was impatient and urged him to hurry up. The guard said he had to do this for every car leaving at such early hours, as a security measure. Then I was holding back the tears in my eyes and sped along the highway with no other cars in sight. I arrived at the hospital in less than 30 minutes. I ran up to the ward where my brother was staying. I rushed to his bed. I grabbed his hand and called his name. He did not respond. His hand was cold. A minute later, a nurse came and gently told me that my brother had already passed away. I was standing in the same spot, holding the same hand as I did the day before. But then the hand was warm. That early morning it was cold. My brother’s wife, their son and daughter, and my third brother arrived a few minutes later. It was only 40 days between the time when my brother first felt the pain in his abdomen and the day he died. Like my eldest sister, he was strong and always took good care of his health. They never drank alcohol or smoked. They both lived a simple and healthy lifestyle. We did not have a clue about why they got such terrible diseases and passed away so early in their lives. They both gave up their own schooling in their early teens and started supporting the family for the education of their two younger brothers. Before she died, my eldest sister was a health care assistant in a hospital. My second brother started as a car-repairing apprentice in his teens and worked as a mechanic in the same industry for the rest of his life. In all these sorrowful moments, my family stayed together and supported each other. My children were very sentimental on the deaths of their aunt and uncle. Whenever I returned home from the hospital, they always asked me about the situations of their aunt and uncle. At an early age, they started to puzzle about life and death and asked a lot of questions I could not answer. I talked with them, sharing each other’s tears and sorrow, love and memory.

The SARS Reflections The ultimate questions of life and death also came forth suddenly for many families in Hong Kong during the epidemic outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in the spring of 2003. We were suddenly thrown into grave anxiety without any warning. Our usual lives were overturned. All schools were closed for a month. Business activities were drastically affected. The whole city was under enormous stress.4 Affected

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family members were isolated for fear of contagion. Those who were diagnosed as SARS patients could not be visited by their family members. They had to fight, for some even to death, alone in the isolated wards in hospitals. Since the outbreak in March 2003, we had accumulated 1755 SARS patients in Hong Kong, 299 of them died after painful but unsuccessful treatments, including some brave and dedicated doctors, nurses, and health care assistants who contracted the virus when trying to save the lives of their patients. Having experienced the losses in my family a few years before, I was particularly sensitive to the great pain of these hundreds of families losing their loved ones in that terrible time. For my generation who were born in Hong Kong in the late 1950s, this might be the first real crisis we experienced in our society. We had practically lived a smooth and peaceful life: we were born after the war; the turmoil in China was experienced only by our parents’ generation; the June 4th 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square happened thousands of miles away, though we were hurt emotionally; except for the few years after 1997, Hong Kong’s economy was generally on the rise; we benefited from the education and welfare systems under the colonial government; we enjoyed a relatively stable living and upward mobility as compared with our parent’s generation. We have never experienced anything so mean, so massive, so depressing, and so close to us. It was probably the first time that we all had to learn to live in crisis and adversity, and to try to understand the meanings of life and suffering. And there is something that we should teach our children so that they could face the challenges in their future. In the midst of the SARS crisis, I wrote the following to my friends outside Hong Kong: … the crisis would be over someday. It would not be here forever. We should have the confidence to believe this even when we are in the middle of the crisis. How we come out from the crisis depend very much on what we have learned in the crisis and adversity. That’s why we could and should always choose our attitudes in facing difficulties. How we adults face our difficulties also teach our children to face their challenges in the future. The crisis is not at all a bad thing if we could learn some valuable lessons in the process. There are lessons for every one of us and for the societies. The mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Toronto, and Hong Kong have taken different strategies to battle with the SARS and with different outcomes. The situations in mainland and Taiwan are still critical. The impact of SARS also demonstrates so clearly our global connectiveness, dependency, and vulnerability. We are not alone. (Personal email, May 11, 2003)

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We are not alone. We are connected with each other. When deaths come so close to us, to our brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, colleagues, friends, loved ones or neighbours, to someone we know and care for, and to someone we don’t know but we do feel the pain – like all those who lost their lives in the June 4th movement, the September 11 terrorist attack in the United States and its aftermath all over the world, and the SARS epidemic outbreak. All these life and death events shook us off our “overwhelming ordinariness of the lives we live” (Greene, 1978, p. 44). When we confront all these life and death events in close proximity, we could no longer take things for granted. We need to make sense of what is happening. What could we learn and what could we teach our children of the meanings of all these chances and tragedies? What hope can we offer them? What are the value and meaning of life? Of death? Of suffering? Of love? Of hope? Of courage? Of responsibility? Of sacrifice? Of knowledge? Of war and peace? Of justice? Of living together in the contemporary world? These are all conceptual questions but do have practical implications on how we choose to navigate the daily challenges in our lives. Death confronts us with the meaning of life in the most intimate and ultimate manner. Education is supposed to help people live a better life. But what is a better life? What is good? What are the most valuable things or qualities in life? What should we teach the children? How do we teach them? What are we doing in our school, in our family, in our society to cultivate the human qualities that are deemed desirable and essential for a future that could be so vulnerable? These fundamental issues and questions often come to my mind when I am experiencing and making sense of our lives in different educational and cultural landscapes, as I am going to document and explore in the following chapters.

Notes 1. There were only two universities at that time that catered for about 2 to 3% of the high school graduates. About another 10% would study in other institutions that offered sub-degree courses. The rest would start finding a job. 2. The United Kingdom obtained control over portions of Hong Kong’s territory through three treaties concluded with Qing China after the Opium Wars: • 1842 Treaty of Nanking: Hong Kong Island ceded in perpetuity;

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• 1860 Convention of Peking: Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutter’s Island additionally ceded; • 1898 Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory: the New Territories and outlying islands leased for 99 years until 1997.

3. The Institute I was working in was in the process of relocating to a new campus. The campus was not completed on schedule and so I was having an extended summer holiday that year. 4. In 2003, the SARS epidemic affected 29 countries and last only for less than 8  months. Globally, the disease infected 8098 individuals of whom 774 died. However, Hong Kong bore a large proportion of this morbidity and mortality burden, and was the link between cases in China and other parts of the world. Of 1775 cases identified in Hong Kong, 299 deaths occurred from February 15 to May 31 2003 (Leung et al., 2009). At the time of writing (March 2021), the whole world has been affected by Covid-19 for over a year, with over 2.7 million deaths among the over 125 million affected people, with the numbers still counting. The current Covid-19 death toll in Hong Kong is 204 in 14 months (less than 0.5 people a day) while in the 2003 SARS, it was 299  in 3.5  months (nearly 3 people a day). It was thus a more fearful and stress time for Hong Kong people in 2003.

References Census and Statistics Department. (1993). Hong Kong: 25 years’ development: Presented in statistical data and graphics (1967–92). Census and Statistics Department. Cheung, M. P. Y. (1998). Introduction. In M. P. Y. Cheung (Ed.), Hong Kong collage: Contemporary stories and writing (pp. ix–xiii). Oxford University Press. Commissioner for Census and Statistics. (1969). Hong Kong Statistics, 1947–1967. Census and Statistics Department. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1995). Narrative and education. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 1(1), 73–85. Cummins, J. (1996). Negotiating identities: Education for empowerment in a diverse society. California Association for Bilingual Education. DeWolf, C. (2018, August 29). The longest commute: How Canada and Hong Kong are tied together. Zolima CityMag. https://zolimacitymag.com/ the-­longest-­commute-­how-­canada-­and-­hong-­kong-­are-­tied-­together/ Greene, M. (1978). Landscapes of learning. Teachers College Press. Hayhoe, R. (2004). Full circle: A life with Hong Kong and China. Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong.

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Leung, G. M., Ho, L. M., Lam, T. H., & Hedley, A. J. (2009). Epidemiology of SARS in the 2003 Hong Kong epidemic. Hong Kong Medical Journal, 15(6), Supplement 9. Nieto, S. (1992). Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural education. Longman. Olson, M., & Craig, C. (2009). “Small” stories and meganarratives: Accountability in balance. Teachers College Record, 111(2), 547–572. Rodriguez, R. (1983). Hunger of memory: The education of Richard Rodriguez. Bantam Books. Sheppard, M. A. (1998). The “astronaut” family and the schools. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, Toronto. Skeldon, R. (Ed.). (1994). Reluctant exiles? Migration from Hong Kong and the new overseas Chinese. M.  E. Sharpe, and Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Sussman, N. M. (2011). Return migration and identity: A global phenomenon, a Hong Kong case. Hong Kong University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Early Experience of Toronto and the Initial Transition

In this chapter, I write about how my inquiry ideas emerged in April 1999 when I came for a conference in Toronto. At the outset, the opportunity to live and study aboard for one year brought excitement to my family but the idea of doing a self-study was met with apprehension. While everything was still up in the air, we had to prepare for the move amid all the uncertainties. When my family finally arrived at Toronto in August, we faced unforeseen changes and uncertainties. Our initial experiences of Toronto were a mix of both excitement and frustrations. Things seldom worked out as planned. In those strange and novel situations, our learning was accentuated. To invite you to travel with me in this beginning part of our journey, I have used the narrative present in some of the scenes.

You Must Be Joking! “We miss you,” Daphne says. “I miss you too,” I say, “and I love you. I am always thinking about you these days. And our children.” “Really?” “Yes, and I think maybe you should come earlier, in September. Maybe we should stay here for one whole year.” “How could it be possible? You must be joking.” Daphne laughs at the other end of the line. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. K. Lau, Life and Learning Between Hong Kong and Toronto, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80052-9_4

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“No, I am not. I am serious. I will tell you more about what I see and what I think over these few days when I come home.” (Reconstructed telephone conversation, April 1999)

I wake up alone in a downtown Toronto hotel at 2:00 a.m. I switch over the different channels on the television and read the Bible I find inside the bedside cabinet, hoping that either one of these can help me fight jet lag and enable me to doze off. It’s no use. I am still awake and haunted by the thoughts and experiences I have during the day. I visit the local schools and kindergartens. I drop into bookstores and food courts on Bloor Street. All these scenes and people are strange to me: the classrooms are brightly decorated with children’s art work, the children are not sitting in rows; they make much more noise but the teacher does not seem to be annoyed. When I am listening to Cuban music in the audio CD section of a big bookstore, the staff greets me warmly even though I am not going to buy anything. I feel puzzled. Things are not what I am used to. What I see and hear and feel during the day dance around me in the hotel room for hours until 5:00  a.m. It’s time to call home. They should be home by now – it’s 5:00 p.m. in Hong Kong. I came to Toronto in April 1999 to attend a conference and, at the same time, to have an initial orientation with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) people and places. I was in the first year of my doctoral studies at OISE/UT. This special doctoral programme began in Hong Kong in the summer of 1998 and I was preparing to come to Toronto to fulfil the requirement of an eight-month residency starting from January 2000. Before I left for the conference, my wife and I had already decided that our family would come and stay together in Toronto during my residency period. Our two kids were still too young to be left behind with their mother. My daughter Fanny was 10 and my son Andy was 7 at that time. During the conference week, I had a feeling that Toronto and Hong Kong were espousing very different cultural and educational values, though I did not understand what they were exactly. I started to think about the possibility of doing a narrative inquiry on my family’s cultural and educational experiences in these two different places, as a research topic for my dissertation. I shared these initial research ideas with some of my colleagues studying in the same programme, who came to the same conference with me. They all said that it was a good idea and that I should have no problem getting the consent of my participants and I could have

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easy access to my participants to collect my data. This was a handy research topic, they said. And I was thrilled. My wife and I were both born and educated in Hong Kong. We had been teaching in schools for many years. Our two children were studying in a primary school in Hong Kong. We had never lived or studied in other countries before. We did visit Toronto before as tourists in the summer of 1993. But that was a kind of “touring around” experience  – we stayed with our friends and relatives for one or two days and we joined a three-­ day local tour. We enjoyed the French music and exotic scenes in the pebble walks in Quebec City. We were splashed by the thundering water under the Niagara Falls. We visited places of interest for tourists and we took lots of pictures. We were on vacation. We did not know what it was like living and studying there. We did not care to know. After the conference week, I returned to Hong Kong with my vague research ideas and some little souvenirs for my family. While my wife and children were unpacking the souvenirs, I told them my initial ideas of doing a research on our would-be experiences in Toronto. Their responses were not what I had expected. “No, no, I don’t want to be a guinea pig.” Fanny protests immediately. “I know it will be different. But … I don’t know any English.” Andy adds. “This idea does not sound good to me. We are just staying there for eight months …” Daphne hesitates. “Actually, I am thinking whether we could go for one year.” I say. “How is it possible? Even one year is too short a time.” Daphne continues, “Our experience is not representative of other people’s. Our situation is so special. Furthermore, the idea of being researched makes me feel uneasy. This would make our lives complicated. I don’t feel like it. And I am afraid that we might not live up to what you expect and it will spoil your research.” “No, I have no specific expectations that you have to live up to. The research approach I am going to use is ... ” I have to stop. How can I explain “narrative inquiry” to my wife and children when I do not exactly know what it is? I have just taken a three-week intensive course on qualitative research methodology. The idea of telling stories in research is still new to me. How can I expect my wife and children to understand what I am going to do when I myself do not know what I am going to do? (Reconstructed conversation, April 1999)

My heart sinks when I hear their responses. The hesitation of my wife is my major concern. I know that I cannot proceed without the consent of

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my family. This is a basic prerequisite I have learned about research ethics. It is impossible to find other participants for this particular study. If I could not persuade them, I have to find another research topic. From that day onward, I kept the research idea to myself like hatching an egg, waiting for a more suitable timing to talk with my wife. But every time when I mentioned this again to her, she suggested that I should better find another more viable research topic. My wife’s worries were understandable and not ungrounded. I studied social sciences and my wife studied arts in the university in the early 1980s. It was a time in Hong Kong higher education when the dominant academic culture valued the quantitative scientific knowledge. Stories and literature were good for leisure and enrichment but were regarded as something soft and secondary. When Daphne thought of research, what came to her mind were questionnaires, numbers, and statistics. This was also what I learned in sociology and psychology when the major trend was to model after the more established hard sciences. In our university years, we never came across the idea of writing personal stories as a possible research genre. I wrestled through years of relearning experience myself in order to appreciate other research approaches beyond surveys and experiments. How could I expect my wife to change her conceptions of research overnight?

Preparing for the Move While we had not yet come to any conclusion regarding my research plan, my wife and I did agree that it would be a valuable experience if we could stay for a whole year in Toronto. So, amid the many uncertainties surrounding my research topic and the vague possibilities of extending my study leave,1 I started to prepare for our “emigration” assuming that we would move in August: arranging for shipping our family utilities, clothing, and books to Toronto; applying for visas from the Canadian Consulate; exploring possibilities for family housing from the University and finding school information for our children. There were a lot of excitements but everything was hanging in the air during the following months. The preparation would be much easier if I were just going by myself as a single student, maybe with a backpack and a suitcase. Accommodation for the family and schooling for our children were the first two things I had to settle in my to-do list. I wrote many emails to different offices in the University and I waited for months until I received the

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final confirmation from the Student Housing Services of the University by the end of June, less than 60 days before we flew to Toronto. Once the housing location was settled, the schooling arrangement was relatively simple and straight forward. In the Toronto school system, students were automatically placed in a school in their neighbourhood. I was advised by the Canadian Consulate that all we had to do was to go to the school directly for simple registration. I was so happy when these things were settled. I wrote an email to Michael Connelly, my thesis supervisor, to tell him the good news. I received confirmation on June 30 that I am allocated an apartment in the Student Family Housing on Jane Street.2 This is a great relief for me! I intend to move in after August 23. My two kids are probably going to the Julian Public School. (Email, July 6, 1999, CK to Mick)

And I got his response: It is good to hear from you and to know that your plans are proceeding so well. Julian should be an excellent school for you so you should be pleased all around. (Email, July 8, 1999, Mick to CK)

With confirmation from my professor that Julian was an excellent school, what better news could I expect? I thought things were nicely settled.

Changing the Landscapes: Hong Kong, Downtown Toronto, and North York The accommodation I was offered was located at the heart of the Toronto downtown area. It was one of the few options for students with family. The rent was reasonable and the location was convenient. When I came in April 1999, I visited the hostel once and I found it decent and good for me. After all, we were just staying for one year and student housing should be a practical and convenient solution. The diversity and dynamics of the multicultural city centre had a special appeal for me. We could meet people from all over the world at our doorstep. We arrived at Toronto on August 24, 1999. The airline lost one piece of our luggage during the transit at the Vancouver airport. I had to file a

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lost claim at the airport and thus we missed the original connecting flight to Toronto. We had to wait for another flight and were delayed for 10 hours. It was not a smooth start. When we finally arrived at the Toronto airport, we were picked up by one of my friends who had been living in Toronto for more than ten years. We planned to stay with him for a few days before we moved to our student housing. The next day after our arrival, while we were still trying to overcome our jet lag, Daphne and I reported to the office of Student Housing Services to receive our allocated apartment. It was a Wednesday afternoon. There were some showers in the morning and the sky was a bit foggy. After checking our documents, we were given a brief introduction to the surroundings and facilities, and finally, the key to our family apartment. We walked across the street to another building. While waiting for the elevator in the lobby, I read the many notes on the notice board posted by the residents. Some were written in languages unknown to us. Some were written in simplified Chinese characters. They were offers to share apartments or used furniture for sale. The board looked quite messy. We went up to the sixth floor. After turning around some corners, we finally arrived at the door of our apartment. With a mix of excitement and uncertainty, I inserted the key into the keyhole, turned it, and opened the door. I took a deep breath and stepped inside our would-be home for the year. The flat looked a bit gloomy in that overcast afternoon. The smell told us that it had probably been vacant and unattended for some time. There were two bedrooms and a living room, with a kitchen, a bathroom, and a small balcony left with plenty of birds’ excrement. Some paint on the walls were peeling off and several cupboard doors in the kitchen refused to be closed properly. One water tap in the bathroom was out of order with dripping water. After checking in our apartment, my friend drove us back to his house in the suburb. During the car ride, Daphne said she felt uncomfortable when we were inside the apartment. We did not talk much in the car. We were already too tired under the spell of jet lag. That night Daphne stayed up in bed and cried. She talked about her feeling of uneasiness and stress since we arrived in Toronto. She questioned whether we had made the right decision to choose that apartment. She expressed that she felt awfully incompetent and uncomfortable when we had to talk to people here in English. “Our luggage was lost. Our flight was delayed. The condition of the apartment was not good. Everything was not going well”, she said.

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It so happened that our friend with whom we were staying was a real estate agent. When he knew that we were not quite satisfied with the student housing the next day, he offered to take us to see some private apartments. He did this with his clients as part of his job every day. So, during the next couple of days, he drove us around to see different types of accommodation in Toronto. After days of negotiations and compromises, we finally decided to move to a residential area away from downtown. The quality of the apartment and the surrounding environment was much better; and the rent was of course much higher. Our housing plan was completely changed. We surrendered our downtown student housing to the University with some strange reasons. All these changes happened within a week after we arrived at Toronto.

Changing Schools Once we decided to change our place of accommodation, the next immediate task was to find a new school for our children. It was only days away from the beginning of the school year. We did not want the schooling of our children to be interrupted. We went to a Toronto District School Board office and we looked at a large map on the wall. We located the school near our residence – Sibley Elementary. We hurried to the school office and were told that we were living just outside the boundary that the school catered for. We could not register our children in the school and were directed to another one – Little Acorn Elementary School. On Monday, we went to the Sibley and were redirected to Little Acorn. That was a beautiful and quiet environment. We found several squirrels running around in the schoolyard. It was the first time my kids had seen squirrels from a close distance. The first time I saw one was in a film I watched twenty years ago. The school had a welcoming environment. The staff was nice and helpful. … I got some forms and filled them in that night. (Journal, September 1, 1999)

After all these twists and turns, this school became the place that our children would experience Canadian education for the year. Before we came to Toronto, I had spent months planning for my family’s housing and children’s schooling for the year and eventually we were settled in totally different places. Lyrics of a song by John Lennon jumped to my mind at that time: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” (Lennon, 1980).3

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Our Experiences as a Family of New Arrival in Toronto When we arrived at Toronto in August in 1999, we found that we had to work out hundreds of mundane details to settle a family there. We had to apply for a bank account, credit card, home telephone line, mobile phones, electricity supply, cable television, health cards, student registration, house insurance, and Social Insurance Cards …. After deciding on our residence and finding a school for our children, we went shopping for the basic household furniture, utilities, and dozens of other daily necessities. Some of these tasks were more important and some of these were of lower priority. The problem for us was that we could not always distinguish between the two since we sometimes received conflicting messages from different people. And that made us nervous. We encountered more frustrations in various applications and shopping experiences. For example, once we were told that we had to apply for a Social Insurance Number (SIN) from the government as a proof of our residence status immediately upon arrival. We went to a government office and spent half an hour filling in the information on four separate application forms. We handed them to the officer-­ on-­duty, only to be told that we did not have to apply since we were not allowed to work in Canada. However, when we went to apply for other basic utilities such as the telephone service, we were rejected since we did not have any one of the three identity proofs required: a local credit card, SIN card or local driver’s licence. We seemed to be trapped in a loop. As a last resort, we sought help from the International Student Centre and were told a different message that we were entitled to apply for the SIN cards. We then went to another government office in another district, filled in the forms once again, handed them in and were accepted without further questions. For Hong Kong people who were used to standard rules and procedures, these diverse practices were not easily comprehended. A few weeks later, the SIN cards were mailed to us when we found that we did not really need them anymore. In short, for the first couple of weeks, our initial excitement in this new country was soon overtaken by the overwhelming details. We had to visit different places every day to try our luck to get things done. Even though we got the generous help from our friend to drive us around, we could only get one or two things done in a day. Things would be much more difficult if we had to take the public transport in an unfamiliar city. The main reason for the challenges was simply geographical – different offices

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and facilities were located far apart in Toronto while in a tiny and crowded city like Hong Kong, everything was within easy reach. Place matters. Another reason, as I learned later, was that people in Toronto seemed to value warm and personal service more than work efficiency. In Hong Kong, efficiency was the highest priority. Our friend explained to us that it would be considered impolite if a bank teller did not chat with the customers while serving them. So, we needed to learn to be very patient in a queue. One day, I went to open a bank account. I waited for over half an hour in the line and then personally served by a friendly bank officer. She checked my documents carefully and did all the paper work for me. I was thankful by her friendly and personal service to me. But I was more than surprised that it took me over two hours to open a bank account. In Hong Kong, we could probably get the same thing done by a junior teller in less than 20  minutes. Why couldn’t the Canadians work more efficiently? I wondered. Sometimes even getting daily little things done could be arduous challenges for us and made us feel clumsy. For example, we had trouble sorting out the right coins at the check-out counters in the supermarkets. We had awkward feelings in buying a sandwich or bagel when we were not aware there were so many varieties of toppings and sauces, the names of which we hardly knew. Even buying a McDonald’s meal perplexed us when we did not know how to respond to the long and strange word: “forhereortogo”. Getting off at the right bus stops or leaving the subway station from the right exits were only achieved through many trials and errors. Once I accompanied my children to their school, I took the wrong bus and got off at the wrong stop and had to walk literally for miles to the school with my children. We were practically lost in the wild without another human being in sight. Even telling our home address, telephone numbers, or buzz code – I wondered what on earth a “bus code” was at the beginning – to pizza delivery people over the phone could become an embarrassing test of our English listening and speaking abilities.4 These were of course unavoidable minor hiccups in adapting to a new environment when we looked back. However, for the new arrivals, these could be confounded with other difficulties and caused frustrations and anxiety to a family in their early settlement period. Because of our change in family residence for the year, our landscape was changed: living in the bustling downtown student housing was very much different from living in a quiet private residential area. We could have met different people and had different home life and family activities.

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But what exactly the changes were, we could never know, for we only live once. Changes of school for our children also changed the whole fabric of our children’s experience of Canadian education. Every school has its particular landscape, history, and stories. The teachers our children met, the classmates they got along with, and the school events and activities they participated in would never be the same. However, it was exactly these specific events, people, and places that weaved together our children’s learning experience during the year. In the next chapter, I will turn to detail the education and the school life of our children in Toronto.

Notes 1. The minimum residency requirement of the programme was eight months. I needed to apply for special approval for extending my study leave beyond the required period. I negotiated with my employer for months and only received the final approval two weeks before we had to board the plane. 2. Except for the names of my family members, all names of specific people, schools, and places in this book are pseudo names. 3. This lyrics ironically foretold the tragic ending of John Lennon’s life. Having retreated from the music scene to raise his new born son for 5  years, he returned with his new album in 1980, at the age of 40. He was, however, shot dead by one of his fans near his New York home on December 8, 1980. The lyrics quoted here came from a song he wrote for his son, “Beautiful Boy” in the new album. 4. These difficulties were not only due to our linguistic but also our cultural strangeness. There are always parts of a language in a society that could not be learned from the outside. For the sake of readers outside Toronto, a buzz code functions like a door bell. The visitors press a specific code at the entrance of an apartment building. The residents of the apartment with the specific code answer the call and let the visitors in. We did have something similar in Hong Kong but the term “buzz code” was completely new to us.

Reference Lennon, J. (1980). Beautiful Boy. On Double Fantasy [CD]. Records.

CHAPTER 5

Education and School Life in Toronto

As the stories in the previous chapter illustrated, when we moved from Hong Kong to Toronto, my family often “[fell] out of step with the march of surrounding things” (Dewey, 1934, p. 14); we had to learn to adapt to a new life. Things were not like what we were used to. Our daily exposure in a new society often prompted us to rethink the values and practices we carried with us for years. Things we had taken for granted, values that we had assumed as universal, practices that had become our unthinking habits were suddenly called into questions. Thus, this one-year period in our lives could be regarded as “moments of escape from cultural walls” which bring “awakening to new ways of seeing” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1995). We began to wonder and rethink our assumptions on life and learning when things were not going as usual. As we puzzled and reflected on our experience, we gradually came to develop understanding about the themes, or recurring messages, both in different places and in our lives. These themes are embedded in the particular situations but extend beyond the situations themselves (Eisner, 1991, 1994). In this chapter, I will unpack the experiences of my children in schools in different educational landscapes. In my attempt to make sense of the episodes of school life my children had in Hong Kong and Toronto, I began to reflect on the educational values and practices in these two places.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. K. Lau, Life and Learning Between Hong Kong and Toronto, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80052-9_5

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The Start of the School Year September 6. Andy woke up first. I talked with him in our living room.

Andy:

Daddy, I am afraid. I have to go to school tomorrow. I am afraid that I don’t know how to talk to my classmates. Most of them speak English. Daddy: Yes. But there are classmates from different countries and some speak English better and some do not. Some might come from Taiwan, Korea, or Japan. And they are learning English just like you. Andy: I am afraid some classmates will bully me. Daddy: Well, the school is small and the class is small. The teachers will keep an eye on the students and so that would not happen. However, if that really happens, you could firmly say, “Please stop it. I don’t like that!” (Reconstructed conversation, based on journal, September 6, 1999) The school started on Tuesday, September 7, 1999. Neither Andy nor I had any idea what the new school life would be like. Andy had his worries and what I could do was to try to comfort him based on my imagination: a small and caring school in which teachers know their students well. We had our imagined stories for the schools in Canada before we entered the country. I came here for a conference in April 1999 and had the opportunity to visit some local schools and kindergartens. I was a teacher educator interested in alternative education. I got my images of classroom in other countries not first-handed but mainly from books and videos from the library. One of the most impressive videos I watched before I came to Canada was Why do these kids love school? (Fadiman, 1990) in which some exemplary alternative schools practising child-centred philosophy were portrayed in the documentary. When we do not have personal experience of other people and things, we tend to categorize, dichotomize, and stereotype them. When I first watched Fadiman’s documentary years before, I thought, “Hmm, this is the wonderful progressive education in America. Their classrooms are colourful and the teaching and learning are interactive and dynamic. The teachers are so caring and are always ready to listen to individual children to help them solve their problems. They know every child well. How wonderful!” I had my prejudice based on my limited knowledge and ignorance.

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That was my imagined story of Western education. My wife had different schooling and working experiences and thus she had her own imagination. Our children were small then. Their images of schooling came only from their personal experience in Hong Kong. They hardly knew anything about education in other places. Afterall, we all brought these images and wishful thinking with us when we entered the educational landscape in Toronto. Did all teachers in Toronto know their students well  – as I tried to assure Andy? Well, not all the time. Below is an account of what happened to Fanny on the first day of school.

“Oh Fanny, I Know You! I Remember Your Face!” We took the public bus to school on the first day. It was a cloudy day with patches of rain in the morning. We arrived at the school at about 8:30 a.m. We came to the school office through the front door and were directed to wait at the playground at outside the school. It was a concrete playground with a large adjacent park. There were not many students there. More arrived at about a quarter to nine. Then we saw the teachers. All teachers wore a paper badge of smiling face on their shirts. The name of the teacher and their class were also printed on the badge. Many wore an even bigger smile on their faces. We found Andy’s teacher first. He was Mr Thompson, a nearly baldheaded man in his thirties who always greeted his students with a big smile. He was one of the two Grade 3 teachers. Fanny’s teacher appeared later. I walked across the playground to meet him. With Fanny standing beside me, I tried to engage him in conversation saying that we had just arrived in Canada for less than two weeks and Fanny was new to this school and this country and that we were staying for a year because I was studying here at OISE. I didn’t know if I had said too much or not enough. He responded energetically to my stumbling introduction. He put his hands on my daughter’s face and said, “Oh, Fanny, I know you! I remember your face!” When it turned out that he had mistaken Fanny with another girl he had taught last year, we had a brief talk and then he walked away. How embarrassing! (Journal, September 13, 1999)

When I came forward to the teacher to introduce ourselves, I was hoping that the teacher would understand our challenges as newcomers to a different country. I hoped he could pay special attention to my daughter in the early adjustment period. Why did he mistake her for another girl he had taught the year before? I did not know. Perhaps the girl he had taught

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was also an Asian that looked alike. Maybe it is difficult for a Westerner to distinguish a Chinese from a Korean or Japanese, just like I cannot notice the subtle distinctive features among people from different European origins. I recalled my own stereotypes of Westerners in the past. When I was a schoolboy under the British rule, I only knew of two major foreign countries in the world – Great Britain and the United States of America; both were rich and powerful. I knew about people in these countries mostly from the images I saw on the television programmes and cigarette advertisements. For a small child like me, all people with fair skin and blonde hair were either British or American, and all British and American have fair skin and blonde hair. The differences between the British and the American I could not tell and did not care to know. When I was in the university, one of my favourite psychology professors came from Canada. He often emphasized he was a Canadian but we students were not as keen to distinguish him from the American.

The Main Course on the Menu Though Fanny was more mature and better prepared academically, she did encounter difficulties on her first day in school. We came to the school to pick up our kids at about 3:30 p.m. We wanted to know how they were doing on the first day. We met Fanny in the school corridor. She was carrying a school bag on her back. Her school bag was not heavy but she seemed to be walking heavily. Her face flushed like a big tomato and her eyes were like staring into emptiness through the corridor. Mom: Fanny: Mom: Fanny: Mom: Dad:

How are you doing today? …… Are you happy today? …… (Unable to hold her tears back anymore, her tears start to run down her cheeks.) Oh, silly girl! No need to cry, silly girl! Don’t cry. Silly girl. (Holding Fanny with my arm) It’s okay. It’s okay to cry. Let’s go home first. (Journal, September 13, 1999)

For the first month or so in the school year, our children were going through hard time in the all-English environment in school. Though they had learned English for several years in Hong Kong, they told me they

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could not understand a word in the classroom in the first few days. Fanny got good grades in English when she was in Hong Kong but she said she felt like an “invisible dummy” in class on the first day of school in Toronto. Andy also said he did not understand what his teacher was saying but he managed to follow the instructions by mimicking his fellow classmates. He seemed to adapt a bit easier than his sister. He sang songs happily and enjoyed himself when he was taking a bath at home after the first day of school. There were real difficulties for both of them but they seemed to respond to the new situations in different ways. However, in the first one or two weeks, both of them did cry and were reluctant to go to school when they woke up in the morning. In Hong Kong, children learn English as one of the many subjects in the school curriculum. It is a core subject but it is not a total disaster if they do not learn English well. When the main course in a meal does not suit our appetite, we can still try the side dishes or desserts on the menu. In a Canadian school, however, English is ingredient in the main course, the side dishes, and the desserts. One day when Andy came home after school, he was literally starving, partly because of his inadequacy in English. Andy: Mom: Andy: Mom: Andy:

Mom, I am hungry. I didn’t have lunch in school today. Why? You brought your lunch box to school today. Yes. But you didn’t put in a spoon. Why didn’t you tell your teacher? Mmm … I don’t know. I didn’t know how to ask. (Journal, September 28, 1999)

Peer Relationships Outside the Classroom Classroom learning is only part of the school life for children. Peer relationships matter a great deal for them. In my observation, boys seem to make friends more easily on the playground through ball games and other physical activities. For girls, especially those approaching adolescence, they usually form exclusive social groups that are more difficult for the outsiders to join. Fanny recalled that one day she was approached by several girls in the school yard. They asked if she wanted to join them. She said yes and they gave her a challenge. They told Fanny to write her name in the sand on the

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ground. Fanny did as she was told. Then they asked her to cover her name with the sand. Again, Fanny did as she was told. Then they told Fanny that she could be their friend if she could find her name in the sand again. Fanny knew she was tricked. She felt frustrated and walked away from the girls who were laughing behind her (Interview, August 14, 2000). Yet not all classmates imposed such hard conditions on Fanny. Some girls were more pleasant and friendly. There was another occasion when Fanny watched a group of girls jumping rope during the recess. One of them invited her, “Do you want to play with us?” Fanny said yes and happily joined in. Lack of English skills sometimes invited bullying from Andy’s classmates. One day, he told me how he was challenged by his classmate. Andy:

Today Joshua hit me. And I said I would tell the teacher. But he laughed, “You don’t know English. How can you tell the teacher?” (Journal, December 3, 1999)

Fortunately, Andy soon befriended his hockey playmate Jordon, a local Canadian boy, who told the others to stop teasing him. Whenever Andy stumbled in his English or was in trouble, Jordon was always around to help. He soon became Andy’s guardian angel and the best friend in the school. An immigrant student’s initial language difficulties in a new country are unavoidable. And teasing of newcomers to a school might be a common ritual that children have to face before they gain acceptance by their peers. Teachers’ planning and organization of the classroom life, however, could be instrumental in helping students to find their places and feel being a part of the new environment.

A Place in the Classroom Andy’s teacher obviously spent time planning ahead for his students before the start of the school year. He designed a game for the class. On the first day of school, he called out the name of each student and gave each one a yellow slip of paper before they entered the classroom. He asked the students to find their designated desks by following the specific instructions given. The students’ names were printed on the slips, together with a directional puzzle on where their desks were located. Every student got a

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different slip and had a unique place in the classroom. Andy got his (Fig. 5.1): The children then moved around the classroom excitedly to solve a big seating puzzle. They checked with each other and sometimes offered help to one another. Some would find their desks quicker and some might need a bit more time. But in the end, they all succeeded in this game. Everyone was a winner. The prizes were their designated desks, a bunch of friends they had initial interactions with, a sense of achievement, and most importantly, fun on this first day of class. Whether the teacher had these purposes in mind when he was planning this activity I did not know. But the experience for the children was definitely rewarding and it certainly helped Andy to have an easier entry into the new environment. In my own school days, a usual practice of allocating seats to students in a classroom in Hong Kong was to have them line up outside the classroom, with the shorter ones standing at the front and the taller ones at the back. Then the shorter students would take up seats at the front of each row; followed by the taller students, ended with the tallest ones taking seats at the back. The seats were arranged according to the students’ heights so that everybody could see the blackboard clearly. This arrangement was practised when I was a beginning teacher and might still be practised in some schools today. There are different pedagogical assumptions and considerations for different seating arrangements. When the main activity the students are supposed to have in class is to watch and listen attentively to the teacher at the

Fig. 5.1  The seating puzzle

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front of the classroom, knowledge and authority come from one direction from the teacher to the students. In a classroom packed with 30, 35, or even over 40 students, this might be the most reasonable way of arranging seats and conducting a lesson. Schooling in Hong Kong, like many other areas of our achievements, is noted for its high efficiency and effectiveness.1 Arranging seats according to the heights of the students is far more time-saving and orderly than letting them run around in the room. However, various educational messages might be embedded in different classroom practices. What messages and values are the students learning in these different practices? The decisions made by the teachers are both an expression of their personal educational experiences and also contextualized in the prevailing stories and practical constraints in their educational landscapes. When the teachers themselves were taught by “chalk and talk” in a traditional classroom, it might take some time and new experiences to relearn and imagine a different mode of teaching and learning. Limited space in the classroom might also leave little room for choices of different educational activities.

Birthday Party in Class There was another classroom ritual in Andy’s class in Toronto that served to recognize and affirm the uniqueness of each child. During the year, the class teacher encouraged the children to treat their classmates with some goodies on their birthdays. One day in December, Daphne and I prepared some mini pizzas at home and brought them hot to the school. The pizzas were bought from the supermarket a few days before. We heated them in the oven in the morning, carefully packed them in picnic boxes, and delivered them to the school by bus. We went up to Andy’s classroom. It was the last session before the recess in the morning. We knocked on the door, notified the teacher of our coming, entered the classroom with his permission, and introduced ourselves to the students. We told them it was Andy’s birthday and we wanted to give them some little treats. Then we handed each student a mini pizza and a pack of juice. Before they started eating, the teacher led the classmates to clap their hands and sang a birthday song for Andy. We saw Andy’s sweetest smile on his face on this very special day. This exceptional birthday party was not only a memorable moment for an eight-year-old boy. It was also a sweet and enlightening experience for his parents. We talked about it a lot afterwards. My wife and I had been teaching in Hong Kong for many years. Never once in our teaching lives

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we had expected parents to come into the classroom during the class time. Serving pizza and drinks in classroom, singing birthday song aloud in the middle of a lesson were simply unimaginable and would be seen as a disruption to teaching and class discipline. How could we waste precious class time on the birthday of one single student when we had so many things to be learned in a lesson? We could not imagine how classroom life could have anything to do with the children’s birthdays. In our belief, a child’s birthday belongs to the family, not to the school. School is a place for serious business. We recalled that we spent about 15 minutes in the classroom on that day. It means that if a teacher allows the parents to do it for every child in the class, this will probably take away hours of teaching time in a year. But did the children learn anything from such experience? What did they learn about life and celebration? About their uniqueness? About sharing? Was the time wasted or were the children learning an important lesson in a subtle way, on a special day in their lives? Is it a worthwhile ritual in the class? What notions of teaching and learning, of life and education, are embedded in such classroom practices? I began to wonder.

Smile and Recess, Music and Work There were other classroom routines in Andy’s classroom that intrigued me. Andy said his teacher was always very kind and funny. When it was recess time, he would often order the students to line up straight and be quiet. Then with tongue in cheek, he would announce seriously, “Listen! Those who do not smile cannot leave for recess!” The children of course complied with the teacher immediately  – with big smiles on their faces when they walked out of the classroom. Discipline and order could sometimes be fun and go hand in hand and in tune with children’s nature. Hong Kong classrooms are usually very busy. Most of the time, the teachers and the students have to work at a quick pace. In nearly all the classrooms I that have visited during my teaching supervision, the teachers are always busy doing the talking, explaining, or questioning the students. There is always action and seldom a minute of silence in a classroom. Andy had a different experience in his class in Toronto. He told me that sometimes they had to do individual work in class. When the teacher wanted them to do work quietly by themselves, he would play some light music from the CD player on the teacher’s desk. The teacher would then focus on his own work at his desk and the students would quietly work on

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their own with music in the background. Everyone worked quietly and no one wanted to disrupt the music. I gather that in this classroom, children were not only learning English language or mathematics by reading or working on problems. They were also learning a habit to work independently and individually by following the example of their teacher, in an environment where they felt safe, relaxed, natural, and comfortable.

Andy’s Troubles with His Homework Life was not all that happy or easy for Andy, however, especially when it came to homework time. During the year, our children did have homework assignments to be done after school every day. Andy was in Grade 3 that year, he was expected to finish his written work in about half an hour, as we were told in the student handbook. The other daily homework item was reading a storybook of his choice. This was not too demanding, compared to what he had to do in Hong Kong, when he had to complete at least one to two hours of written assignments every night. However, before Andy could get used to the class routine and had a better mastery of English, the daily homework assignments could be a painful experience for him. Wednesday. I have class in the evening. It is about 9 pm when I return home after a half an hour subway journey. I open the door to our apartment on the 8th floor and find Andy sobbing over his homework at the dining table, grabbing a pencil in his hand. Daphne is sitting beside him. Once again, they have been struggling with the English assignments and with each other for hours. It happens every Wednesday night when I have evening class at OISE. “If you don’t get these words right, then you don’t leave this table!” Daphne orders Andy. “I don’t know how to teach him!” she turns to me. “He never gets the words right. He only cries and says he doesn’t understand. I tell him to pay more attention and learn them by heart but he still gets them wrong. How can he go on like this? When we were in Hong Kong, I asked you whether we needed to give them extra preparation in English. You said no need. Now, you see! If he fails again and again like this, the teacher would think that we parents are not helping him enough!” (Journal, early October, 1999)

Andy finished Primary 2 in Hong Kong before he entered Grade 3 in Toronto. His academic performance in Hong Kong was below average. In

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Primary 1 and 2, he was ranked near the bottom 20 among the 120 students in the same class level in the school. His English was average. He was still learning at the simple sentence level in Hong Kong before he came to Toronto. When he started school in Toronto, his English competency was obviously far behind that of his local classmates who were mostly native speakers. He could manage to follow instructions and performed classroom routines by mimicking his classmates. When he was left alone with his homework, however, he often found that he did not understand what the teacher had said in class. He sometimes did not even know what homework he was supposed to do, even though he had copied, letter by letter, the homework instructions on his school planner. The textbooks and exercises, designed for native speakers, were apparently beyond the level he could manage, especially in the first one or two months. For me, the difficulties my children encountered in a new environment were not unexpected. When I made the decision to come to Toronto together with my family, I knew that we would all encounter difficulties in adapting to a new environment. Things would be smoother and more peaceful if they had stayed in Hong Kong in a familiar environment. Changing to another school system was sure to bring more challenges. I knew we needed time and patience to overcome these initial difficulties. But when the difficulties were coupled with our anxiety and strangeness at arriving in a new country, they were sometimes quite daunting for both the children and their parents. And it sometimes caused much frustration and conflict in the family.

Evaluating Students – Andy’s Report Card Several months passed and it was time for student evaluation. We received the first report card from the school in December. Unlike the report cards we had in Hong Kong, which recorded a student’s marks and grades in every subject, Andy’s teachers wrote detailed descriptions of how he learned in class during the term, identifying his strengths and areas that needed more effort. Most of the comments were written by the homeroom teacher and some were written by specialist teachers in Physical Education and Music. Andy’s English competence was obviously far behind that of his local-born classmates and he had difficulties in many of his school tasks. However, in the report card, he was evaluated on his own

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terms and for his own accomplishments. He was given encouragement and affirmation for his individual strengths by his teachers. The Ontario provincial report card reported letter grades in each subject to indicate the student’s achievement of the provincial curriculum expectations. There was, however, no comparison among students in a class. Instead of a numeric ranking of his position in class, Andy got the following summary comments from his teacher in the first report card in December 1999: Andy has worked hard this term to make friends and establish himself in the Little Acorn’s culture and has been very successful. He can communicate basic concerns in English and follows simple instructions. He expresses himself creatively and very effectively through drawings. His diagrams are very well drawn and include a high level of sophistication. Andy persists and perseveres when confronted with daily tasks but is encouraged to ask for support when concepts and instructions are unclear. He is quickly learning basic reading strategies and reads simple texts during group readings. Andy you’re amazing. Keep up the good work. (Andy’s report card, December 1999, p. 3)

This type of evaluation is more “personally referenced” (Eisner, 1991) as compared with the norm-referenced evaluation often used in Hong Kong. As a father who had known my child for years, I was not flattered by these positive comments on his artistic talents, creativity, and perseverance. However, I was surprised that the teacher could notice the individual potentials and strengths in a new student and made such detailed and accurate observations of him in three months’ time, despite his apparent weakness in the classroom. What is happening in the classrooms? What are the underlying educational values and practices in the two educational milieus? How do the educational values reveal themselves in the differences in classroom physical settings, in teacher focus and attention on the children, in the different practices and emphases in reporting students’ progress? I continue to wonder. I do not see the different practices simply as one better than the other. Instead, I am more fascinated by the different educational philosophies underlying such practices. How a child is evaluated in school tells a lot about the values espoused in the school and the society. Do we recognize the uniqueness of each child or do we reduce the diverse talents of children by measuring them against a single yardstick? Could we uphold

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standards and excellence and at the same time recognize and develop the uniqueness and talents in our children? Our answers to these issues reflect our basic values in life and learning. These school practices are connected to some ultimate questions for our educators: what do we want for our children’s future? What are the qualities of humanity that we should cultivate in our young people (Nussbaum, 1997)? How do we educate them so that they could continue to learn along the way and contribute to humanity in a multicultural world (Bateson, 1994, 2000)?

Fanny’s Story: A Lesson in Black History for Her Father When Fanny was in Grade 5  in Toronto, her school work was more demanding and required intensive study on language, mathematics, science, and social studies. However, the teachers taught differently and my daughter learned differently in Hong Kong and Toronto. Formal curriculum in Hong Kong primary schools composes of a number of subjects including Chinese, English, mathematics, general studies, music, arts, and physical education. However, the subject matter in different subjects is not necessarily integrated as they are often taught by different subject teachers. As Dewey contended, when subject matter is acquired in a segregated manner, it becomes “disconnected from the rest of experience that it is not available under the actual conditions of life” (1938, p. 48). The subject topics Fanny learned in school in Toronto seemed to be relatively fewer but were more related. They were mostly taught by her homeroom teacher. For one single topic in science – clouds, she spent a whole month observing the clouds every day after school in September. She had to make notes and keep records of the cloud patterns and other weather details, fill in worksheets, and draw conclusions from her own data. In Black History Month (every February in Canada and the USA), she learned about African heritage. There were activity booths for the students to learn about African arts and music during the school day. The students had to research and write about prominent Black people and made presentations in their English language class. In social studies class, they watched a documentary on Martin Luther King Jr. and read about the history of the struggle of the Blacks in America. She watched performances and learned about African music and dance in music and drama lessons. She also made a paper sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. as an

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art project and kept a project journal on what she had done every day for several months. One Sunday afternoon in April, when I was reading Maxine Greene’s The Dialectic of Freedom (1988) I came across a sentence: “And we may recall the blacks, escaping in the slave years through the Underground Railroad, shipped northward in trucks …” (p. 88). As I had never studied history in school, I had no clue what this “Underground Railroad” was about. However, I remembered that my daughter had mentioned this to me a week before, so I sought help from her and was immediately given a private lesson on the lives of slaves in the southern American states in mid nineteenth century. The slaves escaped from their masters and became free when they crossed the border to Canada. Fanny also told me in details the story of Rosa Parks and how the bus company was boycotted after Marin Luther King Jr. made a speech to the people, and became arrested afterwards – a story I had heard about but not known in details. I was amazed that my daughter could make use of what she learned in school to answer my query in a sensible way. She was a diligent student in Hong Kong but I seldom saw her talk about real-life issues with such depth and intelligence. What she learned in her school in Hong Kong mostly remained as “school work”, not something to be integrated in her knowing of the world. What she learned in school and what she knew outside school seemed to be residing in different compartments in her mind. As I knew more about how she learned in school in Toronto, I began to appreciate the wisdom of learning more by teaching less. As I said above, since Black History Month, different subject matter in English, social studies, music, art, and drama in the school were geared towards a central theme. At the same time, the tasks she did under the central theme were connected and further developed her learning in other subject areas. The history of human life was represented and learned through different modes and media – words, music, drama, images, and artefacts. As different modes of teaching enable different ways of knowing (Heshusius & Ballard, 1996) and different forms of understanding (Eisner, 1991, 1994), her learning in different subject matters gradually became part of her personal knowledge (Polanyi, 1958). This knowledge also enabled her to become her father’s first teacher on Black history in America.

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Learning, Achievement, and Awards Compared with immigrant children from other non-English speaking countries, Fanny and Andy might be better prepared in their basic English language skills and also other subject knowledge for their study in Canada.2 During that year, all new immigrant children in the school received language support from an ESL teacher one hour a day, four days a week, and in small groups.3 For the rest of the time, they stayed in the regular class with their native-speaking classmates. This seemed to be a planned combination of individual attention and total immersion in the new language environment. Building on a stronger academic background, Fanny was able to develop her potentials in the new learning environment. Given proper guidance from the teacher and sufficient room for exploration in the curriculum, she acquired one of the most important skills: independent learning. During the year, Fanny did several independent and group writing projects. She chose her own topics. She read books from the library and used the internet to find information she needed to write short biographies on people like Beethoven, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jeanne Sauvé (the first woman Governor General in Canada). Not all of these assignments were completed in excellence but she was given the guidance and opportunities to learn to explore on her own. Although she felt like an “invisible dummy” on the first day of school, she started to raise her hand and answered questions in class by the end of September. Her language proficiency progressed steadily during the year to allow her to participate fully in class after a few months. Even though she had never learned French before, she was able to catch up with her classmates; some of them had been learning the language for one or two years. At the end of the year, Fanny received the Excellence Award in French, Visual Arts Award, and the Academic Excellence for Overall Effort Award in the graduation ceremony. The way a school recognizes a student’s achievement also conveys significant messages to both the students and the parents about what is valued in the school. It is probably also a reflection of the fundamental values in the educational landscape. It is interesting and insightful to examine the values and messages reflected by the wordings as shown in the certificates Fanny received in Toronto and in Hong Kong (Figs. 5.2 and 5.3). In the Hong Kong, the award was given to the “winner” – the student who performed better than all other students to be the “FIRST” in the examination. In the Toronto school, the award was given to the student

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Fig. 5.2  Certificate from Fanny’s school in Toronto (with identifcation details blurred)

who demonstrated certain desirable qualities in learning for a sustained period of time. It was not merely based on the marks the student got in a final examination. In a competition, there is only one winner. Once the best student gets the “first”, all others have no chances to go for it. However, in the Toronto school, certain desirable qualities were recognized and honoured: “desire, determination, and ability to maintain an exceptional academic standing”. Not all students would receive a certificate but at least everyone recognizes what qualities are valued by the school and teachers. A student could be proud of his or her strong desire and determination in learning even if their results are not as outstanding. The cultivation of desirable qualities is not a zero-sum game as in the win-­ lose situation in competing for the first place. These differences might seem trivial if they are just regarded as ornamental words on a certificate. But when the choices of these wordings are in effect shaping and defining

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Fig. 5.3  Certificate from Fanny’s school in Hong Kong (with identifcation details blurred)

the goals we aim at, we could give them more serious thoughts on what we value in the education for our children. Recognition of individual effort and achievement was also evident in Andy’s dictation experience in Little Acorn. Andy’s English competence was far behind that of his local-born classmates at the start of the school year. The whole class had spelling tests every Friday. Looking back on the spelling sheets we collected, students had to dictate 15 words every time. For the first few weeks, Andy scored only 3 or 4 out of 15. The teacher wrote “good try”, “work harder” on his spelling sheets. One or two months later, when Andy got 7 or 8, the teacher wrote “good job”, “well done”, “good for you” together with some attractive stickers. When Andy worked harder and scored 9 or 10, his teacher wrote “wonderful”, “fantastic”. During the later months, Andy could score over 10 most of the time. He even got 15 out of 15 once. I think that if Andy was reminded of his weakness by constant comparison with his classmates, by being labelled a “failure” every time instead of being evaluated on his own pace

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and level with appropriate encouragement, he might not have been able to achieve what he had done (Fig. 5.4).

Summary Since I first conceived the idea of this inquiry in April 1999, I started writing field notes and journals on family events and recorded my ongoing reflections. I talked about my puzzles with my friends and colleagues through emails and conversations from time to time. These field notes, journals, records of emails and conversations served as memory signposts which aided my later reconstruction and interpretations of the stories on our journey. These field texts are then transformed into research texts using three interpretive devices: broadening, burrowing, storying, and restorying (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Broadening situates my family stories in the larger social and historical contexts. Burrowing allows me to dig deep into our puzzling experiences along the way. Storying and restorying happens when I talk about my puzzles with my friends and colleagues and family members to “capture transitions that take place over time” (Craig, 2012, p. 92). However, the readers should be aware that “all field texts are constructed representations of experience” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 106) and the reconstruction here is contingent on my autobiographical and social backgrounds as I narrated in Chap. 3. These stories can always be told and retold in different ways. As such, these field texts and research

Fig. 5.4  Samples and progress of Andy’s spelling tests in Toronto

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texts constructed here should not be regarded as “mirror of nature” (Rorty, 1980) but as an attempt to enter into the ongoing conversations in different educational and cultural landscapes. The readers should also be mindful of the temporal and fluid nature of inquiry and experience. People and places are always changing, never static or fixed entities. This change over time in the world and in our lives can be captured in Geertz’s (1995) metaphor of a parade. My narrations and understanding of the educational landscapes in Hong Kong and Toronto are contingent on when and where we join and leave the parades. The central concerns of my inquiry are the notions of life and learning in different landscapes, not a snapshot comparison of the two static places. Also, as we move on in our life journey, our memories of difficulties and frustrations tend to fade away as time goes by. As my family looked back on our lives in Toronto, we had, on the whole, intense and positive feelings towards the places, the school, and the people we met. Our memory tends to smooth details out (Dillard, 1988). By going back to the field texts, I recovered many of the odds and ends that enabled me to draw a more completed picture of our lives in Toronto in richer and more complex hues and colours. Based on my memory and aided by the field texts, I have recounted, in this chapter, the challenges my children faced when they started their school year in Toronto in September 1999. They experienced early difficulties in using English and in building their peer relationships in a new school. I described how the teachers could create a supportive learning atmosphere to help the students to adapt to and to achieve in a new environment. Such an environment recognized the uniqueness and celebrated the strengths of individual students; it provided practical support and timely encouragement; it evaluated the students in their own terms, without constantly comparing one student with another. Emphasis was placed on cultivating the desirable qualities and habits of learning in the students. I began to understand the wisdom of teaching less, learning more. I began to ponder on the various notions of life and learning in different educational landscapes. Faced with the difficulties our children encountered in school, my wife and I had different reactions to the situations which sometimes triggered conflicts and frustrations in the family. These tensions led me to uncover the different narrative threads in my family stories. I realized that the differences between two persons can only be understood narratively, and

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likewise we need to learn from other people, countries, or cultures instead of passing judgements on the others too easily. The difficulties of our children faced at school began to ease up after one or two months. They started to enjoy school life and made new friendships with their schoolmates. They started to read a lot and discovered a whole new world in reading. They enjoyed the many celebrations and parties at school. However, all these experiences had to come to an end when we left Canada and returned to Hong Kong. In the next chapter, I tell our experiences of leaving Canada and going back to Hong Kong. In my telling, the contrasts between the educational landscapes of these two places become more evident. When we come to a different country, we learn not only inside the classrooms. Our daily life experiences in the society also reveal significant cultural lessons if we are attentive enough to the mundane and daily routines. In Chap. 7, I explore our social experiences in the cultural landscape beyond the school boundary. I believe that the school, the family, and the society have to work closely together to create a culture to sustain the kinds of lives we want.

Notes 1. Hong Kong has been ranked at the top few places in the PISA test for many years. The OECD publication, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons from PISA for the United States (2011), has included both Hong Kong and Ontario in their detailed case studies, which are coincidentally the two key locales of my family stories. 2. Fanny told me that some of her classmates who came from Korea or mainland China possessed very limited English language skills. Some of them could only say “Good morning” and “Goodbye” on the first few days. Andy also said that one of his classmates did not understand the words “Boys” and “Girls” on the doors of the washrooms and entered the wrong one. 3. In each grade level, there were about five or six students in the school who needed ESL support. Fanny and Andy went to the respective groups for their grade levels during the normal class time. The ESL teacher provided individual learning materials and support for each student. The English language backgrounds of the students did vary a great deal, particularly at the start of the year.

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References Bateson, M. C. (1994). Peripheral visions: Learning along the way. HarperCollins. Bateson, M. C. (2000). Full circles, overlapping lives: Culture and generation in transition. Ballantine. Clandinin, D.  J., & Connelly, F.  M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2–14. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1995). Narrative and education. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 1(1), 73–85. Craig, C. (2012). Butterfly under a pin: An emergent teacher image amid mandated curriculum reform. Journal of Educational Research, 105(2), 90–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2010.519411 Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. Perigee. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Simon & Schuster. Dillard, A. (1988). An American childhood. HarperCollins. Eisner, E. W. (1991). The enlightened eye: Qualitative inquiry and the enhancement of educational practice. Macmillan. Eisner, E. W. (1994). The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs. Macmillan. Fadiman, D. (1990). Why do these kids love school? [Video]. KTEH-TV. Geertz, C. (1995). After the fact: Two countries, four decades, one anthropologist. Harvard University Press. Greene, M. (1988). The dialectic of freedom. Teachers College Press. Heshusius, L., & Ballard, K. (1996). From positivism to interpretivism and beyond. Teachers College Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (1997). Cultivating humanity. Harvard University Press. Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rorty, R. (1980). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Blackwell.

CHAPTER 6

Leaving Canada and Returning to Hong Kong

After a full year in Canada, we had to return to Hong Kong. All things, good or bad, in Canada were coming to an end. They became part of our memories and part of our lives. We carried our experiences from Hong Kong to live in Canada. We gained new experiences and we carried our transformed experiences to return to Hong Kong. What and how did our Canadian experiences affect our lives? What would we miss about Canada? What would happen when we return to Hong Kong, having experienced different learning styles, values and social practices, and different orientations towards life and learning? In this chapter and the next, I try to probe into these puzzles, knowing that many of the partial answers could only come on some distant day. In this chapter, I focus on the changes in school experiences of my children in different places. I start with a reconstruction of an emotional evening in my family on the last day of the school year in Toronto. Then I narrate their stories of returning to the school they had been away for one year. In Chap. 7, I move beyond the school and explore the different cultural values and practices in the two societies. The stories in these two chapters show that after experiencing an alternative way of life and a different form of education, our experiences of coming to terms with the former ways of living and learning were often more painful and frustrating. The difficulties encountered in returning to the former landscape were often greater than the difficulties of entering a new one (Dong, 2017; Storti, 1990, 2001). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. K. Lau, Life and Learning Between Hong Kong and Toronto, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80052-9_6

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When people travel from places to places, they carry with them their different experiences from one place to another and from one time to another. This experience would bring out the contrasts of different landscapes more sharply. These people in motion are “making the strange familiar” and “making the familiar strange” (Erickson, 1984). In a way, this is a special vantage point in my inquiry in making observations and reflections on the notions of life and learning in different landscapes. These issues will be explored more deeply in Chap. 8. In order to understand and appreciate different cultures or educational practices, we cannot rely on snapshot comparisons and make quick judgements. A sustained period of time and involvement is needed for understanding. This kind of understandings and observations, however, as Geertz (1995) reflects in After the fact, are always “unsatisfactory, lumbering, shaky, and badly formed” (p.  20). These are not “timeless” or “context-­free” knowledge or findings as those being advanced by research in the grand narrative of positivism. These understandings and observations are constructed by people with their specific experience, history, and orientation. Narrative thinking is always temporal, peopled, and contextual (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Therefore, the accounts here should only be read contextually, taking into consideration of the specific time, people, and places from which they are constructed. Only when these accounts are read in this way that we could try to make meanings from them and to think about the different notions of life and learning in different cultural and educational landscapes.

Part 1: Leaving Canada A Time and Place in Between The school year in Canada was coming to a close by the end of June. Both for the children and the parents, the last day of school was a more symbolic ending of our year in Canada, though our return flights to Hong Kong were scheduled in August 2000. They were not going back to the school anymore. They were not seeing their teachers and friends in the school again. One phase of our children’s schooling experience ended. The next phase was yet to come. We were somewhat caught up in between different times and places. The last day of school was symbolic for us because school life was one of the most significant part of our lives in Canada for the year. The

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education of children is always one of the top priorities for parents with young children. When my wife and I were talking about whether we should come to Canada together for my residency year, one of our prime concerns was how it would affect our children. Was it worth the troubles to interrupt their school life in Hong Kong? What school arrangements were available for them in Canada? We hoped it would be a worthwhile experience but we were not certain then. We could make a realistic estimate of the financial costs of taking a one-­ year no-pay leave in my wife’s career and extending my study leave from eight months to a year. The living expenses for a single foreign student were much lower than that of a family moving together. The arrangements were much less complicated. On the other hand, the potential benefits of living abroad together for a year could only be imagined. The complications of this back-and-forth movement in our children’s schooling experiences and in our lives were unknown when we made the decision. We could only leap forward to the unknowns with lots of wishful thinking coupled with even more uncertainties. So how did we look back on this year, especially when it was coming to an end? “Bye Little Acorn. Bye everything. Bye everything in Canada” Having said the final goodbyes to their friends and teachers in school, Fanny and Andy took their last school bus trip and returned home in the afternoon of June 29, 2000. They shared the candies they received from their classmates and talked excitedly about what had happened during the day, with all the farewell cards, school yearbooks, and many little souvenirs lying lavishly on the floor in our living room. Fanny recalled what had happened in the ESL classroom on the last day of the year: Today Miss Goldfield was tidying things up in her room. She found a pile of colour paper and she said to me, “Fanny, could you put these back beside the sink, please?” I said yes and I told her, “You taught me what a sink is and where the sink is on the first day of ESL.” And then she said, “Oh, yeah.” And when I put the paper beside the sink, she said, “Now Fanny knows where the sink is.”

And she got a special souvenir from her ESL teacher.

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Dad: Fanny: Dad: Fanny: Dad:

Look at this. How did you get this – the Canadian flag? Miss Goldfield gave it to me. Oh, I see. Was it placed in the classroom? Yes. Because she is leaving the school this year, she gave it to me. She gave something to everyone in the ESL class today. Wow, that’s good for you! You got this Canadian flag. You can take it back to Hong Kong as a souvenir. Whenever you see this, you’ll remember Miss Goldfield.

Andy had his own style of saying goodbye to his friends and to the school: Today I shared my snack with Cam. And he shared his with me. And then Cam said, “I think I’ll never ever see you again.” Then I replied, “I think I’ll come back when I get married.” Before I left the school today, I said to myself, “Bye Little Acorn. Bye everything. Bye everything in Canada.” I sat on the school bus and when it started to move, I waved goodbye to the school.

Andy’s teacher, Mr. Thompson, gave every student in his class a farewell card on the last day. He wrote some encouraging words for each student. This was what he wrote for Andy: We’re all going to miss you. You have worked so hard this year. You can be proud of your effort. Have fun and keep in touch!  – Mr Thompson, your Grade 3 teacher.

The teacher also taught the students to hand-make a memory book for themselves and encouraged them to write something to each other. Fanny picked up Andy’s memory book and found this interesting note: Fanny: Look! Brandon spelt ‘until’ wrongly as ‘ontil’. He wrote, “I will miss you when you are in Hong Kong. You’re my best friend forever. Remember you ontil death.”

Fanny and Andy also vividly talked about how some of the teachers hugged each other and cried in the assembly because they were also leaving the school that year. Some of them were retiring and leaving the school. Fanny and Andy seemed to joyfully recount the incidents without much bitterness with candies in their mouths.

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“I didn’t realise that I wasn’t coming back on Monday” Their emotions started to creep in later that evening. Memories of the year, far and near, started flashing back to Fanny and Andy. After we finished dinner, Andy started crying when he continued to talk with me inside our bedroom. He said he missed his friends and teachers in school very much. After a while, Fanny and Daphne came and joined in. I sensed that it was going to be an emotional and unforgettable moment. I suggested to them maybe we should record it. They did not mind bringing in the tape recorder. We had already got used to it. We continued to pour out our thoughts and feelings of our lives in Canada. I tried hard to keep myself composed to soothe the others but eventually we all cried but still managed to talk together in broken phrases for the next hour or so. Fanny recalled how she left the school on the last day: Today when the school ended, I got the yearbook. I took it to Miss Goldfield for her to sign on it. When I was leaving her room, I said to her, “Miss Goldfield, see you on Monday, as usual.” … I know … but … I don’t know … I didn’t realise that I wasn’t coming back on Monday. Because … they always helped me … and Melinda and Jenny were both so good to me. … But now we have to leave so soon. I really don’t want to leave Miss Goldfield. She did not only teach us English. She helped us with our school work. And whenever we had problems or we were unhappy, we would go and tell her. The other day when Jenny’s father did not allow her to go to Mono Cliff [the graduation camp], Jenny was very upset and she talked to Miss Goldfield. Then Miss Goldfield said that was an experience she shouldn’t miss and so Miss Goldfield phoned Jenny’s daddy. She explained to him the purposes of the camp and persuaded him to give permission for Jenny to go. At last, Jenny could go to the camp. We were so happy. [Jenny was a Korean girl who came to Canada a month after Fanny. She was Fanny’s best friend in the school and they planned to share a room together during the graduation camp. Fanny also phoned Jenny’s father to help persuade him to grant the permission.]

We talked about their friends, teachers, and the many school events during the year. We talked about what we had learned, and what we would miss when we returned to Hong Kong. Our memories of the year kept flooding in with our tears. Our random stories flashed back and forth, in and out, here and there. Our talks were dampened with sobs and sprinkled with laughter. They were markedly indistinct and incoherent, tangled with tidal waves of emotions. Above all, we held each other composed momentarily by the fond memories we all shared and treasured.

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Andy: Mom: Andy: Dad: Andy:

You’re also crying, mom? Yes, when I see you two like this, I was unhappy too. I also don’t want to leave Canada. (Surprised to see his mom crying, he turned to me and asked in a low voice.) Is she really crying? Yes, and it’s okay. Whenever we feel sad and don’t want to leave something precious, we might cry. Daddy and mommy would cry too. How about you, dad? We three cried already. You cry.

My tears were almost triggered by Andy’s innocent and unintended joke. * * * Fanny: When I first came to the school, I knew nobody.... But now I have to leave. Andy: Yes, me too. At the beginning, ... I did not know any one of my classmates. Sometimes I called their names wrongly. And now I know all of them. We become best friends. But then ... I have to leave. … I have many friends here. I had very few in Hong Kong. Andy: Daddy, are you okay? You’re crying. * * * Fanny: At first the classmates excluded me, I wanted to join their play but they said no. But then Melinda helped me. Melinda asked the others to include me, so I could join them. ... Melinda wrote this in my yearbook: “I wish I got to know you more.” At first Melinda wanted to sit with Rose. But when she knew I wanted to sit with her, she sat with me. … Sometimes when I had anything I did not understand, I’d ask her. [A few months ago, their teacher asked them to choose their seating partners in class by writing an argumentative essay to support their choices.] Why? ... Why could we only be friends with each other for such a short time? And now it’s over. ... Why did it end so fast? Andy: (Handing a tissue paper to his sister and trying to cheer her up.) Don’t cry, Sis. Don’t cry.

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We hugged and tried to offer each other console that evening. However, inside our bedroom, only the tape recorder was able to remain detached at that moment. The cassette tape continued to roll and gathered our partial, inarticulate, and incoherent utterances between the breaks in our gasps and sobs. Andy: Dad: Mom: Andy: Dad:

I don’t want to leave. You don’t want to leave here? Let dad and mom think about it first. Will we ... will we ... will we come back again? I don’t know. It’s a small world. We don’t know what would happen in a few years. Maybe we would come back ... or maybe not. We don’t know. * * *

Mom:

In fact, I cried not only because I saw you two crying. I don’t understand why in Hong Kong, nobody wants to go to school. And here everybody is so happy and eager to go to school. Fanny: When I go back to Hong Kong, I can’t see my schoolmates again. ... I can’t see their smiling faces. … We can’t belt out our school song in the gym together anymore. ... On the first day, I cried when I came home. Now I am leaving, I ... I ... cry again. Mom: It’s not easy to fall in love with a place. It’s more difficult to leave. Tides of emotions began to subside when our tears ran dry. We were able to recompose ourselves by the end. We recalled at length what the retired Principal had told us during the graduation ceremony. Dad:

Fanny:

Your Principal has been very caring to her students. Even after her retirement in the middle of the year, she came back whenever there was a special function in school. She went to the Mono Cliff outdoor camp and she also came to the Graduation Ceremony. She came back to talk to you. Do you remember she recited a poem that she wrote to all of you in the Graduation Ceremony? The last line was: “Talk to your parents, no matter what.” Yes. After her retirement, she had lots of time to prepare her speech. ... And she always smiled. ... Too bad I only had three or four months with her here.

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Dad:

Fanny:

Yes, but sometimes we can think it in another way: Too good I can have her for three or four months. … You are very fortunate. You’ve come across so many good teachers and such a good Principal. I know it’s hard to say goodbye. You had a wonderful year here and now you have to go. I know it’s hard. It’s really a special year for us. This year we could have this chance to come to live together in Canada. You can study here and get a very different learning experience. You’ve got new friends and good teachers. It’s surely a treasurable experience. Dad, I remember that at the beginning of the school year, when I told you I was very unhappy, you said that this year was going to be a precious year. I didn’t understand at that time, but now I understand. Crying, but Not the Same Tears

Our children cried at the beginning of the school year. They cried again at the close. But the tears were not the same tears. They had gone a long way from being “an invisible dummy” (Fanny) and “mimicking others” (Andy) to be able to fully enjoy and learn in a new environment. They started from scratch and gradually built close friendships with the people and made connections with the place. However, these budding relationships were to be uprooted soon by our going back to Hong Kong. They had lots of new experiences in Toronto. There were difficult times as well as joyful moments. We experienced the first snowfall in our lives. We made huge snowballs, built snowman, and formed angel figures with our bodies on the snow in the garden. Our faces were reddened after intense snowball fights, followed by hot pancakes in our cosy apartment on the eighth floor, looking over the snowflakes landing gracefully on the roofs of the houses in our neighbourhood. We celebrated the advance of the new millennium under the iconic CN Tower at the Toronto Harbourfront Centre. We joined the long parade in the Street Festival and were mesmerized by the Latin and South American musicians in the Jazz Festival. Among all these excitements and fond memories, however, the stories that came foremost on this last day were our relationships with the people here. And these were the human connections we treasured most and were the most difficult for us to leave behind.

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I could fully empathize with their feelings since I had my own painful experiences of separating with my classmates and close friends. Fanny and Andy were experiencing their first parting with their friends, which was the most difficult to handle. I recalled that I experienced the same difficult time in my younger days. Breaking up of relationships was a helpless and most unfortunate experience for me. At ages 10, 18 and 22,1 I had to leave potentially very enduring relationships. I knew it would cause hard feelings but I was not aware that it could hurt so much at that time. For me, relationships took much effort and time to develop but could end up easily. The lesson was learned the hard way. (Personal experiential paper, August, 1998)

Looking back all these years, I realized that my first separation experience at the age of 10 was probably the most difficult for me. As I grew older, I tended to carefully constraint my emotional involvement with people in the first place, foreseeing that many of these relationships were going to be transient. This holding back, as I recognized much later, often had a higher price to pay. On this last school day in Canada, we looked back on the stories we lived by and we were also looking forward to the life when we returned to Hong Kong. What would be waiting for them when they went back to the school that they have left for one year? Andy was offering comfort to his sobbing sister, who was foreseeing some hurdles. Andy: Fanny: Daddy:

Andy:

Don’t cry, Fanny. … And when you go back to St John’s [their school in Hong Kong], your Primary 4 classmates will be eager to see you. Yes, I will go back to see them. I’m sure when you go back in Primary 6, you will be very happy. You could see your Primary 4 classmates again. You have developed close friendships with them before you left. I guess when they see you after being separated for one year, they will come forward immediately to hug you. No, they don’t hug. We hug only in Little Acorn here.

Andy seemed to be sensitive enough to recognize this cultural difference by his instinct.

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Part 2: Returning to Hong Kong Andy’s Dream I had a dream. When I went to school, the teacher called me up to the blackboard to write some Chinese words so the other classmates could see. Then suddenly when I was writing, the chalk was broken. Then the teacher gave me another one. But my hand was shaking... shaking. I did not know how to write. Then the teacher scolded me. The teacher scolded me nonstop. And he said that I would have detention in the recess. Then it was a Math lesson. The teacher asked me, ‘30x30x40x100x3600=? What is the answer?’ I said I didn’t know. The teacher scolded me, ‘You don’t know this simple problem!? Then how can you learn in here!?’ The teacher scolded me. He scolded me. He scolded me nonstop until the recess. Then I had detention in the recess again. Then it was English lesson, the teacher asked me to write fifty English sentences. When I finished, the teacher praised me, saying I was good at English. But I was not happy when I walked home after school. Because I know that here in Hong Kong, we speak Chinese but I am good at English but poor in Chinese. When I woke up, I felt very strange and funny. (Transcription – Andy, August 22, 2000)

This recall of a dream was recorded on the second day after we returned to Hong Kong from Toronto. Andy woke up early in the morning and told me that he had with a strange dream. He told me a little bit of it and I immediately knew that it was something interesting. Before he continued, I asked whether I could record it. With his consent, I grabbed my tape recorder and we went outside our apartment and went down to the podium garden. Fanny and Daphne were still sleeping. We did not want to disturb them. We sat beside each other on a bench under the warm morning sun and he recalled his strange dream. In his recall, Andy was picturing scenes of his classroom in Hong Kong. He seemed to know well what he had gained and what he had lost after one year in Toronto – his English had improved but his Chinese and Math were far behind. On this first day after returning to Hong Kong, while he was still in his summer holiday, he seemed to be anticipating his coming troubles when he returned to school. However, as I observed from his funny expressions and tone of voice, he did not seem to be actually worrying at that time. He was telling me his dream in a curious and puzzling manner.

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Allocating Classes: Are You an Elite, or Not? Fanny and Andy returned to the same school they had left a year ago. Fanny went to Primary 6 and Andy went to Primary 4. In Hong Kong, the classes in Primary 5 and 6 were usually divided into two streams: the “elite classes” and the “non-elite classes”. Students were allocated to different streams according to their final examination results in Primary 4. This arrangement was supposed to narrow the difference in abilities of the students in a class so that the teachers could teach accordingly in different pace. The schools did not explicitly use these labels but everyone  – the teachers, the students, and the parents, knew this common practice in most schools in Hong Kong. Fanny’s results were at the top of the grade when she left one year before. However, as she was away for one year, the school gave her a screening test in three major subjects – Chinese, English, and Mathematics – before the start of the school year, to determine how her performance was compared to other students in the same grade level. The test lasted for one hour and took place two days after we returned. After taking the test, she was allocated to the non-elite stream because her Chinese and Mathematics performances were not up the standards in the elite stream. This allocation test separated Fanny from her best friends and made her unhappy for quite a while. The elite and non-elite distinction was taken seriously by the students. Fanny told me how one of her classmates greeted her on the first day of school. Fanny was in Class 6A, a non-elite class. Many classmates were surprised to find me in 6A. They wondered why I performed so badly when I returned. One of the boys shouted out loudly to the others during the recess, “Fanny was the best student in Primary 4. Now she is in 6A! Haha! She is in 6A!” I thought they were silly but I found them annoying. (Journal, September 1, 2000)

Andy’s placement in the class was a more complicated story, though there was no elite class arrangement in Primary 4. He was randomly placed in one of the four classes in the grade. After a week, however, he had to change to another class for some administrative reasons. The following account was from an email I wrote to Mick, my thesis supervisor, after I returned to Hong Kong. After we have adjusted ourselves to the unbearably hot summer, we began to feel the crash and clash with the school. We were having great frustrations this week.

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Andy began school on September 1. After a few days, the teachers discovered that there were two “LAU Lok Hang” in the same class. (“LAU Lok Hang” is my son’s Chinese name. The name of the other “LAU Lok Hang” has different Chinese characters but were pronounced the same.) So, the teacher decided to transfer my son to another class. However, the transfer turned out to be a very bad experience for him because he had already begun to learn and know his teachers and classmates. Because of the transfer, he knew none of the students in the new class. The boys in the new class were very rude and some spoke foul language. Andy did not like to play with girls and naughty boys. He felt lonely and often walked alone during the recess. Because of the transfer, he did not know the different homework abbreviations used by the teachers in the new class. So, he did not know what homework to do and he could not phone his classmates to seek help as he did not know his classmates well in the first one or two weeks. He failed to hand in some homework on Tuesday and was scolded by the class teacher. Later that day, because he forgot to bring a textbook to class, he was punished and had to stand in class for the whole session for 30 minutes. Yesterday, he had Putonghua lesson. The teacher told him to stand up and asked (in Putonghua), “Are you Liu Le Xing2?” Andy nodded. The teacher asked again, “Are you Liu Le Xing?” Andy nodded again. The teacher asked the third time, “Are you dumb?” Scared and didn’t know how to respond, Andy answered (in Putonghua), “Shi. (Yes.)” The whole class cracked up and the teacher laughed, “You are dumb? You are dumb!? Haha!” Many classmates continued to tease him after class. (Email to Mick, September 15, 2000)

Friendships and Sports Life was not all that gloomy for a little boy who had found his friends. When I picked Andy up one day after the hockey practice in school, he told me excitedly about his new friendships. Daddy, I am very happy. Do you know why? Because even though I failed in the Chinese dictations, I got to know two friends. Every time I got my dictation back, I told Henry my marks. And he would say: “Work hard. Keep on. Never give up!” or something like that. I got TWO friends now. One is Henry. Another one sits behind Henry. He also plays in the hockey team. (Journal, October 23, 2000)

Andy had always shown great interest and talent in sports since he was small. So, when the school offered hockey as one of the after-school

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activities, we enrolled him in no time. After a few sessions, he established himself as one of the best players despite the fact that he was the smallest in build in the whole team. He finally found a niche for himself where he could excel and most importantly, be happy. Another upturn for Andy came on the School Sports Day. Andy participated in the “bean bag throwing” event. The year before, he had done a lot of tennis ball throwing during recess in the large schoolyard in Toronto. He used the skills he acquired in Canada and won the championship for the event, beating the other contestants which were much taller and bigger than him (Fig. 6.1). After the Sports Day, he won not only a gold medal but also friendship and fame from his classmates. He continued to play hockey and was appointed by the coach as the captain of the team. And Henry became one of his best friends to cheer him up when he was running far behind the others on the track of learning Chinese.

Fig. 6.1  Andy winning a gold medal in the Sports Day

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Coping with School Work Catching up with different school curricula is something students have to deal with when they move between different educational systems. When Fanny and Andy started their school year in Toronto, they needed one to two months to adapt to a different language and a new learning environment. Since they had previous schooling experiences in Hong Kong, we expected them to have some, but not much difficulty in returning as compared to entering a new language and a new environment. Since Andy had missed a whole year of instruction in the Chinese subject, his difficulties were most evident in this area. In the Hong Kong primary schools, the students are expected to learn about 400 to 500 new Chinese words each year. The lists of words expected to be learned by children in different grade levels are published by the Government. The new words are introduced to the students mainly through the textbooks and daily assignments of copying the Chinese characters stroke by stroke. Texts used in a higher level are built upon the foundation in the lower ones. Without mastering the new words at one level, it is extremely difficult to read and understand the textbook passages at the next level and dictations will become a formidable task in class. Most primary school students in Hong Kong have weekly Chinese and English dictations to test their mastery of the new words taught in the textbooks. The routine goes like this: Every week, a passage in a new chapter is taught in class and the students would have dictation on the passage the following week. After the dictation, the dictation books would be collected, marked by the teachers, and returned one or two days later for the students to make corrections. Every week, students have to do corrections for the previous dictation and prepare for the new passage for the coming dictation in the following week, in addition to the daily assignment of copying new words learned that day. Some students who are quick and have better foundation can handle these tasks more easily. For those who are slower, these routine tasks could take hours each and every day. The weaker their performance, the more work they have to do because the amount of correction is multiplied. The more time they have to spend on doing correction, the less time they would have for preparing for the next dictation. And this becomes a vicious cycle. Daily word copying and weekly dictations are common rituals in most primary schools in Hong Kong. These rituals have not changed much for

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years. When I was a child, I went through more or less the same ritual. This way of teaching and assessment satisfies the expectation of many parents who learned in the same way themselves. Daily word copying is a way of occupying children’s time at home to ensure that they do things related to what they learn at school. The marks they get in their weekly dictations are the most immediate and evident indicators of how well the children learn at school. In Chinese culture, “knowing words” is closely connected to “gaining knowledge”. I remember that when I was a child, my mother always used a traditional phrase which summarized her idea of the purposes of school: “read the books, know the words, and understand the way” (讀書, 識字, 明理). This saying adeptly captures the folk understanding of the connections between books, words, and knowledge in Chinese culture. For English dictations, the ritual is similar. Here the drilling is on spellings. Some children can master Chinese easier and some can master English easier. Some have difficulties in both languages. The same is true for parents – not all parents are well educated enough to be able to help their children effectively. Some seek help from private tutors or send the children to tutorial centres after school. For those less educated parents or those who cannot afford the high fees of private tutoring, the only way they can rely on is drilling, drilling, and repeated drilling, with carrot or stick, or both. Even for educated parents like my wife and I, there were still endless frustrations. The frustrations were intensified when our children had been away from the Hong Kong schooling system for one year. Skipping a year in Hong Kong created enormous difficulties for my children. One day after school in the second week after we returned to Hong Kong, I asked Andy to read me the first chapter in his Chinese textbook. It was terrible. I found that not only he could not read all the new words, he forgot many of the words which he should have learned in previous years. I was worried and I knew that Andy was even more frustrated than me. How could he prepare for the dictation next week when he could read less than half of the words in the chapter? Andy had Chinese dictation on Tuesdays and English dictation on Thursdays. After each dictation, he had to do corrections for the words he got wrong. Normally he had to copy the words he got wrong five times. When he got a failure mark, however, he had to copy the whole passage twice. It was a huge punishment and consumed a multiple of time. While he was doing the additional corrections during the weekend, he had less

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time to prepare for the coming tests in the following week. As a result, Andy failed almost every time in his Chinese dictation. He asked me many times whether he was dumb and stupid after he got failure marks in Chinese. Every time he asked, I tried to assure him that he was not stupid at all and that he just needed more time to catch up. I had hope and confidence in my son and tried to encourage him. But I knew that no matter what I said, he still had to face the trials, shame, and humiliation himself. Below are some emails and journals I wrote on my children’s difficulties in school after they returned to Hong Kong. Some were related directly with school work and assignments. Some were concerned with the general school life. Some of these were accounts of bedside talks before they went to bed. Some were the first words they told me when I woke them up in the morning. Before he went to sleep last night, I told him, “Andy, as long as you have tried your best, the mark you get is not a big issue. No matter you pass or fail, that is not a problem if you have worked hard.” “But for me, pass or fail is a big issue,” he said in tears. (Journal, October 2, 2000) He said in a very disappointed voice, “Today’s dictation was very bad, very very bad. I think I would get zero mark. The new words are difficult, very bad.” (Journal, October 3, 2000) Andy: I am afraid that I will get detention today. Dad: Why? Andy: I can’t finish the Chinese Composition. The teacher said there won’t be any more chance for me. (Journal, October 4, 2000) When I got home from work, Andy hid in my bedroom with his dictation book. He asked whether I wanted to see his bad work. He asked if I could read it after he left the room. I said it was okay for him to stay with me when I read his dictation book. He quickly passed the book to me and wanted to go out. I read the book. He got 6 marks out of 100. I said it was okay because I knew he had worked hard and tried his best. Again, he asked me if he was stupid. I said no. I said that he just needed some more time and as long as he had tried his best, I would be happy and he would succeed someday. (Journal, October 5, 2000)

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He failed badly in dictations for several weeks. Instead of going out to library on weekends as we did in Toronto, I stayed at home to help him, drill him, coach him, counsel him, and hug him. My ultimate hope for helping him was not so much on getting a high mark but to help him to reclaim his confidence, to prove that he is able, and to attain what he deserved. With endless pressure, sweat, and tears, he finally got a passing mark once and even a 91/100 another time. It was a great boost on his self-confidence. However, when the examination came, he had to prepare for nine chapters all at once. We tried even harder and tackled the chapters one by one. His best friend Henry had also helped him with “dictation rehearsals” in school. One day when he came home from the dictation examination, he told me that he was so nervous during the examination that he was sweating on his head and on his palms. He forgot many words he had learned the nights before and that he nearly cried but tried hard to hold his tears. I was not surprised but I felt bad for him. Because his confidence was smashed into pieces once again. The teacher returned the dictation exam papers to the class yesterday. Andy got his paper from the teacher, returned to his seat, put it face down on the desk. He took a deep breath, lifted up one corner and read his mark. He heart dropped to the floor and his face twisted as he saw the number in red – 6. He did not have the nerve to turn the paper over. He did not dare to read it. During the recess, many classmates were excitedly telling each other their marks and urged Andy to tell them his. He told them he got 60. Before he went to bed last night, he asked me to sleep beside him and talk with him. He wanted to talk about the exam. He said that he was afraid that he had to repeat Primary 4 next year. And he asked why he did so badly, even when he had tried so hard. I asked him about which subjects he did well and which subjects were not so well. He said he did well in English, math, computer, and music, but he did poorly in Chinese … I explained to him why he did poorly in Chinese. I also reminded him that compared to his results in September, he had already made good progress. I reassured him that with his perseverance, he would definitely improve in the coming months. “Are you sure?” “Yes, I am.” We kissed each other good night. (Journal, November 16, 2000)

Though Andy did much better in English, he had to exercise great caution to play the schooling game well. With one little careless mistake, he could fall badly. With so many new tasks to be handled at the same time at the beginning of the year, it was easy to overlook one thing or another for a small boy. The following journal was written when I returned to my

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office one morning, still thinking about how we had struggled together the night before and how Andy was going to face the day. It is going to be a failure again today. We will lose again in this game. Last night, I hurried Andy to finish his homework – well, not yet finished actually, I had to write a note in his Student Handbook telling his Chinese teacher that because Andy had to prepare for the English dictation the next day, I asked for the teacher’s permission to allow Andy to hand in the two Chinese dictation corrections one day later. Andy got zero in his previous Chinese dictation. The reason was that he had prepared for the wrong chapter (Chapter 5 instead of Chapter 6). We had spent days before the dictation to prepare well but for the wrong chapter! He felt so bad about it and his mother was so angry that we couple had a heated quarrel again. With tears in his eyes, Andy stood before his mother and told her that he should have passed if he had not prepared for the wrong thing. For the next Chinese dictation, which Andy had on Tuesday, he got 73 marks. He got the dictation book back yesterday and had to do the correction for the previous two dictations. Since I knew Andy needed time to prepare for the English dictation the next day, I convinced him to postpone doing the Chinese correction. I used more than an hour yesterday evening to drill him, train him, and teach him to spell all the difficult words in the English dictation passage. He was under great pressure and so was I. However, he managed to do well and remembered all the words. Both Andy and I were quite confident that he would do well this time. He managed to go to bed at 10:30 p.m. This morning, I woke them up at 6:30 a.m. As usual, I hurried the children to wash their faces and brush their teeth, put on their school uniforms, and have breakfast. They left home at 6:57 and ran to the school bus stop to catch the school bus at 7:00 a.m. Before I left home for work, I found a sheet of paper from Andy’s English teacher on one of our desks. It reads: “P. 4 Dictation for October 26”. And it was not the same one we had prepared for on the night before! How would Andy feel today in his English dictation lesson? With a pencil in his hand, full of confidence to get a high mark, and then discover that the teacher is reading a different passage? (Journal, October 26, 2000)

Fanny could manage her school work better but she felt angry about her endless homework. It was a Sunday afternoon. Fanny had a lot of homework to do. After finishing some, she entered her bedroom. When I went into her room later, I saw her lying in bed in a very strange posture: her body was in bed but her head was on the

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bedside cabinet, with her right hand stuck between her head and the cabinet. She was weeping. I asked her why. She said she wanted to destroy her hand in this way so that she did not have to do any more homework. I talked with her and pulled her back to my aching heart. (Journal, November 5, 2000)

Before we left Hong Kong in 1999, we were anxious about whether our children could adjust well to the school environment in Canada. We were venturing into somewhere foreign and unfamiliar. When we returned to Hong Kong one year later, we did not anticipate them to have great difficulty. After all, this was a familiar place we had been living in ever since we were born. Our children were returning to the same school they had left just a year ago. They would meet the same classmates and teachers. It would not be too difficult. We thought. As illustrated by the field texts above, this did not seem to be the case. After we returned, we found that it could be harder in many ways to come back than to go to a new country. It was made more difficult by having experienced a different kind of educational arrangement. We had to learn to re-adapt. When we leave a parade to join another, we learn to adapt to a different pace and a different way of dancing or walking. When we go back to the original parade, it takes some time for us to join the pace of the original procession. In fact, the parades change, the other participants change, and we change. Things never stay the same.

Notes 1. At age 10, I changed school as detailed in Chap. 3. At age 18, I did not study Engineering in the Polytechnic as most of my classmates. At age 22, I changed major in the university and deferred my study for one year. In all these three occasions, my connections with friends were interrupted. 2. Andy’s Chinese name in Putonghua’s pronunciation.

References Clandinin, D.  J., & Connelly, F.  M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass. Dong, L. (2017). Sea turtles’ home coming: Chinese returnees’ returning experiences. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/1604

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Erickson, F. (1984). What makes school ethnography ‘ethnographic’? Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 15, 51–66. Geertz, C. (1995). After the fact: Two countries, four decades, one anthropologist. Harvard University Press. Storti, C. (1990). The art of crossing cultures. Intercultural Press. Storti, C. (2001). The art of coming home. Intercultural Press.

CHAPTER 7

Experiencing the Cultural Landscape

During our stay in Toronto, I kept journals, field notes, and sometimes interviewed my children and recorded the stories they told me about their school life. When I was trying to make sense of the field texts on their school life, I had sufficient familiarity of the general school setting and process to notice the distinctive features and the contrasts in different educational landscapes. Based on my own teaching and supervision experiences, I can tell that schools in different places do share some common goals, though they might do things differently. I had a relatively easier task in constructing the research texts on the school life of my children. However, as I moved beyond the familiar school setting into the social and cultural landscapes, I was more in bewilderment. I found it more difficult to comprehend what was going on and to make sense of our everyday lives. Unlike schools, we do not seem to have a clear common goal or social structure across different societies. People in different societies live and organize their everyday lives in such diverse ways that sometimes confuse me. In the previous chapters, when I was telling my autobiographical stories (Chap. 3), my family’s experiences of early adjustment (Chap. 4), our children’s stories in school (Chap. 5), and our stories of leaving Canada and returning to Hong Kong (Chap. 6), we were the protagonists in our stories. I mainly used the narrative text type (Chatman, 1990) in my writing. However, as I began to think about composing the research text for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. K. Lau, Life and Learning Between Hong Kong and Toronto, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80052-9_7

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our social and cultural life, I bumped into difficulties in narrating the stories that I did not have adequate understanding of the plotlines. I struggled to find a form of writing to accommodate my strangeness towards the events in the parade of which we had not yet fit into. I need a form of writing to accommodate my naivety in capturing and understanding unfamiliar experiences. I need to use a more informal and personal tone that allows me to sketch my spontaneous thoughts and feelings without being heavily censored by my academic lens. After several drafts and experiments, I finally decided to share my strangeness and puzzles in the form of letters to my wife. Personal letters are written with a particular audience in mind. They are not as meticulously crafted as academic writings which are jammed with citations, footnotes, and references. They are often more spontaneous and reveal our bias and unsophisticated views that we would hide in academic books or journals. We talk with more intense feelings and are more likely to be critical towards things we like and things we don’t. I would, in these letters, preserve this intimate, nuanced, partial, and inarticulate quality when I recount our social and cultural experiences in Toronto. In the summer of 2003, three years after we returned to Hong Kong, I took a month of study leave and flew to Toronto alone to focus on the final stage of my thesis writing. This time, I stayed in a student hostel by myself. I continued to keep journals and wrote emails to my family and friends. These journals and emails were mainly for personal communication but in some of them, I consciously wrote with greater elaboration as a way of sharing my thoughts on some puzzling issues.

Letter 1: Three Accounts of Reading Culture Friday, July 4, 2003 Dear Daphne, Thank you so much for your understanding and support for the writing time I need this summer. I am now working on the other side of the world. I am in the morning; you are at night. There is exactly 12 hours difference between us. When we were about to end our talk over the phone yesterday at 11:15 p.m. (your time), you told me that you had to continue with your school work probably until 2:00 a.m. before you could go to bed. I felt so sorry for you. It must be hard for you. You said that there were still loads of work and endless meetings in the school in the coming two weeks, before you could start the summer holidays. It seems

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that you are kind of getting used to and accepting it the way it is. Yes, how can you not? But is it the kind of life we want? I know how difficult it is to leave you behind with our two kids, both emotionally and practically. I hope that our kids are doing their best to share the housework. I hope they could learn to handle the petty conflicts themselves and become more mature. They are our beloved children. I am confident that we will support and learn from each other, especially during the time I am not at home with you. We struggled and argued a lot in making this decision of my returning to Toronto this year to write my thesis, especially during the SARS crisis. During the Iraq war in February, I cancelled my conference trip to the United States and decided to postpone my study leave, which was originally scheduled from April to July. Anyway, we felt that the war was far away from us and not really concern us. Then in March, the SARS outbreak suddenly cast the whole of Hong Kong people in great shock and dismay. During the early onset of the SARS epidemic, we knew very little about the virus. We did not know it passed from one person to another. We did not know it could be stopped and how the patients could be treated. The number of infected patients kept on escalating. The death toll increased day by day. You worried that the plague would visit any one of us at any time. It was amid such fears and uncertainties that I had to decide whether I should leave my family behind to work on the final stage of my thesis. The SARS situation began to be under control by mid-May and you felt more comfortable for my going to Toronto. So, I finally flew from one SARS affected area to another. What am I doing here? Why did I sit in front of my computer alone in a room in a college residence in Toronto, when half a million Hong Kong people took to the streets, walked for hours under the blazing sun, to voice out their grievances to the government on July 1? What am I doing here to withdraw myself from the hassle in Hong Kong to write stories of our experiences in the past few years, leaving you behind with all the burdens at home? I am here to look back on the journey we travelled together in the past few years. I am doing this because I believe that we have learned something significant in our experiences of moving back and forth between Hong Kong and Toronto. During the year we stayed in Toronto, our experiences in different educational and cultural landscapes prompted us

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to rethink our own life goals. We began to rethink the educational and cultural values and practices that we had taken for granted for years. We reevaluated what we really wanted in our lives and what kind of society would be more humane to people. We began to ask how the family, the school, and the society should work together so that our children could learn to enjoy and live a more meaningful life. However, when we ended our year in Toronto and returned to Hong Kong in August 2000, we found that we were immediately drawn into the black hole of “busy-ness”. We, children and adults alike, were almost drowned in the sea of homework and schoolwork. We had more tensions and conflicts at home and in the schools than we had in Toronto. As I reread my journals, I noted that oftentimes you were so busy marking student assignments late at night that we could hardly sit down and talk to each other. We had no space in our minds to think. There were also times when I had to coach and counsel our children to help them fit into the Hong Kong schooling system after we returned. We went to bed with exhausted minds and bodies. Even during the weekends, we often had to stay home to catch up with the work that we had not finished the previous week and to prepare for those tasks coming in the next. When I reread my journals about our life in Toronto, I found that after a couple of months, we began to adapt to the life there. However, I felt sad to see that we were still struggling with tensions from our children’s schools and from our own work for over a year after we returned to a place that we called home. This was something I could not understand. I thought that we had lived in Hong Kong for years. Our children were going back to the same school they left for just one year. I did not anticipate that we would encounter more difficulties in re-entering Hong Kong than when we went to Toronto. We felt more like strangers in our homeland than in a foreign place. That’s why I need to get away from Hong Kong to free the time and space in my mind to think, to write, and to learn from all these experiences. We need to learn from our past experiences to guide our next steps in our lives. I believe that other people could also benefit from reading our stories because what I am writing are not only our family mundane experiences but also stories with bigger educational implications. In Chap. 5 of my thesis, I wrote about the experiences of our children in their schools in Toronto, with their school experiences in Hong Kong in the background. Most of what I wrote was based on the stories our children brought home from schools. In a way, we did not have much

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first-hand experience of their school life in Toronto, except on some special occasions: the welcoming tea party for parents, the millennium show, the curriculum night, Andy’s special birthday party in class, the farewell party for the retiring principal, family picnic on the school yard, year-end talents show, and the graduation ceremony … Hey! We did go to the school a lot, right? The only time we went to our children’s school in Hong Kong was on the parent-teacher interview day. We often had only 5 to 10 minutes to talk with the teachers, about their results on the report cards in front of us. School and family seem to have different relations in two societies. During our stay in Toronto, I kept journals, field notes, and sometimes interviewed our children to record their school stories. When I am trying to make sense of our children’s school life, I feel pretty confident and familiar with the general school setting and process to understand what is happening in schools in Toronto and Hong Kong. I have visited many different schools in Hong Kong when I supervise my student teachers in their practicum. I can safely assume that schools share similar features: there are classrooms, students, teachers, and principals; the general goal is to educate the children – to equip them with desirable values, skills, and attitudes. Different teachers employ different strategies and create different learning environments for their students, enacting their personal and professional knowledge, constrained by the circumstances they find themselves in. I think that I have a relatively easier task in writing the part on the school life of our children. However, as I moved out of the familiar school boundary into the society, I was kind of like Alice in Wonderland. It was a bigger challenge for me. It took us some time to learn the implicit social norms. There were difficulties. There were challenges. There were some funny puzzles. With our limited lingual and cultural competencies, especially during the first couple of months, sometimes while we were still struggling to respond to simple social greetings, when the other person was already walking down the hallway; even words we learned in kindergarten like “there”, “man”, “boy” carry different meanings and funny usages that we had to guess and relearn. Examples like these, big and small, are numerous. We are still puzzled. I want to explore some of these puzzles with you and search for their meanings. That’s why I am writing this letter to you, Daphne. Most of the stories and events I write below we experienced together. But we might remember different things, perceive them in different ways, and make

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different meanings from them. That’s not a problem. It is exactly because we have different understandings that we need to share and that’s what makes life interesting. One thing that surprised me most was that reading seemed to be a very common activity among people in Toronto. I saw people reading thick fictions in the subway, on the buses, in the coffee shops, and in the food courts. Some could read for hours under the trees in a park. Do you remember once we even saw a streetcar driver reading a novel whenever he stopped at red traffic lights? You teach Chinese language in school. I think you would agree that one of the main goals in language teaching is to develop in the students the desire, the ability, and the habit of reading, so that they could continue to read when they leave school. They need to read in their further study, in their work, and in fulfilling daily tasks. This I think is the practical function of reading. You would also agree there is another level of reading when people read for pleasure, for enrichment, to set free their imagination in different human possibilities. But how well are we doing in developing reading habits in students in Hong Kong? Not much, in my view, and at least from my own experience. In my own schooldays, I read almost nothing at all except for the textbooks all though my childhood and adolescence. I’d never read any fiction in the first 20 years of my life, until I went to university. I remember that the first writer I fell in love with was the German novelist Hermann Hesse. I first came across his novel Siddhartha in my freshman year. The novel depicts the soul-searching journey of the protagonist into the inner self. I was completely mesmerized by the story that I borrowed and read all other works by Hesse that I could find in the library  – Narziss and Goldmund, Demian, and Steppenwolf. These were the first novels I read in my life. I did not know why I read them with such burning passion. Perhaps it’s like someone who finally finds water after walking for days in the desert. However, like most other skills in life, reading skills and habit are best developed in childhood. I missed the golden period for acquiring good reading habits. Even now, I still need a great effort to finish any full-­ length novel. I want to share with you in this letter three accounts of my encounters with the reading culture in Toronto. Then in the next letter I would describe four vivid images that capture some little stories that prompted me to think about the social values in this city. These accounts and images were composed from the notes in my journals. You will find yourself in

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these stories. We have been to most of these places together. But as I have said, you might recall different things and make different meanings out of these experiences. We could share and talk about these when I come home. The first one was our first visit to the library. Account 1: The Library The place where we lived in Toronto was one subway station north of a big shopping mall which housed a cinema, a large bookstore, a Chinese restaurant, a civic centre, a hotel, and many other shops. One Saturday in late September, a month after we arrived at Toronto in 1999, we decided to explore our neighbourhood on foot. We walked along Yonge Street to the shopping mall. There were not many people on the street, as compared with the crowded scenes we used to in Hong Kong. We walked for about half an hour and reached the commercial complex where we found a public library adjacent to it. We went into the library and learned that we could apply for library cards right away with no cost. We were so surprised at this unexpected gift. After we had filled in the application forms, the librarian immediately issued four library cards to us, with our names hand-written at the back of the cards. I remember that in Hong Kong, we had to return to the library a week after submitting the application form to get a library card. On that Saturday afternoon, with our newly issued library cards, we went off to explore different areas in the library. The library had three or maybe four floors. The adult and reference sections were on the upper floors. The children section was on the ground floor. There were books for children and young adults, music CD, audio story cassettes and videos. Some children were sitting in the television corner watching a Disney movie. In some corners, people were sitting on the floor reading story books with their young children. Some were dramatizing the scenes in the picture books, with their toddlers sitting on their laps. It’s an amusing scene for me. I was thinking, “Do the toddlers really understand the stories? Does it really help?” I did not know how many books we could borrow so I asked the librarian at the circulation counter. She looked puzzled for a moment, as if nobody had ever asked her this question before. When she gave me the answer, I was not quite sure of what I heard and so I asked again, “Did you say 15 or 50?” She replied with a smile, “It’s 50. You just come and check out whatever number you want. I think 50 should be more than

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enough.” Yes, it is definitely more than enough for us. With the four library cards we had, we could check out a total of 200 books for three weeks! That was really a big but happy load for us to carry home without a car. In Hong Kong, we can only borrow six books for two weeks with one library card. That day Fanny and Andy chose over 20 books and some children’s videos. You also picked several Chinese novels. We were surprised and happy to find Chinese books in a library in Toronto. Later that afternoon, we walked out of the library with full loads of books in two big grocery bags. We laughed out loud on our way home as if we had unearthed some hidden treasures. I never knew we could be so happy with books. From that Saturday onwards, going to the library was a weekend activity for our family every two or three weeks. Every time, we carried loads of books to and from the library and our home. Sometimes we needed to take the subway when the books were too heavy to carry home. Account 2: Reading at Home About a month after the start of the school year, Fanny and Andy made some new friends and began to catch up a bit with their school life. When they returned home from school, they had relatively less written homework but they had to read a lot more than they did in Hong Kong. Their teachers expected them to read every day and regarded this as one of the daily homework, which had to be recorded as an assignment item on their school diaries. They were required to read for at least 15  minutes in September. As they progressed through the year, the time for reading was increased to 20 and then 30 minutes or more a day. There were no designated books they should read. Instead, they could choose any books that interested them. They could borrow books from the class or read the books they had at home or books borrowed from the library. At the beginning of the year, Andy was not yet ready to read by himself and I had to read with him. We had brought a Disney story book from Hong Kong. I remember that during the first month, in September, when I tried to read the stories to him in English, he insisted that I told him the stories in Chinese. After a month, he could patiently sit beside me and listened to me reading the whole story in English, pausing a few times to explain some vocabulary in Chinese. Several more weeks later, we sat together on his bed with the Disney story book and he started to read aloud by himself. I just needed to fill in when he came across some difficult vocabulary.

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One day in February, I was exhausted after a whole day of classes and meetings. When I returned home in the evening, Andy came to me waving two books in his hands and said, “Daddy, these two books are very interesting.” I thought to myself, “Oh no, could I be spared for just one night?” Before I could explain to him that I was really tired and I could not read to him then, Andy said to me, “Do you want me to read them to you?” This was what I wrote in my journal before I went to sleep that night: Tonight, before I went to sleep, we had story time again – this time, Andy read two stories to me! One is “This is the BEAR”. The other one is “Life with Max”. I haven’t heard him read for a long time and I was so surprised to hear him read so well. He pronounced most of the words correctly with good intonation and expression! He really started to enjoy reading interesting stories at his appropriate level. (Journal, February 29, 2000)

I wondered what magic had been done on him in just a few months. Account 3: A Small Book that Made a Big Difference During one of my first classes at OISE in September, I introduced myself as a newcomer to the country and told my classmates that I came with my family with two young children. As I was the only student in the class who came from outside Canada, several classmates came to me after class and generously offered their help. Mary wrote me a list of places that I should visit with my family – the Centre Island, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Children Museum, and places like that. Brenda had worked abroad for a while and knew the difficulties and emotional challenges of the newcomers to a country. She suggested several books to me and said that they would be interesting readings on immigrant experiences. One of the book titles she wrote me was Yang the youngest and his terrible ear (Namioka, 1992). She said that my daughter would probably like it. I immediately went to Chapters (the bookstore) after class and found the book. I bought the book and gave it to Fanny that night. Over the next two days, it was the only book I saw her reading at home. She seemed to be so absorbed in the book that I was also tempted to read it. The book was about the stories of a family who migrated to Seattle from mainland China. When I finished reading the book, I was surprised to find how a thoughtful book could be written for young children in a language comprehensible to them. The stories were so close to life, and at the same

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time, great fun to read. I found strong resonance with the different characters in the stories as we were experiencing similar situations in a new country. As I found out later, the author, Lensey Namioka, was actually a Chinese woman named 趙來思. She was born in China in 1929 and moved to the United States when she was nine, knowing minimal English when she first arrived. Lensey later attended Radcliffe College and studied mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. Namioka is the family name of her Japanese husband Isaac Namioka, who taught mathematics at the University of Washington. But interesting she is perhaps known more as a children’s book author than a mathematician. She has written more than 20 books for children and young adults and has won many awards for her work. Several of them are about what it is like to move to a new country and learn a new language. Yang the youngest and his terrible ear is one of them. And you know what? Lensey’s father was the renowned Chinese linguist, educator, scholar, translator, poet, and composer 趙元任 Chao Yuenren (1892 – 1982). Chao was born in China but went to the United States in 1910 with the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to study mathematics, music, and physics at Cornell University. After graduating from Cornell in 1914, he continued to study at Harvard and earned a PhD in philosophy in 1918. Chao was really multi-talented. He spoke German and French fluently and some Japanese, and also read ancient Greek and Latin. He later returned to China to teach mathematics at Tsinghua University. He was Bertrand Russell’s interpreter when Russell visited China in 1920. In 1921, he married the physician 楊步偉 Yang Buwei. Their wedding ceremony was a simple one attended only by two of their friends, one of them was 胡適 Hu Shih (one of the key figures in China’s New Culture Movement). The Chaos gave birth to four daughters and Lensey is the third one. The family moved between China and the United States many times before finally settled in the USA since 1938. I think the family’s experience of moving back and forth had definitely inspired Lensey in her writing. Yang the youngest and his terrible ear is one title in a series that centred on the immigrant challenges. You see, this children book arrived at our family at a particular time and place and then we were somehow connected to another family’s experience from an important period in modern China. How amazing!

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How Do We Make Sense of These Three Accounts? As I have noted in Chap. 5, reading was highly emphasized in the school our children attended in Toronto. The students were required to read at home every day. They chose for themselves books that interested them and suited their reading levels. Their teachers also led them into the reading world by reading to them in class. Fanny and Andy told me that they enjoyed the story time on the carpet, listening and watching their teachers dramatizing the exciting stories to them. Through these engaging stories, the teachers introduced reading to the children as something enjoyable. Teachers in Hong Kong also agree that reading is one of the main learning goals. They also encourage their students to read at home. But we know from our own experiences that our children seldom have time to read after finishing hours of written homework and preparing for weekly dictations in English and Chinese. Many of our friends who have children like us are also troubled by such dilemma. Our friend Joyce once told us that her son liked reading very much but she had to hide the story books away so that he could only read them after finishing his daily homework – which often meant no story books until long holidays. What a shame! I think that the number of books we can check out from the public libraries also tell us something about the reading culture in a society. I guess not many people would borrow 50 books at one time from the Toronto library. But this public library policy is an indicator to the popular demand and provision of reading in a city. It also reflects the amount of investment a city is willing to put into supporting and promoting the reading culture for its residents. It represents what the community values. Do you know how many books we can check out in the public libraries in Hong Kong? It is six. Do you remember that we bought a lot of children’s books from the bookstores before we left Toronto in 2000? We did that because we knew it would be very difficult to find such books in Hong Kong. There are huge bookstores like Chapters and Indigo on the prime locations on the main streets in Toronto and in nearly every neighbourhood around the city. They are big businesses. There are books on almost every subject and for people with different reading interests and reading levels. I bet that the variety and the number of books in any one of these bookstores are more than any 10 bookstores we could find in Hong Kong put together. There are also story-telling hours in the bookstores when children could sit around the staff and listen to stories read to them. The prices of children’s

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books in Toronto are much lower compared to those of the same quality found in Hong Kong and the sales volume is high in Toronto. Children’s books in Hong Kong are relatively expensive because of the small and limited market. Our friend Joyce, who has worked in the children’s book business, once told us that it would be lucky if a good children’s book published in Hong Kong could sell a few thousand copies. It seems that books are one regular necessity for ordinary families in Toronto while they are purchased mostly by some well-off families in Hong Kong. In other Chinese cities like Shenzhen in the mainland and Taipei in Taiwan, there are huge bookstores which attract a large number of customers every day. The books in those places are also more affordable. But we can’t find one of these in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a highly developed and wealthy city. It is a shame that we are falling behind in promoting the reading culture in our society, for our children especially. As we can see here, the school, the family, and the community have to work together to promote the reading culture – the schools teach reading and make it one of the key goals in the curriculum; the families provide early reading literacy experiences; the children have ample time to enjoy reading at home without being overloaded by other school assignments; there are enough public investments and private enterprises in the society to support and promote the reading needs and interests of the people. All these agencies work together and support each other in a culture that values something beyond fulfilling the basic material needs of living. There is no one single causal relationship in this nest of school, family, and community partnership. To effect a change in Hong Kong, our teachers, parents, and society at large need to reconsider our notions of life, learning, and education. What is a life worth living? How do we balance work and leisure? What are the most significant qualities that we want our children to learn? And how could we support this kind of learning? Unless our parents, educators, and policy makers have a fundamental grasp on these basic value issues, we will end up in dismay in the black hole of busy-ness. Lastly, let me share with you a quote I read from the small book I brought with me here. I’m sure you know what it means for us. “It is also good to love: because love is difficult”. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Love, CK

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Letter 2: Four Images Wednesday, July 16, 2003 Dear Daphne, In the last letter, I talked about how Hong Kong and Toronto differ in one thing that I consider of utmost importance – reading. I found that in Toronto, the school, the family, and the society all played significant roles in promoting the reading habit of the people. Reading should be a key goal in school. Whether or not a society is able to, or is willing to, promote a strong reading culture says something more fundamental than reading literacy. In this letter, I want to go further to inquire into these fundamental values. I want to explore why these two cities seem to display contrasts in their facilities towards reading. I think they go deep into the root of our values towards life, learning, and education. These fundamental values should be manifested in the daily life of the people. Therefore, our everyday life experiences in society could reveal significant cultural lessons if we are attentive enough to the mundane and daily routines in our lives. I have vivid mental images of four episodes of our lives in Toronto. These images capture some little stories that I think could serve to reveal some deep-seated values and culture in a society. These images prompt me to rethink some of the most basic and fundamental concerns in education – what does our society teach to our children? How do we teach them? Let me share the images with you and we’ll see how we could make sense of them. Image 1: A Little Coin Box Beside a Printer in the Children’s Section of a Public Library In the public library we often visited during weekends in Toronto, there were computer facilities in the children’s area on the ground floor. Printers were attached to the computers. There was a little coin box beside the printer. On the box there was a note attached which said “Help yourself and put your money here – 20 cents per page”. I have two related experiences of paying for my printing – I once used the printer at a hotel when I was in Toronto in April 1999. After I finished printing, I handed my pile of paper to the concierge for him to check the number of pages. Instead of counting and checking the number of pages, he just asked me how many pages I had printed and then told me the money I should pay.

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Another time I used the printer in the library at my workplace in Hong Kong. When I finished, I brought the printed sheets to the counter and told the library staff that I had printed 20 pages. She took my pile of paper and counted them again one by one. Image 2: A Middle-Aged Man with a Ponytail Sitting Beside a Fare Box in a Subway Station I often took the subway from the Finch station to downtown for my classes. During morning rush hours, the station master set up an extra entrance for passengers. They used a temporary fare box to collect the coins or tokens from the passengers. I remember seeing a middle-aged man with a grey ponytail sitting beside the fare box. He was not watching the fare box to check whether the passengers tendered the exact fare. Instead, he looked into the eyes of each passenger and greeted them with a smile, saying “Hi!” or “Good morning”. What a nice way to start a day, I always thought. Image 3: A Little Boy Holding a Door Open for His Schoolmates The school our children attended in Toronto was an old three-story building, outside of which was a large park where the children played during recess. Do you remember one day when we went to the school during recess time and watched the children play? Some children were skipping rope; some were throwing and catching tennis balls high up in the air; some were playing foot hockey; some were just strolling around, talking with their friends, or running wild in the open space. When the bell rang, I saw Andy running quickly towards the door of the school building. He pulled the door and proudly held it open so that all his classmates could walk through the door and came inside the school building. Image 4: A Bus Driver Pulling over the Side of the Road One day we were taking a bus to visit our friends in Markham. It was about 3 pm. The bus made a stop outside Tim Hortons. The bus driver got off the bus and walked slowly toward the coffee shop. We were wondering whether he had to use the washroom there. But he did not seem to be in a hurry. A few minutes later, he came out of the shop with a cup of coffee in his hand, returned slowly to the bus, restarted the engine and we

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continued with the ride. We were stunned, not only by the driver but by the reactions of the passengers – they were just chatting or reading as if nothing unusual had happened. No one made a complaint or showed any annoyance. Perhaps we were the only passengers on the bus who were surprised by this scene. What Lessons Do I Learn from These Images? When I first conceived my research proposal, my thinking was packed with grand terms like “Culture” and “Education systems”. I looked for changes in our “educational experiences”, “attitudes towards education, life and cultures”, “global perspective” and “cross-cultural awareness and understanding” – all high-sounding terms. Pondering our experiences in different landscapes in the past few years, I realize that we are not living in an abstract or conceptual world. The big word “Culture” is captured in the little stories in our lives. We can see the world in a grain of sand. When a society plants the seeds of trust, self-respect, and respect for others in small kids in a children’s library, we can trust the adult passengers to tender the exact fare without being watched. There is a chance that some people might pay less than the required fare in this honour system. But this could be the price we are willing to pay if we want to build a society of trust and cultivate a person with self-respect, honesty, and integrity. We have to teach these lessons and provide chances for the people, especially the young children, to practise these virtues every day. I don’t want to be misunderstood to be saying that everything we experienced in Toronto was good and that everything in Hong Kong is bad. Things are never so simply dichotomized. Various practices in different societies are interwoven with their specific social, historical, political, and geographical fabric. Hong Kong is a small place with few natural resources except for the 7.5 million inhabitants. We do have a strong reason to stress efficiency, competition, and cost effectiveness in our school and society. While we cherished the layback lifestyle and were amazed by the tolerance of the passengers toward the bus driver in Toronto, the same behaviour would be considered insane, unlawful, and unethical in Hong Kong. Imagine if a bus driver pulled over on a busy street in Hong Kong for 3 minutes, he would have blocked hundreds of vehicles behind, causing big troubles. Hong Kong’s economic success and vitality is undeniable. However, as I reflect on our experiences in moving between different cultures, I begin to wonder: What is education? What is life? What are our

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schools doing for our children? What do we gain and what do we lose in the way we choose to live? What human qualities do we want to cultivate in our children and young people? How do our children learn? These are the questions that continue to ring in my mind, wherever I go. See you soon, CK

CHAPTER 8

Life and Learning in a Multicultural World

In this final chapter, I draw my family stories from the previous chapters together to highlight and discuss the different notions of life and learning in the context of people experiencing a rapidly changing world. This is at the same time an inquiry into what we observed outward in the educational and cultural landscapes and also a looking inward into our own personal beliefs and experiences. My field notes, observations, and understandings are based on our life experiences in two different places evolved over a specific time period, with our personal life histories as a wider backdrop. Nothing stands still in our personal and social landscapes. Consequently, the reflective accounts offered here are inevitably tentative, evolving, and ever changing. Furthermore, all these accounts of people, places, and events are situated, contextual, and temporal. In each telling, and also reading, of such experiential stories, we should avoid the pitfall to “harden” the stories, seeing them as uniform, consistent, generalizable, context-free, portable, and detached from ourselves (Conle, 1999). These stories and experiences can always be interpreted from multiple perspectives resulting in multiple possible interpretations (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000; Olson and Craig, 2009) as “each variation on narrative practice makes the world visible in a different way” (Zatzman, 2006, p. 131). They also tend to change with every telling (Conle, 1999). After all, when all these observations and understandings are inevitably “unsatisfactory, lumbering, shaky, and badly © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. K. Lau, Life and Learning Between Hong Kong and Toronto, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80052-9_8

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formed” (Geertz, 1995, p. 20), I need to answer a crucial question of why these personal family stories should be made public? And why should you, the readers, bother to read this?

Personal Experiences, Social Significances In a personal sense, this study is an inquiry into the learning and living experiences of my family in different landscapes. This is a personal account and interpretation of the experiences written from my perspective, shaped by my own prejudice, history, and orientation. This study enabled me to gain a better understanding of the learning and living experiences of myself and my family in those years. I gained better understanding of myself as a person, as a parent, and as a teacher. All these reflections fused together to form my personal practical knowledge (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988). This knowledge is pivotal in shaping how I think, how I feel, and how I act in my personal and professional lives. There are certainly great personal benefits for me and for my family to have the opportunity to live in different cultures and to reflect on our experiences. However, these family stories as such and the self-knowledge that comes from them might have minimal public or professional value (Clandinin & Connelly, 2004) and should find a better place in personal journals rather than in academic or professional writings. What is the point of making public these observations and discussions on the experiences of just one family over a specific period of time? As our experiences are always situated within particular temporal, social, and spatial contexts and circumstances, they will never repeat themselves or be replicated in any other time and place. What is the worth of these accounts of my family experiences beyond the fact that they are so dear to maybe only four persons on earth? I have been asking myself, and indeed being asked, the above questions since the first day I thought about this inquiry. The quest for social and educational relevance of my work led me to a journey of reading in literature on immigrant experiences (Carger, 1996; Hoffman, 1989; Rodriguez, 1983); ethnography (Wolcott, 1994); cultural anthropology (Bateson, 1990, 1994, 2000); aesthetics and arts-based inquiry (Barone, 1989, 1995, 2000; Diamond & Mullen, 1999; Eisner, 1991); memoirs (Ayers, 2001a; Zinsser, 1998); teachers biographies and autobiographies (Ayers, 1995, 2001b; Ayers & Miller, 1998); and philosophy (Greene, 1978, 1988, 1995; Nussbaum, 1997). This rich stream of works have

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enlightened me to think about the connection between the personal and the social (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), the practical, the theoretical, and the eclectic (Schwab, 1969, 1971, 1973), and most importantly the knotted relationships between experience, life, and education (Dewey, 1934, 1938, 1990). These traditions of work help me to position my inquiry in a broader intellectual context. While the personal gains and benefits are certainly positive in our lives, my purpose of embarking on and engaging in this inquiry has never been primarily directed at self-fulfilment or self-­ understanding. Ever since the very beginning stage of this inquiry, my intention has been to look closely at and to look beyond our experiences in different educational and cultural landscapes with an aim to enter into the ongoing conversations in the professional community, and to make sense of some broader issues in life and learning. All the time as we moved back and forth between Hong Kong and Toronto, I engaged myself in thinking over the sources of our puzzles, tensions, excitements, and difficulties in our everyday life at home, in school, and in the society. I tried to make sense of these personal experiences within the different social contexts with their particular educational and cultural ideas and practices. I tried to understand these experiences along the temporal dimension of our life paths and social history, taking into consideration of our changing personal and social experiences, and the changing educational and cultural landscapes in different places. There is a continuous interest in my attempt to think over some generic and perennial issues in human lives across different cultures – issues concerning people’s lives, people’s learning, and people’s education. On a personal level, my personal and professional concern as a parent and as a teacher educator is to examine the ends and means of our educational practices in the school, at home, and in the society. The way I approach these issues in this book, however, is not through a theoretical discussion over these concepts. My purpose is to deliberate on the notions of life and learning evolving from the life context that we lived, along concrete temporal dimension, social dimension, and in different places (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). In this project, narrative inquiry is a way of life and a way of thinking which enables me to live and tell, relive and retell our stories (Clandinin & Connelly, 1994; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) and, in these telling and retelling, make sense of our concrete lived experiences.

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As I worked through the field texts and research texts over the years, I have always tried to position my understandings and experiences on the educational landscape in which I am a part of. These texts documented my children’s experiences in different educational systems. I noted that these experiences often displayed sharp contrasts that made me stop and puzzle: what has happened? And why? I asked these questions not only to understand our personal perplexities in life but also to reflect on the many deep-­ seated values, beliefs, and practices shared by people in different time and places. I imagined that my readers could be parents, teachers, and other people thinking seriously about the education endeavour in this rapidly changing world. What benefits could they have in reading this book? Would the stories here help to create imagination (Greene, 1995) of hopes and possibilities? How could these stories enter into the ongoing conversation (Rorty, 1980) in making this world a better place? I always ask myself. I gradually came to the understanding that the significance of the stories here does not rest on the specific details of my family or the particular events we experienced and observed in particular time and places. Instead, it is how we make sense of these contextualized experiences and what we have learned from them that is more important. With our concrete lived experiences, I hope to engage the readers to join me in thinking about some persistent concerns in life and learning, the significance of which extends beyond the specific circumstances of a single family. I hope that these stories can initiate reflections and conversations in different communities in how we want to educate our children, in how we want to live our lives, and in how we want to shape our society. We need to reexamine our taken for granted beliefs and practices in our school and family lives, to learn from each other, to clarify our diverse values in our society, to think about the desirable qualities we want to cultivate in our children, and to create conditions for a better society tomorrow – a society in which people of different languages, ages, genders, beliefs can live in harmony and learn from each other; a society in which each and every single person can make his or her unique contributions in this world and add colours to the kaleidoscope of human lives.

Changing People, Changing Places This inquiry is not only a study of the educational and cultural phenomena in two different places. This is also a study of people’s experiences of moving back and forth between different landscapes  – a study of people in

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motion. We are living in a much more mobile and connected world today (Chap. 3). We are connected with different people on the individual level, the institutional level, and the national level. We are connected through cultural contacts and exchanges, in close economic ties, and in political conflicts or cooperation. On a personal level, whether we travel physically from one place to another or exchange ideas through the internet, we are likely to meet people, ideas, things, and places different from what we have met and experienced. The kind of mobility of people and ideas and the global connectiveness today was unimaginable a few decades ago. Consequently, we need a stronger sense of awareness and understanding of the challenges and opportunities we are facing today. We need to rethink our connections with people and nations nearby and afar. We need to rethink how we could live with and learn from the changes and diversity in our lives. This book also casts light on the experiences of people on how they live with and learn from these frequent and fluid changes. In this sense, this book is about differences and changes and people’s experience of differences and changes. Within a few years, my family moved back and forth between different places. We lived through changes in our everyday life during the move. We experienced different educational practices and values. We navigated through different social norms and expectations. We lived with, learned from, and were changed by such experiences. As I looked back on our journey during these years, I realized that the two landscapes that we have lived in – Hong Kong and Toronto – might not have changed as much or as fast in a couple of years. Rather, it is the changes we experienced in ourselves that seem to be more drastic and rapid. Our experiences of moving in between different places made the changes and differences appear in a more acute and contrasting manner (He, 2003; Kanno, 2003; Storti, 1990, 2001). This is our special vantage point in making observations of the experiences of people in meeting changes in different places.

People in Motion We are the people in motion. We moved from one place to another and returned to the original place within a couple of years. The two places – Hong Kong and Toronto – are obviously different in a myriad of ways: the climate, the population, the living environment, the languages, the social rituals, and the schooling practices. All these features of the places have been going on for years. Though they are also ever changing, most changes

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are gradual and might not be noticeable to people living with them day by day within the society. Just like many parents, we do not notice the gradual growth of our children when they are living with us under the same roof every day. The changes are often more evident to people outside the family or those who have been away for some time. By the same token, the different ways of learning and living in different places might be more apparent for people who are strangers in the society. In our case, we experienced the differences in a much more drastic and rapid manner. We took off from one place and landed on the other within 24 hours, after a flight across the Pacific Ocean. We carried with us not only our luggage but our habits, values, and other life experiences we had learned for years from one place. We then had to learn to live with a different language, in a different climate, among a kaleidoscope of people with diverse cultures once we got off the plane. It seemed like that our luggage was checked as we went through the custom office but our habits, values, and beliefs were not. We sneaked them into the new country; sometimes not even aware of what we were carrying with us ourselves, until the day we came across some incompatible situations in life. Instead of experiencing the gradual changes in our homeland, we came to meet head-on with a different way of life in an unfamiliar landscape. We could not ignore or escape from the differences happening within inches of our lives. We were not tourists who stayed in hotels for holidays, visited tourist attractions, and took quick snapshot photos of postcard-like scenery within days, returning to their comfortable and familiar home after the holidays. Instead, we lived in a different landscape for a whole year and experienced a full circle of the changing weather and rhythm of the society. My children immersed in a different learning environment for one complete school year. We lived in an apartment just like an ordinary family in the neighbourhood. We dined and shopped around. We bought our food and daily necessities from local food courts or supermarkets. We visited the shopping malls, bookstores, and libraries. We took the subways and streetcars. We visited friends and places. We had fun in the many festivals on the street – the Winter Fest, Jazz Fest, Street Fest – in Toronto throughout the year. We survived the long and cold winter with experiences we have never had before. In all these everyday life events and experiences, we encountered excitements, puzzles, tensions, and difficulties that made us stop, ponder, and wonder. We encountered novelty in situations regarded as commonplace

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by the local people. We saw the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange (Erickson, 1984; Miller, 2017). We needed to learn along the way as we sailed through the storms and navigated the unknown islands in the sea of life and learning in uncharted waters. Our one-year experience in Toronto was eye-opening and mind-­ opening, not in the sense that we had been to exotic places in some remote corners of the world but that we lived an ordinary life there, which was so different from what we had been accustomed to before. Moreover, with our new experiences in Toronto, we were changed. Our experience of changes was drastic and intensified because of our moving back and forth between two different places. We were challenged by our new experiences. We experienced difficulties, puzzles, tensions, and frustrations at different stages in our year of studying and staying abroad. We had to learn to sing an unfamiliar tune. As the year went by, we slowly picked up the new rhythm and melody. After one year, when we returned to Hong Kong in summer 2000, we were compelled to think about things and practices that we had not noticed before. Values and practices that we had been taken for granted were suddenly questioned and shaken. We returned to our comfortable and familiar home but we soon found that we had to deal with much more tensions and frustrations in the place that we had left one year before. The landscapes were no longer the same. Time passed. People and events were changed. We were changed. Somehow, we felt like strangers in our homeland. Craig Storti, in The Art of Coming Home (2001), provided a rich description and analysis of this kind of reentry experience, when people returning home to discover that both their home and themselves have changed. People usually expect difficulties and are relatively more tolerant towards differences in a foreign landscape. They are less prepared for the difficult experience when they return home. As we are moving from one place to another within a short period of time, we are the people in motion. We often find ourselves in novel situations that demand adaptation and new learning. Our everyday life presents endless challenges to us and we have to adapt to new challenges in our daily lives. We need to learn the precise timing and movement to dance through the revolving door at the entrance of a shopping mall. We need to find appropriate responses to jokes and conversations that we half understand (Hoffman, 1989). The feeling of strangeness could happen when we come to a foreign place and also when we return to our home with our drastically changed experiences (He, 2003).

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People Encountering Differences People are always in motion in this rapidly changing world. We encounter rapid changes across different time, places, and social contexts. In this book, I am also interested in what happens to people when they are in motion, moving between different landscapes. From my family’s experiences in moving back and forth between different landscapes, I recall that before we could tune in with the rhythm of life in the new environment, we usually become easily judgemental towards other things and people different from our accustomed way of life. We tended to make quick and often superficial judgements towards the differences we noticed. As the differences we encountered call for our practical adjustments in our daily life, we often compared the new practices with what we were familiar with in our homeland. This was often inevitable because our original ways of thinking and looking at things were our only frame of reference to make sense of the world. In the early period of our entering a new place (or returning to the former one), we tended to judge our new experiences with the values and beliefs we carried with us from the place we immediately came from. However, when we kept staying in this frame of mind, we would have difficulties in understanding the different social practices and their cultural meanings in the new place. Only when we were aware of and realized that our familiar way of thinking as one of the many possible frames of reference, we could begin to understand and appreciate the meanings in our new experiences and become more at home and be flexible in our way of looking at things.

Life and Learning in Changing World—An Unfinished Conversation In the following sections, I focus my discussion on the notions of life and learning in the context of people experiencing a rapidly changing multicultural world. These notions are my persistent concerns over the years as a parent and as a teacher educator. As a parent, I do have personal interest in the well-being of my children in their developing years at home, in the school, and in the society. Like other parents, I wish to provide the best learning experiences possible to my children. Thus, I cannot pretend to be impartial in making value judgements and the many practical choices for them. However, in deciding on what is the “best”, we need to judge which

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is “better”, which inevitably leads us back to the fundamental philosophical idea of what is “good”. As a teacher educator, I always confront my student teachers and myself to think about the essence and the purposes of our endeavour as a teacher in this conflicting and challenging world. What good do we do to the lives of our students and to the society? How do we prepare our students to live a meaningful life in a confusing world where there are escalating wars, pandemics, prejudice, hatred, and political lies? The traditional emphasis on the 3Rs  – reading, writing, arithmetic  – seems no longer suffice to equip our young people to survive in this era. It seems that much more has to be taught and learned apart from the work skills or purely academic subject matter knowledge in making sensible and responsible moral choices and ethical decisions. As such, teaching is more a moral and ethical than a technical endeavour in this confusing and perplexing world (Ayers, 1995, 2001b). These professional quests of our teachers will inevitably lead us to think about our fundamental values in life and learning – what do we really value in our personal and social lives? What qualities do we want to cultivate in our children? What kind of society do we want to live in? How do we live with differences among people in a peaceful manner? And how could we, as teachers, parents, or citizens, contribute to help this desirable society take shape? These are moral questions that demand informed reasoning and value judgements for every teacher in this ethical profession. In this book, I did not approach these questions from a purely philosophical perspective. Instead, I built my humble discussion on the lived experiences of my family in the journey of moving back and forth between different landscapes. This inquiry was inspired by Dewey’s (1938) theory of experience that there is an organic connection between education and personal experience. Drawing on the source of Dewey, Clandinin and Connelly (2000) posited that education, experience, and life are inextricably intertwined. They further argued that “the study of education is the study of life – for example, the study of epiphanies, rituals, routines, metaphors, and everyday actions. We learn about education from thinking about life, and we learn about life from thinking about education” (p. xxiv). From my family’s experiences in the past few years, we reaffirm the simple but sometimes forgotten truth that learning and education do not merely take place inside schools. It is in our lives and everyday experience that we learn, provided that we are attentive enough and think about education as experience (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. xxiv). As parents,

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educators, or anyone concerned with the education for our children, we need to reassert this fundamental meaning of education, to connect the experiences of children inside school and beyond, in the family and in the society. Only if the society, the school, and the family could work together in concert with some shared values and principles, could we hope to create a truly educative environment for our children. This environment begins at home, follows through in schools, and is supported by various policies and facilities in the society.

Notions of Learning and Education in Different Landscapes In this section, I discuss the different notions of learning and education in Hong Kong and Toronto based on some commonplace phenomena I observed in the classroom and schooling practices in these two places. The two key issues I discuss here are: (a) the uses of textbooks and (b) the role of school in relation to the family and community in the education of children. Again, the readers should be reminded that these observations and discussions are always temporal and contextual. They should not be read as fixed and static descriptions of the places. The different orientations depicted here are not particular to specific places. They can be found in other places, at different times. There are no inherently good or bad practices when they are taken out of context. It all depends on the particular times, contexts, and purposes. The situations in more affluent countries and those in war-torn zones are definitely not the same. In this time of flux and changes in the local and global contexts, it is crucial that we rethink our basic orientations in learning, education, and life in perspective. Again, my rethinking started from the lived experiences of my family. The Uses of Textbooks: Teacher-Proof Packages or Teachers as Curriculum Planners One thing that brought us distress when we returned to Hong Kong in summer 2000 was the buying of textbooks for Andy and Fanny. There were a large number of textbook items on the booklists. Also, not all textbooks could be bought from one place. We had to go to bookstores in different areas in the territory to get all the required items. During one of

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these “textbook hunting” trips, Fanny asked me in a distressed manner: “Why do we have to use so many textbooks?” (Journal, August 24, 2000). Teachers and students in Hong Kong seemed to rely more on standardized textbooks and supplementary exercise books for classroom teaching and learning. These textbooks and exercises provide pre-packaged materials to be learned by the students. Usually, a few sets of popular textbooks in the textbook market are adopted for use in a large number of schools across the territory. Teachers in different classes and even in different schools teach more or less the same materials to the students. In a way, this is efficient in saving time for teachers in lesson preparation. At the same time, this practice involves much less teachers’ judgement in designing learning materials for the particular students they are teaching in a particular class and time. This practice of relying heavily on textbooks might reflect the expectation or assumption that pupils at the same age group should learn the same materials and progress at the same pace (Chap. 5). With respect to the use of standardized textbooks, my children’s one-­ year experience in Toronto classrooms seemed to tell a different philosophy about learning and teaching. During their year in Toronto, a few textbooks and exercise books were used but there were more worksheets chosen or designed by individual teachers. In language lessons, for example, teachers chose books in children literature they thought interesting and appropriate to the students and studied them in class. In arts and science lessons, there was more individual and group project work in which students chose their own topics and directions of investigation. Teachers assumed more the role of “curriculum planners” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988) than just teaching from pre-packaged materials as in most schools in Hong Kong. The different uses of the textbooks, reflecting different approaches to teaching and learning, might be originated from the demands in different educational landscapes in two different places. Student populations in Toronto classrooms are obviously more varied in terms of their educational and cultural backgrounds. The diversity in student background calls for the teachers’ flexibility in dealing with the varied needs of their students. The teachers need to exercise more in-house judgements in planning and structuring the curriculum in the classrooms in a particular year. In Hong Kong classrooms, the student populations might look homogenous in terms of their ethnic backgrounds (Chap. 3). However, we might overlook or be disguised by this surface similarity that, in every classroom anywhere in the world, each and every student does have different needs,

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talents, and potentials that need to be addressed, affirmed, and developed individually. The different uses of textbooks in Hong Kong and Toronto might also be pointing to a more fundamental question we need to address in this rapidly changing multicultural world – our value orientations toward conformity and diversity in human lives. What is the balance between transmitting common cultural norms and developing individuality? How do we accommodate the needs of the society and the needs of the individuals at the same time? How do people negotiate their identities (Cummins, 1996) in a diverse society? Bateson (1994), in her discussion on multiculturalism, discusses two essential aspects of multiculturalism: “identity multiculturalism” and “adaptive multiculturalism”. Bateson’s views urged us to think about our tasks in educating children in the multicultural world: we need to cultivate individuals who can, on the one hand, affirm their own identity and on the other hand, be able to respect, live with, and learn from people of different educational, cultural, and social backgrounds. My family experiences in the back-and-forth movement in the past few years show clearly the needs to learn to live with changes and differences with people inside our home, in the schools, and in different societies (Chaps. 5, 6, and 7). From my inquiry into our experiences, I would tend to think that human qualities like respecting diversity, tolerating differences, negotiating and affirming identities of self and others are more likely to be cultivated in a classroom which allows for more flexibility and professional judgements of the teachers who could recognize and affirm the individual needs and potentials of the students. School as the Sole Centre or as One of the Partners in the Education of Children Besides different approaches in using textbooks, the different policies and practices in assigning homework in the two places also posed questions for us to think about our conceptions of learning and education, and especially the relationship between the school, the family, and the society. In Hong Kong, family life with school-age children is often taken over by schoolwork or homework.1 Such homework usually occupies hours of the children’s time at home every evening. In almost all families with school-age children that we have known of, children’s school work is often the sole parent-child activity at home every evening, until both the children and parents are exhausted late at night. In many families, this

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parent-child activity might even turn into endless struggles between the children and their parents (Kralovec and Buell, 2000). Weekends and holidays are no better since the children often got additional assignments for the holidays. This homework practice might come from the expectation or assumption that the school should take over the sole or major responsibility in the learning and education of children. With this expectation, the school has to ensure that the children spend as much time as possible on schoolwork, which is supposed to lead to learning and proper education of children. In Chinese traditional culture, there is a popular saying that strongly conveys the expected attitude on the children in learning: “Diligence is merit, playing is no good” (勤有功, 戲無益). Children are expected to spend as much time as possible and work as hard as possible on their schoolwork. Parents are expected to work with the school to supervise the children’s homework and to prepare for tests and dictations. With this understanding of the relationship between learning and education, school and family, family time often becomes the extension of school time, in working on the same exercises or reviewing the same materials taught in school during the day. This might in effect strengthen the mastery of subject matter in a short time. But there might be a price to pay in losing time for developing other human qualities like creativity, initiative, and self-determination. My children had a different learning experience in Toronto with regard to their homework. Homework assignments, depending on the grade levels of the children, amounted to half an hour to about one hour and a half per day in their elementary school, plus their daily free reading assignments (Chap. 7). There were no extra assignments for the weekends. This homework practice leaves more time at the discretion of the children and their families. Throughout the year, my children enjoyed ample time for developing and sustaining their reading interest. They tried other explorations at home in the evening. They acted out and dramatized the scenes together after reading some interesting storybooks. Andy made full sized model cars from the shipment cartons and Fanny practised on the piano. They planned, scripted, directed, and performed their own version of a Chinese opera after watching a Cantonese film on the television. During the weekends and holidays, we visited the libraries, museums, and parks. We visited our friends and experienced a life with a different routine from the weekdays. In retrospect, I realized that we were having different learning experiences outside the classroom settings in all these personal pursuits

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and family activities. We learned from our real-life experiences to complement what we had learned in the textbooks in schools. I am not intending to conclude this discussion on different homework practices by nominating one of them as a better or happier alternative. There might be, as I have said, depending on our purposes and needs in specific times and contexts. However, I tend to think that these different practices are pointing to some very different notions of learning and education. From the prevailing practice in Hong Kong, it seems that we more or less equate “education” with “schooling”. The school becomes the sole centre of education of children. While we were in Toronto, it seemed to me that teachers and parents tended to consider school as one of the partners, together with the family and the society, in the education of children. They each had different and irreplaceable roles to play in the upbringing of the children. In both Hong Kong and Toronto, children spend most of the time of the day in schools. School provides a relatively safe and protected environment in which children learn to relate to people outside their families, to interact with strangers and friends, to cooperate with them, or to resolve conflicts that sometimes arise. School offers valuable learning experiences not easily available in the family. The schools obviously have an important role to play in educating the children. However, when education is seen in a broader sense that includes learning from the family and the society, the school does not claim the exclusive rights and responsibility in the upbringing of the children. In the family, children could explore and learn things in a more intimate and individualized environment and pursuit their personal interests. It is a primary social group in which a child’s basic value orientations are established and developed. In the society, there are many valuable resources – the libraries, the zoos, museums, parks, the shopping malls, and even the streets  – that presented endless learning opportunities. These opportunities, again, were outside the provision of the school and the family. Therefore, we can see that learning inside school, learning in the family, and learning in the society could offer different kinds of learning experiences to our children. Each of these spheres of life could provide unique contributions and learning opportunities for the children that complement each other (Chap. 7). However, when the schoolwork takes over the time and mental space of the children outside the school hours, the education experiences of the children are likely to become limited and

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unbalanced. There is much we need to think about in the way we organize our school life, our family life, and our social life.

Learning and Education in a Multicultural World From the above discussion, the readers could see that learning and education are my continual concerns over the years in my teacher life and parental life. Learning and education are two closely related but different terms. In the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd Edition, 1989), the meaning of learn is “to acquire knowledge of (a subject) or skill in (an art, etc.) as a result of study, experience, or teaching.” And learning is “the action of receiving instruction or acquiring knowledge; … a process which leads to the modification of behavior or the acquisition of new abilities or responses, and which is additional to natural development by growth or maturation.” Drawing from these definitions, I use the term learning in this book to refer to some particular acts or arrangement of acquiring knowledge, abilities or values. Meanwhile the term education is used to refer to a broader process – “(1) the process of nourishing or rearing a child or young person, an animal; (2) the process of ‘bringing up’ (young persons); the manner in which a person has been ‘brought up’; (3) systematic instruction, schooling or training given to the young in preparation for the work of life; (4) culture or development of powers, formation of character, as contrasted with the imparting of mere knowledge or skill” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 1989). In this book, I use the term education to point to a broader and more extensive process of nurturing, upbringing, instructing, and developing a person. Thus, a discussion of education inevitably calls for a more philosophical deliberation of the aims and values in the educational process beyond the immediate pedagogical concern of the effectiveness of a particular act or arrangement of learning. In this book, both terms – learning and education – were examined in context. In particular, I considered how the home, the school, and the society had different roles to play in bringing about the kind of education we desire and shaping the society we want to live in. In Chaps. 5 and 6, I noted and discussed how the organization of activities in teaching, learning, evaluation, and award in school could convey key educational messages to the students about their individual worth and identity; and about how the learning in school could be related to the experiences in students’ personal and social lives.

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These observations and discussions, as I explained earlier in this book, are based on our specific experiences in particular times and places. I am not claiming any generalization from our specific circumstances and experiences. I make no claim to present any eternal or universal truth here. Instead, I tried to construct authentic stories from our experiences. I took the advice of the director Jill Godmilow in making her films: “Don’t tell lies, don’t tell the truth, tell stories. In stories, there’s the possibility of pointing at some truth” (Godmilow, 1989). These stories of our lives “are essentially not to be summed up, but to be known, as they lived, in many curious partial and inarticulate ways” (Murdoch, 1943, cited in Conradi, 2001). Having said that, I do hope that the discussions in this book surrounding my perplexities in the educational aims and value orientations I have been struggling with; the puzzles I had in negotiating meanings from our social life in different cultural landscapes; and the queries I raised with some of the implications of different schooling and social practices could invite and contribute to serious deliberations in the educational community. This book is coming to an end, but not the inquiry. Life goes on and I am forever engaged in this inquiry into experience, education, and life. Our experiences in these few years of moving back and forth between different landscapes have opened up endless interesting puzzles for us, a few of these were explored in this book. As a closing, I constructed a fictional conversation between my daughter and I. This version of conversation is fictional but it is the kind of conversations we are likely to be engaged in the years to come. This conversation carries the unfinished quality of my exploration and inquiry into life, learning, and education in this rapidly changing multicultural world.

Note 1. It is almost a standard practice for teachers in Hong Kong to assign written homework to students after every lesson. As the students have different teachers for different subjects during the day, it is normal for students to have six to eight, or even more items of homework each day. It is not unusual for some students to spend two or three hours a day on their homework, especially for those children who are slower in catching up the pace of the teachers in class or those who have weaker fine motor skills in writing to handle the large amount of written work.

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References Ayers, W. (1995). To become a teacher: Making a difference in children’s lives. Teachers College Press. Ayers, W. (2001a). Fugitive days: A memoir. Beacon Press. Ayers, W. (2001b). To teach: The journey of a teacher (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press. Ayers, W. C., & Miller, J. L. (Eds.). (1998). A light in dark times: Maxine Greene and the unfinished conversation. Teachers College Press. Barone, T. (1989). Ways of being at risk: The case of Billy Charles Barnett. Phi Delta Kappan, 71, 147–151. Barone, T. (1995). The purposes of arts-based educational research. International Journal of Educational Research, 23(2), 169–180. Barone, T. (2000). Aesthetics, politics, and educational inquiry: Essays and examples. Peter Lang. Bateson, M. C. (1990). Composing a life (2nd ed.). Atlantic Monthly Press. Bateson, M. C. (1994). Peripheral visions: Learning along the way. HarperCollins. Bateson, M. C. (2000). Full circles, overlapping lives: Culture and generation in transition. Ballantine. Carger, C. L. (1996). Of borders and dreams: A Mexican-American experience of urban education. Teachers College Press. Clandinin, D.  J., & Connelly, F.  M. (1994). Personal experience methods. In N.  K. Denzin & Y.  Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 413–427). Sage. Clandinin, D.  J., & Connelly, F.  M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2004). Knowledge, narrative and self-study. In J. J. Loughran, M. L. Hamilton, V. K. LaBoskey, & T. Russell. (Eds.), International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education practices. Springer international handbooks of education, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. Conle, C. (1999). Why narratives? Which narratives? Struggling with time and place in life and research. Curriculum Inquiry, 29(1), 7–32. Connelly, F.  M., & Clandinin, D.  J. (1988). Teachers as curriculum planners: Narratives of experience. Teachers College Press. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2–14. Conradi, P. J. (2001). Iris Murdoch: A life. W. W. Norton & Company. Cummins, J. (1996). Negotiating identities: Education for empowerment in a diverse society. California Association for Bilingual Education. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. Perigee. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Simon & Schuster. Dewey, J. (1990). The child and the curriculum. University of Chicago.

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Diamond, C.  T. P., & Mullen, C.  A. (Eds.). (1999). The postmodern educator: Arts-based inquiries and teacher development. Peter Lang. Eisner, E. W. (1991). The enlightened eye: Qualitative inquiry and the enhancement of educational practice. Macmillan. Erickson, F. (1984). What makes school ethnography ‘ethnographic’? Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 15, 51–66. Geertz, C. (1995). After the fact: Two countries, four decades, one anthropologist. Harvard University Press. Godmilow, J. (1989). Dialogue on film: ‘Don’t tell lies, don’t tell the truth, tell stories’. American Cinema, 14, 20–24. Greene, M. (1978). Landscapes of learning. Teachers College Press. Greene, M. (1988). The dialectic of freedom. Teachers College Press. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. Jossey-Bass. He, M. F. (2003). A river forever flowing: Cross-cultural lives and identities in the multicultural landscape. Information Age Publishing. Hoffman, E. (1989). Lost in translation: A life in a new language. Penguin. Kanno, Y. (2003). Negotiating bilingual and bicultural identities: Japanese returnees betwixt two worlds. Lawrence Erlbaum. Kralovec, E., & Buell, J. (2000). The end of homework: How homework disrupts families, overburdens children, and limits learning. Beacon Press. Miller, C. (2017). Design + anthropology: Converging pathways in anthropology and design. Routledge. Nussbaum, M. C. (1997). Cultivating humanity. Harvard University Press. Olson, M., & Craig, C. (2009). “Small” stories and meganarratives: Accountability in balance. Teachers College Record, 111(2), 547–572. Rodriguez, R. (1983). Hunger of memory: The education of Richard Rodriguez. Bantam Books. Rorty, R. (1980). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Blackwell. Schwab, J.  J. (1969). The practical: A language for curriculum. School Review, 78(1), 1–23. Schwab, J. J. (1971). The practical: Arts of eclectic. School Review, 79(4), 493–542. Schwab, J. J. (1973). The practical 3: Translation into curriculum. School Review, 81(4), 501–522. Storti, C. (1990). The art of crossing cultures. Intercultural Press. Storti, C. (2001). The art of coming home. Intercultural Press. Wolcott, H. F. (1994). Transforming qualitative data. SAGE. Zatzman, B. (2006). Narrative inquiry: Postcards from Northampton. In J. Ackroyd (Ed.), Research methodologies for drama education. Trentham Books. Zinsser, W. (Ed.). (1998). Inventing the truth: The art and craft of memoir. Houghton Mifflin.

CHAPTER 9

Epilogue: A Fictional Conversation Between Father and Daughter

Daughter: Daddy: Daughter: Daddy:

Daddy, who am I? Why? Of course, you are Lok Fan (樂凡), my daughter. Why did you give this name to me? What does it mean? Well, it could have more than a dozen different meanings. All are very meaningful and interesting, aren’t they? And it doesn’t have to be fixed on one single meaning. That’s why I like this name and gave it to you. It’s also a very special name, right? I haven’t yet come across another person with the same name as you. You are unique. Daughter: Is every person unique in this world? Daddy: Yes. Every person is unique. This we call a person’s identity. Daughter: Daddy, what is identity? Daddy: Well, it’s hard to explain. I think identity has something to do with uniqueness. We say a person has an identity. But we don’t usually say a piece of pencil has an identity because that can be discarded and replaced by any other one. Daughter: Do you mean that living things have identity and non-living things do not? Daddy: I guess so. Daughter: How about plants and animals? Daddy: Well …

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. K. Lau, Life and Learning Between Hong Kong and Toronto, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80052-9_9

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Daughter: How about Bingo in Canada? She has been living with Uncle David’s family for a long time, for more than eight years. And she’s got her character. Daddy: Well, in that case I would say that Bingo has an identity too because she is not like any one of the other dogs. You know she has developed a connection with people. And people have developed connections and feelings with her. Daughter: Then a piece of rock could have an identity too, if that has a special meaning to me. Daddy: You may say so. But that identity is conferred by other people. I think that is not the same as a person’s identity. Daughter: What do you mean by “conferred by others”? Isn’t a person’s identity conferred by others? Daddy: Yes, sometimes it does. But I would rather say that a person has to construct his or her own identity when he or she starts to think about it. Daughter: Why? Can you explain? Daddy: Oh, well, I’ll try. Even when you were a baby, you had an identity. You have an identity once you were born. But you are not very conscious about it, so to speak. You are given a name. You belong to a family. This is your source. Your mom and dad gave birth to you. Our parents gave birth to us. So theoretically we could trace many generations back to our origin. That is our identity given biologically. But that is just one source of identity. When you are old enough to ask questions like these, you are ready to construct an identity for yourself, or at least, you are thinking about it. By that time, you might think of other sources of identity besides the family, like you might identify yourself with a religious group, or you might say you belong to a country or the global world, or you might say you belong to a specific time in history, a generation who live through the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. All these identities are true at the same time, but their significances could vary from person to person, and from time to time, in different circumstances. Daughter: Is it something related to specific time, places, and people?

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Right, exactly. You were born at a specific time, a specific place, into a specific social relation, in your case, our family. A person’s identity can only be understood as such. Daughter: Do people’s identities change? Daddy: Yes, as I said, people are born at a specific time, a specific place, into a specific social relation. But as they grow up, they travel along time; they move to different places; and they form different social relations with people. All these, taken as a whole, form the person’s identity. But from time to time, people might lay emphasis on different sources of identity and their meaning and significance at a particular time can only be determined by the conscious person. Daughter: Sometimes I heard about “ethnic identity” in my history class. What is it? Daddy: Oh, that you should tell me. I have never studied history in my school days. Daughter: You say that a person’s identity is unique. But “ethnic identity” is shared by many people, like Chinese. Daddy: I guess that “ethnic identity” is a kind of category that describes a group of people from a certain ethnic origin associated with a place where a group of people lived together for quite a long time to form some kind of distinctiveness and cohesiveness among themselves. They might have the same skin colours, the same languages, religious beliefs or traditions. Daughter: How does it related to the personal identity we have been talking about? Daddy: They are not the same but are related. You know in the past, people usually stayed together as a group at a place for their whole lifetime. Identity was not much an issue. I guess many people might have never thought about it. But today people travel a lot. They meet different people. They migrate to different places and settle their lives there. That’s why sometimes we see so many people of different ethnic groups living in the same place, like Toronto, which is perhaps one of the most multicultural cities in the world. So, in a way, the world today is much more complex and much more interesting.

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Daughter:

But sometimes people discriminate against other people of different colours, or languages, or religious beliefs. They sometimes have terrible conflicts too. Daddy: You are right, Fanny. And that’s very unfortunate. That happens when people treat other people as a category, and not as a person with a personal identity. I think if you’ve got to know a person more, you would discover that he or she is unique in some ways, with their special strengths and character. That’s why we could always learn from other people. Every person is unique and different from others. Every person does belong to an ethnic group, if we trace back to their origins. We can’t change our skin colour and there is no reason for us to do so. But people do not necessarily draw on ethnic identity as their major source of personal identity. It is always part of a person’s identity but not necessarily a significant part, especially for those who are born in another country different from their parents or their grandparents, like your cousins who were born in the United States and your friend, Hugo, who was born in Canada. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. They are constructing a different social identity but there is always some kind of continuity between the generations. At the same time, that kind of moving around experience is also part of the history of an ethnic group and the history of a person. People move to different places and develop different ways of life. They have to learn and adapt in order to survive. As I have said before, every ethnic group has developed some distinct ways of living, and different ways of thinking about life, and that is interesting in itself. As you have learned in your biology class, diversity is more conducive to the survival of organisms. Daughter: That means every person, every group of people could have something unique to contribute to the human society. Daddy: Exactly. And you know, every person is different from the other, even if they belong to the same ethnic group or the same family. We are different in age, in gender, in our knowledge and skills, in our tastes and interests, in our educational background and life experience. You are different from your mom and dad. And you often argue with your brother. You

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have friends who have different religious beliefs or have come from different countries. And if we can learn to know ourselves, affirm ourselves and, at the same time, respect each other, there is much we can learn from other people, provided that we can have genuine conversations with each other. Difference is not a bad thing. It’s quite the contrary. You don’t want to talk with a person who think and act exactly like you. That’s so boring. Daughter: But it is sometimes difficult to have conversations with other people. Sometimes we don’t have a common language. Daddy: You are right. Human beings communicate in languages. Sometimes when they have difficulties in using a common language, it’s not easy for them to have in-depth sharing. That’s why if you could have good command in two, or three, or even more different languages, you would have a great asset and good potential to act as a bridge between different people in this multicultural world. But bear in mind that communication is much more than using languages. You’ve got to have something to say. You’ve got to have different sources of knowledge. You’ve got to know what the strengths are in yourself and in your culture. And you know, Chinese people have a long history. And throughout this long history, our ancestors have learned and adapted a lot. They have accumulated a wealth of learning and wisdom that could contribute to the contemporary world. But these potentials have to be realized by people like me and you. Daughter: Oh, that’s such a heavy task for me. How do I know what am going to be in the future? Daddy: You don’t know. But you are shaping your identity. Look back on the paths you have walked through these years and see what you can learn from them. Look forward into the future. Imagine how you want your life to be. Make yourself useful to others. You are constructing your identity day by day. But for now, you have to go to sleep. And so do I. Daughter: Good night, daddy. Thanks for talking with me. Daddy: Good night, dear. Have a sweet dream.

Index1

A Accidental visitor, 15 Accommodation downtown Toronto, 32, 35–37 residential area, 25, 37, 39 student housing, 35–37, 39 Award certificate, 55–57 desirable qualities, 56, 59 effort and achievement, 57 learning, 55–58, 113 recognition, 57 zero-sum game, win-lose situation, 56

identity multiculturalism, 110 living with strangers, 6 Bay Street School, ix, x Black history, 53–54 Blake, William, 7 British colony, v, 1, 4, 13, 17, 18

B Bateson, Mary Catherine, x, 5, 53, 100, 110 adaptative multiculturalism, 110

D Dewey, John, vi, vii, 6, 41, 53, 101, 107 Duster Story, 11–13, 16, 22

C Chao, Yuenren, 92 Clandinin, Jean, ix, x, 7, 11, 41, 58, 64, 99–101, 107, 109 Connelly, Michael, vi, ix, x, 7, 11, 35, 41, 58, 64, 99–101, 107, 109

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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G Geertz, C., 7, 59, 64, 100 After the fact, 64 parade, 7, 59 Godmilow, Jill, 114 Don’t tell lies, 114 H Hayhoe, Ruth, 13 Hesse, Hermann, 88 Hoffman, Eva, 3, 5, 100, 105 Hu, Shih, vii, 92 I Identity, v, 2–4, 8, 9, 17, 19, 20, 25, 38, 110, 113 L Language Chinese, 88 Chinese spoken forms; Cantonese, Putonghua, Mandarin, vi, 1, 19, 22, 74, 81n2, 111 Chinese written forms; traditional and simplified, 1, 19, 20, 36 competency and difficulties, 44, 46, 51, 57, 59, 76, 77 English, 50, 53, 55, 60n2, 60n3 official, 4, 19 Lennon, John, 37, 40n3 M Making the familiar strange, 64 Making the strange familiar, 64 Migration astronaut families, 19 the longest commute, 19 political uncertainty, 18 population changes, 19

Murdoch, Iris lives are not to be summed up, 114 lives are to be known as they lived, 114 N Name English name, 1–4 first name, vi, 1 last name, 1 meaning, v, vii, 2 proper name, 3 surname, v, vi Namioka, Lensey, 1, 91, 92 Nussbaum, Martha C., x, 53, 100 P Personal experience boarding years, 17 breakup of relationships, 19 childhood stories, 11, 14–16, 88 Covid-19, 28n4 early family experience, 13–16 holding hands, 25 jet lag, 32, 36 life and death, 22, 25, 27 pandemic, xi, 107 SARS, 25–27, 28n4, 85 R Reading ability, 88 bookstores, 32, 89, 91, 93, 94, 104, 108 habit, 88, 95 at home, 90–91, 93, 94 interest, 91, 93, 94, 111 in the public, 89, 93, 95

 INDEX 

story books/children book, 50, 89, 90, 92, 93 Yang the youngest and his terrible ear, 91, 92 Research method narrative inquiry, vi, x, 32, 101 personal letters, 84 quantitative, 34 research topic, 32–34 Rodriguez, Richard, 3, 5, 20, 100 S School life Are you dumb?, 74 birthday party, 48–49, 87 crying, 70–71 curriculum, 45, 52, 53, 55, 87, 94, 109 dictation, 57, 76–80, 93, 111; prepared for the wrong passages, 80 discipline, 17, 49 elite class, non-elite class, 73 holding door, 96 homework, school work, 50–51, 53, 54, 67, 74, 76–81, 84, 86, 90, 93, 110–112, 114n1 invisible dummy, 45, 55, 70 last day of, 63–67, 70 Little Acorn, 37, 52, 57, 65–66 name covered in the sand, 46 peer relationship, friends, 45–46, 59, 64, 65, 67 principal, 69, 87; graduation ceremony, 55, 69, 87 report card, evaluation, 51–53, 87 seating arrangement, puzzle, game, 45–47, 56, 58, 79, 101 smile and recess, 49–50 spelling test, 57, 58 sports, Sports Day, 75

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start of school, 42–43, 46, 57, 60, 90 teachers; curriculum planners, 108–110; ESL, 55, 60n3; homeroom, 51, 53; subject, 53, 114n1 textbook, 21, 51, 74, 76, 77, 88, 108–110, 112 Social history China, 17 Hong Kong, 8, 17, 22, 101 Social life anxiety, 25, 39, 51 bus driver, 96–97 buzz code, 39, 40n4 coin box, 95–96 dream, xi, 72 fare box, 96 honesty, 97 integrity, 97 library, 42, 55, 79, 88–90, 93, 95–97, 104, 111, 112 new arrival, 38–40 printing, 95 subway station, 39, 89, 96 supermarket, 39, 48, 104 trust, 97 Stories meganarratives, grand stories, 4 small stories, 4 T Teaching emphasis on subject matter knowledge, the 3Rs, 107 moral choices and ethical decisions, 107 as technical endeavor, 107 Y Yang, Buwei, 92