Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Identities (Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education) 3030820319, 9783030820312

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INTERCULTURAL RECIPROCAL LEARNING IN CHINESE AND WESTERN EDUCATION

Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge Crossing Cultures, Crossing Identities

Betty C. Eng

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 https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15114

Betty C. Eng

Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge Crossing Cultures, Crossing Identities

Betty C. Eng Independent Scholar Sacramento, CA, USA

Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education ISBN 978-3-030-82031-2 ISBN 978-3-030-82032-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82032-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 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: Tom Wang/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

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 ninteenth 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

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futures often tum 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 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 child hood 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 Windsor-Southwest University Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Program and the Shanghai-Toronto-Beijing Sister Schoof Network. These programs provide a comprehensive educational approach

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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. The first few books in the series will be direct outgrowths of our partnership study. 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:

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• build educational knowledge and understanding from a crosscultural 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; • 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.

Toronto, Canada

Michael Connelly

Windsor, Canada

Shijing Xu

References Dewey, J. (1926). America and the Far East. Survey, 1 May, 1926, 188. Later published in: John Dewey, TheLaterworks, 1925–1953, (1984). Volume 2: 1925–1927, pp.1173–1175. Hayhoe, R., & Pan, J. (Eds.). (2001). Knowledge across cultures: A contribution to dialogue among civilizations. Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong. Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Vintage Books. Tu, W. (1993). Way, learning, and politics: Essays on the Confucian intellectual. State University of New York Press.

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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

This book makes a unique contribution to the series on lntercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education led by Professors Shijing Xu and Michael Connelly which focuses on a Canada-China partnership in teacher education over a seven year period. The core concern with intercultural understanding and identity formation fits into a similar framework, while its geographic scope is somewhat broader, including California and Hong Kong. Its historical reach goes back to the early twentieth century when the author’s father first immigrated to the United States as a “paper son,” getting this opportunity with the help of a friend who had “legitimate” status. As a doctoral student of Michael Connelly and faculty member at the former Hong Kong Institute of Education, Betty Eng became familiar with the narrative method which informs all of the books in this series, and used it for her doctoral research under a collaborative program between HKIEd and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Much of her research has also related to teacher education, a core focus of the Reciprocal Learning Project that provides a foundation for the book series. What is unique in this volume is the way in which Betty has used narrative method to explore the multiple dimensions of a life that began with birth in a rural village in Toishan, South China, experienced what it was like to grow up as a child of disadvantaged immigrant parents in California, study and teach in universities there, then move to Hong Kong for a twenty year period. Multiple visits to her home village at different

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time periods enabled her to connect with close relatives there. Her vivid accounts of interviews with her grandmother, her parents, her fellow teachers and students in these different venues take the reader back and forth across a century of Asian American interaction, including painful experiences of racism, going back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and up to the anti-Asian violence that has erupted in vicious ways under the conditions of COVID19 in 2021. Through all of these experiences her engagement with forms of narrative that go deep into her own inner thoughts as well as those of her interlocutors enable her to bring incredibly rich insights into the field of teacher education. As one of the founders of Asian American Studies in the 1970s, she is able to show the importance of educational content that connects immigrant children to the rich heritages of Asian and other world civilizations and enables them to develop healthy and balanced identities that enrich their communities. She also provides a living example of longlasting student-teacher engagement through a chapter co-written with two of her Hong Kong students, each sharing their own vision and struggle. Bamboo is a metaphor that runs through the book from its first page, beginning with her mother’s criticism of her as a “juk sing” or empty bamboo stick and ending with a chapter where she withdraws to a quiet grove with the bamboo crackling in the gentle wind to reflect on the learnings of a lifetime that have been articulated throughout the book. Bamboo is a remarkable plant, strong yet able to bend, useful as food, construction material and in multiple other ways, also environmentally healthgiving. The very emptiness of its stems makes possible its combination of strength and flexibility. Perhaps the most powerful image comes from Hong Kong where bamboo scaffolding is used around steel and concrete skyscrapers. All along the journey Betty returns to this metaphor as a way of encapsulating the many complexities of developing an identity in which rich Chinese roots are linked in positive ways to core North American values and those of the hybrid Chinese-British context of Hong Kong. For me, as a Canadian who spent more than 50 years bridging Chinese and Western educational cultures, and got to know Betty in the years when we both served in teacher education at the former Hong Kong Institute of Education, this book has been both fascinating and deeply moving. While I have long held a strong intellectual commitment to antiracism, reading this book gave me the experience of feeling what racism means in my guts, and has brought me to acknowledge the realities of

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white privilege in a life that has had its own challenges and difficulties. There could not be a more timely volume in this period of COVID and the resurgence of anti-Asian racism. Most of all, this book demonstrates on every page the kinds of richness that can be accessed through the careful and consistent use of narrative method and the importance of staying alive and awake through all the experiences of life, even those that may seem painful or damaging at the time. I see it as a book that undergirds all the other books in this series, holding them in arms that embrace more than a century of interaction between Asia and the Western world. Ruth Hayhoe University of Toronto Toronto, Canada

Acknowledgments

This book belongs to my mother, father, and family in the United States, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. They give me the gift of experiences from which to compose my rich and complex narratives that shape my journey. Their narratives provide me with an appreciation and understanding of who I am, where I came from, and who I wish to become. This book flourished from my doctoral research study with Dr. F. Michael Connelly who inspired and guided my narratives. I am also grateful to Dr. D. Jean Clandinin who along with Dr. Connelly, pioneered Narrative Inquiry, which provides the framework for my stories. Dr. Connelly wisely and generously “pushed and pulled” me to reflect and understand the meaning of my narratives along with the power of the inquiry. He moved me to puzzle, wonder, and be in awe of the taken-for-granted. I am delighted and honored to contribute to this book series Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese Western Education edited by Drs. Connelly and Shijing Xu. My deep appreciation also goes to Dr. Ming Fang He and Dr. JoAnn Phillion who gave me the gift of their scholarship, introduced me to how research could be through sharing their own experiences, and continue to help me discover a place for myself in academia. Dr. Clare Kosnik, as my teacher, mentor, and colleague, reaffirmed the importance of community in the classroom.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am honored by the participation of Dr. William Schubert and Dr. Julia Pan who reviewed my writings and gave me their collegial support. Dr. Schubert’s perceptive questions invited illuminations and puzzles for future exploration. He reaffirmed the space for my “teacher lore” and reminded me that I am in the process of becoming. My thanks to Dr. Pan for taking a genuine interest in me and my narrative inquiry. I am indebted to Dr. Ruth Hayhoe who, as the former Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) and now renamed The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) originated and supported the joint sponsorship of the Doctor of Education degree between the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education of the University of Toronto and EdUHK. My genuine gratitude goes to Alex and Suki, former students at EdUHK, who are my teachers and colleagues and have become members of my extended family in Hong Kong. Their participation in the book has been integral to my understanding of how to be a teacher for the Hong Kong milieu. My boundless appreciation to Dr. Margaret McIntosh of Wellesley Centers for Women who encouraged me to make myself visible in the narratives. She provided resonance to my narratives that profoundly contributed to imagining who I could become. I thank the many friends, colleagues, and scholars who thoughtfully read my book at its various stages. Their helpful comments and suggestions informed my thinking about the many directions my journey could take. My journey has been nurtured and sustained by members of the narrative community at the Centre for Teacher Development at OISE/UT and the Hong Kong cohort of classmates. They have been my home base for the journey. Finally, I wish to thank EdUHK for recognizing the importance of my book with their consent and support to conducting the research with sabbaticals, grants, and staff development programs.

Lifeline: A Brief Chronology

1948 1955 1970 1971 1975 1973–1983 1979 1982 1978–1983 1984 1986 1986–1990 1990–1992 1990–1992

1992–1994 1994 1994 1996 1995–2006 1999

Birth in Toishan, China Emigration to the United States B.A. in Social Sciences/Psychology California State University, Sacramento Completion of Teacher Education Program California State University, Sacramento M.S. in Counseling California State University, Sacramento Lecturer, California State University, Sacramento Asian American Studies, Women’s Studies Counselor Education First return to Toishan, China Lecturer, University of California, Davis Asian American Studies Counselor, University of California, Davis Counselor, California State University, Hayward Re-location to Hong Kong Counselor, Hong Kong International School Return to United States from Hong Kong to Brooklyn, New York Educational Consultant with Chinatown History Museum, New York; Project on Inclusive Education: Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity, Wellesley College Return to Sacramento, California Return to Hong Kong Counselor, Hong Kong International School Trip to Toishan, China with parents Teacher Educator, The Hong Kong Education University Trip to Toishan, China xvii

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LIFELINE: A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY

2002 2005 2004–2015 2006–2013 2013–2015 2015–Present

Trips to Toishan, China for purpose of research Ed.D., The Ontario Studies in Education of the University Of Toronto Family Caregiver Faculty, The City University of Hong Kong Research Fellow, Centre for Governance and Citizenship The Hong Kong University of Education Return to California from Hong Kong

Prologue

I begin this inquiry with dread. This pervasive dread tempts and urges me to maintain my silence. I dread not having the courage and vision to articulate the voices in the community of my classroom, my village in China, and my family. The gravity and magnitude of this inquiry confront me as I choke and stall to shaping all my writings of the past five years to begin. I am at the edge of a primeval bamboo forest, peering into a lush and dense landscape that shows no path. The bamboo timbers run high with elegant leaves that allow the sun to filter through, casting light and shadows from the sun. I glance over my shoulders to look at what I am leaving behind but I find no shelter there, and I know I must move forward. How might I know that I have captured the experiences of Alex and Suki, my pre-service students, with the voice of authenticity they deserve that rightly belong to them in the curriculum? Alex and Suki have generously shared the rich experiential wisdom of their youth with me. They are the conduits for my understanding of how to be a teacher educator and have become members of my extended family in Hong Kong. This question is one I also ask of the narratives I have presented here of my parents and village family, who shape who I am and inform my teacher knowledge. I dread being found a fraud and dread faltering. This is a presumptuous journey I am embarking, to think I can compose the needed clarifying

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narratives that are intended to serve the communities described within this book. Personal narratives invite and cultivate a culture of trust and respect. This journey requires that I lend my own voice, thus revealing my strengths and vulnerabilities and exposing doubts and uncertainties. Will my stories of experience be welcomed, and are readers ready to hear my stories? I believe the source of this dread can be understood in the scars that are inscribed upon my spirit. These scars remind me to be fearful and memories of them counsel my silence. The scars were made by the systematic exclusion of the voices of learners and teachers in deliberations that determined the curriculum. The personal voices of learners and teachers have been rendered mute and lost within the curriculum. The scars are also from being asked to seek a universal way of knowing and to narrowing my sights to a “knowledge for teacher” rather than “teacher knowledge.” My silenced and lost voices are stories of experience from Chinese coolies who labored on the railroads and in the garment factory sweatshops, from the Exclusion Act in the United States that separated families, from stereotyping and being called “Chink,” from my grandmother’s bound feet, and from my community that tell me who I am and where I belong. I begin this inquiry with wonder and puzzlement. I wonder and puzzle why my mother calls me a juk sing or hollow bamboo. My exterior appearance is that of a Chinese but inside, my mother believes, is devoid of the honored and traditional values and beliefs of the Chinese. I wonder and puzzle why and how she, and others like her, come to perceive me this way. The wonder and puzzle provide the seeds that flourished into this inquiry that leads me to a transformative understanding of my culture and identity. The inquiry begins with a puzzle, and as it unfolds with meaning and discoveries, it continues in a lifelong journey. I begin this inquiry with passion. As I assert my claim to my experiences, I re-discover the passion I have for this journey. It is a passion driven not only by the elemental and universal need for self-discovery and self-understanding but also by a sense of duty and obligation to the communities of my classroom, my village, and my family. I discover the passion for the journey of inquiry that contributes to a scholarship that hopes to serve the interest of my communities.

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I begin this inquiry with blessings. Blessings for “good fortune” and “safe passage” are wished upon me from my mother and father. Their blessings are joined by those of teachers, mentors, colleagues and friends who give me the gift of a safe and empowering narrative space to recover my stories. They have boldly gone before me and are my navigators for this journey. Their blessings inspire and fortify me to confront and move beyond the dread. I begin this inquiry in celebration. It is a celebration for the act of “writing self” that becomes a “writing of nation” for a global community. In my acts of self-recovery, I endeavor to reconstruct the stories of experience of my familial village and my students to reaffirm their voices and place in the curriculum. I celebrate my discovery of narrative inquiry as a way of thinking that recognizes the primacy of experience and brings me into the “midst of lives” with the telling and re-telling of a never-ending story. I also celebrate my invitation and welcome to a narrative inquiry community. It is a special and endearing community where we meet as learners and continue as colleagues and friends. I begin this inquiry with hope. I hope that my personal narratives provide a resonance to continue the conversation and inspire the narratives of others. I hope this inquiry develops a cross-cultural personal practical knowledge that illuminates educators’ understanding of the diversity and multiculturalism in our classrooms. I hope that this cross-cultural personal practical knowledge will provide meaning to all educators and to those who live cross-cultural lives. Our cross-cultural lives are characterized by a journey that moves from culture to culture and from language to language. I hope that this inquiry provides the readiness and alertness to hear the rhythms and nuances of the stories of experiences from the commonplaces of the learners, teachers, curriculum, and milieu to make our classrooms more balanced, inclusive, and inviting.

Praise for Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge

“The narratives challenge readers’ assumptions of multicultural issues by offering author’s cultural experience and academic perspective. The book raises awareness, enhances understandings, and promotes insights into the opportunities and challenges of culturally responsive education.” —Diana K. Kwok, Associate Professor, The Education University of Hong Kong, Teacher of Cultural and Sexual Diversity “Betty Eng explores complex identities—the ‘fluid in-betweenness,’ in the ‘fusion of East and West.’ She shares with her students the wish to be accepted and to belong on their own terms. Through experiences of China, Hong Kong, and California, she traces the evolution of her commitment to herself and her students to claim and depend on an honest plurality of personal and cultural identities.” —Peggy McIntosh, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist, Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College, MA “Through a metaphor of Juk Sing (hollow bamboo), Betty Eng narrates and reflects on her professional and personal experiences that reveal how teacher knowledge may be constructed and construed in the inbetweenness of identities and cultures over time and space. This book

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PRAISE FOR PERSONAL NARRATIVES OF TEACHER KNOWLEDGE

is invaluable to all educators, policy makers and other stakeholders in the field who are striving for better understanding and practice of learning, teaching and education in a global age.” —Jun Li, Professor (Western University) and Vice President (Comparative and International Education Society) “The storytelling and personal experiences are an empowering and compelling way to recover and reclaim our community’s history, culture and identity.” —Satsuki Ina, Ph.D., Community Activist for Social Justice

Contents

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Introduction: A Hollow Bamboo

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All I Have Are My Experiences: The Soil That Nurtures and Flourishes

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Giving Definition to the Contours of the Landscape: The Scaffolding That Frames the Inquiry

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A Sojourner in a Village Landscape: The Earth That Seeds

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Journeying to Gold Mountain: Uprooted and Transplanted to New Soil

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Seeking Gold Mountain: Grafted and Propagated

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Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China: Transported with Multiple Grafts and Growths

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Uprooted, Transplanted Grafted Redux: From Hong Kong to Reentry to the United States

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Looking Back and Looking Forward

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Epilogue: A Gathering Harvest

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: A Hollow Bamboo

“Aiyaah! Juk sing, juk sing !” my mother cried out in despair. Juk sing , a “hollow bamboo,” is how I was often criticized by my mother as I grew up Chinese in America. Like a bamboo, my outside appearance suggested Chinese or Asian features and origins. And, like a bamboo, my mother thought me empty and hollow inside, devoid of the honored traditional Chinese values and beliefs. We had just returned from the traditional Chinese red egg and ginger party for the first born of a close cousin. In times when infant mortality rates were high, a red egg and ginger party occurred only after one month, when it seemed the survival of the baby was assured. Eggs, dyed red, are part of the treats for the celebration. The red color represents good fortune and prosperity and the shape of the egg symbolizes harmony, unity, and new life. Ginger was served to fortify and strengthen the mother, as a yang or “hot” food to balance the qi or energy in the body. I had admired, praised, and congratulated the parents on their first born, a son they named “Ming.” Ming was born weighing over 8 lbs. and had been gaining weight steadily. Ming’s mother proudly remarked that the doctor told them that the baby’s weight and height were on the upper range of the acceptable size for a new born. With good intentions, I advised the parents be watchful of the baby’s diet and exercise so that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. C. Eng, Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82032-9_1

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he does not become obese and be subject to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or become diabetic as an adult. “Don’t you know better than to talk about negative and bad consequences about the baby’s weight at a celebration party? It is bad luck and bad omen for you to make such comments. A baby that is robust and plump is a sign that the family has ample food for the baby and a sign of good fortune and prosperity. Many babies were malnourished and died for lack of mother’s milk and food. Though you are a daughter of China, you are a juk sing my mother lamented. You embarrassed me and shamed me in front of our family! Aiyaah! They must think I am a bad mother for not teaching you proper Chinese ways!” I was puzzled and shaken by my mother’s scolding. I was about 16 years old in Sacramento, the valley city that is California’s state capital where I grew up. I had thought my suggestions and precautions intended to be helpful advice, particularly since family members have a history of cholesterol and diabetes. While I was born in China and a “daughter of China,” my mother thought my behavior was just like that of the Chinese who were born and raised in the United States who just did not know any better. To her way of thinking, these juk sing Chinese were so absorbed and sucked into the American culture that they didn’t have any more Chinese left in them. My mother’s lecture to me continued: “In my days in China, only those who were poor and did not have enough to eat were thin. Being ‘fat’ is a sign of prosperity and good fortune. Aiyaah! It would have been better for you to have stayed home.” I had not known of the significance of the red egg and ginger party for a robust and plump looking baby. The many complicated and intricate meanings as understood by my mother about a new born and in what I had thought a simple and well-intentioned advice. My Americanized understanding of social etiquette and values often jarred with that of my mother and caused her much distress. Our different understandings became a persistent source of tension between us. Aiyaah!, my mother lamented. “Have I not been a good mother and teacher for you to become so twisted? The ignorance you show shames and humiliates me in our family and community. What has our coming to ‘Gold Mountain,’ the land of opportunity and promises, done, and what have you become?”. Indeed, what had growing up Chinese in America done, and what had I become? My mother’s criticism of me in my teens left me feeling guilty

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and shame for her “loss of face” in front of our family and community. I was genuinely confused about who I thought I was, and who I was supposed to be. This exchange from my past probably lasted only a few minutes, but my mother’s lament was played out on numerous other occasions. My mother’s lament, shared by many others like her, formed an indelible impression on me that serve to inspire this book. Embedded in my story are the experiences that provided the beginnings of my quest to understand my culture and identity that are the focus of this book.

How My Experiences Are Educational: Personal Practical Knowledge The intent of my journey is to explore and make meaning of my personal experiences and how they shape and inform what Connelly and Dienes (1982) conceptualized as personal practical knowledge in my role as a teacher educator in Hong Kong, where I have lived and worked for almost 20 years. Connelly and Dienes describe personal practical knowledge as a comprehensive view of the world that includes theoretical knowledge as well as personal beliefs and values. Connelly and Clandinin continue the study of personal practical knowledge through their extensive research with teachers and schools. Connelly and Clandinin describe personal practical knowledge as knowledge that is imbued with, and understood in terms of a person’s experiential history, both professional and personal. This knowledge is a blending of personal background and characteristics that has cultural origins. Personal practical knowledge emphasizes the teacher’s knowing of a classroom and is a term originated by Connelly and Clandinin (1988) to talk about teachers as knowing persons. Experience, Connelly and Clandinin (1990) believe, is best represented and understood through narratives or stories. They believe that understanding our own personal narratives may be a metaphor for understanding the curriculum and our students. As such, it is important for teachers to read their own narratives or their own curriculum to gain an understanding of their students’ curriculum. Narrative as a process of reflection to make meaning of the classroom experience is based on the thinking of Crites (1971), Alter (1993), and Connelly and Clandinin (1988). The study of experience is fundamental to the development of my personal practical knowledge and guides my pedagogy and my development as a teacher. Carter (1993) believes that

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as we tell our experiences, we express them through stories, and “storying” our personal and professional experience is a mode of knowing that creates teacher knowledge. My narratives of experience illuminate how my development as a teacher evolved and continues as a holistic and lifelong journey. Connelly and Clandinin (1988) believe that teachers are central in shaping and planning the curriculum and hold an essential voice in their own personal knowledge of the classroom. Hunt (1987) holds that understanding oneself is essential and is the beginning of becoming and being an effective teacher. Hunt (1992) proposes to begin with ourselves to explore our feelings and belief rather than starting with formal theories of education. As teachers, we need to understand where we came from, where we are in the present, and how the past and the present shape our future. And by understanding ourselves, we can in turn become better facilitators of our student’s journey of self-understanding. Framing my research puzzle with these perspectives, I tell my experiences as they are expressed through stories. I tell stories of experience from my family, my community, and my classroom and discover how they become embedded in shaping and informing my teacher knowledge. My research puzzle is a quest that takes me on a journey of cultural crossings to the soils of three landscapes: China, United States, and Hong Kong. I find each landscape is composed of rich and complex textured soils that enter the pores of my being and inexplicably change who I had been and who I am becoming. I extend the puzzlement that was created by being called a juk sing to wonder about my own cross-cultural personal practical knowledge as a teacher educator. Drawing on my personal narratives, my journey explores why and how I became a teacher, the kind of teacher I have become, and the teacher I am becoming. The research puzzle explores a journey of self-awareness and discoveries that contribute to understanding how experience and personal histories can inform and shape teacher knowledge. My journey as a teacher educator takes place in the Hong Kong milieu but also has applications to the international and global context. My study is contextualized and focused on the local and specific but also contributes to understanding the larger puzzle of culture and identity for a diverse and multicultural world. My inquiry presents an invitation for educators and policy makers to consider and reflect on the cross-cultural lives of our students and to develop culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally responsive teachers.

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Teacher Knowledge/Knowledge for Teachers Clandinin and Connelly (2000) propose a study of teachers’ knowledge as opposed to knowledge for teachers. Their epistemological perspective draws from Polanyi’s (1958) argument that knowledge has a subjective and personal character. This view is complemented by Dewey’s (1938) idea that knowledge and knowing are dialectical combinations of subject and object, and the cultural and the individual. The qualities of teacher knowledge are experiential, personal, and subjective which is expressed as “tacit” professional knowledge, according to Clandinin and Connelly (2000). Thinking narratively, they describe and study the personal stories that reflect a person’s social and historical life. Autobiography was one of the first methodologies used to study what it meant for a person to be educated in the field of educational studies, according to Connelly and Clandinin (1991). However, with the shift of inquiry to how people are educated, the use of autobiography for the study of education disappeared. Autobiography, according to educators such as Edel (1984), Kerby (1991), and Olney (1980), is life-writing of the self and is a reconstruction of one’s narrative. Such writing has the power to give voice to a community that has been made invisible or silenced. Through my personal narrative, I attempt to understand my personal practical knowledge as it contributes to my development as a teacher. Teacher knowledge that should be taught as opposed to knowledge for teachers presents a dramatic and fundamental shift for teacher education programs. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) describe the process of this shift by questioning knowledge that is held by pre-service teachers and knowledge that is found in profession practice. Instead of beginning with theory, we begin with pre-service teachers’ or practicing teachers’ knowledge. But Connelly and Clandinin do not propose to displace theory and knowledge for teachers in teacher education programs. They recognize the role and importance of theory but urge this not be forced upon preservice teachers but be provided as an available resource that enhances their understanding of what it means to be a teacher.

The Soil That Nurtures Drs. Ming Fang He and JoAnn Phillion first introduced me to the narrative inquiry of Connelly and Clandinin when they gave me the gift of their

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scholarship. Their groundbreaking scholarship on the topics of multiculturalism, identity, and cross-cultural lives became an invitation into a community of narrative inquirers and narrative thinking that served to inspire and nurture my own journey. I will further discuss the significance of their work and their impact on my own writing and life in a later chapter. John Dewey (1938), the educator and philosopher, believed that to study education and life is to study experience. He developed a philosophy of experience in education and held that thinking is inquiry, inquiry is life, and life is education. Understanding experience is key to a nurturing a child’s development and to understanding why teachers do what they do. Dewey encouraged a respect for all sources of experience but also cautioned that not all experiences are educative. There needs to be selective discrimination about the quality of the experience for not all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. Some experiences may produce callousness or insensitivity that can prevent or hinder growth of further experiences. The recognition of experience as key to education and the importance of narrative permeate across the disciplines. Geertz (1995), after a life’s work as an anthropologist that spans four decades, calls for anecdotes, parables, tales, or narratives that serve to deepen our understanding of cultures. He describes anthropologists as participating in “thick descriptions” of interpreting social discourse (Geertz, 1973). In psychiatry, Coles (1989) calls upon life experiences and stories from his patients and students who become his teachers in order to understand his profession. Educators such as Conle (1996) and Witherell and Noddings (1991) have demonstrated how storytelling and narratives are an effective way to create reciprocal learning and teaching from the voices in our classroom. In the arts, scholars such as Eisner (1988) and Diamond and Mullen (1999) have recognized the primacy of experience for teacher development and educational research. Connelly and Clandinin (1990) believe that it is through narratives that experience can be best represented and understood. For Clandinin and Connelly (2000), experience is what they study and encourage the development of a narrative thinking as a key form of experience in which to write. My narratives draw on my experiences of being Chinese and a woman from an immigrant working-class family, who has crossed and crisscrossed the cultures of China, Hong Kong, and America over time. This life story chronicles the immigration of my family from China to America

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or “Gold Mountain” as a land of opportunity and riches first promised by the gold rush of the 1800s. It includes my role in the Asian American movement and Asian American Studies in universities in California, my return to Hong Kong to become a teacher at the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK), a major provider of teacher training for Hong Kong’s early childhood, primary and secondary schools and now as an independent scholar.

Emerging Narratives of “In-Between” Spaces The quest for culture and identity is a key theme emerging from my personal narratives. The exploration raises questions of “what is Chinese?” and “what is Chinese culture for a woman who was born in China and raised and educated in the West in an immigrant community of workingclass parents?” My quest for identity, culture is shared by my Hong Kong Chinese students, though the contexts of our quests differ. Heightened by the handover of Hong Kong as a British colony back to the motherland of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1997, my students ask: “Am I a Chinese or a Hong Konger?” No longer British colonial subjects, my students in Hong Kong raise questions about what it means to be Chinese, what is Chinese culture, and who is it that they wish to become? These questions are raised and discussed in the educational context as I explore my own personal and professional identity in the Hong Kong milieu as a teacher educator. Another theme emerging from the inquiry is how I come to embody a multitude of blended identities and cultures as I improvise, adapt, and transform myself to shaping an evolving and contested personal practical knowledge as a teacher educator. I discover that I am not a Chinese American within my teacher educator community in Hong Kong. To my Hong Kong Chinese colleagues, I am an American Chinese, with an emphasis on my American appearance that is marked by my American English language and my demeanor that prominently distinguishes me from my Hong Kong-born colleagues of Chinese descent. Ironically, my Hong Kong Chinese colleagues consider me an American first even though I was born in China of Chinese ancestry and am a member of the dominant ethnic group of Hong Kong’s population of over 7.5 million, a provisional statistic recorded for 2020 by the Census and Statistic Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR).

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My American English and my fractured Cantonese accented by my Toishan village dialect seem to reveal and determine who I am and where I belong, in the eyes of my Chinese Hong Kong colleagues. I often find myself maintaining a silence in hopes of “passing” so as to fit in as I seek a sense of belonging in Hong Kong. I maintain a silence to become a participant-observer in the margins or situated in what He (2002a), an educator, calls the “in-between” space between cultural boundaries that are examined in her groundbreaking work on cross-cultural lives. As a Chinese student from China studying in Canada, He (2002a) felt neither Chinese nor Canadian and felt caught in the backwaters as a river flowed past. The in-between space, I learn, occurs in cultural crossings, and the narratives from this space are ones I explore in this book to study my teacher knowledge. To my American expatriate teaching colleagues and friends in Hong Kong, I am not an American, but a Chinese from the States. To them, I seem to be of two separate entities from two separate continents. And when I visit my extended family in the village of my birth, Toishan, China, I am referred to as an Overseas Chinese and the daughter of Eng Gim Hong, my father. It is an identity that shows where I come from and where I belong within my village clan. And these terms that name me are altogether different from Asian American, an identity forged by the Asian American movement that I had sought to become in the late 1960s in the United States that expresses the unity and commonality of all people of Asian descent. My personal narratives explore the relationship among such multiple identities and my role as a teacher educator. I discover how my multiple identities are a source of tensions, challenges, celebrations, and transformations.

Teaching as Improvisation Teaching in Hong Kong, I am called upon to improvise, adapt, and transform an evolving personal practical knowledge. My beliefs and views on the shared and reciprocal relationship between learners and teachers lead me to invite my Hong Kong students to call me by my first name, “Betty,” as a mark of the shared roles I believe we play as learners and teachers. Like Hollingsworth et al. (1993), Greene (1978), and Noddings (1992), I believe that the exchange of learning and teaching between the learner and the teacher is collaborative, reciprocal, nurturing, and organic. I have come to realize, however, the familiarity that my invitation signifies

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imposes tensions and awkwardness for some of my Hong Kong students because their understanding and expectation of the role of the teacher is one of authority and respect. Some prefer to call me “Missee” and bow their heads to me as a sign of deference and honor. However, I have discovered that my students feel quite comfortable and are accustomed to calling a teacher by an English first name if they are a non-Chinese teacher from overseas, especially a member in the English Department. In my case, however, my Chinese physical features juxtaposed with my American background confound my students’ understanding, and I sense their struggle to figure out who I am and what to call me. My inquiry explores how I respond to such encounters and how these kinds of experiences shape and inform an evolving personal practical knowledge as I negotiate the kind of teacher I am for the Hong Kong milieu. There are a number of significant reasons for this puzzle that addresses teacher knowledge through personal narratives of culture and identity. While Hong Kong is the focus and context to explore teacher knowledge, the puzzles in this journey have international implications. First, the book is an invitation to educators, teacher educators in particular, to recognize how teacher knowledge can be formed through lifelong experiential learning. It is an invitation to readers to search for their own roots, to understand their own values and beliefs, and to reflect on their relationships with others and their understanding of the world. Teacher knowledge (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) is embedded in our personal histories, rather than “knowledge for teachers,” provides an alternative way of learning that can contribute to our understanding of how to prepare future teachers and serve experienced teachers. This is particularly significant for Hong Kong with its view of the primary role of education as one of transmission or “funneling” of information, that has in turn established a predominantly “knowledge for teacher” approach in teacher education. This transmission or funneling in education is evidenced in a curriculum that is driven by testing. Major educational reforms have sought to transform Hong Kong’s emphasis from what Sweeting (1990) describes as an examination-driven curriculum with rote learning and memorization as the primary approaches to teaching and learning into one that promotes critical thinking and self-reflection. At the very beginning stages of a child’s education in Hong Kong, their placement and advancement to the next grade are determined by the results of examinations taken at the end of each school year. Secondary schools or high

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schools are ranked based on a variety of factors including the examination results of their students and the number of graduating students’ admissions to the highly competitive and limited places in Hong Kong’s universities. As a former British Colony for over 150 years until its return to the sovereignty of China in 1997, Hong Kong’s the education system was designed primarily for producing an English-speaking elite to serve as conduits or the upper ranks of Civil Service. Though this system is no longer appropriate in post-colonial, post-modern, and post-handover to China, it remains largely intact. Students completing Hong Kong’s primary schools are assigned to their secondary schools through the results of examinations which determine student placement and academic band or track. Once 5 bands, secondary schools are now ranked by 3 bands, with 1 being the highest. Whether a primary or elementary school student is placed in a band 1 school or pursues a mathematics or science program which in turn, increases the likelihood of university admissions, or is given the opportunity to enroll in a school that uses English as a medium of instruction is dictated primarily by the results of the examinations. With the completion of secondary or high school, students are allowed to take the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Examination (HKDSE). The results from the HKDSE will determine whether the student can enroll in a 4-year bachelor’s degree, a 2-year sub-degree, or choose a vocational-related path. After the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, more progressive reforms and shifts in Hong Kong’s educational policies provide timely and potent opportunities for developing personal narratives of experience for learning and teaching and suggest new directions for educational research. Hong Kong’s Curriculum Development Council (2002), a governmental body that guides and establishes educational curricular goals, promoted a “learning to learn” approach in the early 2000s that engaged learners’ critical thinking and reflection. It introduced a re-organized personal, social, and humanities education curriculum that promoted self-directed inquiry. The curriculum promotes nurturance of the whole person, intellectually, personally, and socially, in a learning culture that is seen as lifelong. With this shift in orientation in the Hong Kong curriculum to embrace the whole of a student’s development, it would seem that personal narratives of experience could play an important role in learning and teaching.

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While the reforms propose a whole-person approach that makes way for personal narratives in the classroom, difficulties may still arise in the reforms’ implementation. Morris and Scott (2003) reflected the international literature on educational reform by pointing out the perennial discrepancy between educational policy and its implementation. This literature underscores the difficulty of achieving policy fidelity in practice and is a caution for the implementation of a curriculum of addressing the whole-person captured by the idea of “learning to learn.” The recently enacted National Security Law of 2020 aimed to safeguard national security, according to the government of Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region, is another significant policy initiative with potential practical consequences. Another reason why this book is significant is that the personal narratives focus on cross-cultural experiences of a kind that is immensely relevant and essential in an increasingly diversified, connected, and global world. The magnitude of the catastrophic events such as September 11, 2001, that resulted in the brutal loss of lives and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York and the pandemic of Corona Virus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) compels us to understand cultural differences and ways of relating to self, others, and the world. I experienced September 11 while living in Hong Kong, the other side of the world, where the shock, pain, and grief were profoundly felt and shared. Many responded to September 11 with shock while others sought revenge, and some celebrated with joyful righteousness and victory. More than anything else, I believe the events of September 11 and its aftermath dramatically confront us with the reality that each of us is a member of an inextricably connected world community. In numerous e-mail messages during this period with my colleagues in Hong Kong and friends, I wrote of the profound impact the September 11 event had for me as a teacher educator and as a Chinese American: I have been sleepless and horrified by the violence, devastation and loss of innocent lives. My heart is too full to speak much but I am easily on the verge of tears. There is a range of response to the attack on the US. Some of my students have expressed sorrow, shock and fear. They feel bombarded by the relentless news reports on T.V. and feel bewildered and confused by what could cause such an attack. September 11 challenges me to examine the stance and role we as educators can take.

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The terrorist attack changes our world. The prominence of this event has been an integral part of my lessons this past week. I can speak to the emotional and personal crisis that is experienced by people around the world in my classes on ‘Guidance and Counseling,’ and ‘Students with Special Needs.’ I can relate the responses from young people as they struggle to understand the madness of these events in my ‘Adolescent Development’ module. I have found addressing these events and how they touch all our lives in a multitude of dimensions helps me grieve for the loss of lives, of innocence, and of homes to make way for hope for the future. I am fearful of the coming events and the war that will surely be declared. I am very watchful of China’s stance and its impact on us as Chinese nationals. Will China condemn the attacks or support the cause of the attackers? What positions will China take and how will that affect me as a Chinese American? I have been sharing my feelings with my students in Hong Kong, and this has been a helpful form of expression. (E-mail messages to colleagues and friends, September 12–17, 2001)

I feel the shock, fear, pain, and anger of September 11 as I do the pandemic of Corona Virus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) and the alarming Anti-Asian Racist Hate crimes in 2019. The Anti-Asian crimes, linked to the pandemic, have a historical precedent that I examine upon my return to California in Chapter 8. As educators, we are positioned in a critical role to facilitate and nurture an awareness and understanding of cultural diversity and an acceptance of others. There is much to be taught and learn from diverse cultures and as educators, we can invite and foster reciprocal learning. We can inspire tolerance, respect, compassion, and cultivate a reciprocal and collaborative world community. The narratives in my journey seek to present my cross-cultural experience as an example of developing empathic understanding of others and of coming to know oneself as a member of a changing and expanding world community. My inquiry is an invitation for educators to reflect on the cross-cultural lives of our students and to develop culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally responsive teachers. Finally, the book provides an alternative way of thinking about and doing research in education. For Hong Kong, specifically, few studies have positioned the experiences of culture and identity in the context of teacher education nor have there been many studies using the personal experience method of narrative inquiry. Narrative inquiry presents transforming

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possibilities for education and the research landscape in Hong Kong. The use of narrative in Hong Kong provides an empowering alternative to what Ho et al. (1989) characterize as research that is an instrument-driven activity with a thoughtless replication of Western studies dominated by a quantitative-oriented approach. Ho, Spinks, and Yeung came to their conclusion as a result of an extensive compilation and analysis of 3,548 selected bibliographic citations pertaining to normal and abnormal behaviors in Chinese culture from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States up to the end of 1986. Though the conclusions of Ho, Spinks, and Yeung focus on the discipline of psychology, it holds significant implications for other academic fields as well. But there is a developing interest and an emerging body of scholarship in Hong Kong that is using narrative inquiry and a more qualitative approach in research that provides an alternative and significant contribution to the academic landscape in Hong Kong. An example of this can be seen in the scholarship of Dr. Vincent Kin-Shing Tse who conducted his thesis research study in Hong Kong using narrative inquiry. Dr. Tse’s thesis, Changing Professional Perspectives: Co-constructing Stories About an Elementary School Principal and a Teacher Educator’s Personal Experience Across Decades (2002), is unique and groundbreaking. Tse believes his study is the first comprehensive narrative inquiry of its kind in Hong Kong. And through this publication series, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, produced by the grant project, Reciprocal Learning in Teacher Education and School Education between Canada and China (2013–2020) by Dr. F. Michael Connelly and Dr. Shijing Xu, we are invited to an extensive and rich collection of scholarly works that promote open communications and inspire conversations between Chinese and Western educators. In their article, Reciprocal Learning in the Partnership Project: From Knowing to Doing in Comparative Research Models (2019), Connelly and Xu describe their innovative and international project and advocate for a model of collaborative reciprocity. Among the published books in the series, Cross-cultural experiences of Chinese immigrant families: In search of home in times of transition (2017) by Shijing Xu, weaves engaging and complex episodes of experience from learners, parents, and families that inform our understanding of crosscultural schooling and the importance of fostering bridges between the East and West. Another is Cheryl Craig’s Curriculum making, reciprocal

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learning, and the best-loved self (2020). Craig invites us to the mutuality and reciprocity in learning that encourages curiosity and respect in a dialogue across civilizations. Teachers, Craig tells us, are more than the subjects they teach and develop “best-loved self” as an educational concept. Finally, Xuefeng Huang, author of Teacher education in professional learning communities: Lessons from the Reciprocal Learning Project (2018) highlights the importance of how different cultures can collaborate and learn from each other as a connected global community. The book provides insightful and thoughtful reflections of lessons learned from obstacles and failures for internationalizing our schools. My personal narratives use the method of narrative inquiry pioneered by Clandinin and Connelly (2000). Connelly and Clandinin follow the central terms in Dewey’s (1938) theory of experience and extend it to narrative inquiry. My journeys are guided by the “three-dimensional” narrative inquiry space created by Connelly and Clandinin. In this threedimensional space, I tell of my past that frames my present and move back and forth from the personal to the social while situating it in a place. My journey takes me to the soils of the landscapes of China, America, and Hong Kong (place) as I explore why and how I became a teacher (past) to the teacher I have become (present) and the teacher I am becoming (future). I explore the experiences of my journeys in each landscape in my own narrative (personal) as I interact with others (social), such as my students, my teaching colleagues, my parents, my extended family in my Chinese village, and global community. In turn, these dimensions interact in a narrative that moves inward, outward, backward, and forward over time. Further discussion related to the theoretical thinking that frames this book appears in a later chapter, “Giving Definition to the Contours of the Landscape: The Scaffolding that Frames the Inquiry.”

Voices and Inquiry Voices in my book include family members, particularly my parents in California, and my extended family in Toishan, China. In Hong Kong, participants include my students and colleagues at The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) who contribute to my understanding of how to be a teacher educator for the Hong Kong milieu. My parents, particularly my mother, are key to understanding who I am and who I wish to become. Through their telling and retelling of their stories of experience with me, they help me discover my roots and understand

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our family history. My mother provides the pivotal and seminal question about who I am that has evolved into this research puzzle. And as my narrative journey progressed, my mother is the voice that poised the tensions that pushed and pulled me to dig deeper into the landscape to uncover and discover the complex meaning of being a Chinese woman. My parents’ stories lead me to the stories of my uncles, aunts, and extended family in Toishan, China and to the stories of our immigrant community. Alex and Suki, featured in the book, are former pre-service students at EdUHK where I was a teacher educator. We first met when they were assigned to me as their advisor and mentor. Alex and Suki continued their relationship with me after they graduated and became teachers themselves, and we have since become colleagues and friends. Because of the importance of their relationship to me, how they have informed my teaching, and because of their generosity to sharing their stories with me, they have become integral to understanding my teacher knowledge. All who are featured in the book received a letter of invitation to participate and signed a consent form that ensured their confidentiality and privacy. Interviews were recorded through audio tapes and transcribed. All transcripts of interviews were provided to participants, and the narratives that appear in the text were reviewed by the participants. As needed, audio-taped interviews were translated from Chinese to English. Interview questions were developed, and these questions served as a starting point or guide for the interviews. Interview questions included: What Chinese values or beliefs do you hold, and how do they influence your life? Describe a significant experience growing up as a Chinese, and Where do you feel at “home” or strongly feel a sense of belonging? Frequently, I wrote my interviews as field notes or journal entries that served as a basis for the narratives that appear in the book. To substantiate the credibility or plausibility of the stories, I conducted interviews with multiple sources along with review of archival materials and artifacts. Materials were collected through various methods over a five-year period. The focus of my inquiry drew on a review of literature across academic disciplines and from diverse fields. I drew heavily from the literature of teacher development and teacher knowledge, Hong Kong’s educational reforms, Asian American Studies, sinology, anthropology, and from literature devoted to the study of autobiography and self-narrative. And to understand the qualities of bamboo that I use as a metaphor throughout the book, I delved into the literature of horticulture. In writing my book,

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I intersperse my review of literature throughout the chapters in an attempt to maintain the continuity of the narrative while citing relevant scholarship. In addition to a review of literature, my data collection includes materials from an archival search, official and government documents, interviews and informal conversations, participant-observations, reflective writings, journals dating to the 1960s, e-mail and personal messages, photographs, lecture notes dating from the1970s, employment records, academic records or report cards, letters, and artifacts.

Metaphors Lakoff and Johnson (1980), in Metaphors We Live By, discuss the importance of metaphors and how they serve to guide our lives. They believe that metaphors are pervasive in our everyday thought and actions. I use metaphors such as the bamboo, landscape, and journey throughout the book to convey my experiences of self-discoveries to understand my teacher knowledge. I find the use of these metaphors helpful for thinking through my research, and they provided the supporting links that connect each chapter. The metaphors facilitate my representation of my experiences as I cross linguistic and cultural boundaries and expand my thinking of the complexities and fluidity of my culture and identity. My selection of the bamboo metaphor has its origin with my mother’s likeness of me to a “hollow bamboo” which has an Asian appearance but is empty of Chinese substance. The landscape of China’s rich soil provides the roots for the bamboo seedling and nourishes its growth. The roots of my bamboo are complex, extensive, intertwined, and portable with the timbers of the bamboo pliable yet strong. The bamboo is uprooted, transplanted to fresh soils, grafted and re-grown, and harvested, as my journey takes me on crossings and crisscrossing of cultures and continents over a span of a lifetime. And like a bamboo, I am called upon to be flexible and resilient to sway in a breeze and to withstand the force of a typhoon. The versatility of the bamboo represents the adaptations and improvisations which my cultural crossings have demanded of me as I compose a life for myself of blended and multiple identities and cultures that inform and shape an evolving and contested teacher knowledge. As my research puzzle progresses, however, I discover that I am not hollow and that that the bamboo’s center serves as a core where there is “somethingness in nothingness.” I also discover that this metaphor that I live by may also

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be one that restricts or can be harmful in crossing cultures. The epilogue provides further elaboration of the bamboo metaphor.

Looking Forward From the “Introduction: A Hollow Bamboo” of this chapter, let me provide an overview of the book by looking forward to “All I Have Are My Experiences: The Soil that Nurtures and Flourishes,” Chapter 2, to chronicle the primacy of experience as a beginning point for understanding my family roots, my community’s history, and my personal practical knowledge. I begin with the development of Asian American Studies which flourished with the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s. As one of the first teachers in the newly formed Asian American Studies programs in the universities in California, I did not come to the classroom armed with textbooks and theories from established academic disciplines. All I had were my experiences. The period is a pivotal moment in my life that provides a platform for exploring and studying my personal narratives of culture and identity. This is followed by “Giving Definition to the Contours of the Landscape: The Scaffolding that Frames the Inquiry,” Chapter 3, which provides the conceptual framework for exploring my puzzles and examines narrative inquiry as a research method and phenomena. I find in narrative inquiry a recognized and established scholarly framework, an entrée to writing self as an act of writing about its people that engages me in acts of recovery and reclamation of my voice and the voices in my classroom and community. “A Sojourner in a Village Landscape: The Earth that Seeds,” Chapter 4, begins the personal journey in the village of my birth. This is where my roots began, grounded me, and called for my return after growing up in the United States. I see myself as a sojourner in a village landscape who, like others before me, quest for culture and identity. Understanding my Toishan roots lead me to tracing our family’s immigration to the United States. “Journeying to Gold Mountain: Uprooted and Transplanted to New Soil” Chapter 5 and “Seeking Gold Mountain: Grafted and Propagated,” Chapter 6 chronicle our immigration from Toishan to America as a land of opportunity and promises and provide narratives of what we hoped for and what we found. The United States promised a mountain of gold, but while my family and I found many opportunities, we were also confronted

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with the realities of my parents’ sacrifice and harsh labor working in the grocery stores, canneries, and garment sweatshops. Recognizing how education could free me of such hardships, my parents instilled in me the value of education, and I pursued a career as a teacher. “Hong Kong, The People’s Republic of China: Transported with Multiple Grafts and Growths,” Chapter 7 tells of my return to Hong Kong as a daughter of China, a Chinese American expatriate in a British Colony that now has become a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China under a “one country, two systems” policy. This experience is another cultural crossing that I learned to navigate and negotiate to construct yet another identity for myself in the Hong Kong milieu. I become a teacher educator at The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). Through my exploration of my personal narratives, I connect and return to the questions of why and how I became a teacher, the kind of teacher I have become and am becoming. In Chapter 8, “Uprooted, Transplanted Grafted Redux: From Hong Kong to Reentry to the United States,” I narrate my return to California, where I grew up, after living and working overseas for almost 20 years in Hong Kong. Though I have roots here, I find I must get re-acquainted and re-enculturated to understand its current culture and my place in it. Reflecting, reminiscing, shifting back-and-forth, crossing and crisscrossing between the two continents, I explore and discover commonalities, unities, disparities, and tensions that challenge and inform who I am. “Looking Back and Looking Forward,” Chapter 9 reviews the originating journey and re-visits the significance of the book and its contribution to education. It also “looks forward” to puzzles yet to be explored that form a collection of “Could-Be” stories. Finally, the book concludes with an Epilogue, “A Gathering Harvest.” The epilogue provides the quietude of being in the midst of a bamboo grove to reflect and extend the meaning and significance drawn from my personal narratives. A Lifeline, or a brief chronology of significant life experiences, is provided to clarify and bridge some of the gaps of time that appear in the book.

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References Alter, G. (1993). Empowerment through narrative: Considerations for teaching, learning and life. Thresholds in Education, 19, 3–5. Carter, K. (1993). The place of story in the study of teaching and teacher education. Educational Researcher, 22(1), 5–12, 18. https://doi.org/10.3102/001 3189X022001005 Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass. Coles, R. (1989). The call of stories. Houghton Mifflin. Conle, C. (1996). Resonance in preservice teacher inquiry. American Educational Research Journal, 33(2), 297–325. https://doi.org/10.2307/116 3286 Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1988). Teachers as curriculum planners. The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Press. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2–14. https://doi.org/10.2307/117 6100 Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1991). Narrative inquiry: Storied experience. In E. Short (Ed.), Forms of Curriculum Inquiry (pp. 121–152). State University of New York Press. Connelly, F. M., & Dienes, B. (1982). The teacher’s role in curriculum planning: A case study. In K. Leithwood (Ed.), Studies in curriculum decision making (pp. 183–198). The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Press. Connelly, F. M., & Xu, S. (2019). Reciprocal learning in the Partnership Project: From knowing to doing in comparative research models. Teachers and Teaching, 25(6), 627–646. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2019. 1601077 Criag, C. (2020). Curriculum making, reciprocal learning and the best loved self. Springer Palgrave MacMillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-601 01-0 Crites, S. (1971). The narrative quality of experience. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 39(3), 291–311. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/ XXXIX.3.291 Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Simon & Schuster. Diamond, C. T., & Mullen, C. A. (Eds.). (1999). The postmodern educator. Peter Lang Publishing. Edel, L. (1984). Writing lives: Principia biographica. Norton. Eisner, E. (1988, June/July). The primacy of experience and the politics of method. Educational Researcher, 15–20. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. Basic Books. Geertz, C. (1995). After the fact. Harvard University Press. Greene, M. (1978). Landscapes of learning. Teachers College Press.

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He, M. F. (2002a). A narrative inquiry of cross-cultural lives: Lives in China. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 34(3), 301–321. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00220270110108196 Ho, D. Y. F., Spinks, J. A., & Yeung, C. S. H. (Eds.). (1989). Chinese pattern of behavior: A sourcebook of psychological and psychiatric studies. Praeger Press. Hollingsworth, S., Dybdahl, M., & Minarik, L. T. (1993). By chart and chance and passion: The importance of relational knowing in learning to teach. Curriculum Inquiry, 23(1), 5–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/036 26784.1993.11076103 Hong Kong Curriculum Development Council. (2002). Basic education curriculum guide: Building on strengths. Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. https://cd.edb.gov.hk/becg/eng lish/notice.html Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government of the People’s Republic of China. Census and Statistics Department. (2021, May 23). https://www. censtatd.gov.hk/en/ Huang, X. (2018). Teacher education in professional learning communities: Lessons from the Reciprocal Learning Project. Springer Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11516-020-0025-5 Hunt, D. E. (1987). Beginning with ourselves. Brookline Books. Hunt, D. E. (1992). The renewal of personal energy. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Press. Kerby, A. P. (1991). Narrative and the self . Indiana University Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/414069 Morris, P., & Scott, I. (2003). Educational reform and policy implementation in Hong Kong. Journal of Educational Policy, 18(1), 71–84. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/0268093032000042218 Noddings, N. (1992). The challenge to care in schools: An alternative approach to education. Teachers College Press. Olney, J. (Ed.). (1980). Autobiography: Essays theoretical and critical. Princeton University Press. Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge. University of Chicago Press. Sweeting, A. (1990). Education in Hong Kong pre-1841 to 1941: Fact and opinion. Hong Kong University Press. Tse, V. K. S. (2002). Changing professional perspectives: Co-constructing stories about an elementary school principal and a teacher educator’s personal experience across decades (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Witherell, C., & Noddings, N. (Eds.). (1991). Stories lives tell: Narrative and dialogue in education. Teachers College Press. Xu, S. (2017). Cross-Cultural schooling experiences of Chinese immigrant families: In search of home in times of transition. Springer Palgrave Macmillan. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46103-8

CHAPTER 2

All I Have Are My Experiences: The Soil That Nurtures and Flourishes

My mother thought me a juk sing or a hollow bamboo devoid of proper Chinese values and culture and taught me to question what it means to be Chinese. Asian American Studies provided the community and intellectual forum to share, write, research, and act on this seminal question. My mother’s lament about what I had lost as a Chinese American provided the experiential seeds that grew into my quest for my culture and identity that was first explored on the soils of Asian American Studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s and has now flourished into this book to explore my teacher knowledge. This discussion serves as a platform from which to begin the exploration of the experiences in my personal narrative that inform and shape my teacher knowledge. It is from my participation in the Asian American movement and Asian American Studies that I begin the conscious and systematic narrative of recovery and reclamation of the stories of experience that have been invisible and lost to me. My participation in the Asian American movement and Asian American Studies provided the awakening of a new way of thinking about my culture and identity, the power of students and the community, and a new understanding about the social and political structures and forces around me that determine my place in the future. Coming full circle, it would seem, having crossed and crisscrossed the continents of North America to Asia over time, I discover in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. C. Eng, Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82032-9_2

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the narrative inquiry of Clandinin and Connelly (2000) the bridge and unity for exploring and understanding my personal practical knowledge as a teacher educator in Hong Kong.

On (Re)Memory I tell and retell the stories that appear in my exploration in my return to my California home in this present time and space. I tell my stories of experience in the Asian American student movement and the development of Asian American Studies that occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s, decades ago. Given the intervening span of time, I question whether my memories can be relied upon to convey the “facts” and “truths” of the story. Educators and scholars have studied extensively the question of memory as it relates to realities. In this personal narrative form that I use for my book, my memories become my “realities” and my reconstructed truths, as Zinsser (1987) might say of my autobiography. May I have practiced self-deception in the retelling of my stories and embellished the “truths” to fashion a recollected, fabricated composite memory of an image of who I wish I could have been? The answers are “perhaps” and “most likely.” In Kerby’s Narrative of the Self (1991), he contends that memories are of representative images and thoughts that are occasions for interpretation and narration. In The Aesthetics of Self-Deception (1979), Crites contends that when we explore experiences, we are engaging in artistic expression. We may practice self-deception, and the dynamics of experience are such that it provides not only truths but also falsehoods. Crites believes that we are all sincerely confused and deluded and that the practice of self-deception is the rule and not the exception unless one is a saint. Crites maintains that self-deception can be practiced through lying, storytelling, reshaping, or re-arranging the facts, through omission, and creating a cover story to hide the real story whether the story is negative or positive. As the author of this book who is both the object and subject of the study, I am challenged and alert to Crites’ views. Deciphering and understanding human experiences through stories is a highly complex and difficult process. From Crites’ argument, one raises the question of what is truth and reality. Perhaps in my exploration of teacher knowledge through my personal narratives, I practice self-deception as suggested by Crites. But according to Zinsser (1987), a writer’s version of the facts is what it was like for them and this is the only truth that the memoir can

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convey. Clandinin and Connelly (1994) point out that autobiographies are but one possible reconstruction of one’s life and that there could be others. Moreover, those who question multiple realities found in qualitative research as described by Denzin and Lincoln (1994) and Lincoln and Guba (1985) will most likely also challenge the reliability and validity of my narratives. My personal narrative serves to explore complex and personal experiences that are detailed and particular to me. As such, this personal narrative does not claim to develop generalizations and universal truths. During the course of retelling my stories of experience of the period that are depicted, I drew data from a variety of sources that included a review of literature, personal journals from the 1960s and 1970s, newspaper clippings, notes from meetings in Asian American Studies dating from 1970, lecture notes used in my teaching in Asian American Studies, websites and informational materials for various Asian American Studies programs in the United States, employment records, letters of reference, academic transcripts, school and family photographs, interviews and conversations and medical records. These sources of data served to substantiate, supplement and facilitate my process of remembering and informing the stories of experience that shape my personal narratives.

Experience as Beginning and Focus Experience was the beginning point and focus in developing Asian American Studies in the early 1970s in the United States. The civil rights movement, the anti-war movement protesting the United States involvement in Vietnam, and the student movements of the period challenged and compelled universities to recognize the place of ethnic minorities in society and in the curriculum. This was a tumultuous period of political and social upheavals in the United States that charged the American dominant hierarchy of systematically rendering voices of ethnic communities silent and powerless. Published materials of the role of Asian Americans during this period are limited but one such documentation is provided by Omatsu (1994) in a chapter in the book, The State of Asian America. Omatsu depicts this period as one of struggles that transformed the lives of “ordinary” people. The growing awareness and consciousness created by the social and political movements and Asian American Studies of that epoch forcefully compelled me to reflect on my personal culture and identity. I came to

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view my growing ethnic awareness and self-redefinition as an act of defiance and recovery of power that had been denied my community and me. I developed a growing realization of the systematic and purposeful ways that the voices of my community had been excluded within the curriculum. This realization gave me a deep sense of anger and betrayal. My views found expression in the power of community organizing and education as constructive and meaningful ways for social change and social justice.

“On Strike!” at San Francisco State College The “Third World Strike” by students at the former San Francisco State College (SFS) in the fall of 1968 was a powerful and transformative experience for me. This was the era of the Civil Rights movement and I am beholden to this period for inspiring me to see the need for developing a movement for my own Asian American community. It is believed that the SFC strike contributed to the birth of the Asian American movement. Third World Students were composed of Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian Americans who went on strike by boycotting classes, and brought the SFS to a standstill with protests and demands for educational equity at the college. This period was truly radical and revolutionary. The strike resulted in the first School of Ethnic Studies and gave the power to the activists to create the curriculum, recruit, hire, and fire faculty at SFC. Programs such as the Equal Opportunity Program and Affirmative Action were established to recruit, admit, and retain underrepresents minorities to the university. Indeed, the strike was a profoundly educative experience for me. It was a cathartic period that began the transformative journey from striving to become the stereotypic model minority to a student activist. The writings that follow bring forward my memories of the educative experiences of that period.

A Chinese Banana I was a sophomore in college during this period and I recall being captured and moved by the vision of students demanding and gaining a measure of control and power from the college administration. The powerful images were vividly recorded on television news and in the press. The strike at San Francisco State College strike gave evidence to “student power” and paved the way for similar experiences at my college,

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Sacramento State College, now called California State University, Sacramento (CSU, Sacramento). Over five decades later, the images of the students at the San Francisco State College strike stay with me, bring home profoundly and vividly by not only the fact that these were students like myself but also Asians like myself. Never before had I witnessed Asians, alongside with Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans, being so aggressive and militant. It challenged my own self-image and understanding of Asian Americans as being the “model minority”: obedient, soft-spoken, and industrious. We termed those of us who were yellow on the outside but white inside as bananas. Though we had the yellow skin of our Asian ancestral roots, our inside substance was composed of values and beliefs of a white culture. Based on my personal writings of that period that became writings shared with my students in my classes, I can see how my identity was in the process of being “unpeeled” to reveal who I had become and to explore who I wished to be. One such story, “I Forgot My Eyes Were Brown,” tells of how I found myself emulating and striving to meet the standards of beauty represented by a Barbie Doll culture and Scarlett O’Hara in the book, Gone with the Wind. A glance at my university transcript of my academic performance during this period showed a shift by my declining grades and academic performance as an indication of the person I was and the person I was becoming. Previously, not one to be absent from a class and a responsible student who studied diligently, I almost failed my biology class. Having missed several biology class meetings due to the hectic activities of the student movement, I finally attended class. Upon opening the door to the classroom, I found the class in silence as I discovered that everyone was taking a test. I recall how stunned I felt that I had forgotten about the test and, needless to say, not prepared to take the examination. Without going into the classroom or speaking with the lecturer, I closed the door and walked away in a daze. In retrospect, this may not seem a very serious infraction, but I can still feel how bewildered and disoriented I felt trying to figure out how the priorities in my life had so dramatically shifted from unconsciously striving to fulfill the expectations of the model minority student to becoming someone else all together.

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A Model Minority Unknowingly, I appeared to have lived out my life in the tensions created by the notion of the “model minority” during my childhood and high school years. The idea of Asian Americans as a model minority created identity issues and tensions for me within my family and my community. I realized how pervasive this view of Asian Americans as a model minority had become and how it belied the realities of our community. At the height of promoting Asians as a model minority in the 1960s, Chinese families in San Francisco’s Chinatown had medium incomes of 25% less than the norm, according to Uyematsu (1971), a community activist. Chinatowns in San Francisco and New York have been characterized as “glittering ghettos” by Wei (1993). Chinatowns were slums with substandard dwellings, infested with rats and cockroaches. Tuberculosis was twice the national and state average with high rate of suicide and many too poor to afford medical insurance. Growing up, I was oblivious and ignorant to the conditions in my community, nor understood the significance of the working conditions of my own mother and father. My father worked six and half days a week and, except for Sundays, 12 hours a day. His working hours was not an uncommon practice within our Chinese community. Nor did I find it unusual that my mother labored in the canning industry followed by work in the garment factories during the off season left us as young children to care for our newly born brother. My parents modeled the work ethic of many immigrants like themselves in the United States and their experiences inform my personal narratives. Following the examples of my parents’ hard work, I became the first high school graduate in my family and graduated early from high school by attending summer school and doing advanced studies. Unknowingly, I fulfilled the stereotypical expectations of the studious and hardworking student who overcame the obstacles that confronted an immigrant generation. At graduation, I possessed the academic qualifications to attend a private school like Stanford and any of university of my choosing. But realizing that it would be a financial hardship for my workingclass parents, I chose to attend a college in my hometown to minimize expenses to complete my undergraduate degree and teaching credential. The State College system rather than the University of California system also appealed to me because it was known for the strength of its teaching

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that focused on the relationship between teachers and students rather than academic research, which I had not seen as relevant to my life at the time.

Forging a New Identity Like many others, I was inspired by the events of the San Francisco State College strike. In 1968, I became one of the founding organizers of the first Asian American student organization, calling ourselves “Asian Americans for Action” (AAA), which became the representative body that met and negotiated with the College President and the university administration. AAA contributed to the establishment of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Sacramento after intensive negotiations with the university administration, organized demonstrations, and petition drives on campus. The university administration was resistant and objected to the establishment of Ethnic Studies and it is through the revolutionary actions of Third World Student that Ethnic Studies was established. This experience of establishing Ethnic Studies was shared by other universities across the nation at the time. For Asian American Studies, our goal was to provide a forum within academia to systematically recover and reclaim our personal stories and histories to become an integral part of the university’s curriculum. We negotiated for the classes to fulfill requirements for graduation, an indication of its rightful place within the curriculum. Through this process, we were forging a new identity by redefining and transforming ourselves to becoming Asian Americans. We were empowered to challenge the stereotypical images of the model minority, bananas who were yellow on the outside and white inside, oriental, chinks, coolies, gooks, and Buddhahead. We rejected other stereotypical images of the hard working and studious student, the Hong Kong prostitute portrayed in the 1960 movie, “The World of Suzie Wong,” the servile servant and the mysterious and cunning Charlie Chan. I became one of the original lecturers of Asian American Studies and developed and taught the first Asian American Woman course at CSU, Sacramento and later at the University of California, Davis. As described by Hirabayashi and Alquizola (1994), this period was indeed “revolutionary” in intent and practice. As a coalition of student activists, we had the authority to hire and fire and to determine the curriculum that became the Asian American Studies. I do not recall the specific details or reasons for my selection to be one of its first faculty members. Perhaps it was because

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I had demonstrated my commitment to Asian American Studies since I was a founding member and continue to advocate for its development. As such, I did not “apply” for a teaching position in the Asian American Studies but felt “pressed” into service by the movement. My becoming a teacher in Asian American Studies was not part of a career or professional development plan. My career path was to become a third-grade teacher, a respectable job for a woman. As lecturers in Asian American Studies, our status was not on par with other faculty members. We were hired on a lower salary level, did not qualify to receive medical and retirement benefits, were hired on temporary contracts, and were not given tenured track appointments. These terms of employment were inconsequential for me at the time. I believed deeply in the work we were doing in Asian American Studies, and the terms of my employment were of secondary concern. It was not until much later that I learned of the tenure system in the universities as an issue of political and social justice. My understanding of tenure came through extended political campaigns protesting the denial of tenure for some Asian American Studies faculty members. They were denied tenure when their research and publications about Asian Americans were judged to be esoteric and irrelevant. Some of these cases have been documented in the first Asian American Studies journal, Amerasia Journal, published by the University of California, Los Angeles, and serve to demonstrate the persistence of our struggle to receive fair and equal treatment.

Of Struggles and Neophytes Reflecting on this experience over four decades later, I realize how the establishment of Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies was a momentous and historical period in re-defining the educational landscape across the country. Omatsu (1994) described this period of struggles that profoundly changed our communities with the growth of grassroots originations, the establishment of Asian American Studies, and a new generation of writers, poets, and artists. Importantly, this was a new way of thinking that challenged concepts of power and authority. As neophytes in academy, we were guided by our experiences and a deep commitment for social justice. My experiences as a woman and a Chinese immigrant became the subject of the curriculum. I participated alongside of Black, Chicano, and Native American student activists who negotiated with the university administration to establish Ethnic Studies.

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I was just an “ordinary” person and do not believe there was anything special about me that I was chosen to be one of the program’s first lecturers. Honed by the experiential lessons from my mother’s lament of being a juk sing or a “hollow bamboo” and by the forceful images of Asian American students participating in the San Francisco State College strike, I happened to be present at a pivotal moment that demanded an Asian American voice. At the time I began my teaching in Asian American Studies, I was just completing my final year in teacher education and only slightly more “qualified” than my fellow Asian American student activists. My teaching at CSU, Sacramento and at the University of California at Davis as a teacher and counselor continued for a period of over 10 years. Looking back, I would characterize myself as an ordinary person, unworldly and shy, who was placed in extraordinary circumstances during a remarkable epoch. My fellow student activists and I were in our mid-20s who sat at the same table with the university president and renowned scholars. The university’s administration was concern and sensitive to the local news media that gave extensive coverage to our protests and demands and wanted to at least go through the motions of being understanding and tolerant. We were seldom taken seriously or welcomed at the table and I felt the administration was patronizing and dismissive. We were seen as intimidating and confrontational militants who were annoying and, hopefully, go away upon graduation. I viewed the administration’s establishment of Ethnic Studies as a temporary measure and an appeasement of the liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s civil rights and student movements. Liem (1998) reaffirms this view and states that Ethnic Studies Programs did not develop from the initiatives of the administration but resulted from the demands of disaffected students, faculty, administrators, and community activists. Further indication of the administration’s dismissive attitude was the status Ethnic Studies was accorded at many other universities as a “program” rather than an academic department. This designation meant our courses were limited to being a service-oriented program designed to meet the general education requirements for graduation rather than an essential academic area of study. Our program and faculty were housed in makeshift temporary bungalow offices for decades. We did not have the welcome, status, budget, and resources within the university to be regarded as an academic discipline to justify departmental status. According to the Association for Asian American Studies (2021) and

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website search of Asian American Studies, there are now courses offered in universities across the nation that are identified as programs as well as departments, an encouraging indication of the growth and strength of Asian American Studies.

“I Didn’t Know I Ought to Be Afraid” I recall a local newspaper prominently reporting on a meeting between the students and university administration. As the only woman, I am pictured sitting alongside Black, Hispanic, and Native American fellow students and comrades holding a press conference, stating our demands for the creation of an Ethnic Studies program. I must have felt nervous appearing before the press for the first time, but I also felt strongly about the importance of our demands and felt fortified by common unity of my fellow students in our shared belief. Once, I asked my mother if she, not speaking any English and in a foreign country, was afraid when we were subject to a strip search and interrogation by customs officers at our arrival at the airport when we first immigrated to the United States in 1955. My mother replied resolutely: “I didn’t know I ought to be afraid.” The events of the student movement that led to the press conference had that same quality for me. These were events that I had not been prepared for; few of us were, and I “didn’t know I ought to be afraid.” This scene is particularly eventful because my life up to that moment had very little contact with non-Chinese. The news clipping of this event showed, I believe, my shift in identity and the tensions that emerged in questioning who I was becoming. I grew up in a predominantly Chinese immigrant community, and looking back at many of my elementary school class pictures, most of my classmates were Chinese while others appeared to be White. All my teachers and principals appeared to be White. I say “appeared to be” because this was before I understood the meaning and significance of the color of one’s skin or the complex identities that are formed by racial categories or social and cultural ideologies. It could very well have been that some of the “Whites” that are pictured in my school photographs at the time were in fact Hispanics, Native Americans, or of other ethnic identities I was ignorant about at the time. But it seems that in some understood manner of knowing, perhaps modeled and shaped by my family, my best friends and circle of friendship were confined to Chinese females throughout my years in elementary and high schools. And somehow, I felt I knew with a certainty that my first

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boyfriend and the man I would marry ought to be not just Asian but Chinese, and preferably one from the same village in China who could speak the same Chinese dialect. By college age, however, I was ready for a departure from the confines of my small circle of Chinese friends. Jane, a Chinese classmate of mine since high school, shared a similar point of view, and we found in each other the comfort of a familiar relationship. We sought out new adventures together by meeting people of various cultures in college. Jane and I had not been close friends in high school, but our relationship grew when we found ourselves attending the same college to pursue a teaching career and ended up taking many of the same classes together. I believe the enthusiasm and eagerness of our youth to begin a new phase in our lives and our receptiveness to new ideas and to meeting new people contributed to my involvement in the student movement and Asian American Studies. I recall proudly showing my mother the newspaper article from the press conference where I am pictured with my Black, Hispanic, and Native American fellow students stating our demands for the establishment of Ethnic Studies. I wanted her to understand the importance and significance of this work. My mother, however, shook her head in alarm and disapproval of my public appearance and was thankful that the somewhat grainy black-and-white photograph made it difficult to identify me as her daughter. My mother was mortified and felt a loss of face in that her daughter was rubbing shoulders with people of color in such a public and aggressive manner. And because I was one of the few Asian women in the movement, my mother feared I might marry a non-Chinese. That there might be a black man for a future son-in-law horrified her. The disparity in our views and our discordant responses to the event continued to be a source of tension between my mother and me. When I recalled this event with my mother in a recent conversation, she dismissed that period as a phase that “I had grown out of” that had done only superficial and momentary harm. Well, I have not “grown out” of this period nor have the experiences that took place during that period been dismissed and forgotten. The experiences of that period are embedded in who I have become and the kind of teacher I am for the Hong Kong milieu. I will continue to explore how the values and beliefs from this period of social activism have extended to the Hong Kong context and how my shifting culture and identity are adapted, improvised, and transformed for my Hong Kong

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classroom. Looking back, I feel profoundly honored and privileged to have been given the opportunity to voice the needs of my community by justifying the study of Asian Americans as an essential part of the university curriculum. Today, Ethnic Studies has gained recognition and status within higher education, though the tensions and struggles for funding and a place within the universities have continued. Added to the complexities of the struggles have been the divergent, and sometimes conflicting, views held by faculty within ethnic studies programs. These struggles are to be expected and indicate the development and growth of the programs. In 1984, the University of California at Berkeley became the first to offer a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies as documented in a chronology by Wang (1997). According to its program description, the Ph.D. encompasses the historical and sociocultural study of Asian Americans, African Americans, Chicanos and Latinos, and Native Americans. Through website searches of various Asian American Studies in universities across the nation, Asian American Studies has grown from California in the 1960s to many other states. Programs have been established at such campuses as Cornell, Columbia, Ohio State, University of Colorado, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The academic journal, Amerasia Journal, founded at the University of California at Los Angeles in March 1971, serves as a resource for Asian American Studies and the Asian American community. Amerasia Journal is regarded as a national and leading journal of interdisciplinary research in Asian American Studies. In an announcement of a special issue of Amerasia Journal, commemorating its 30th year anniversary, the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (2004) aimed to collect and publish cutting edge Asian American materials for this emerging discipline. Later, the Journal of Asian American Studies was established in 1998 in partnership with Johns Hopkins University Press, and according to Liu and Okihiro (1998), has as its mission to establish Asian American Studies as a scholarly and academic discipline.

Experiential Knowledge Through our personal narratives of self, we became both the object and subject of the new curriculum in Asian American Studies in the 1960s. We were empowered by authority of our personal narratives. As bell hooks,

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the writer and feminist, states in her book, Teaching to Transgress, Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994), holds that we all bring experiential knowledge to the classroom as a way of knowing. The acknowledgment of experiential knowledge enhances learning and lessens the possibility of participants being silenced. The titles of our classes included the “Asian American Experience,” an introductory and foundations class, “Asian Women in America,” “History of the Asian American Experience,” and the “Asian American Community.” At the time, Asian American Studies at CSU, Sacramento had the ambitious task of studying the experiences and lives of the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Pacific Islanders. As teachers and learners, we did not enter the classroom prepared with the conventional and established political framework, social and economic theories, or historical analysis to teach our subjects. There were few research studies or textbooks about our people or our communities to use in our readings written by trusted and authentic voices of authors of Asian descent. Instead, as learners and teacher, we turned to writing our own personal narratives that became the textbooks for our curriculum. Learning was a reciprocal and collaborative experience. We wrote of personal stories of growing up and striving to become the model minority who excelled in science and math, and being terrorized, bullied, and taunted with being called “Chink Chong Chinaman,” Coolies, Gooks, Buddhahead and told to “go back to where you came from.” Asian women, subjected to both race and gender, wrote about striving to fulfill a blond and blue-eyed Barbie Doll culture by bleaching their hair and cosmetic surgery. These stories have always been in our communities as secret, sacred, or honored stories. Asian American Studies provided the platform to give an empowering voice to these experiences while providing the historical, social, and political context to reflect and understand ourselves and our relationship to others. These stories of experience by learners and teachers formed the first written textbooks for an emerging discipline and created a collaborative community for curriculum making in Asian American Studies. Through writing stories of the self, we are recovering and reclaiming our identity and creating a sense of community. When our stories were given historical, social, and political context, they were understood and resonated with others across the nation. Our personal narratives that became the text for our curriculum in Asian American Studies were rich, intimate, and authentic. We intended

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our stories to be an integral and essential part of the American experience and not be dismissed or inserted as a special marginalized community. New and relevant knowledge was being created through the study of Asian American communities that could change and revise the whole of our understanding of American society. During this period, our classes in the Asian American Studies were over-enrolled and in high demand by many others like ourselves who sought to fill a personal and intellectual void in their education to understand their culture and identity.

Emerging Asian American Literature and Art A new generation of writers, poets, and artists have flourished since the beginning of the Asian American movement and Asian American Studies. An vibrant and powerful body of literature and art from Asian Americans has begun to trace and recover the indigenous Asian oral tradition of “talking stories” to transmit our people’s history. The literature has expanded to a robust and diverse range of artistic mediums and genres that include histories, fiction, memoirs, documentaries, and films. Here, I highlight just a few of the Asian American contributions and their significance. Maxine Kingston Hong’s book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts written in 1976, became a welcomed text for teaching my class, Asian American Women. Hong created an innovative new form that blended autobiography with Chinese mythology and folktales. More recently, Kiyo’s Story: A Japanese-American Family’s Quest for the American Dream (2009) by Kiyo Sato is an inspiring memoir of her family’s journey from Japan to California and their experience with the internment camps during World War II. Author Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese refugee, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among numerous other awards, for his remarkable book, The Sympathizer (2015). The Sympathizer is a thrilling spy novel that takes place in the midst of the chaos during the fall of Saigon. On the last flight out of Saigon to America, the narrator tells the story of complex political loyalties, a life between two worlds, betrayal, love, and the legacy of the Vietnam War. Film director Chloé Zhao became the first woman of color to win the Oscar in 2021 for directing her film, Nomadland. Born in Beijing and educated in London and Los Angeles, Zhao seeks to tell truths and authenticity through films. In Nomadland, she explores the lives of nomads who choose to live unconventional lives on the road less travel

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that blends fiction and documentary. Zhao’s remarkable accomplishment in a field that is less traveled by Asian Americans serves as a shining role model. Also of significance is the compelling book, Freedom Without Justice: The Prison Memoirs of Chol Soo Lee (2017) co-edited by Chol Soo Lee and Richard Kim, Professor of Asian American Studies at University of California, Davis. The memoir chronicles the wrongful incarceration of Lee, a Korean immigrant, in the 1970s and his survival in prison. Lee’s case became a national political movement that contributed to the historical release of Lee from Death Row in 1983. The book addresses the discrimination by race and class in US justice system, youth at risk, prison gang, and death row. In the field of education, authors Dina Maramba and Timothy Fong write of innovative and culturally relevant ways to enhance student outcomes. Their edited book, Transformative Practices for Minority Student Success : Accomplishments of Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander (2020), is the first book to focus elusively on this group. The studies in the book challenge misconceptions and offer viable alternative practices and models to address student needs.

Looking Back at Sitting in Front When possible, I arrange the seating in my classroom in circle. I believe that the circular formation encourages and represents the reciprocal and collaborative role we play as learners and teacher in a shared conversational dialogue that recognizes, values, and respects the voice of everyone in the class. However, one semester I found I was assigned to a lecture theater with desks bolted to the floor. I took my place in front, at the podium intended for the teacher. As the students entered, this is where they saw me when I introduced myself as the teacher. As anticipated, there were gasps of surprise, some nervous laughter and bewilderment. I was not much older than my students, dressed casually in jeans, with my hair worn long and straight. I must have confounded their image of the usual university professor. At the time, there were few Asian American teachers except in the sciences, math, and engineering. Rarer, still, were Asian American women. What I had not anticipated, however, was the ambivalence and mixed acceptance of an Asian American teacher who so closely resembled themselves. One such student in my class later confided in me that when she first saw me sitting in front of the class, she thought I was a student

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and had felt offended and disturbed that I would dare sit in the position reserved for the professor. Indeed, how dare I, and others like me, sit in that position. How presumptuous and impertinent I must have appeared to displace and turn upside down the traditional image and role of the university professor, to re-define the relationship between learners and teachers and the process of learning and teaching. I was not only “re-arranging” the classroom seating but also challenging fundamental assumptions about the curriculum and the role and relationship of learners and teachers. I believed the classroom was a “family” and a collaborative community who shared a reciprocal teaching and learning experience.

Theorizing the Asian American Experience But we intended the vision of Asian American Studies to go beyond experience to evolve into a process of theory making that genuinely reflected our communities. We knew that going beyond experience would strengthen Asian American Studies and establish it as a scholarly discipline within the universities. While experience was a fundamental and essential beginning point for Asian American Studies, its next step would need to be “theorization” of our experiences. While creating theories or models that truly reflect our communities is an important and essential scholarly endeavor, this was often done with uneven success. Most of my efforts relied on established theoretical frameworks in traditional academic disciplines of sociology, psychology, economics, and history. Fitting our experiences into a prescribed conceptual framework to understand our communities often proved culturally inappropriate, incongruent, and just did not make sense. I participated in this process of “fitting in” and theorizing, relying and drawing heavily on the discipline of psychology while I continued in a Master of Science program in Counselor Education at California State University, Sacramento. My M.S. thesis project, A Survey of Counseling Needs for Asian American Students Enrolled at Sacramento City College for Spring 1975 (Eng & Jang, 1975), conducted with another classmate, continued my study of the Asian American community. Our research examined the special characteristics and counseling needs of Asian American students in a community college where I had received an internship. A review of literature at the time showed that little was known of the counseling needs of Asian American communities.

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Sue and Sue (1971), who were two of the few Chinese American psychologists and educators at the time, first pointed out the lack of research and understanding of Asian Americans and referred to our communities as a “neglected minority.” Our research study questioned the cultural appropriateness of the conceptual framework and assumptions in established psychological theories for Asian Americans. While our research study was considered pioneering for its time for challenging established disciplines and theories, our methodology was rooted in and derived from scientific and formalistic thinking. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) refer to “formalism” as dominated and driven by a social structure, ideology, theory, or framework with a formal set of terms. They contrast it with the work of “narrativists” who see experience as central to inquiry. Our thesis project took an empirical approach, and elicited forced questionnaire responses from students with Asian American surnames at this community college. The questionnaires were mailed to the students who were instructed to return them by post. In-person contacts or individual interviews with the participants were not provided in the data collection. From the data of 270 respondents, an analysis was made with a frequency distribution and cross tabulation of selected variables to determine if need and use of counseling services were related to selected demographic variables. As I review my Master’s thesis today, I see how incomplete and unsatisfying the data which I generated was to understanding Asian American students. While I could produce a statistical “profile” of the utilization rate and the reasons why most Asian American students did or did not seek out campus counseling services, I was unable to capture the diverse and rich life experiences and stories of the students that might have been served by counseling. The findings from our thesis were helpful and important for their time but narrow and limited to a scientific and quantitative approach. In retrospect, our Master thesis study did not consider the urging of Sue (1999), psychologist and professor, to avoid limiting our “way of knowing” to science, but to broaden our research to embrace qualitative ways of discovering deeper and fuller meanings in cultures. Moreover, Sue believed a linear scientific line of cause and effect may not capture the spirituality of a culture which is best understood through lived experiences. Reflecting as I do now, I discover that the roots of my research were contrary to the initial experiential and participatory approach I had taken as a teacher in Asian American Studies. Personal experiences, I thought at

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the time, were good enough as a beginning point but were not a serious or valid scholarly endeavor central to a theoretical framework. Experiences, after all, are so common and ordinary. Everyone has them. How could commonplace personal experiences warrant an academic research study? My research was also driven by an ideology that took a critical and accusatory stance of viewing most established theories and models as biased, racist, and discriminatory. My criticisms of the concept of the “model minority” serve as an example. While I could readily criticize existing theories and models, I was unprepared to offer viable alternatives. If we were not the model minority as maintained by educators and politicians, what were we? What was the process for understanding who we are, who we were becoming, and who we wish to be? Creating, adapting, or transforming theories or models was a process I felt wholly unprepared to tackle. I thought that if we employed the established scientific and empirical approach, our research would gain the acceptance and recognition in the academic community and contribute to elevating Asian American Studies. But in the process of striving for this goal, I lost touch with the personal narratives of my community by dismissing the primacy of experience. Moreover, individual and common daily experience had little place in my work and thinking at the time. Thinking of personal and individual experience was an act of “bourgeois liberalism” that ran counter to my work in the community that sought out what was good for the “masses” and not for individual interests. I thought dwelling on individual personal experiences an indulgent and selfish act unless they were placed in the context of a larger social and political landscape to serve the community.

The Community as Curriculum/The Curriculum as Community I received my Doctorate in Education from the Ontario Studies in Education of the University of Toronto in 2005. I came to my doctoral studies belatedly and cautiously. My personal experiences growing up as a Chinese immigrant woman gave me the credentials, qualifications, and authority to teach in Asian American Studies. I felt the established disciplines for a doctoral degree would not address my needs and might, in fact, compromise and distort my experiences. And I did not want to teach in the “ivory towers” of academia and wanted to be actively engaged in serving

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the community. I envied my fellow Asian Americans who pioneered community services for young immigrant teens to support their cultural adjustments and language needs and those who established culturally appropriate counseling services, served abused Asian women, the elderly, provided day care centers for low-income families, Asian legal services and health clinics. In the community was where the “real action” and heart of the movement was happening and where I yearned to be. It was in the community service that our ideals could be tested and put to meaningful and useful purpose. My teaching at the universities was intended to be a temporary way for me to serve the community. But this temporary job continued for about ten years, primarily at California State University, Sacramento and later as a teacher and counselor at the University of California, Davis. While the location of my teaching and the direction of my career have changed over the years, the experiences of this period are profound, enduring and life changing to shape and inform an evolving personal practical knowledge. I continued in the universities because I came to view my classroom as my community and my teaching as a means for social change through education. My teaching in Asian American Studies became the community contained on campus. Our students interviewed their mothers and fathers to explore their family history, wrote autobiographies, and served as interns in community grassroots organizations for class assignments. I encouraged students to reflect and analyze their personal experiences in context of social, historical and political factors. While their experiences were personal, they are played out in a milieu and not in isolation to understand the whole of a life or community. In this way, the curriculum was the community, and the community was the curriculum. The narrative that follows is one story from that period.

Vision Stigmatism/Astigmatism Jane, my Chinese classmate and friend from high school, and I yearned to have the green eyes of Scarlett O’Hara featured in Gone with the Wind (1955) by Margaret Mitchell. We were hoping that our optometrist could tint our contact lenses green to emulate Scarlett O’Hara. The book and the movie were sources of passionate and obsessive pursuit as we embraced every shade of scarlet and green in the clothes and shoes we wore. However, with the technologies at the time, we were unable to

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obtain the green tinted contact lenses we desired and our eyes remained brown. And might we ever achieve Scarlett’s “magnolia-white” skin? I had been taught to fulfill and achieve the “American dream” and while looking into the mirror, I forgot my eyes were brown. At the time, I did not realize that there would be personal and political compromises and cost to achieving the dream. We practiced rejection and denial of our physical appearance to achieve an acceptable standard of beauty as represented by Scarlett O’Hara and the blond, blue-eyed Barbie Doll culture. Our Asian appearance, culture, and identity were subsumed by cosmetic surgery to de-slant our eyes to become rounder and to include an epicanthic fold to eyelids and de-flatten noses. For me, achieving the American ideal meant speaking proper American English instead of my Toishan village dialect, excelling in academic subjects, especially in mathematics and the sciences, eating hamburgers instead of my mother’s rice box lunches, and forgetting that my eyes were brown. But I felt that my new contact lenses would at least liberate me from the heavy thick glasses with cat-eye frames I had been wearing since elementary school. The astigmatism in my vision might have been attributed to my passion for reading. Books were my friends, and they transported me on a magical journey to another world. I could be found in the library on weekends and summers, with my head burrowed in a book or sneaking books to read under the covers in bed with a flashlight in hand when I should have been sleeping. I was a voracious reader with a relatively wide range of reading materials. I read the fairy tales of Cinderella and Snow White, the novels, National Velvet and Jane Eyre, mysteries of Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie, the comics of Superman and Lois Lane, teen romances, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, Shakespeare, Greek and Roman mythology, and biographies of Anne Frank and Helen Keller. Looking back, I believed I must have discovered and learned the culture of Gold Mountain through reading. My understanding of the world was surely influenced and shaped by the basic beginning reading primers of “Dick and Jane” (Gray et al. 1956) that were the adopted school textbook series of the time. This book series effectively taught me how to read and provided me my first introduction to the family and household of non-Chinese. The illustrations in the books remain vivid for me today, and I can recall the images of a home with a white picket fence, a father who wore a suit to work, a mother who worked at home wearing an apron and even when grocery shopping, and a family dog named “Spot.” I think I recall these illustrations because I

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found them so unlike my own family life. Whether the illustrations in the “Dick and Jane” book series were accurate or representational of a nonChinese family life was something I did not question at the time. After all, the stories held the authority of the printed words contained in a book approved by the school. At one time, I pestered my parents for a dog that was often a part of the American family as portrayed in my books. My parents did not understand why I wanted a dog and refused. In our village in Toishan, China, my parents did not grow up with animals as pets. Animals provided a practical and functional purpose. Dogs served as guards to warn of bandits, and cats were raised to catch rats. Other animals such as rabbits, chickens, and pigs were raised to be sold at the market as a part of a farming livelihood. As a compromise, my parents bought me a toy cocker spaniel dog, similar to the dog in my beginning readers, that slept in a cardboard box from my father’s grocery store. Looking at photographs of myself in my childhood and adolescent, I was too self-conscious to wear my “coke bottle” thick glasses and appeared to be a stereotypical Chinese Geek who was studious, awkward, painfully shy, and socially inept. That my reading materials were never about the stories of my Chinese community, related in any way to Chinese histories or cultures, even in fabled form, never occurred to me. While I admired the courage from the stories of Anne Frank and Helen Keller, I never came across such qualities portrayed or modeled by Asians in the literature. I never read books like the “talking stories” of my parents that depicted their fear and courage hiding from the Japanese during the war, of my parents arranged marriage, or of their boldness, duty, and sacrifice to travel in search of Gold Mountain. At the time, I was too immature to listen and comprehend the significance of the “talking stories” but they were woven into our daily conversational life but never portrayed in the books I read and treasured. Through the authoritative words of books, I created an imagined identity for myself. Looking at myself in the mirror, I forgot my eyes were brown and saw, instead, the green eyes of Scarlett O’Hara. Gone With the Wind did not portray the Chinese of the times even though they had immigrated to the Americas during the period of the Civil War. In The Chinese Americans (2000) by historian Benson Tong, he records the beginning of immigration of Chinese in the early 1800s with 200 contract workers going to the sugar plantations of Hawaii. Later, an estimated 50,000 Chinese immigrated between 1852 and 1900 and

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spread across the United States. Those who immigrated were primarily men, with women never exceeding 7% of the total Chinese immigrant population from 1860 to 1900 according to Yung (1995). Of course, I was ignorant of such immigration patterns at the time I yearned for Scarlett’s eyes. But not even in my most fanciful imagined reveries did I ever envision a Chinese southern belle sipping a mint julep under a magnolia tree in this epic tale. The realities that presented themselves during this period, however, were more likely the life of an indentured Chinese laborer, a cook, or a laundry worker, tending to the daily needs of Scarlett and Rhett. This is highly likely given the eventual enfranchised status of Blacks in the South that displaced Blacks from such jobs with White planters fearing a “Nigger rule.” White planters were eager to hire the Chinese who they thought worked hard, were well behaved and compliant. Chinese were employed to work on plantation, railroads, drainage operations, construction sites, and turpentine camps. Pitting the Chinese against the Black was a divisive move that maintained white control. Through Asian American Studies, I came to a growing awareness and realization that I had been taught a curriculum that silenced and excluded the lives and experiences of my Asian American community. Through rediscovering, recovering, and reclaiming my history, I learned of the systematic racism and exploitation of Chinese laborers who died working on the railroads as a result of the hazardous use of gunpowder and nitroglycerine to blast tunnels through the mountainous terrains. It was a struggle to retain workers for the construction of the Transcontinental Railroads due to the dangerous and back-breaking labor. But 15,000– 20,000 Chinese immigrants were hired and proved to work tirelessly even as they were considered a barbarian and inferior race. In the photo celebrating the completion of the railroad in 1869, no Chinese were featured and have been largely ignored in history. I also learned of Chinese miners who were murdered, of lynchings, and burning of Chinese campsites by racist prospectors who felt threatened by the growing presence of the Chinese during the gold rush in the 1800s as documented by historians Liu (1963), Sung (1967), and Wu (1972). I learned through our research that Chinese were not allowed to purchase property like European immigrants and could only work as laborers on farms, in laundries, and in saloons. These were meager paying and laborintensive jobs that other immigrants did not want, according to such scholars as Chen (1980) Takaki (1979), and Wong (1982). Even in the

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1960s, segregation in housing prevented people of color from purchasing or living in certain neighborhoods, according to Rothstein (2017) in his book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. I recall that when there were plans for our neighborhood in Sacramento to be demolished to make way for a freeway, my father sought another home for our growing family. I later learned that we were restricted from living or purchasing property in some areas due to discrimination and segregation. I had been thoroughly ignorant of this history. Instead, I embraced the American “melting pot” that welcomed its people and ensured success for all who were industrious and willing worked hard. I came to realize that my school experience taught me to fit in, adapt, and accommodate. I was fulfilling the expectations of Asians as a model minority, who, despite race and economic hardships, serve as exemplars to other minorities of how to be successful. The message was that if one worked diligently and obeyed the rules, one could become successful in America’s melting pot. I was taught that those who did not succeed must be lazy and irresponsible. When I discovered the fallacy of the “melting pot” and Asians as a “model minority” during the Asian American movement, I felt deceived, betrayed, and exploited. I worked alongside other people of color, Black, Hispanics, and Native Americans, and I found the contradictions in the principles of the model minority. The principle served to divide people of color and did not acknowledge the historical and inherent systematic social injustice. I discovered my voice to express my outrage and anger that was effectively and forcefully directed to developing the curriculum for teaching Asian American Studies. My personal experiences were not isolated and I found my students also had rich and meaningful stories to tell. These stories became the textbooks for our curriculum. They were stories of parents working in the laundries that were later documented by Siu in his book, The Chinese Laundryman (1987), of “paper sons” who established false family relationships to acquire false papers to circumvent the unjust Chinese Exclusion Act to gain passage to Gold Mountain. There were also stories of arranged marriage of their parents and pressures from teachers to tracked them to professions of business, medicine, and engineering. Student told stories of how they hated and rejected their physical appearance and sought to round out slanted eyes, heighten and slim down flat noses, and lighten yellow skin through cosmetics and plastic surgery.

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By telling and retelling these stories of experience, we were developing a clearer, fuller, and deeper understanding of who we were. As learners and teachers in the same instance, we were collectively rediscovering and reclaiming our past, present, and future to develop our culture and identity. All I had were these experiences to inform and shape my personal practical knowledge as a teacher educator.

Growing Up Chinese and Becoming Asian American But what is an Asian American? I asked this question then and I continue to ask it today. While we developed an understanding of how we had been defined by others as a model minority and were developing an Asian American consciousness, what was this Asian American identity? Moreover, what were the processes or conditions for creating an Asian American identity? Others shared my questions, and as the Asian American movement grew and matured, distinct ideologies emerged that caused strident tensions among the Asian American community. Our common ground was in the establishment of an Asian American Studies, but we came to develop divergent political ideologies. The ideological differences that became evident during this period are described by William Wei (1993) in his book, The Asian American Movement. Wei describes one camp as those who sought culture and an Asian identity while another camp viewed such goals as counterproductive and detracted from social revolution. Wei argues that the establishment of Asian American Studies was a revolutionary act rather than a cultural one. Omatsu (1994) contends that the original focus of the Asian American movement activists was not on asserting racial pride, as held by some current Asian American Studies teachers, but on reclaiming a tradition of militant struggle as represented by Malcolm X, the Black revolutionary, who demanded freedom “by any means necessary,” and Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung’s challenge to “serve the people” that embraced fundamental questions of oppression and power. Omatsu is alarmed by the misinterpretation of this period and urges for reclamation of this militant stance and for an examination of the importance of these concepts to Asian American communities today.

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Political Ideologies As the Asian American movement matured, distinct political views and philosophical trends emerged along with antagonisms and conflicts. Based on my understanding of the emerging trends of that period within the Asian American movement, I can identify three different perspectives: Cultural Nationalists, Asian Nation Building, and “bread and butter” point of view. These three trends were adapted from and shared, in some form and degree, with the Black community and later with the women’s movement. As a neophyte in politics, I, along with others like myself, participated in various organizations or coalitions that held these perspectives. I could see contributions that each perspective held, and my membership and alliance with each of these “camps” varied depending on the situation and issue at hand. I took the view then, as I do today, that “ethnic pride” and culture were essential beginning points that needed to be addressed to move us forward in making fundamental political and social changes within our community. I believe that our culture and identity as Asian Americans have to be understood in the context of a larger historical and social movement and not limited or isolated to individual and personal reflections. But I could not wholly embrace the view of “cultural nationalist” within the Asian American movement that promoted all things Chinese or Asian. Embracing a culture wholly because it was a culture one identified with did not necessarily address the fundamental inequities within that culture. For instance, the practices of footbinding and arranged marriage are part of the Chinese traditional and historical practices. Might I embrace such practices as cultural acts without regard to their meaning and significance to my present identity as an Asian American woman? To me, this seemed to be the narrow and regressive perspective that such “cultural nationalists” seemed to be promoting. While I could respect their views, I did not believe their efforts were prudent nor necessarily a transformative endeavor. Nor could I wholly embrace the radical call for building an Asian Nation within the United States by those who were guided by MarxistLeninist thought to attack the systems of capitalism and imperialism. These Asian American groups promoted the establishment of a power base to create an autonomous Asian culture, economy, geographic territory, political institutions, and military base as necessary. Building an

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Asian Nation was linked to national oppression shared by other minorities who also sought revolutionary and international systematic changes. Then there were the Asian American organizations whose primary goal was to promote “bread and butter” issues. These organizations were active in providing community social services such as job training, health care, legal counseling, and childcare. The primary focus of these organizations was to provide critical and basic services but had little or limited long-range goals for fundamental social change. They tended to have faith and belief in the existing social and political system and sought to obtain a fair share of the system’s pie for Asian Americans. There were intense debates and divisions in ideologies during the early developments of the Asian American movement and Asian American Studies. With the passing of time and as the events of the 1960s and 1970s form a historical past, the Asian American movement and Asian American Studies are subjected to my interpretations based on my remembered experiential past. These debates and tensions continue today, as they should, to contribute to the evolving change and growth of the Asian American movement and Asian American Studies. Looking back, I believe that I was developing a political and cultural identity within the Asian American movement that I find very much a part of my professional identity as an educator. The persistent tensions that developed from these debates continue to be reflected in my quest for culture and identity as an educator in Hong Kong. The Asian American movement and Asian American Studies provided the forum to raise the questions about who I was and who I was becoming, what my culture was, and where I belonged. If I did not want to be a juk sing or hollow bamboo, as deplored by my mother, or a “banana,” yellow on the outside and white on the inside, or to be a “model minority,” who was it that I wished to be? And was this new identity to be of my own making, or would I again be subjected to other social and political forces to define this newly evolving identity? Might I simply take from a menu, as it were, of American values and attributes that I found “desirable and good” and combine, blend, and mix and match them with Chinese values and attributes to come up with an Asian American identity? Or is my quest for that sense of belonging, for an invitation and acceptance to the dominant American culture, central to defining an Asian American identity? Or might I find this new identity through a more radical and revolutionary approach that transcends culture and racial identity to create a new social order? These questions were neither readily answered nor resolved and

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continue to present ongoing tensions that inform and shape a lifelong quest for self-understanding. Later, I explore this quest that takes me back to the place of my birth in Toishan, China and to my role as an educator in Hong Kong.

Looking Back and Looking Forward This chapter has chronicled the primacy of experience to explore and understand my culture and identity, my family roots and community’s history through teaching in Asian American Studies that becomes imbedded in my personal practical knowledge. My mother’s lament of my becoming a juk sing , or a hollow bamboo, who is devoid of Chinese values and beliefs, provided the experiential seeds for my quest for culture and identity. Years later, these seeds flourished within the soils of Asian American Studies, which provide the intellectual and political platform for a systematic exploration of what it means to be Chinese and my place within society. Next, “Giving Definition to the Contours of the Landscape: The Scaffolding that Frames the Inquiry,” provides the conceptual framework for exploring my puzzles by examining narrative inquiry as a method and phenomenon. Like the network of scaffoldings formed by the timbers of bamboo in the construction of Hong Kong’s skyscrapers, narrative inquiry provides the supporting scholarly framework that engages me in acts of recovery and reclamation of the voices in my experiential history.

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Sung, B. L. (1967). Mountain of gold: The story of the Chinese in America. Macmillan. Takaki, R. T. (1979). Iron cages: Race and culture in 19th-century America. Knopf. Tong, B. (2000). The Chinese Americans. Greenwood Press. Uyematsu, A. (1971). The emergence of yellow power in America. In A. Tachiki, E. Wong, F. Odo, & B. Wong (Eds.), Roots (pp. 9–13). University of California Press. Wang, L. C. (1997). Chronology of Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley. Newsletter of the Department of Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley, 2 (2, Spring). http:// socrates.berkeley.edu/~ethnicst/es/esmajor.html Wei, W. (1993). The Asian American movement. Temple University Press. Wong, B. (1982). Chinatown, economics, adaptation, and ethnic identity of the Chinese. Holt. Wu, C. T. (1972). “Chink!”: A documentary history of the anti-Chinese prejudice in America. World Publishing Co. Yung, J. (1995). Unbound feet: A social history of Chinese women in San Francisco. University of California Press. Zhao, C. (Director). (2020). Nomadland [Film]. Searchlight Pictures. Zinsser, W. (Ed.). (1987). Inventing the truth: The art and craft of memoir. Houghton Mifflin Co.

CHAPTER 3

Giving Definition to the Contours of the Landscape: The Scaffolding That Frames the Inquiry

In Hong Kong, mighty gleaming skyscrapers command the exuberant and crowded international urban landscape. These steel, concrete, and glass superstructures soar to 80 floors and more, each competing for the soil and land that ground them and support a foundation to secure their place in the sky. These dazzling high-rise structures are constructed with the support of the simple enduring natural strength and versatility of bamboo timbers that serve as scaffolding that frame the skyscraper’s form and structure. The bamboo timbers are tied and joined with twine to brace, connect, and bridge to create a network of scaffolding all the way to the top that define the contours of the skyscrapers they will become. The very lives of the many construction workers who traverse to perilous heights, to-and-fro, cross and crisscross its timbers depend on the strength and resilience of the bamboo as they scale up to the skies. Like the bamboo scaffolding that supports and frames the skyscraper, this chapter provides the underpinning conceptual framework for exploring the research puzzle by examining the narrative inquiry of Clandinin and Connelly (2000) as a method and phenomenon. In this chapter, I discuss how I came to learn about narrative inquiry and its strengths and tensions as applied to my research puzzle. This chapter explores how I find in narrative inquiry a “way of thinking” that facilitates the reconciliation of contradictions between the traditional hierarchical © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. C. Eng, Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82032-9_3

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“ivory tower” approach of academia and the recovery and reclamation of voices in the Asian American community and the community of my classroom. The chapter also provides my initial ventures and experimentations with narrative inquiry for the Hong Kong milieu with my colleagues and my students, which provide some startling challenges and cultural discoveries. My personal narrative now moves forward to another time and place, from California to Hong Kong, where I served as a teacher educator. A Lifeline or a brief chronology of significant experiences is provided.

Visions of How Research Could Be Narrative Inquiry of Clandinin and Connelly (2000) provides the theoretical framework to explore experience as a focus of my book to understanding my experiences as an Asian American woman and the experiences of my students in Hong Kong. Teaching at the universities in California and in Hong Kong, I sought to advance my knowledge with a doctoral degree. It was a difficult task to find a doctoral program that would not be a disappointing replication of my master’s thesis research in counselor education, which was devoid of the learners’ personal experience as it related to their counseling needs. I wanted my research thesis to invite readers into what Clandinin and Connelly (2000) describe as the “midst of lives.” Seeking a doctoral study that would value and support my telling the stories of my community, I met Drs. Ming Fang He and JoAnn Phillion in the summer of 1999. He and Phillion provided me with visions of how research could be through the gift of their books that flourished and extended the scholarship of Narrative Inquiry. The scholarship of He and Phillion centered on the importance of their experience for understanding cross-cultural lives and multiculturalism in the classroom. He’s powerfully crafted research blends the resonating voices among her participants that include herself in a “composite autobiography,” as she takes the reader on a journey from China’s Cultural Revolution to Canada. He’s book, A River Forever Flowing: Cross-cultural Lives and Identities in the Multicultural Landscape (2003), invites us to a cross-cultural narrative approach that is evolving and shifting to honor, to cultivate, and to understand multicultural experiences. Phillion’s scholarly and methodically researched book, Narrative Inquiry in a Multicultural Landscape, Multicultural Teaching and

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Learning (2002), takes us vividly into the midst of the culturally diverse classroom of Bay Street School as we learn of the rich and complex stories of her participant Pam, the teacher, and her students to experience what Phillion has termed “narrative multiculturalism,” a pioneering perspective. Phillion’s book intensely immerses the reader to Bay Street School, the school she studied over a two-year period, to tell us “what is” with day-to-day real life and “taken for granted” happenings in Pam’s classroom. The innovative studies of He and Phillion invite readers to a rich and complex exploration of experiences to capture the subtle nuances of the individual that is often lost when analyzed through formalistic or conventional categories. Moreover, their exciting and original research studies contribute to the creation of a new form of scholarship in cross-cultural teacher education literature. I found their scholarship exhilarating and inspiring as they captured such issues as social justice, diversity, and global citizenship. Eager to present narrative inquiry to my Chinese pre-service students at the EdUHK, I introduced He and Phillion’s scholarship as an alternative way of thinking and understanding the development of personal practical knowledge. I discuss my introduction of Narrative Inquiry, the role of experience, and some surprising responses from my Hong Kong students later in the book. He and Phillion (2001) describe narrative inquiry as an approach that offers possibilities for a “fluid and experiential way of understanding.” They view the qualities of narrative as a way of thinking that is fluid rather than fixed, as being in the “midst of lives” or seeing research as living in the daily realities of participants. The process of making meaning of stories of experience is developed in a relational knowing. And stories, as Bateson (1994) tells us in her book, Peripheral Visions, have more than one meaning and urges us to reject unitary answers. These narrative qualities provide a way of understanding that challenges the confines of formalistic terms used in conventional research that limit their research in theory. Narrative inquiry is grounded in experience, not theory and the formal set of terms that confine it. Facts and not experiences are the basis for establishing realities, according to formalist thinking. What I found most remarkable in the research studies of He and Phillion was that it was highly personal as they gave the reader entrée to the lives of their participants and the classroom by capturing the feelings and thoughts of daily occurrences and “taken for granted” kind

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of experiences over time. Moreover, the voices of He and Phillion as the researchers hold an integral place in the research as they boldly and generously expressed their insights, revelations, hopes, doubts, and fears throughout their thesis research journeys. Reading their books provided me with visions of how research could be. It was a liberating and empowering moment to discover how personal narratives form a recognized and accepted body of academic scholarship. Narrative inquiry as a research method provided me with a coherent theoretical framework and the scholarly space to express and make meaning of my experiences. Here, I thought, was the opportunity to tell my personal stories growing up as a Chinese American, the stories of my parents and our village home in China and how these experiences are embedded in my teacher knowledge. Through narrative inquiry, I could explore my puzzles and the tensions about my identity, the meaning of culture, and being Chinese. After all, I have been involved in journal writing, participated in oral history projects, conducted interviews with my family, especially my parents, and recorded, through slides, photographs, and videotapes, my journeys to China in search of my roots over the years since 1979. Based on my understanding of narrative inquiry and how it was used in the research studies of He and Phillion, narrative seems to be a mode of inquiry that would continue the flow of recovering and reclaiming stories of my community in Asian American Studies and to explore my personal practical knowledge as a teacher educator.

Narrative as a Mode of Inquiry Connelly and Clandinin developed narrative inquiry as a result of their extensive observations and research in teaching and learning in the classroom. For them, narrative inquiry is a way of understanding experience. Researcher and participants collaborate over time, in a place, while interacting with milieus . Connelly and Clandinin support Dewey’s belief that to study education and life is to study experience. For Dewey, experience, education, and life are necessarily intertwined (1938). Following Dewey’s belief that experience is central and the beginning point for all social science inquiry, Connelly and Clandinin developed narrative as the best way to represent and make meaning of experience. Narrative is both a method and a phenomenon according to Connelly and Clandinin and Connelly (1994). They believe that we live scripted lives and that people hold the power to write the kind of story they

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choose to live. Narrative researchers describe such lives, collect and tell their stories and write narratives of experience. According to Clandinin and Connelly (2000), narrative inquiry engages the researcher’s voice in the research text to find ourselves in the past, present, and future. And as researchers tell stories of themselves, there are possibilities of retelling and multiple plotlines. Narrative inquiry employs such methods as oral history, annals and chronicles, family stories, research interviews, journals, autobiographical writing, letters, conversations, and field notes.

Thinking Narratively and Three-Dimensional Space Understanding the method of narrative inquiry is to study narrative thinking by way of understanding what narrative inquirers do. What narrative inquirers do, conduct interviews, take field notes, interpret, and so on are very similar to what other researchers in qualitative inquiry do. However, it is the “narrative thinking” that translates and defines the methods into a distinct mode of inquiry. Connelly and Clandinin developed inquiry terms, and the spaces these terms create for inquiry. They explore these terms to define how they form the evidence to determine the research texts. Following the central terms in Dewey’s (1938) theory of experience, Clandinin and Connelly extended the terms to narrative inquiry. Clandinin and Connelly developed a set of terms to create a metaphorical three-dimensional narrative inquiry space. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) write about Dewey’s work on experience as an imaginative touchstone that guides narrative inquiry. Clandinin and Connelly (1994) describe narrative inquiry as interacting in four directions: inward (such as our emotions and morals) and outward (the environment), backward and forward (the past, present, and future). Thus, as the narrative inquirer engages in the experience, the inquiry methods focus on the personal and social by looking inward and outward, and the temporality of an event, its past, present, and future. My puzzle takes me to remembered experiences (past), such as my first encounter with an American school as an immigrant child. My remembered experience of this encounter is told in my role as the researcher and teacher educator in Hong Kong (present). As the experience is re-told, there are possibilities and directions for other plotlines (future). And at the same time that I retell the story of this first encounter with an American school, I tell the remembered emotions (personal) I felt and the

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school setting and environment (social). Clandinin and Connelly believe that to do research into an experience is to engage in these four ways at each point. The three-dimensional space of narrative inquire provides the framework to tell and retell the many and diverse pieces of my personal experiences from my past, present, and future while expressing the personal and social to explore how culture and identity shape and inform my personal practical knowledge.

In Whose Interest? During the period of the Asian American movement, I first became aware of the contradictions between the hierarchical top-down “ivory tower” research of academics and the real life experiences of the Asian American community. I learned that much of the academic research had little relevance to Asian Americans or, worse yet, distorted and misrepresented our community. I had become suspicious of the work of academic researchers who came from these ivory towers to study our communities. Their research findings were often used against our communities or exploited and distorted the voices in our communities. “In whose interest does the research serve?” is a question I raised then and continue to raise as I question the underlying reasons or purpose of research. Through narrative inquiry, I believe, with the stories rooted in the personal experiences of its participants and authenticated by them that brings us into the “midst of lives,” alleviates my concerns about in whose interest the research serves. A case in point of how research might be distorted or used against our community can be seen in the research of Chinese and Japanese Americans that created the dominant stereotype of Asians as a model minority, which I referred to in the previous chapter. Hune (1977) chronicles the evolution of the “model minority” stereotype as originating from a study of the late 1950s by sociologists to explain the low levels of juvenile delinquency among Chinese and Japanese Americans in the United States. In 1966, the article “Success Story of One Minority Group in U.S.” appeared in US News and World Report, further expanding and promoting the model minority stereotype. Wu and Song (2000) express strong disagreement with the contents of the article and point to its inaccurate data and analyses to present a distorted picture of the realities of the Asian American community. The article appeared at the time of the civil rights movement and was designed, according to Wu and Song (2000), to reprimand and attack other disenfranchised

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minorities, particularly Black Americans. The model minority stereotype argued that if Asians can be so successful, other racial minorities can also be successful only if they worked hard and tried harder. Failure to be successful is the result of a lack of initiative and not in any racial inequalities in our structure. Creating a stereotype of any kind poses the obvious problem of confining and restricting the behaviors and expectations of an entire community to a narrowly defined “type” that is subject to distortions and gross generalizations. In this instance, the stereotype of Chinese and Japanese Americans as model minorities was used to promote the American values of hard work, perseverance, self-reliance, and a respect for authority to achieving success in America’s melting pot. We were a model minority who as immigrants worked diligently, became self-reliant, and obeyed the laws to successfully achieve a piece of the American pie. The fulfillment of the American dream, according to the model minority construct, was accessible for all if one only followed the Asian American as exemplars for success. Prompted by the expectations from my teachers and the examples set for me by my parents, growing up Chinese in America meant fitting in and conforming. The model minority stereotype flourished as it was used by mainstream authorities to pit Asian American communities against the radicalism of the civil rights movement of African Americans and used to attack social welfare programs. The message was blatantly accusatory: If people of color would only follow the examples of the Chinese and Japanese, work hard to overcome obstacles, make sacrifices, and follow authority, they too could achieve the American dream. But the model minority stereotype was flawed by contradictions and gaps between the image and the realities in our Asian American community. There existed in our community a growing population of poor and working poor with students who were failing in schools and struggling family-owned small businesses that were not “making it.” The story of my mother working in the garment factory “sweatshops” and canneries in California discussed in a later chapter presents one such narrative, shared and resonated by many other immigrants in our community, that challenges the melting pot theory and our model minority status in America. Another prominent example of a controversial research is a report by political scientist Samuel Huntington (1975) of Harvard. Addressing the mass campaigns of the 1960s for democratic rights of Americans that corresponded with the awakened self-consciousness of

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Blacks, Indians, and Chicanos, Huntington saw a crisis developing that challenged the existing systems of authority and believed that people no longer felt the obligations to obey. Huntington concluded that the US government must find a way to exercise control through curtailing their rights. The Huntington report, according to Omatsu (1994), was used by the administration of former President Ronald Reagan to institutionalize a platform of reforms that included restoring traditional American values and cutting social programs for the poor. How then does narrative inquiry as a research method provide an alternative to the “ivory tower research” approach I feared and rejected? How could narrative inquiry, specifically this autobiography that is a personal narrative on teacher knowledge, not distort or be used against the Asian American community or the community of my classroom? How might I convey the voices of my community and classroom with the authenticity they deserve? Might I inadvertently misrepresent the facts and realities and leave readers with yet another stereotype, and might my memory of past experience prove faulty, deceive or fabricate, and embellish the “truth?” Indeed, these are relevant concerns and daunting challenges that might very well persuade me to maintain my silence and are persistent concerns for narrative inquirers. I have learned to be alert to such questions and have attempted to position my narratives with these caveats to alert the reader to how I might have shaped my story to portray myself and my experiences of the times.

Narrative Inquiry for the Community The strike at San Francisco State College, where students militantly challenged the administration, and the Asian American movement taught me was that the “people are the makers of history” and the need to “serve the people.” These slogans, originating in the Mao Tse Tung-era Chinese revolution and used in the Asian American movement provided me with a new way of thinking about being Asian American. The slogans became my guiding principles in which to re-think my identity and my place in society and translated into my participation in the formation of ethnic studies and community service programs. The unprecedented student strike gave the students the authority and control over the hiring and retention of faculty members, directors, administrators, and the determination of the curricula in Asian American Studies. This authority and control by students were

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first experienced at San Francisco State College, the University of California at Berkeley and other universities across the country, including my campus, California State University, Sacramento. These guiding principles resonated in my reading of Teachers as Curriculum Planners (1988) by Connelly and Clandinin and Schwab’s (1973) view of the shared and equal participation of the bodies of experience represented by the commonplaces of the subject matter, learners, the milieus , teachers, and the curriculum-making process. Together, these commonplaces participate in deliberations that determined the curriculum. To my understanding of their scholarship, my experiences as a student activist seem to be validated by their educational philosophies and research. My experience as an activist is embedded in my personal practical knowledge as a teacher educator in Hong Kong, and I find how my beliefs are transported to my Hong Kong classroom with some surprising discoveries and tensions as explored later in this chapter. Narrative inquiry instills a way of thinking that brings us into the “midst of lives” of our participants. My participants, such as my family and my students, collaborated in the creation of their narratives within this thesis. Interviews and conversations with participants were collected, recorded by audio tape, and transcribed. The transcripts were “verified” for accuracy with the participants who had the right to change or delete passages from their transcripts. The participants shared a determinant role and responsibility in the shaping of the research text. Narrative inquiry provides the space for a diversity of voices within a community to be heard in what Schwab (1973) hoped for as “equal” roles shared by the central bodies of experience represented by the commonplaces. It would seem to me that such a way of thinking and approaching research that advocates a place for all stakeholders would ameliorate the “ivory tower” phenomena where research is generated from a hierarchical top-down approach. Narrative inquiry would be personally and professionally fulfilling, a legacy for my family and for my community. Narrative inquiry would provide an opportunity to integrate and connect my past experiences with my present experiences as a teacher educator in Hong Kong. This autobiographical narrative would provide the expansive and flexible intellectual space to rediscover, recover, reclaim my experiences to form my community’s history and contribute to the literature of teacher education. Narrative inquiry provides for the conceptual framework to explore my culture and identity and how they shape and inform a personal practical knowledge as a teacher educator. I finally found, on the other side

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of the world, a doctoral study program where I would not feel intimidated or compromised by being subjected to theories I did not believe. In narrative inquiry, I believed I could find a means of accomplishing my doctorate that was consistent and affirmed my personal and political philosophy.

An Insider/Outsider Situated in the “In-Between Space” Given that my journey is a personal narrative of my own culture and community, I am both the subject and object of my study. Narrative invites the research to write a narrative of what Richardson (1994) refers to as a narrative of the self. It is a research method that is developed through the negotiation and collaboration between the researcher and participants. The researcher becomes immersed in the culture or context being studied and is given voice in the research discourse. However, anthropologist Janesick (1991) states the “golden rule” for ethnographers to try not to study one’s own group lest we jeopardize our validity as a researcher. Subjectivity and a biased point of view are of primary concern as the narrativist interacts and connects with the participant’s experiences and stories. Being an insider also means certain understandings are assumed to be commonly shared. As members of the same community, the assumption that there are common experiences and shared views may in fact be misleading. Experiences and “facts” that are taken for granted are left unspoken and could potentially be a cause for misinterpretations or misunderstandings. Wax (1971), an anthropologist who has conducted fieldwork in the Japanese American Relocation centers and Native American tribes, urges fieldworkers to illuminate the significance of what we have experienced and learned. Powdermaker (1966), also an anthropologist, refers to this as a process of stepping in and out of society. Wax further contends that fieldwork is ambiguous and that there are no absolute rules for conducting research in a community. Many of my narratives of experience in this book were based on interviews and conversations with my mother and father. My mother, in particular, held a key role in presenting the tensions that serve as a focal point for my puzzles. Throughout the research journey, I was aware of the dual and simultaneous role I played as a researcher and a participant in the interview and conversations. The issues of subjectivity, objectivity,

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and validity are ones that I am alert to in my writing. Some of my advisors and reviewers of my drafts also raised these issues and challenged me to think deeply about narrative inquiry as a research method. And in her own way, my mother challenged me. “Why do you want me to tell you these stories?” my mother asked. Even after describing, explaining, and obtaining her agreement to participate, my mother still wondered about the purpose and relationship of her personal experiences to my book. Being my mother’s daughter and being an insider did not necessarily go unquestioned and automatically give me full access to her life histories. And until I satisfied my mother’s questions and concerns that her stories would help me understand who I am and the importance of her stories to our relationship, she remained puzzled and skeptical about her participation. But there are advantages to being an insider in certain conditions. As a member of the same ethnicity with a shared culture and community, it is possible to establish a mutually accepted trust to gain access and entry to its stories of experience. Wax discovered this to be the case when she requested to read letters about the internment camps of the Japanese that were being discussed among the elders. She found that the contents of the letters were openly shared among the community as well as in her presence, even though she was an outsider. However, it was inappropriate for Wax to read the letters herself. Had Wax been an insider and a member of the culture, access might have been more readily negotiated or achieved. As an insider, she might have been more likely to be alert to the unspoken and unwritten norms, values, and practices of that culture. As an insider to this narrative, I am a member of a community that recognizes who I am and where I belong. I have points of commonality and shared experiential history with the people of the community. But there are conditions that define my “insider” status particularly since the settings of my home cross continents and cross identities and cultures over a span of decades. I have learned that there is not just one monolithic Chinese community. There is the Chinese community of my village clan in Toishan, the Chinese immigrant community of my childhood of the 1950s, and the Chinese community of Hong Kong. Nor are these communities static but are fluid and in a constant flux of change and transformation. As such, when and where I enter a Chinese community affects my insider/outsider status and my role and relationship to the community. Nor is there just one way of being Chinese for we are not a homogeneous group. As I enter a Chinese community, I realize my

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ethnicity alone does not make me an insider, and there are conditions that are defined for me within the community. I will never be a true insider among my Hong Kong-born Chinese teaching colleagues, even though I am Chinese and have lived in Hong Kong for about twenty years. What seems to matter here is my lack of deep history in Hong Kong that is bounded by such experiences as common school ties as classmates in primary or elementary school, family and personal relationships along with professional alliances. My position within my professional community is also bounded by conditions. There have been, however, occasions that my very lack or limited past history has served to provide my passage into its community. When I am called upon by academic staff, for instance, to advise them about an employment dispute or conflict, I am often seen as being “without baggage” of past histories that enable me to offer an “objective and fair” view. They also tell me that because I am Chinese, I am not as threatening or intimidating as a “Westerner,” who are often their superiors. Often, I find that such conversations with me are more of a rehearsal that prepares them for the more formal meeting. In this instance, I seem to be perceived by my colleagues as a person who is a conduit or bridge between the East and West that can link and facilitate their passage. But like a bridge, while I extend to both sides, metaphorically speaking, I am situated in neither place. I am neither the Hong Kong Chinese nor the Westerner. To my Hong Kong Chinese colleagues, I seem to be the American Chinese situated in the “in-between space” of cultural boundaries. In the same instance, the landscapes of the spaces are also changing and in constant movement, making me feel I am neither here nor there, but in-between. As I have been away for almost 20 years from Sacramento, the city where I was raised for most of my life, my identity, status, and place in the Chinese community are in relation to the established insider status of my parents. My identity is known to members of the Chinese Sacramento community through my mother and father: “Your mother worked with me in the canneries” and “You are the daughter of Eng Gim Hong who had a grocery store on 10th Street.” My parents’ place within our community affords me a kind of entitlement that makes me privy to the community grapevine and gossip: news of marriages and births, of a son who has a drug problem and has gotten into trouble with the law, of rumored business extortions, and of another’s gambling habits. As such, I am given entry to the Wong and Eng Family Associations, the family surnames of my mother and father, the Chinese community

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church, and the Chinese grocery store not as a stranger but as someone who is recognized and accepted as a member of the community. Even after an extended period of absence from Sacramento, I am greeted with an enthusiastic and warm welcome that invites me to blend and flow effortlessly to the stream of the community’s life because of my parents’ insider status. However, I realize this connection with my parents that provides me with the privileges of an “insider” in Sacramento does not extend to Hong Kong, where I feel I am always perceived as an “outsider” by my Hong Kong Chinese colleagues. However, I am more likely to be the “insider” in Toishan, the village of my birth in China, and accepted within this community, again because of my connections to my parents and family there. It would seem that my “insider/outsider” status is not clearly defined and static but ambiguous and fluid depending on the place or location and the nature and quality of my relationship to that community. Related to this discussion, Chow (1991), speaking as a Sinologist, tells us to be alert to the complexities of using Western theories to understand non-Western China. She suggests a consideration of Johannes Fabian’s “a nation-centered theory of culture,” a theory that thinks of the “other” as sharing a common space and time at the moment of writing as a way of seeing modern China. Of special consideration for me as the author is the difficulties of confronting Westernized Chinese spectators who must come to terms with themselves as both objects and subjects in “seeing” China. Moreover, outsiders, generally, have historically not shown an interest in studying Chinese Americans. Sue (1999) states that there continues to be a dearth of research and literature on diverse ethnic cultures and calls for more support and funding for such efforts. Schneider (1998) believes that a linear scientific approach of cause and effect may not capture the spirituality and intuitive dimensions of diverse cultures that can be best understood through lived realities. These dimensions, Sue (1999) charges, have been absent or neglected in our research not because of science but because of bias and selective practice of science that have contributed to inadequate funding for ethnic minority research. As a result, there has been limited scholarship in studying the culture and communities of the Chinese in North America. It has not been until the last two decades that an increase in the body of literature has emerged, authored primarily by Asian Americans as “insiders” to their research. As insiders, these authors provide a rich literary contribution that might

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not otherwise be made to the research and scholarship for understanding Asian Americans. But whether an insider or outsider, neither position suffices in the formidable work of retelling of the story or the interpretation of the culture, according to anthropologist Geertz (1995). Geertz questions the ability of any individual to grasp the vastness of an entire community and find the words to describe its people. Geertz advises those who study culture to fully welcome and embrace its people and life.

What Are You Doing in This Narrative? Writing a personal narrative as a way of exploring teacher knowledge can be a sensitive, painful, and treacherous path to take. Here I am, expressing my joys as well as exposing my foibles and my secret and sacred family stories that can make me vulnerable and appear unprofessional. Pulling at my emotions and heart to draw out the meaning of my experiences can be spiritually exhilarating and intensely exhausting and painful. And while the stories may be personally meaningful to me and may even provide an interesting and entertaining tale, so what? What meaning do they hold for learners, teachers, and teacher education? I came across the so what ? question in a number of discussions and conversations I had with those who generously provided me with feedback for the drafts of my book. Their so what question pressed me to think through the meanings of my stories and to keep connected to the focus of my narratives. One such experience with a visiting scholar is re-told in the following narrative. Early on in my writing, I had an occasion to share some of my autobiographical writing with a respected Hong Kong visiting scholar at EdUHK who was available to my department to support our teaching and research studies. I thought it an opportunity to obtain some valuable feedback to my work and availed myself of his considerable expertise as an educator. I had high regard for his extensive research in Hong Kong schools, and though he was not a narrativist, I wanted an “outsider’s” response to my narratives. After hearing me explain my proposal to explore teacher knowledge through a personal narratives, he asked in a very collegial and gentle manner: “Your stories about your village in China pique my interest, but what do they have to do with education? And, what are you doing in the story and who but your mother and father would want to read your stories?”

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His remarks, understandable, were jarring but a reality check to likely responses from my colleagues and readers. I was eager to state the importance and significance of using narrative inquiry and my research topic for the Hong Kong context, but I was also trying to be receptive to hearing the counter arguments to narrative’s limitations and weaknesses and the tensions that “narrative thinking” might provide in a research climate dominated by a quantitative research method. My consultation with the visiting scholar provided a forum in which to test out and strengthen my understanding of narrative from hearing “counter voices.” Personal narratives and autobiography, I contended to the visiting scholar, are life writings of the self and are a reconstruction of one’s narrative according to such respected scholars as Edel, the biographer (1984), Kerby who developed the view of narrative identity and selfhood (1991), and Olney, a scholar of autobiography (1980). I cited and asserted the autobiographical method as described by Pinar (1981). Pinar believed that our individual and collective life histories are preconditions for knowing that illuminate and guide us forward. Autobiographies serve as a type of field text and express the whole context of life. In educational studies, autobiography was one of the first methodologies used to study what it meant for a person to be educated. However, with the shift of inquiry to “how are people educated,” the use of autobiography for the study of education disappeared. One’s particular reconstruction of narrative suggests there could be other reconstruction according to Clandinin and Connelly (1994). Zinsser (1987) and Rabin (1986) state that such reconstruction involves complex issues and tensions of memory, self-deception, and “truth and reality.” Unlike the conventional autobiography, the autobiographical personal narratives applied in this journey have less emphasis on method. The purpose of method is to reveal something about the person whereas in narrative, as it is defined for the study of personal practical knowledge, it is on how people know the classroom, according to Connelly and Clandinin (1987). For Clandinin and Connelly (1994), an autobiography is a research text. I continued to articulate and share the purpose of my narrative to other colleagues, to friends in the women’s community, and to family and friends. I would explain that my personal narratives are autobiographical in nature, but it is not just about me as an individual. My research study is not intended as a narcissistic or egotistic enterprise or merely a study of the self. My self is both a personal narrative and an educational narrative

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for the curriculum. At the time, I had never read, for instance, in the literature of teacher education the personal experiences of a Chinese American or Asian American teacher in understanding the classroom, teacher development, and teacher knowledge. What might have been identity and cultural issues that a Chinese American teacher encountered with their students, in their practice, and with other teachers? My hope, I explained, is that my narratives contribute to the body of literature that tells of multiple and fractured identities and cultures that juxtapose themselves in the classroom in the hope to enhance all educators’ understanding of the diverse voices in our curriculum. I continue exploring my understanding of narrative inquiry, this time with my Hong Kong students in a later chapter. Through my student responses, I discover their perception of their lack of authority and place in the curriculum when they tell me they have no experiences of value to share. And later in my narrative, I will explore how my students and colleagues seem to echo my quest for culture and identity when they question what it means to be Chinese.

Looking Back and Looking Forward This chapter has provided the conceptual framework of narrative inquiry pioneered by Connelly and Clandinin that supports and guides the telling of my personal narratives like the bamboo scaffolding to Hong Kong’s skyscrapers. While my mother metaphorically likened me to the hollowness of the bamboo by calling me a juk sing who is devoid of Chinese values and culture, it provided the experiential seeds that later flourished in the soils of the Asian American movement and Asian American Studies of the 1960s and 1970s. Though my mother and others like her in my Sacramento home lamented my being a hollow bamboo and perceived this as a weakness, I discover enduring strength and versatility in the bamboo when used as scaffolding that supports the construction of Hong Kong’s mighty skyscrapers. In a similar way, my Chinese colleagues in Hong Kong remain baffled about who I am, and I sense their disapproval and non-acceptance of me as an “insider” even though we share the same ethnicity and that I have lived in Hong Kong for almost twenty years. But perhaps strength emerges from this very state of perceived “alienness” situated in the “in-between” space between cultural boundaries. This “alien-ness” is the result of multiple and creative ways of thinking about culture and identity. To be able to bind together, blend, adapt, and

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improvise shifting identities and cultures for oneself is a potential source of strength like the bamboo timbers that provide the scaffolding to Hong Kong’s superstructures. The chapter that follows, “A Sojourner in a Village Landscape: The Earth that Seeds,” takes me back to the place of my birth, Toishan, in the People’s Republic of China. This is where my roots began, ground me, and beacon for my return after growing up in the United States. I am like the bamboo that has been uprooted and transplanted with its timbers grafted with multiple identities and cultures. I continue to explore how my journeys and experiences in Toishan connect me to my evolving personal practical knowledge as a teacher educator in Hong Kong.

References Bateson, M. C. (1994). Peripheral visions, learning along the way. HarperCollins Publishers. Chow, R. (1991). Women and Chinese modernity. University of Minnesota 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. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1987). On narrative method, biography and narrative unities in the study of teaching. The Journal of Educational Thought, 2(3), 130–139. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23768646 Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1988). Teachers as curriculum planners. The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Press. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Simon & Schuster. Edel, L. (1984). Writing lives: Principia biographica. W. W: Norton. Geertz, C. (1995). After the fact. Harvard University Press. He, M. F. (2003). A river forever flowing: Cross-cultural lives and identities in the multicultural landscape. Information Age. He, M. F., & Phillion, J. (2001). Trapped in-between: A narrative exploration of race gender, and class. Journal of Race, Gender & Class, 8(1), 47–56. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41674960 Hune, S. (1977). Pacific migration to the United States: Trends and themes in historical and sociological literature. Research Institute on Immigration and Ethnic Studies of the Smithsonian Institution. www.jstor.org/stable/258 27217

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Huntington, S. (1975). The United States. In M. Crozier (Ed.), The crisis of democracy: Report on the governability of democracies to the trilateral commission (pp. 59–118). New York University Press. Janesick, V. J. (1991). Ethnographic inquiry: Understanding culture and experience. In E. Short (Ed.), Forms of curriculum inquiry (pp. 101–119). State University of New York Press. Kerby, A. P. (1991). Narrative and the self . Indiana University Press. Olney, J. (Ed.). (1980). Autobiography: Essays theoretical and critical. Princeton University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7ztmtj Omatsu, G. (1994). The “four prisons” and the movements of liberation. In K. Aguilar-San Juan (Ed.), The state of Asian America activism and resistance in the 1990s (pp. 19–69). South End Press. Phillion, J. (2002). Narrative inquiry in a multicultural landscape: Multicultural teaching and learning. Ablex Publishing. Pinar, W. F. (1981). ‘Whole, bright, deep with understanding’: Issues in qualitative research and autobiographical method. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 13(3), 173–188. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022027810130302 Powdermaker, H. (1966). Stranger and friend: The way of an anthropologist. W.W. Norton and Company. Rabin, D. C. (Ed.). (1986). Autobiographical memory. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511558313 Richardson, L. (1994). Writing, a method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 526–529). Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446286463 Schneider, K. J. (1998). Toward a science of the heart: Romanticism and the revival of psychology. American Psychologist, 53, 277–289. https://doi.org/ 10.1037/0003-066X.53.3.277 Schwab, J. J. (1973). The practical 3: Translation into curriculum. School Review, 81, 501–522. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1084423 Sue, S. (1999). Science, ethnicity, and bias: Where have we gone wrong? American Psychologist, 54(12), 1070–1077. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066x. 54.12.1070 Wax, R. (1971). Doing fieldwork: Warnings and advice. University of Chicago Press. Wu, J., & Song, M. (2000). Asian American studies: A reader. Rutger University Press. Zinsser, W. (Ed.). (1987). Inventing the truth: The art and craft of memoir. Houghton Mifflin Co.

CHAPTER 4

A Sojourner in a Village Landscape: The Earth That Seeds

My journeys to Toishan, the place of my birth in China, provide the narratives of experience in this chapter. Toishan is the earth where my roots flourished, ground me, and call for my return, first in 1979 after almost 25 years in the United States. I came to see myself as a sojourner in a village landscape who, like others before me, quest for culture and identity. The experiences of the Asian American movement of the late 1960s and Asian American Studies in the 1970s intensely awakened my consciousness to question who I am as a Chinese woman and as the Asian American I am becoming. Connelly and Clandinin (1988) say that as we tell our experiences, we express them through stories, and these stories form a mode of knowing that create teacher knowledge. In this chapter, I tell stories of experience of my journeys to Toishan, China that form a mode of knowing that creates my teacher knowledge. Using narrative inquiry, I tell of my journeys to Toishan over a span of time from 1979 to 2002 in search of my roots to understand my culture and identity. I make meaning of my Toishan stories and connect them to my classroom to discuss how these experiences flow into shaping and informing an evolving personal practical knowledge.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. C. Eng, Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82032-9_4

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Toishan Roots At the time of my involvement in the Asian American movement in the late 1960s and teaching in Asian American Studies in the 1970s, I thought that if I were to genuinely understand my Chinese origins and what it means to be Chinese, I needed to journey to the source of my roots. These roots lay in the soil of Toishan, the place of my family village and birth, and held, I believed, the answers to my questions about my culture and identity. Moreover, I thought such a quest would somehow rectify or at least resolve my mother’s lament of my being a juk sing or a hollow bamboo, one who was devoid of Chinese virtues. I expected the journey to Toishan to bring a sense of closure and unity by coming full circle, as it were, in my quest for understanding my culture and identity. I was intent on understanding my roots and sought out literature about Toishan and China but found a dearth of published materials in the 1970s, particularly of literature that related to the histories of the Chinese who immigrated to the United States. A review of bibliographies for Asian American Studies, such as one compiled by Chan and Hune in 1995, attests to the growth of Asian American scholarship that occurred during the late 1970s and 1980s. The emergence of many of the publications we have today about Chinese Americans and the migrations from China to America can be traced to the period of the Asian American movement and the establishment of Asian American Studies. Ling (1985), speaking of Asian American literature, also points out that as relatively newcomers to American literature, it is smallest branch when compared with other racial groups in the United States. It is during this period that many Asian Americans like myself sought to understand their culture and identity, an endeavor that contributed to the development of research and scholarship for this growing body of literature. The endeavor also uncovered previous scholarship by Asian Americans who had been ignored or forgotten. I was eager to know everything about China, and I sought out the readings of Mao Tse Tung, then Chairman of the Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist thought, philosophies that Mao adapted to the conditions of China and films, such as The East is Red, The Red Detachment of Women, and White Haired Girl, that depicted the revolutionary society that China had become. Such sources became increasingly available as diplomatic relations between China and the United States normalized. China, I believed, held the answers to my questions about my culture and identity and also held the promise of a revolutionary political and

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social order that recognized the power of its people. Many of us in the Asian American movement credited Mao with the creative adaptations of Marxist-Leninist thought to the needs of China to create a classless society to serve the people. While the personal act of seeking self-understanding is in itself a revolutionary act, I also believe strongly that such efforts needed to be continued and extended to the larger society to implement meaningful and systematic long-term changes. As in my story, “Looking Back at Sitting in Front,” I was re-arranging the conventional seating plan in my Asian American Studies classroom where the teacher was re-positioned from a dominant role to a more collaborative and shared experience between learners and teacher. This act represented a shifting relationship among learners, teachers, and the curriculum with the intent of making fundamental and significant changes that could be extended to the larger society. With this kind of thinking at the time, I believed China held the promise of a revolutionary model that could provide visions of how we might transform our society. What lessons might we learn from China’s experience and how might I have an “insider” and “up close” look of how China’s revolutionary changes had been translated into the daily lives of its people? These lessons, I hoped, would be provided by a visit to the place of my birth in Toishan and my family in the village. It was not until January 1, 1979 that the United States finally established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China by recognizing it as the sole legal Government of China and made my travel to Toishan a reality. The “Joint Communique between the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America” (1978), also referred to as the “Shanghai Communique,” opened the doors between these two countries after decades of mutual estrangement. Normalization of relations between the United States and China opened a new era of political relationship that had been paved by the historical trip by Richard Nixon, then President of the United States, to China in 1972. Before the establishment of diplomatic relations, a trip to China would have been like an imagined trip to the moon, so inaccessible was such a journey for most Americans. I recall growing up with occasional and fragmented personal stories of our Toishan village life from my parents. I recall family stories such as the invasion of China by the Japanese, my maternal grandfather and uncle being branded “bourgeois landlords” and being tortured during the “Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution,” and my mother’s hardships during her years of separation from my father who was in the United

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States. I later discovered that these stories were only wisps and fragments of a larger narrative. I believe I was not ready to hear the stories in full and was not receptive to learning from my parents’ stories at the time. Growing up emulating Scarlett O’Hara of Margaret Michell’s Gone with the Wind and being American, there was little room to embrace the meaning and the significance of the stories my parents shared. In retrospect, I imagine I must have felt embarrassed, bewildered, and to some degree, a sense of denial and self-hate that I was connected in any way to their stories, as I tried to distance myself from my Chinese culture and identity. No wonder that my mother would criticize and lament my being a juk sing or a hollow bamboo devoid of Chinese values and culture. My US naturalization certificate identifies my country of former nationality as China, and my US passport states my place of birth as China. These official government documents state the “facts” of my identity and origins. But prior to my exploring and questioning my identity to engage in a journey of self-discovery and to re-define, in my own terms, what I was becoming, I felt very little connection to China nor thought of the country as my homeland or motherland. The stories of experience that follow are extracted from journals dating from 1979 to 2002 of my travels to Toishan, China and reconstructed and expanded here for this research journey. My first return to Toishan was in 1979 followed by another visit with my parents in 1996, with subsequent visits in 1999 and 2002. My stays in Toishan have been all quite brief, ranging from two to five days each time. But given the span of time that my travels have taken place, I have a glimpse of how the people and the village have changed over time and perhaps, more importantly, how I have changed through developing a new way of thinking and understanding of Toishan as a narrative inquirer.

Locating Toishan Toi means platform or plateau with shan meaning mountain or hill. Toishan is located at the edge of the Southern Sea with flat plains, hills, and mountains. Its hills rise to heights of 800 feet (244 m) to 1,000 feet (305 m) with the surrounding region at sea level. It is located 81 miles (130 km) south of Guangzhou, 106 miles (170 km) west of Hong Kong, and 74 miles (119 km) northwest of Macau. Here, I re-tell of my first return to Toishan based on journals of July 9–12, 1979, collaborating interviews, conversations with my parents and family, and photographs:

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For this journey, I wake up with anticipation at 5:00 AM on a summer morning in Guangzhou, China to take the eight-hour bus ride over the rough country roads to my village in Toishan for this two-day visit. Even this early in the morning, I can feel the growing heat and humidity that will envelop the day. I take the short ride that has been arranged for me the night before from my hotel to the city’s bus terminal and find the bus terminal already crowded, noisy, and bewildering. Carrying my somewhat bulky hard case luggage, I maneuver my way among the crowd as I try to read the Chinese characters on the signs on the rows of buses that match the name of my village. The crowds are of the local Chinese, and they are wearing the typical dark trousers and white shirt or blouse, each carrying their own kind of luggage. Their belongings are of newly purchased boxed television sets, electric fans, rice cookers, and crates of yellow-furred chicks intended for their own destinations. Smiling to myself, I realize how incongruent I must appear in my jeans and printed blouse and that I have taken a detour from the usual tourist route of China’s Great Wall, temples, and gardens. Nor is the bus that will transport me to Toishan the kind that has the amenities of air conditioning and padded seats that I have taken for granted. I am feeling really pleased that this part of my journey seems to be putting me in the midst of the local Chinese to experience the real China. Amongst the jostling crowd, I am spotted by my first cousin ah Let and his wife, and I am glad and relieved to see them. I was uncertain that they would be able to make this journey with me, but even without them, I had been determined to find my way to Toishan. But given the confusion I am feeling in the bus terminal, I am grateful that they are able to accompany and guide me on my way home. Ah Let is the son of Big Uncle, my mother’s big brother, and has been living and working as a teacher in Guangzhou with his wife working as a sales clerk in a store. I give them money for the bus fare, and ah Let manages to find the right window counter and negotiates his way in line to purchase our tickets. I marvel at the skill in which my cousin and his wife navigate my travel. Anxious that there may not be a seat for us on the bus, I am taken in hand by ah Let’s wife and quickly escorted to a seat for the three of us. Ah Let, in the meantime, stands outside the bus by the window of the seat we have claimed and hands me my bulky luggage through the window. The lightweight nylon carry-on bag of my cousin and his wife come next. I observe boxed T.V. sets and fans along with large duffle bags containing goods loaded onto the rack on top of the bus. The chicks, however, ride with us, as they are too precious and fragile to be exposed to the elements. Once out of the city, our bus travels through rough, narrow roads and sometimes mountainous terrain. I have been told by ah Let that many of

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these roads are washed away by the heavy rains each year and need to be re-built. The terrain is lush and green from the heat and humidity that is the weather most of the year in this sub-tropical zone. All along the way, cluster of villages, similar in appearance, are sighted from the bus. The low-rise structures have brick walls and are topped with black or red tiled roofs. Radiating from the village homes are the expansive patchwork of vegetables, bok choy, green onions, spinach, rice paddies, groves of banana trees, and bamboo. Our bus is old and battered in appearance. And though the bus is not capable of very high speeds, it dominates the road as the driver frequently honks the horn to pass people bicycling on the roads or farmers walking on foot with a load of goods on their shoulders. There is not much traffic, but occasionally, there might be a vehicle that proves too slow for our bus driver’s liking. With narrow, almost one-lane roads, our driver boldly and precariously overtakes and passes, honking all the while at any vehicle that gets in his way. At one point in the journey, all the passengers get off the bus to cross a river by ferry. While waiting on the shores, we watch the emptied bus along with a herd of water buffalo boarding the ferry first to cross the waters. “Sit and rest,” my cousin suggests to me. The bus ride has been bumpy and rough, and I have been gripping the bus seat railings for balance all along the ride. Now that I am standing on firm ground, I become aware of how strained my muscles have become. But as I look around the shores of where we are waiting, I do not find a seat to take the rest that my cousin suggests. I discover that those around me have taken to squatting down on their legs with many of the men smoking cigarettes to “sit and rest.” I smile at my bewilderment and ignorance of the local cultural practice and then oblige and assume this posture, but not for long. I discover that my legs have not developed the muscles for this kind of stance, and I get up, anxious I might lose my balance and take a tumble. My cousin and his wife are somewhat puzzled when I explain that I cannot manage this position. They must be questioning the kind of life I must lead in Gold Mountain that would not allow me to “sit and rest” in this way. Finally, after about 20 minutes, the ferry reaches the other side of the river, where the bus and water buffalo disembark, and returns for the passengers to resume our journey. When our bus finally arrives in Toishan late in the afternoon, I am greeted by my Big Uncle and Auntie along with an exuberant crowd of my village clan, many of whom I am meeting for the first time. I am tired from the journey but am exhilarated by the warm and enthusiastic welcome I receive. Though it is late in the afternoon, we gather to a restaurant for a full meal that I have been instructed by my mother to pay

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for to mark the occasion of our reunion. We fill two tables, and our meal is simple but seems to have every possible dish. There is chicken, pork, fish, vegetables, soup, and the sugared orange soda. During the meal, there are toasts and cheers for my return from overseas to the motherland. Everyone eats vigorously, and I realize what a rare and special treat the meal is for my village family. Though not impoverished, they must be extremely frugal and rarely eat so well. I am told later that only since members of our family from overseas have begun to return to the village have they eaten at the restaurants. By the end of the meal, every dish has been thoroughly consumed. When we finish our meal, I realize that it is still some five miles to the village of my mother’s family. This time, the passage is through narrow dirt lanes that connect the various villages. For this journey, we must travel by bicycle or ride on covered carts pulled by bicycles. A few of my village family who are fortunate enough to own old but serviceable bicycles have ridden out to meet me. My Big Uncle and Auntie have ridden straddled on the narrow back-passenger seats of the bicycles, and some of the younger members have apparently walked the distance. It is a long summer’s day, and the daylight is still with us as I continue my journey. Another banquet feast is being prepared for me, this time by my village clan, to continue the celebration.

At the Threshold But the one person I have been yearning to meet still awaits me. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, is too frail to make the trip to the bus station to greet me. It is she, I believe, who holds the answers to my quest. In this account, based on a journal entry on July 11, 1979, I finally arrive at my mother’s village to be reunited with my grandmother: At the threshold of my grandmother’s house in our village in Toishan in 1979, after a journey from the other side of the world to be reunited with my grandmother after over two decades, I pause and hold back. “Be careful and don’t trip at the entrance, elder sister Lan!” warns the young woman who cares for my grandmother in the village. “Be careful. The doorway entrance is elevated to ward off the rains that flood the village each year, so watch your step. And you may stumble as you enter the dark interiors of your grandmother’s home after being in the bright summer sun,” she cautions me. I hesitate not because of the warning but because I feel suddenly unprepared for the moment. I remember my grandmother, ‘ah Poa,’ only

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through the rare photographs and the family stories told by my mother, her daughter. I was told to expect my grandmother, in her late eighties at the time, to be frail but spirited. My grandmother’s memory, my village clan has warned me, may ‘float’ from the past to the present and that her thoughts are not always lucid. But Grandmother’s strength and longevity are measured by her sustained ability to eat, sleep, and walk, the three essential conditions, I have been taught, that determine one’s well-being. What would the interiors of my grandmother’s world hold for me? Would I find in her the roots of my culture and identity? Would I achieve the self-understanding that I have been seeking? Would my grandmother tell me who I am and where I belong? What would her face disclose to me, and would she see her daughter’s daughter in me? My questions momentarily freeze me at the threshold, but I finally move forward to embrace my grandmother. My movement is again stalled as my eyes struggle to adjust to the darkness in the room and make out the outlines of the figure that is my grandmother. I find Grandmother alone, sitting on a narrow wooden planked bed only a few steps from the doorway in the tiny room that also serves as the kitchen. There is no bathroom and Grandmother must be guided to the outhouse that serves the village. In a booming voice, my grandmother’s helper announces me with, “This is Won Gui’s daughter, Yan Lan, from Gam Shan.” The helper uses my mother’s name and refers to my mother as ‘ah Gui’ or Auntie and calls me her elder sister, even though we are not related by blood. These titles in Chinese represent our familial relationship, are spoken with deferential respect, and take on a meaning different from the Westernized understanding of such terms. ‘Gam Shan’ or Gold Mountain is the name that the Chinese have given to the United States and refers to the riches and prosperity that the Americas has promised dating to the gold rush of 1849. Tales spread to the village of how the streets in America were abundantly paved with gold for everyone’s taking. My grandmother seems disoriented, as if we have just roused her from a summer’s dream. I feel my heart racing, as I tentatively sit down next to Grandmother on the bed and take her hands in mine in greeting. Grandmother is toothless and seems shriveled and ancient but the hands I hold are firm and warm to the touch. Holding her hands, I find a sudden rush of pleasure in discovering the same furrowed and bulky knuckles and narrow wrists that I share with my mother and discovered to have inherited from my grandmother. Grandmother’s face is dark brown and deeply lined from age and sun. Her short and straight hair is thin with strands of white but is surprisingly dark and neatly tucked behind her ears. Instinctively, I glance towards Grandmother’s feet that, I have been told, had been painfully bound in childhood and later freed in adulthood in yet

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another painful process that was a result of the dramatic political and social upheavals during China’s Cultural Revolution. But I am unable to see her feet clearly in the dark of the room, and my gaze returns to my grandmother’s face and I say, “Ah Poa, I am Yan Lan, the daughter of your daughter. It has been a very long time since we have seen each other. I was only about four years old when I left Toishan. Do you remember me? Did you know I would be arriving today to see you? Mother and Father send their warm greetings to you. Are you well? Have you eaten?” I say to my grandmother in our Toishan dialect. My questions come in a rush, and Grandmother does not immediately respond or seems to comprehend. Grandmother finally murmurs a greeting of sorts, but still seems baffled by who I am. The helper tells me that Grandmother has difficulty seeing and is hard of hearing and that I must speak up. “Sit to her right, since that seems to be the better ear,” the helper instructs me. “Ah Won Gui’s daughter, ah Yan Lan?” my grandmother finally repeats with some emphasis and determination. Grandmother seems to be repeating this as if she were searching the deep recesses of her memory to retrieve the faces that belong to these names. Grandmother’s voice sounds perplexed but is surprisingly strong and forceful as she continues to ponder who I might be. Finally, Grandmother exclaims with delight, “Ai ya! You mean ah Siu Won, my oldest daughter! Ah Won, who lives in Gold Mountain. I thought I would never see her again once she married and left China. I remember us crying big heavy tears when we parted. To have a daughter is to learn to live with loss. I was so surprised and happy when she and your father returned to the village to see me not too long ago. They brought me the flavored ‘laap cheung’ (pork sausages), seasoned duck, dried salted fish, foods that I have not eaten for many years. I feared the rats in my room would get to these precious delicacies, and I sat up most of the night on my bed with a stick in hand guarding over the food. There were also gifts of spices, electric fans and bolts of cloths, all difficult to obtain and too expensive for us to purchase. Our reunion was sudden and too brief. In fact, I thought I merely had a happy dream that ah Won had returned. When was it that they visited me?” my grandmother asks. I quickly and eagerly answer Grandmother as if to establish our relationship between us and to seal the connection that we seem to have achieved. I say, “It was just last year, in 1978, that Mother and Father returned to the village and visited you. And I am their daughter who has also returned to see you.” My grandmother continues, seemingly oblivious to my interjection, “I remember ah Won’s children; she has sent photographs of her growing family in the United States. Ah Won has been a loyal and dutiful daughter

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who remembers her obligations to her elderly mother in the village by regularly sending money home. She remembers us with special ‘lai see’ red packet money to be distributed to everyone in the village for Chinese New Year. Life in Gold Mountain must be prosperous and good.” I nod as if in agreement and smile obligingly at my grandmother’s understanding of my parent’s life in the United States. Little does my grandmother know of the hardships my parents suffered working the long hours of the canneries and grocery stories to support the family. Nor will I disclose these hardships to my village clan at the risk of my parents’ losing face. To return honorably to the village with the ‘gold’ that the Americas promised is everyone’s dream. “Are you well, Grandmother? It is a sign of our family’s good fortune that you have achieved such longevity. Are you happy? Do you have any needs? Can I help you in any way?” I ask. Grandmother replies, “I am old and have lived a long life. I can’t see very well, and someone has to hold me up and support me to walk. I have a hearty appetite but can only eat soft foods since I am toothless. I feel useless but this is how old age goes. Most of my days are spent sitting here in this room. My eldest son and his family are only a few steps away, and they take care of me. This is already more than what many others have in their old age so I feel very fortunate. But more and more people from the village are leaving for the cities for work and school. There are more opportunities outside the village. I will miss ah Ming, my youngest grandson, if he should leave the village. All my other grandchildren have gone. Each year, the heavy rains turn our dirt lanes into a slush of mud, and it is difficult to move about. Travel on our bicycles or even on foot is almost impossible. Life in the village is simple but hard, and living closer to the city would make things easier for us.” My grandmother pauses in her story and asks the helper, who has been sitting on a stool patiently and attentively during our visit, for a drink. The helper quickly pours water into a cup from a thermos for my grandmother. “I boil water for your grandmother each day and leave the thermos close to her side so she can reach for it easily in case I am not here. Each day I clean and tidy up for her,” the helper tells me. But when Grandmother finishes her drink, she has lost the strands of the story she was just beginning. Grandmother turns to me, seems startled to find me there, and implores, “Who are you?” The helper again loudly tells Grandmother that I am her daughter’s daughter. I, too, am startled and shout my Chinese name to her in her good ear to urge Grandmother back to me. “I am Yan Lan, your granddaughter from Gold Mountain,” I say, beseeching Grandmother to know who I am and trying to recall her back to the story she was telling.

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After further prompting but without success, the helper finally suggests we leave Grandmother so she can rest, and for me to return later. I am disappointed that the connection between us seems to have been broken, and I reluctantly get up from the bed to leave. I have traveled so far in this quest in search of my roots and answers to understand my Chinese culture and identity that seem just beyond my grasp. Later that evening after dinner, when I return to my grandmother’s house, I sense she accepts me as a familiar visitor but I can never regain the flow of conversation to hear my grandmother’s stories. And I will never know with a certainty that Grandmother understands my relationship to her. I did not get to ask her about her bound feet, about my grandfather, who had passed away years earlier, who had lived and worked in Gold Mountain for over a decade and returned to the village a broken old man, or of how Grandmother experienced the Chinese Cultural Revolution and how she might have felt towards her grandchildren in Gold Mountain. There are so many questions left unasked and so much more I yearn to know and understand. There are many fragments of family stories I had heard growing up that I thought could be made complete and whole when placed within the landscape of my Toishan roots.

“Who are you?” my grandmother implored of me. Indeed, who am I? As I reflect back on this scene, I believe that my grandmother might well have been reaffirming this seminal question for a larger and universal quest. My reunion with my grandmother was, sadly, the last visit I would have with her before she passed away at age ninety-seven. Fortunately, other family members in the village and my parents were able to tell me stories I was seeking, to give me a family history and a way to understand the person I have become and to envisioning the person I am becoming.

The Legacy of Grandmother’s Footbinding My grandmother had her feet bound as a young girl in anticipation of her future marriage. In conversations with my mother over the years, we have talked about my grandmother’s footbinding. When I first learned that my grandmother had bound feet, I was bewildered then outraged. My awakening consciousness about my history and identity, introduced by the Asian American movement and Asian American Studies, led me to do further research on the origins and practice of footbinding. My earliest conversations with my mother about my grandmother’s footbinding took place in 1970 and more recently, for the purpose of this research study,

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in 2000–2003. It is based on the notes of these conversations that I write here: Mother: During your grandmother’s time, you might not be married off if you did not have your feet bound. Having bound feet made you a more attractive partner for marriage. It was desirable to have tiny feet since it was a sign of beauty and a sign of your class status that you did not have to do physical labor. For women who had to labor in the fields, footbinding was not practical. Your grandmother’s family was from the peasant class but her family hoped she might be better off in the future by marrying well. Your grandmother was fortunate to marry your grandfather who worked in Gold Mountain until his retirement. Marrying a man who had Gold Mountain connections guaranteed wealth and prosperity. Betty: But wasn’t her bound feet painful? How did Grandmother ever manage to walk? Mother: Of course, it was painful! At around 6 years of age, your grandmother had her feet bound. The bones of her toes were broken and distorted with her toes bent back and bound with strips of cloth to achieve the small feet. Growing up, I would catch a glimpse of how your grandmother regularly bathed her feet in a basin of water filled with a mixture of herbs to clean the skin and then re-wrap them in clean bindings. The tight bindings made her feel more comfortable and helped her walk. Her feet were deformed and decayed and she was too embarrassed for us to see her feet. It pains me deeply to think of her ordeal. Betty: But in this rare photograph of grandmother, she is wearing regular shoes, and her feet seem to be normal. Mother: During the many social changes in China, footbinding was prohibited, and women had their feet unbound in a process that proved just as painful. China declared footbinding a cruel practice that oppressed women. Unbinding their feet was intended to liberate women. By that time, your grandmother’s toes were permanently bent, and her feet could not be restored to their natural form. That is why you see grandmother in photographs in later years wearing the ordinary cloth shoes. Her feet, even though unbound, remain bent and deformed.

Footbinding was dictated by the political, social, and cultural practices of the times. Binding or unbinding was not a choice that belonged to Grandmother. I feel a deep sense of grief and pain for the oppressive constraints to which my grandmother was subjected. My grandmother’s

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footbinding also instills a kind of strength and courage that must have been demanded of my grandmother and most women of her generation to cope, adapt, and persevere in spite of, what seems to me, an inhumane practice. How did Grandmother ever endure the pain and manage? “You just did!” is often the retort by my parents whenever I ask a question about seemingly impossible obstacles that confronted them in their life. On the surface, their response seems to be a statement of their acceptance of an unquestioned higher authority. But, “You just did!” also displays an understood kind of quality to their lives that seems to be a declaration of courage, resilience, and hope in facing life’s adversities. It is the gift of this legacy that my grandmother has passed to me.

Conversation with My Uncle In another journal entry from the same sojourn to Toishan on July 5, 1979, I reconstruct and re-tell a conversation with my uncle, my mother’s older brother: After an evening meal celebrating my return home to my village in China, I sit in the doorway with my uncle, my mother’s older brother, in the summer’s dusk. I ask him why the houses are so closely built to each other with only very narrow walkways separating them. China’s landscape appears before me as vast and spacious, yet the village dwellings cluster so closely appear incongruent to me. His response to my question weaves his retelling from memory of his personal story, our family history, and China’s history. “Why the houses are built so closely together is because we treasure the land that nurtures us. Every portion of land is precious to us for the growing of the crops and the keeping of the livestock that maintains the village’s prosperity. There have been times in our past when we feared going hungry, and every grain of rice was like gold. The people are but caretakers of the land. My father, your grandfather, had been a sojourner to Gold Mountain. He had planned to return to the village as soon as possible and retire a rich man. Your grandfather worked hard and dutifully sent money back, but he was unable to return home until he was very old, worn down, and later died in the village. I can still remember how your grandfather gave instructions on the design of the family home when I was a young man. Your grandfather planned for the number of rooms to accommodate me as his oldest son as well as my future wife and children. It was planned so

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that we would all live in the house together. Windows are few and small to keep out the piercing heat of the sun and the heavy rains of the winters. The houses are also clustered together so closely for protection against bandits that occasionally raided the villages. In some villages, watchtowers still stand to serve as outlooks for encroaching dangers. I can still remember times when we were threatened by bandits from neighboring villages, and people were kidnapped for ransom because of their connections to Gold Mountain. Your mother, married but with your father in America, was a likely victim. She would gather her belongings and rush to the safety of the towers to spend the night until she could hear the bandits ransacking the village no more.”

Toishan Soil In these next journal entries, I continue to intertwine my personal narratives with my quest as I reflect on the “narrative thinking” that I bring to my sojourns. The following journal entry is dated March 8, 2002: I have returned from another very full and rich journey to Toishan. Going back to my village with a narrative thinking, however, gives me a different perspective and understanding of my journeys. I am much more alert of myself as part of the experience and the story rather than ‘one from overseas’ as Chinese from abroad are called. Immersing myself into village life is not an easy task and my visits are brief and limited to about five days each time. Nevertheless, I begin to think of myself as part of the village landscape and that I also have a place in the story here. My story is intertwined with the story of others who were born here, have sought their homes in the Americas and become a returnee to the motherland. I see myself as part of that movement of sojourners who quest for a sense of belonging and have made the same journey I have been making. My narrative thinking helps me to not only capture the rhythm of my village but also allows me to be part of it. I feel the pulsating heartbeat that resounds in the landscape that gives it life. At one point, I looked out to the vast landscape of vegetable fields and rice paddies and picked up a hand full of Toishan earth. I could feel its rough texture and rubbed it into the palms of my hands. The soil seemed to blend into my “yellow skin” and become embedded in my pores and flow into my being. I belong to this land.

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Our Emissary From a journal entry dated March 3, 1999, I write how I have become an emissary for my parents: “Make this trip on our behalf, for you are our emissary,” are the instructions from my mother and father for a journey to Toishan. I become an extension of their wishes on a journey they would be unlikely to make themselves again given their advancing age. My visits to Toishan are a mission on my parents’ behalf, continuing for them to make secure our patriarchal home in China. Their instructions have become my duty and engage me on this journey home. “Give US$50 of red packet ‘lai see’ to Uncle who lives in your paternal grandfather’s home in the village. In exchange for living in our ancestral village home and as the eldest son, Uncle is responsible for caring for the grave of your great grandfather. And if Uncle has passed on, give the ‘lai see’ to his wife or eldest son,” my parents further direct me. I find Uncle alive and in good spirits, though hard of hearing, almost blind, and unable to walk due to a recent fall. He is sleeping as I arrive and I urge his family not to rouse him and to let him rest. In the meantime, I request my village cousins to lead me to the village cemetery directly behind our ancestral home just minutes away. Guided by our village family members, I navigate the trail of overgrown path that leads to the village cemetery just behind our home and to pay my respects to my great grandfather. The path is winding and narrow, and my village cousins have brought along a scythe and sword to clear our way. Nature’s profuse growth of grass and vines has taken over, and the path is momentarily lost to us. There is some confusion as even my cousins lose their way and they look toward the direction of the sun to guide them. As I stumble along the path, I note each gravesite is made of mounds of earth that form a kind of miniature hill. Here, the bones of the deceased are placed in glazed covered urns and buried upright and covered by a mound of earth. There are shouts as my cousins alert everyone that my great grandfather’s grave has finally been located, and they signal everyone to join them. They have unearthed Great Grandfather’s plaque that is set in the ground as well as an impressive marker that stands to its side. Great Grandfather’s name had been elegantly engraved on the plaque and marker that my father had arranged years ago. Around me, I note that not all gravesites are so well maintained; some have markers that are crumbling with mounds collapsing. It is with the tending and care of our village relatives that my great grandfather’s grave is in such a proper state. But how long will this

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last? I wonder. Will the continuity of our ancestral home and the gravesite be maintained in the next generation? My village relatives then ably and vigorously set about the task of clearing the gravesite and surrounding area of plant overgrowth. When their work has been completed, I place the flowers I have brought against the gravesite mound. Before the gravesite, my relatives place the special foods that have been prepared in advance, sweet cakes, strips of pork, chicken, and stalks of sugar cane along with ceremonial wine in tiny red wine cups. Once we are ready, I take the lead in bowing first since I am the closest relative to my great grandfather amongst us. To show my respect, I bow three times while holding the stems of the burning incense. I then burn paper money as a prayer for prosperity in the next world. When everyone has taken their turn with this ritual, we make a celebratory feast of the foods that we have brought as an offering. I have videotaped this journey to share with my parents in California. I will watch the tapes with them and listen for the stories from my parents that the tapes will surely elicit. I have come to realize that my stories of experience in Toishan as a sojourner are intertwined with theirs, and our stories form a collective family narrative.

Shifting Landscape: Transitions and Legacies From a journal entry dated April 30, 2002: I have just returned from another trip to China. My journeys there continue to exhilarate me as I dig deeper into the landscape. The landscape is complex and not always calm. I learn of territorial boundary disputes: A neighbor had extended his rooftop onto the balcony of another and is finally forced to square off a section of the roof tiles. I learn more about my mother hiding in the watchtowers as neighboring villagers raided their homes targeting those who had overseas connections and monies, kidnapping for ransom. I also hear stories of intrusions on grave sites that block the ‘fung shui’ or nature’s flow of wind and waters that bring good fortunes to others in the village. I begin to sense that my village is quietly disappearing with the loss of its people and culture even as they have the resources of overseas support from those who have immigrated. But it seems monies do not sustain a community. It is its people. Overseas Chinese family relations like my parents continue to send monies to support their remaining relatives in the village. In more recent years, these aging Chinese have provided funds to construct community centers, schools, and roads. It is their way of giving back to the village and to leave their legacy. Their names are inscribed

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on marble slabs, and flattering photographs of themselves in their younger days are hung prominently on community center walls. Statutes and busts are molded in their likeness and stand in courtyards and at entrances to schools. Roads are named after them. They are enshrined thus and seem to say: “I was born in the village, and in the village I remain.” Forlornly, the community centers stand devoid of people, the school yearns for children to fill its classrooms, and the road seeks its travelers. I first met one of my relatives in my mother’s village in 1979, then a young smiling man, yet to be married. Returning as I have now, more than 20 years later, I meet him again as an aging man with two grown children who have left the village for work and school in the larger cities. In age, I am older than he is by about five years, yet he appears much older. His face is weathered, darkly brown, and deeply lined by sun and labor. He tells me that he can no longer work and, as an explanation, he jabs at his chest. I suspect it is a lung condition that has developed from the years of heavy smoking as men in China are prone to do. I wonder how it is that he and his wife subsist. They grow what vegetables they can manage: garlic, stems of green onions for seasoning, and rice grains that are scattered drying in the sun ready for planting. He laughingly asks me to serve as a matchmaker for his daughter. I am often asked this, lightheartedly, it may seem, but serious in its intent filled with hope and longing for a better life in the Americas. I return his request with a suggestion that he gives me her photograph so that I can “introduce” her to a suitable match, for it would be improper for me to refuse. We exchange a knowing nod that probably not much will come of this. And I get a sense of what Geertz, in “After the Fact, Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist” (1995), means about coming too late, just missing the moment, never being in a place long enough. It never seems just right. To be sure, my visits to Toishan are brief and are not of Geertz’s extended immersion in a community. When and where I enter during my Toishan visits marks the extent and quality of experience I am able to embrace. I realize the moment is fluid but I do not have the “over time” kind of experience that could bring me “in the midst” of the village and feel my research explorations in Toishan are limited in this way.

Living, Telling, Retelling, and Reliving In the telling and retelling of my experiences in Toishan over the years, I draw a narrative meaning that changes my perspective of my visit with my village clan that brings a deeper understanding of who I am. Again, I tell and re-tell these stories of experience with the aid of supporting data drawn from a review of literature, journals, photographs, videotapes,

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letters, interviews, and conversations to lend plausibility to my narratives. I also rely heavily on my memories. That my memories may be selective or flawed is an acknowledgment I give to the quality of my narratives. Here again, my narratives are composed of multiple truths and multiple realities. That I have reconstructed my version of these experiences that occurred decades ago, based on my memory, suggests that there are other possible reconstructions. Connelly and Clandinin (1990) believe that we are living and telling our stories and as we move forward, we are retelling and reliving our stories. As I tell and re-tell these stories, they invariable change in the process. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) hold that it is in the difficult and important process of re-telling of the stories that allow for growth and transformation, a central and essential point of studying experience.

Toishan as an Educational Landscape My journey to Toishan and reunion with my grandmother are based on a journal entry from July 1979 and reconstructed here as I live, tell, retell, and relive my stories of experience. But how are such experiences, expressed in stories and narratives, educational? What meaning and significance do these experiences hold for teachers and teacher education? Connelly and Clandinin (1988) say that as we tell our experiences, we express them through stories, and these stories form a mode of knowing that create teacher knowledge. They describe this knowledge as a “personal practical knowledge” which is embodied in each of us as a way of knowing life. Personal practical knowledge is grounded in experience and focuses on teachers as knowledgeable and knowing persons. They contend that it is important for teachers to understand their own personal life narratives as a way of gaining an understanding of our student’s narratives. Reflecting today on my journeys to Toishan in search of my roots, I discover new meaning and significance for my classroom as I retell and relive my stories in my role as a teacher educator in Hong Kong. I begin to see my classroom as a village with the learners and teacher as members of an extended family or a village clan in a kinship where my students and I are related by a common bond of the classroom experience and a school culture. I become more aware of the “familial” relationship, duties, and obligations accorded each member in the class that often extends beyond the classroom. My grandmother spoke of my mother’s sustained loyalty, duty, and obligation to her and the village, and I feel that kind

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of relationship can be applied to the relationship between learners and teachers. Growing up in California, I recall the preparations my parents made in regularly sending money and “care packages” of candies, cookies, and canned meats to the village. And as I grew older, I also sent money to my grandmother in the village with expectations that I would continue this tradition of support on behalf of my parents and my family. This experience has instilled in me a deep sense of duty, obligation, and loyalty to my parents and to my extended family in Hong Kong that includes my pre-service teacher education students Alex and Suki, whose stories appear in a later chapter. I reflect on the rush of pleasure I felt in discovering the shared physical features of my bulky and wrinkle looking knuckles and slender wrists that I have inherited from my grandmother. The source of my pleasure, I believe, comes from a need to discover and understand our connections to our past that asserts and defines who we are and where we belong. As a teacher, I pose the questions of creating such connections for my students though I am not always certain of the answers or responses. Do my students have a shared basis to establish such connections in the classroom that gives them the immediacy of knowing who they are and where they belong? Do I nurture a classroom culture that cultivates an unexpected “rush of pleasure” for a discovered connection? And what might these connections be for my students in Hong Kong or in my classroom in California? With uneven and mixed successes, I have attempted to establish a connection with my Hong Kong students when I invite them to call me by my American first name, Betty. My students in Hong Kong are unaccustomed to the familiarity of calling a Chinese teacher by their first name. I realize that I have created more confusion and resistance than the intended connections. Perhaps I need to draw on the deference of respect that is accorded to the Chinese title of teacher in a similar way that elder sister and Auntie are used in my village. While my university students in California readily call me Betty, I find a replication of this practice in the Hong Kong context not necessarily fitting and that I need to negotiate, improvise, and create a different kind of relationship with my teacher education students in Hong Kong.

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A Classroom’s Village Culture and Identity My uncle’s stories about my mother’s village were ones I sought in my quest for self-understanding and provided me with a deeper understanding of my roots and my family’s history. I had traveled from the other side of the world in this quest to feel the Toishan earth in my yellow skin that gave me a profound sense of connection and belonging. I was surprised and somewhat puzzled, therefore, to find that many of my Hong Kong-born students have never been to China, whose border is only about a 15-minutes train ride away from the district of my teacher education university. Though the Chinese in Hong Kong can trace their origins to China, most of my Chinese students have no such “village” connection that they identify with nor any wish to visit to explore their roots. Though they are of Chinese ethnicity, their past experiences have been dominated by over 150 years of British colonial rule in an international and multicultural city. It would seem that such a setting might be a source of enrichment as well as a source of confusion and tension for exploring their culture and identity. I explore my questions of my Chinese culture and identity that emerged from the Asian American movement and Asian American Studies alongside my Hong Kong students’ search for their own culture and identity as they question whether they are a Chinese “Hong Konger” or a Hong Kong Chinese during this era of post-British colonial rule. Feelings of displacement and uncertainty, heightened by the return of sovereignty to China from the British in 1997, are common among my students. They question whether they are Chinese or Hong Kongers and where they belong in a Hong Kong that is now designated as a “Special Administrative Region” (SAR) to China and now functions under a “one country, two systems” policy. Yet, in the midst of this dilemma, it is puzzling to me that my students do not seem to look toward China for their roots and the answers to their questions about their culture and identity. Might this be due to the same kind of experience I felt growing up ignoring and rejecting my Chinese heritage? How might they pose their questions about their culture and identity through storytelling of their experiences in my classroom? I reflect on my students’ personal identity and whether they have a sense of belonging within my classroom. Does my classroom provide an inviting and safe “village” space for my students’ family stories and personal narratives that will enable them to understand their culture

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and identity? In international Hong Kong, how have they, intentionally or unintentionally, negotiated and improvised a culture and identity for themselves? And how might these experiences contribute to a personal practical knowledge for their future profession as teachers? These are some of the questions and puzzles that evolve from my uncles’ stories and my sojourns to my village that find their way to my teaching in my Hong Kong classroom.

Classroom Traditions and Continuities The themes of tradition and continuity seem to run through my journal entries in “Our Emissary” and “Shifting Landscapes: Transitions and Legacies.” My parents instructed me to visit my father’s ancestral village home and to pay my respects to my great grandfather at his gravesite and pay homage to the spirits. This speaks to the practice of cultural and village traditions that provide a sense of continuity and maintains our family’s presence and place in the village community. These cultural traditions have been passed on to me even though I may not have a full understanding of why we practice them and how they came about. I continue them as a duty and obligation to my parents and to honor my ancestral family. Are these ingrained practices a mark of a Chinese identity or culture? Do they make me Chinese? I become my parents’ emissary to honor and sustain the continuity of our family home. But, I wonder, what will happen to our village in the next generation or even in the next year? In the future, will these traditions be continued in my family? It seems highly unlikely, given how my village is gradually disappearing as people are abandoning the villages for the larger cities or through emigration. Will my village community disappear altogether? Will the soft, round, and melodic sounds of my Toishan dialect disappear completely and be replaced with China’s national language of Putonghua? In ten years’ time, will my village still be there, and if so, will it have been changed and transformed to something altogether different? Will I be able to locate my great grandfather’s grave? In my Hong Kong classroom, what are the educational traditions that sustain its continuity? When I visit the local Hong Kong primary and secondary schools, I have experienced students getting up from their desks, bowing their heads, and saying in unison “good morning” or “good afternoon” upon the entrance of the teacher to the classroom. Traditionally, this act is an expression of their respect and honor for the

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role of the teacher. The first time I experienced this was on an observation and supervision visit to a school where my pre-service student had been assigned. I recall feeling deeply touched and genuinely impressed by the greeting. Having come from the classroom culture in the United States where abuse and violence in the classroom in some neighborhoods can occur, I found this local Hong Kong school practice a welcomed custom. However, this practice of standing and bowing to the teacher also represents and defines the traditional relationship between teacher and learner. Traditionally, the Hong Kong teacher is seen as the sole authority and transmitter of learning and knowledge. But this view is dramatically shifting as there is a call for a more “democratic” classroom that encourages a more engaged and participatory role by learners. Hong Kong educators, such as Postiglione (1992), Lee (2002), and Fairbrother (2003), have argued for the recognition of the “rights” of learners and that they have a voice in curriculum deliberations. Along these lines, then, will eliminating the traditional practice of standing-at-attention and bowing-in-greeting to the teacher and changing it to a more democratic classroom culture make it less Chinese? If this practice were to be eliminated, will we in the future speak of this ritual as an archaic practice of a feudalistic society or mourn the loss of a past that expressed respect and honor for teachers? Or might there be a creative transformation that develops an “Asian democracy with Chinese characteristics” for the Hong Kong milieu?

Looking Back and Looking Forward The Asian American movement and Asian American Studies provided the soil in which the seeds of my mother’s lament of my becoming a juk sing or a hollow bamboo flourished into a personal quest for understanding my culture and seeking my identity. This quest led me to Toishan, China, the place of my birth, and my telling and retelling of my stories of experience with my grandmother, uncles, and village clan. While I have visited Toishan over a span of time, the answers to my questions about my culture and identity remain only partially revealed. My journeys to Toishan have given me a deeper understanding of my roots, about where I came from, and I have felt reconnected to the land of my village. But who I am in the present, in view of my past, and who I wish to become remain elusive, and the questions persist in an ongoing and unfolding quest.

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Intertwined with my storied experiences of my journeys to Toishan, I have connected my narratives to teacher education and an evolving personal practical knowledge. I have sought to understand my classroom and my relationship to my students by seeing it as a village community with common and shared familial qualities of duty, obligations, and loyalty. The next chapter, “Journeying to Gold Mountain, Uprooted and Transplanted to New Soil,” chronicles our family’s emigration from Toishan to America as a land of opportunities and promises, of what we hoped for and what we found. The United States promised a mountain of gold, and while my family and I found many opportunities, we were also confronted with the realities of my parent’s harsh labor in the canneries, garment factories, and grocery stores.

References Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1988). Teachers as curriculum planners. The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Press. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2–14. https://doi.org/10.2307/117 6100 Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau, The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. (2021, May 23). Joint declaration of the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the government of the People’s Republic of China on the question of Hong Kong. https://www.cmab.gov.hk/en/issues/ jd2.htm Fairbrother, G. P. (2003). Toward critical patriotism: Student resistance to political education in Hong Kong and China. Hong Kong University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jc7xd Lee, W. O. (2002). The emergency of new citizenship: Looking into the self and beyond the nation. In G. S. Khamsi, J. Torney-Purta, & J. Schwille (Eds.), New paradigms and recurring paradoxes in education for citizenship: An international perspective (pp. 37–60). Elsevier Science. Ling, A. (1985, Spring). Asian Amerian literature: A brief introduction and selected bibliography. Asssociation of Department of English Bulletin, 80, 29–33. Mitchell, M. (1955). Gone with the wind. Macmillan Company.

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Postiglione, G. (1992). The decolonization of Hong Kong education. In G. A. Postiglione (Ed.), Education and society in Hong Kong: Toward one country and two systems (pp. 3–38). Hong Kong University Press. http://hdl.handle. net/10722/196898

CHAPTER 5

Journeying to Gold Mountain: Uprooted and Transplanted to New Soil

The bamboo is a hardy, resilient, adaptive, and versatile plant that is rarely seen in most American gardens. It has been described as a “rapid spreader” and stigmatized as an invasive pest with the two bamboo species native to North America eradicated by early farmers, according to Barnhart (2021) of the American Bamboo Society, a society dedicated to promoting the beauty and utility of bamboo. In other parts of the world, the bamboo is used by more humans for more different purposes than any other plant. The bamboo is used in the scaffolding that supports the construction of skyscrapers in Hong Kong and China. Farrelly (1996) describes how bamboo can be fashioned into a delicate and intricate flower baskets, applied to musical instruments to create a unique resonance, and used to erect a sturdy fence or even a house. The bamboo’s powdered secretion has been used as ancient medicine in Chinese acupuncture, or how it can become a weapon with the bamboo tube stuffed with “black powder” to become a rocket projectile. This portrayal of the bamboo seems an apt metaphor for the rich, multiple, and complex experiences of Chinese immigrants to the Americas. The Chinese in America have not always been welcomed to the shores of the United States but have, nevertheless, flourished under adverse and hostile social and political conditions.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. C. Eng, Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82032-9_5

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Journeying “Journeying to Gold Mountain: Uprooted and Transplanted to New Soil,” chronicles the personal and family narratives of our immigration and journey to Gold Mountain or the United States. “Journeying” attempts to convey the fluid and dynamic movement of my quest for understanding my culture and identity and how these experiences shape and inform my teacher knowledge as a teacher educator. The journeying I have experienced is in a state of constant motion and is lifelong. In my personal and family narratives, there seem to be ongoing and unfolding destinations, with arrivals being only a transitory state. Our journeys are not only geographical in nature, such as our arrival in the United States from China, but also of the mind and spirit that shape who I am and who I am becoming. As I will tell later, my parents were required to undergo two separate and different marriage ceremonies, one in the village and the other before the Hong Kong and United States government authorities almost twelve years later in order to document and comply with immigration requirements. Having to submit to two different marriages to satisfy the requirements of two different cultural and social contexts was indicative of the transformation our identities were undergoing that later determined where we belonged. Indeed, the thresholds for another entry and the transitions that serve to bridge me from one threshold to another seem essential to maintaining the unities of my life experiences. Positioned at the threshold, I am provided a glimpse of what I might encounter, a promise that may or may not be fulfilled but can be a source of immense excitement, happiness, hope, threat, or fear. As at the threshold of my grandmother’s house in Toishan, I am not always prepared for the moment of entry. There, I came to a halt and paused to gather myself after journeying from the other side of the world on a quest in search of the roots to my culture and identity. I believe I was able to move forward from the threshold of my grandmother’s house because I knew that I was among family and felt welcomed there. My grandmother’s helper or caregiver, a young woman in our village, served as my facilitator and guide who navigated my movement forward from the threshold in the transition from the glaring sun of the outdoors to the dark interiors of my grandmother’s house. This chapter introduces new thresholds I encountered and the transitions in my journeying to Gold Mountain. The narratives in this chapter and the next highlight the stories of my mother and father. It is by their

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side that I was guided growing up, and their stories of experience have continued to influence me profoundly to become the person I am today and am becoming. Their life narratives shape and inform the experiences that are embedded and infused into my evolving teacher knowledge as a teacher educator. The multiple roots, preparations, and process for the journeying give scope and depth to the whole of the passage from one threshold to another. This is how I have attempted to convey the experience of our family’s emigration from Toishan to the United States and to reflect on immigration as an educative experience and connect it to the development of my teacher knowledge. I position my personal and family narratives in the context of our Chinese American community and in the larger context of our social and political history in the United States. I address how my family narratives, particularly those of my parents, and our experiences of crossing, blending, and melding cultures and identities from China to California, are educative and how such experiences can be relevant for all educators to achieve a cross-cultural perspective.

Threshold: Gold Mountain The threshold of my grandmother’s house in our village home in China was my entry to another world in my quest for my family roots after growing up in the United States for almost 25 years. My reunion with my grandmother in 1979 reconnected me to our village life, and I see myself as a sojourner in a larger narrative landscape shared by others who have made the same journey and sought the same quest for culture and identity. From my journeys to Toishan, I come to view my classroom as a village where learners and teacher are connected in a familial kinship of a classroom culture. Years earlier, in 1955, our family’s journey to “Gam Shan” or the Gold Mountain of the United States provided the first dramatic threshold to a new world that crossed identities and cultures. At the age of six, I with my mother and younger brother were uprooted, transplanted, and grown anew in the soils of the United States. While the Americas promised us a mountain of gold, we discovered its opportunities along with its challenges, conflicts, and tensions in our new home. My parents lived lives that I now recognize for their courage, perseverance, and sacrifice. They expressed their love and fulfilled their duties and responsibilities to the family first over their own individual and personal interests and needs. For my parents, personal desires and aspirations were subsumed within

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the family, an act that is expected and valued within traditional Chinese culture. Growing up Chinese in America and, especially with my political and social activism in the Asian American movement in the 1960s, I came to view my parents’ cultural orientation quite differently. I came to view my parents’ lives as being exploited for their labor working in the long hours of the grocery stores, canneries, and garment factories and marked by what I considered oppressive practices of a feudalistic China and a discriminatory and racist United States. My parents’ arranged marriage in Toishan, brokered by a go-between and decided by the two future mothers-in-laws, seemed an oppressive practice to my way of thinking that had been shaped by my Americanization and political point of view. This is also how I viewed my father’s experience of being forced to be a “paper son” or a person who purchased false paper to become a son of a U.S. citizen to gain passage to the United States and being a bachelor father separated from his family due to the exclusionary acts and immigration laws aimed specifically against the Chinese. More often than not, my views of these experiences and those of my parents were at odds and posed conflicts and tensions in our relationship. “Bitter strength” is how the history of the Chinese in the United States has been portrayed by historian Barth (1964). Bitter strength is a literal translation of the word “coolie,” a name the Chinese have been called in the United States that conveys the harsh physical labor they were subjected and commonly used in a derogatory and racist manner. The early Chinese that arrived in California in 1850s and 1860s came in search of gold as sojourners in transient who later became immigrants. The Chinese possessed a vision and commitment to make money to return to China with their savings to retire comfortably to their families. Their strength and determination provided the strength to endure many bitter years of labor. Scholars such as Sung (1967), Lyman (1974), Takaki (1993), Tong (2000), and Yung (1995) have chronicled how the Chinese pioneers were initially welcomed for their ethics of hard work and cheap labor but encountered discrimination and harsh and brutal conditions when the Chinese threatened the racial homogeneity of America. A pattern of discrimination was evidenced by the Chinese’s ineligibility for citizenship based on a U.S. federal law of 1790. This law in turn denied the Chinese the right to vote and imposed taxes on the Chinese as foreign workers. This was followed by the 1862 Act to Prohibit Coolie Trade

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and a series of other discriminatory laws during the anti-Chinese movement of this period. And when the economy shifted downward when the mines of the gold rush went dry, the Chinese became the target for further discrimination. One of the most damaging and far-reaching policies was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The Act was overwhelmingly passed by the U.S. Congress to suspend the immigration of Chinese to the United States initially for ten years and extended until its repeal in 1943. For the first time, the United States adopted a policy of exclusion based on race and nationality and denied access to naturalization. The Act severely limited the number of Chinese women who could come to America and effectively barred many wives from immigrating to join their husbands already in the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was a law and legal but, I believe, racially motivated and ethically and morally wrong. At the time of the Exclusion Act, the Chinese constituted a mere 0.002% of the United States population in 1880. There was very little basis for viewing the Chinese as a threat except for the fears that the Chinese laborers posed a threat to labor among white society as a way to remedy unemployment and economic tensions. The Exclusion Act became a model to discriminate against other ethnic minority groups. Yung (1995), professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, describes the attacks and violence against the Chinese and documents the common practice of the Chinese being robbed and murdered. Mobs looted, lynched, burned and drove Chinese out of their homes as recorded in riots in Los Angeles, California in 1871 and twenty-eight Chinese miners in Wyoming were massacred in 1885. The harsh and cruel realities posed by Gold Mountain can also be seen in the many Chinese women who were forced into indentured prostitution in the United States in the 1850s as an act of filial duty and sacrifice to save their families in China from starvation. They were robbed and subjected to sexual abuses by white hoodlums. The women had no political or legal rights and more importantly, lacked the support of their families. They were also discriminated with payment for their services less than their white counterparts.

Giving Context Yung’s research and other scholars such as Ko (2001), Hong (1997) have helped me place the experience of my grandmother’s footbinding and

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my parents’ arranged marriage in context of China’s social and cultural milieu. Growing up, my American education was devoid of the histories of China and the pioneering Chinese Americans. By first recovering and reclaiming my personal and family’s narratives of such experiences and then placing these narratives in the context of its social, political and cultural milieu, I have been able to achieve a deeper, more complete, and meaningful understanding of the roots of my culture and identity that immersed me in the “midst of lives.” Being able to place my personal and family narratives in context provides me with a much-needed perspective and understanding of a larger historical, economical, and social narrative. While I might respond with confusion or feel angered by the practice of footbinding of my grandmother’s generation in our village in China or direct my outrage against the lack of individual choice and freedom of imposed arranged marriage of my parents, I have come to understand the social and political forces that dominated and determined their lives. Often, in conversations with my parents over the years, I have asked in puzzlement and with a sense of judgmental indignation and outrage why my grandmother had her feet bound. This is also the attitude I took when I asked them why they subjected themselves to an arranged marriage, or why my father left my mother for the United States to be separated from his family for over 17 years with only one visit to Toishan for the birth of my brother and I. More often than not, my parents have responded to such questions with a firm and authoritative: “That was the way it was!” My parents’ succinct and rather terse statement suggest not only their following of an unquestioned and honored higher authority that dictated their lives, but also their bewilderment of my ignorance. Their bewilderment of my ignorance served to highlight the differences in our values, views, and understanding of the world that marked the deep disparities in our culture and identity and justified their lament of my being a juk sing . But the gulfs that might separate us are often bridged or resolved when I am able to place these family histories in perspective and in context of China’s social and political conditions that determined their lives.

Taking Flight Our family’s journey from Toishan to Gold Mountain had been in preparation for many years for our moment of departure on February 14, 1955. The earliest preparations can be traced back to 1938 when my father

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first emigrated to the United States as a “paper son” three years after his arranged marriage to my mother. Working and scrimping to save enough money to establish a home for us in the United States, my father successfully accomplished reuniting us as a family. Restrictive immigration laws against the Chinese had finally been relaxed due to public pressure during this period, and our application to join my father was finally approved. Moreover, we had to obtain the approval from the Toishan village council to determine our correct political orientation. That we were a family of small landowners or “petite bourgeois” and connected to capitalistic Gold Mountain of the United States, some of the villagers objected and denied our departure. It was not until one of the village elders forcefully spoke up on our behalf that we were granted to leave. The elder had stressed that we had served the village by fairly renting parcels of land for farming, shared the distribution of crops, and that we were honest and hardworking family who deserved to be reunited as a family. As a transition to Gold Mountain, we moved from Toishan to Hong Kong about a year earlier. Once based in Hong Kong, where the American Consulate offices were located, we processed our immigration applications, and attended the necessary interviews with U.S. government officials. My mother, brother, and I attended the interviews and I recall it as a solemn and serious occasion. We dressed properly and we were careful not to say the wrong thing, fearful that we might be rejected. With the assistance of an American immigration lawyer, hired by my father, we received approval to immigrate to the United States about one year later. The black-and-white family photograph the day of departure in 1955 shows a group of almost 30 people who came to Hong Kong’s then Kai Tak International Airport to bid us farewell on this journey to the Americas. I can visualize the scene, with the photographs triggering my memory. My mother, brother, and I are dressed in new and rather formal dress, especially tailored for us for this momentous occasion. I am six years of age, and I am wearing a new rose-colored dress with my hair in tight curls from my first perm. My brother Billy, one year younger than me, wears his first suit, a light brown tweed, with a dress shirt and tie. My mother is in a beautiful emerald Chinese silk brocade jacket lined in soft white fleece that was, especially designed for her for this journey. I recall going to a well-known Shanghai tailor shop in Hong Kong with my mother and tai gui or “Big Auntie” to view all the luxurious bolts of fabrics that were selected for a grand wardrobe of silk brocade cheung sam, the traditional Chinese dress, fine silk blouses, skirts, and dresses.

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With the money that my father had sent for us from the United States to prepare for our journey, we had fashioned a wardrobe we thought fitting for our entrance to Gold Mountain. In the photograph of us at the airport, I am carrying a doll, given to me as a farewell gift, with eyelids that closed when tilted back for sleep, dark brown curling hair dressed in a glamorous, and flowing yellow organdy evening gown ready for a ball. As I look at this photograph, we appear very solemnly poised in anticipation for this journey with elaborate finery to mark the occasion. Never before had we worn such fine clothes and never had we had such a grand and thrilling gathering of family and friends. This journey promised many other “firsts” and “never befores.” Looking at the photograph taken at the Hong Kong airport in 1955 today, my mother remembers: Most of these people lived in our building and had also applied for immigration to the United States. We were the first to have our immigration applications granted, and everyone was thrilled for us. Some of these people came uninvited to the airport but that was all right. It was rare in those days for people to immigrate by plane, as traveling by ship was more common and less expensive. It cost an enormous US$500 for each of us on this one-way trip! Your father wanted us to travel in comfort and in style, and the money he had saved working in the United States made this possible. I treated everyone to drinks and ice cream at the airport restaurant. (Interview Notes, October 15, 2002)

The farewell from our family and friends at the Hong Kong airport was as much an expression of their warm good wishes for us as it was an expression of their own anticipation and preparation for their hopedfor journey to Gold Mountain. Immigration to the United States was a complicated and lengthy process that could take years with requirements that were prohibitive. Having an immediate family member, as we did with our father, and evidence of financial resources were requirements that many were unable to meet in order to immigrate. My mother points out the family and friends in the photograph who later immigrated to the United States. Some immigrated around the same time, some over ten years later, and others with whom she has lost touch. In interviews, my mother recalled: These are Auntie, Uncle, and their teenage children, Judy and Bee. Auntie and Uncle were very kind and generous to us. They rented us the room

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in the building they owned when we first arrived in Hong Kong from Toishan, China. In those days, housing in Hong Kong was scarce and very difficult to obtain, and we were fortunate to have a place to live. Judy and Bee were about 10 years older than you, and they played with you and your brother all the time, treating you like their little sister and brother. Auntie and Uncle were in the business of helping people apply for immigration. They would travel with us by ferry from the Kowloon to the Hong Kong side to accompany us to the American Consulate whenever we were required to go for an interview. Uncle helped me complete all the many forms for immigration. Uncle told me what to expect from government officials and coached me on how to answer their questions. One wrong answer or inability to answer the questions could cause a delay or a rejection of our application. Lucky for us, Uncle was experienced in the procedures and prepared me well. Auntie even told me what to wear. You and your brother had to attend the interviews too since you were proof that we were a family. Auntie took you in hand, and I had your younger brother strapped on my back for the trip across the harbor. Unfortunately, Uncle’s own family was unable to immigrate until many years later because he did not meet the requirements. Also pictured in the photograph are your father’s first cousins, your grandfather’s nephew and niece who were in their early twenties. They too had been separated from their father, and they would not be able to immigrate to the United States until they were married adults. Their father had been working in San Francisco as a cook for over 20 years and helped your father find his first job as a janitor in the community Eng Family Association. I thanked everyone for coming out to the airport, and I said that we would warmly welcome them when it came their turn to arrive in the United States. Ahhh (sighing deeply), everyone yearned to go to the United States, but many were unable to do so. (Interview Notes, October 15, 2002, June 5, 2003, August 10, 2003)

A Viewing for a Bride My mother married at age sixteen and my father at seventeen in a marriage ceremony that was marked with offerings and a celebration feast by the people of our village in Toishan in 1935. Arranged marriages were recognized custom of the time. It was common for the future husband and wife to meet for the first time when the engagement was announced or, in some cases, on the day of the wedding. Matchmakers and gobetweens who served to introduce potential partners were well regarded in Chinese culture. Standards for selection of mates were based on very

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practical and materialistic factors that included one’s wealth and status in the village, good health, fertility or ability to bear children, especially sons, and a respectable family background. In an interview (Interview Notes, March 13, 2000) with my parents, they re-told how they had been matched: Betty: How did you come to meet Father? Mother: Well, your father’s side of the family was in the business of selling clothes and dry goods. My brother was also in the same business and served as a supplier. Your paternal grandfather would go to my brother’s store to purchase goods to be sold in his store. The goods were purchased on a commission basis. When your grandfather came to pay for his purchases, your father would come along. It was at my brother’s store that I first caught sight of your father. But we did not actually meet or talk with each other. But based on this business relationship, our families came to know each other. Betty: How did you finally come to meet? Mother: It was at my school when your father was brought along to ‘inspect’ me (laughing). I was called out from my classroom to a waiting area. Your father, his mother, several of his aunties along with my mother were present. They viewed me, and that was it. I did not even speak, and we were not introduced to each other. My mother had told me in advance that I was to be viewed that day. They wanted to see whether I was big or small, tall or short and whether I was pretty or not. This was the custom of the time. The inspection took less than five minutes, and I returned to my classroom. Betty: So, dad, what did you think? Father: Well, not bad. I thought she looked good and hard-working (laughter). Arranged marriages were just the old-country’s way of doing things. Your mother and I did not have a decision in the selection of our future husband or wife. It was not our place to think or decide on such matters. Betty: Mom, why do you think you were chosen? Mother: I was chosen because his family knew that my family had money! They knew that my father was in the United States and provided a source of overseas money. His father knew how much and how often my father sent money home. As a dowry, our family gave a lot of furniture that included several tables, six to nine chairs, wardrobes, chests. In exchange, your father’s family gave my mother about US$1,200.

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Village Marriage, “Paper” Marriage My parents had a brief engagement in November 1935 and were married the following month in the village. The engagement was announced with the distribution of the traditional wedding cakes to family and village members. On the day of the wedding, selected elder women arrived at my mother’s home to prepare my mother for the ceremony with the traditional ritual of “combing the bride’s hair.” As the women combed my mother’s hair, each stroke of the comb to her hair was said with a chanting rhythm that wished upon her happiness, children, and grandchildren. Only the women elders who had experienced such good fortunes themselves were selected to perform this ritual. My mother wore an elaborate red headdress with a veil with a deep pink long skirt and top that was threaded with gold jewels. My father was dressed in the traditional somber Chinese robe with a red banner draped from his shoulder to waist. All their finery would be returned to the village rental shop after the wedding ceremony. As the bride, my mother rode in a carriage that was carried on the shoulders of men while her family members walked in a procession to her future husband’s family village. Here, the marriage was sealed with a tea ceremony of the bride bowing and serving tea to the groom’s parents, an offering of a roasted pig and a wedding feast with invited guests. In return, my parents received packets of “lai see” or red packets filled with money intended as wedding gifts from family and friends. In an interview with my father when I asked him when he was married, my father provided a different dimension to the story: Well, (pausing) it depends on what you mean by ‘marry.’ We were married in the village in 1935 then again in Hong Kong in 1947. We had a village wedding in Toishan on December 16, 1935. In the eyes of our village, your mother and I were married. In the village, we held the traditional Chinese ceremony, serving tea and bowing to my parents. We held a wedding feast where everyone on both sides of family was invited and dowries were exchanged. It was not necessary to sign papers or have a minister or to be married in a church. The Chinese government recognized the traditional village wedding. But the ‘real’ marriage took place when we had a civil marriage ceremony and received a certificate of marriage in British Hong Kong on September 16, 1947. Based on that marriage the Foreign Service of the United States in Hong Kong issued us a ‘Certificate of Witness to

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Marriage’. Once we had these official papers, our marriage became legally recognized by the U. S. Government. If your mother were ever to immigrate and join me in the United States, we needed to provide documented proof that we were married. (Interview Notes, March 13, 2000)

Having to satisfy two different cultures with two very different sets of requirements became an expected and understood way of life that called upon acts and skills of accommodation, coping, and improvisation in our preparations to navigate our transition from Toishan to Gold Mountain. Our traditional Chinese cultural values and practices, as in my parents’ village wedding, were invalid in the eyes of U.S. Government officials. My parents’ union had to undergo yet another marriage ceremony, almost twelve years after their village marriage, in a British-Hong Kong civil ceremony in the Registrar Office in Hong Kong, witnessed by the office of the Vice Consul of the United States based in Hong Kong, in order to be recognized and be considered valid. For my father, the British Hong Kong government civil ceremony became more “real” to him than his village marriage ceremony because he came to recognize the authority and privileges that such civil ceremonies accorded him and our family in order to function in the “real” life of Gold Mountain. The evidential trail of “papers” that we would have to establish became a way of life for our family and other Chinese immigrants, for these papers defined and determined our identities and where we belonged. These documents established my parents’ marital status, our immigration category and priority, and our citizenship and were essential for our passage to Gold Mountain.

First Landing Call out to your father in greeting: Ba! Ba! Tell him you have arrived safely to Gold Mountain from Hong Kong. You will not recognize him but he will know you. Seek him out in the crowd. He will be the one with the balding crown. Exclaim your greeting in celebration of our family reunion! (Interview Notes, October 15, 2002)

This is how my mother recalls her instructions to my brother and me as the three of us landed at San Francisco International Airport, February 14, 1955, on Valentine’s Day. My mother recalls how we enthusiastically

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began shouting our greeting, Ba! Ba! or father, while still on the plane. We were to be finally reunited with our father who had been working overseas since 1938 to support the extended family in China. Before the construction of arrival terminals to connect the plane to the airport, passengers stepped directly onto the tarmac to be greeted by friends and families. As we departed the plane and descended the steps onto the tarmac of the San Francisco International Airport, we found ourselves in the dark at night surrounded by twinkling lights beyond. Though we were unable to see our father in the dark, my brother and I, nevertheless, shouted our greeting as we came down the steps: Ba! Ba! Our greeting became a declaration to our new home, Gam Shan or “Gold Mountain,” that we had finally arrived to start our new life as a reunited family. The Pan Am flight from Hong Kong had been a lengthy one, with a stopover in Hawaii. It was the first and most important plane ride for us. During this long flight, I recalled that we were unaccustomed to the food served and that we ate very little. No rice accompanied the tray of food, and my mother wondered how a meal could be complete without rice. My mother later told me that she had been sleepless the night prior to our departure, so excited and anxious was she about our flight. Nor could she sleep on the seat of the plane even though she was very tired. With lack of sleep and little food, my mother felt weak and faint. My mother sought to rest on the floor of the plane in the space directly in front of our seats, having been assigned the first row of three seats in economy class that afforded a little extra legroom. My mother recalled that event: I felt dizzy and could not sleep on the airplane’s seat. I thought stretching out on the floor of the plane would help. Dressed in my new and beautiful silk brocade jacket and fine clothes, I tried to sleep lying on the floor of the plane. I was so tired. The two of you were the youngest children on the plane. You both ran up and down the aisles playfully, and the attendants gave you candy. (Interview Notes, October 15, 2002)

The sight of my mother lying in her new and extravagant finery on the floor of plane must have appeared strange and odd. My mother did not seem deterred by social etiquette, customs, or safety factors to do what she thought made perfectly good sense to her by lying on the floor of the plane to rest. I would later find such events of seeming incongruities

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and disparities commonplace occurrences that marked our passage and experience in Gold Mountain.

Point of Entry When we finally touched ground, we were required to clear immigration and customs. We must have had an interpreter, I should think, for we spoke hardly a word of English. Here, my mother recalled, our immigration documents were inspected, and custom officers searched our luggage and belongings. She did not understand why our luggage was being searched, and why we were then escorted to a room to undress for a more thorough search. Others from the plane were not subjected to such a search, and my mother felt confused and lost. Auntie and Uncle in Hong Kong had not prepared or coached her for such a search. My mother wondered what they were looking for and why it seemed we were singled out. Would we be prevented from meeting our father and be sent back to Toishan? We had waited so long for this reunion with our father to be a family again and had traveled so far on this journey. We later learned that the U.S. Customs had determined that our declaration of goods was inaccurate and that we would be fined US$300 in order to clear customs. My mother was told that the jade ring she had been carrying for a family friend exceeded the limit of goods allowed into the United States and that the U.S. Customs was suspicious that we were concealing more goods that should be included in our declaration. When I speak today with my mother about my memories of our first immigration border crossing that occurred in 1955, she is bolder and is brazenly offended that she had to pay another $300 for the jade ring. In an interview (October 15, 2002), my mother told of this experience: Mother: I cannot understand why we had to pay for the jade ring that had already been paid for in full when they were purchased in Hong Kong. Why do we need to pay again in another country? Betty: Weren’t you afraid? Mother: No, (laughing) I did not know enough to be afraid. I had to pay a fine, but the family friend I was carrying the ring for repaid me the money immediately. So, everything worked out.

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Journeying as an Educative Experience Viewed in retrospect, these experiences of immigration, gaining entry to the United States and our passage on a journey in search of Gold Mountain were an educative experience. Navigating and negotiating entry and safe passage into another culture can be stressful, traumatizing, and hazardous. Who gives us shelter, serves as our guides, prepares us as our Auntie and Uncle did in Hong Kong for our entry to Gold Mountain by accompanying us to the immigration offices with all the necessary documents and coaching us to the questions we would be asked? Who unearths the path and shows us the way, as my Toishan relatives did, who helped me locate the site of my grandfather’s grave in our village cemetery that had overgrown and covered with years of undergrowth? Who serves as the caregiver and navigator who alerts us to possible dangers ahead, to pave the way for a safe passage in our journeying? And what are the alternatives if our teachers or guides falter with instructions that are incomplete or inadequate, as with the unexpected and frightening U.S. customs interrogation and search we were subjected to upon landing in Gold Mountain. Are we prepared with the courage, skills, creativity, and fortitude to adapt and improvise our own safe passage? These are questions and puzzles that emerge from my family narratives and experiences in my quest for culture and identity. They are infused in my teacher knowledge and raise questions for my role as a teacher, my relationship to learners, and the process of learning and teaching. In our classrooms and schools, who guides and paves the way for learners? How is this accomplished? Every classroom and school offer a unique and complex cultural and social milieu that may also be hazardous and dangerous for our learners’ point of entry. Are our classrooms a place of shelter and safe harbor? Who or what provides the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to cope and effectively respond to the challenges that confront our students? How do we nurture our learners’ spirits and attend to their emotional needs should they feel frighten, confused, and lost? Educators such as Nell Noddings and Clare Kosnik propose alternative educational frameworks to address my questions and concerns. Their scholarship connects me to my way of thinking about my classroom as a village that is bound by a kinship of shared experiences. They suggest aims and qualities for the village I envision and ways to reimagine the classroom and schools. In A Feminine Approach to Ethics &

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Moral Education (1984), Noddings describes the teacher and learner relationship and interaction as “one-caring” and “one cared-for.” Noddings contends that the aim of the teacher is to sustain and enrich caring in herself as well as all others she interacts. Maintenance and enhancement of caring should be the primary purpose of schools. Noddings presents a case to consider structuring our schools and teaching to develop a caring and ethical society along with higher educational standards. She introduces a care ethic and care theory as alternative perspectives to guide our schools (2002). Noddings (1992) also recognizes that learners possess complex multiple identities, capabilities, and interests. She believes that our learners cannot be cared for if we maintain a notion of achieving an “ideal educated person.” In Kosnik’s Primary Education: Goals, Processes and Practices (1999), she views the class as a community of learners who, while not a family, share similar characteristics. Kosnik proposes, we view the classroom more like a community that share bonds of kinship. Kosnik sees community as essential to a holistic model that she has developed that is characterized by autonomy/control, effectiveness, integration, responsibility/care, and mutuality. Kosnik emphasizes the importance and creating a vibrant and diverse community in our classroom that encourages a sense of responsibility for the well-being of each other. Kosnik invites us to keep the conversation going among the participants in our schools to form a community, much like the village I envision, that provides expansive spaces to encourage and hear the diverse voices in our classrooms.

Building a Narrative Village in Our Classrooms When I come to view my classroom and the school as a village, I am able to make sense of the responsibilities of my role as the teacher and the relationship I endeavor to build with my students. It is through viewing the classroom as a village that I see the “communal spaces” created where the learners and teachers gather and give voice to the narratives that inform our curriculum. Certainly, my mother and father have been my primary teachers who continue to have a profound influence on the person/teacher I have become and am becoming. The conversations between my parents and me have been educative, inspiring, and tensionfilled. Many of my teachers and caregivers have been from my extended family members, Aunts, Uncles, and cousins within a village clan.

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These relationships were not necessarily bound by the blood ties that such titles signify in the Western understanding of such terms. Our usage of titles such as Aunt, Uncle, Cousins, Brother, or Sister to another Chinese person can be conferred to represent a shared kinship even if there is no blood relationship. This “village clan” and kinship was extended to the community of other Chinese working-class immigrants we found in our neighborhood and first home in Sacramento. My father had paved the way for the family and established a village community of relationship for us in Sacramento. Here, we met new Aunties and Uncles who guided and negotiated our entry and passage. They were relationships that aided our transition and adaptation to a new culture and society and were the many “relatives” whom we trusted, respected, and valued. It was from this village that we were referred to a Chinese immigration lawyer who could be entrusted to negotiate our “paper son” crisis as our family faced threats of deportation. It was our Uncle Sam who provided the invitation to join in a business partnership that established my father’s work as a grocer. It is from these experiences that I learned basic life skills and lessons of life that guided my way and that later shaped my pedagogical perspective. As recent Chinese immigrants at the time, we thought the American classroom seemed an unlikely extension of our village. I could not speak the language, did not understand the culture, and my parents did not feel comfortable or welcomed there. For the most part, my village held the commonality of a Chinese ethnicity, a place of origin in China, and bounded by an experiential history as recent working-class immigrants. Was it possible or even desirable to extend my way of thinking of a village to my classroom? How might the merging or inclusion of the American classroom culture into the village of my familial relationships change and shift its landscape? Moreover, would thinking of my classroom as a village be appropriate for international Hong Kong in my role as a teacher educator? The “thinking narratively” that is unique and essential to narrative inquiry supports and enhances my view of the classroom as a village. It is narratives and storytelling that form the conversations that create the communal space within the village. Thinking narratively in the three-dimensional space of an inquiry developed by Clandinin and Connelly (2000), I am able to attend to the stories of experiences from the “commonplaces” that have been identified by Schwab (1973), the curriculum theorist. The five bodies of experience that should be

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represented in curriculum deliberations are the subject matter, learners, the milieus , teachers, and the curriculum-making process, according to Schwab (1973). As in the village I envision, these commonplace voices have a shared and valued place in the deliberations and decision-making process of the school. The beliefs and perspectives I hold as teacher flow from this experiential history. Family, community, relationship, connectedness, support, trust, care, collaboration, and mutual respect form the village that I envision to be my classroom. I believe in creating a community that values an ethic of care and shares a common vision of how education can be for our students. I hope to cultivate a community where learners have voice, feel safe, and are cherished. The work of narrative inquiry, I believe, instills a kind of collaborative care in our community that invites a diversity of voices in the discourse of our classrooms. Within the village, there may be voices of dissonance, sometimes of resonance, but always there is the constancy of the village. I realize that building such a village does not come readily or is without effort. I feel challenged to discover ways to nurture care, trust, and respect in the village. And once such qualities are developed, how are they sustained and renewed?

Looking Back and Looking Forward In this chapter, I have re-told our experiences of immigration to Gold Mountain or the United States and reflected on their meaning to explore my evolving teacher knowledge. I explore how the experiences of immigration and of transitions and thresholds that mark our journeying to Gold Mountain are educative. The guides, coaches, and caregivers who have facilitated this passage are ones that have been my many “Aunts” and “Uncles” in an extended village community, who are bound to me through a kinship of shared experiences and qualities. The qualities that seem to run through our village community are the commonality of our immigrant status, our Chinese ethnicity, and working-class background. I find support for my views in the scholarship of Noddings (1984) and Kosnik (1999) who forcefully support a classroom community and school culture that is caring and inviting. “Seeking Gold Mountain: Grafted and Propagated,” the next chapter, continues with our family’s establishment of a home in Sacramento and the lessons that I learned from my parents that are infused in my teacher

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knowledge. I explore my initial school experience as a recent immigrant child and reflect on how my concept of a familial village could be extended to my school and the beginning seeds for pursuing a teaching career.

References Barnhart, E. (2021). Promoting the beauty and utility of bamboo. http://www. americanbamboo.org Barth, G. P. (1964). Bitter strength: A history of the Chinese in the United States, 1850–1870. Harvard University Press. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass. Farrelly, D. (1996). The book of bamboo. Thames and Hudson. Hong, F. (1997). Footbinding, feminism and freedom, the liberation of women’s bodies in modern China. Frank Cass & Co. https://doi.org/10.4324/978 0203044056 Ko, D. (2001). Every step a lotus: Shoes for bound feet. University of California Press. Kosnik, C. M. (1999). Primary education: Goals, processes and practices. LEGAS. Lyman, S. M. (1974). Chinese Americans. Random House. Noddings, N. (1984). A feminine approach to ethics & moral education. University of California Press. Noddings, N. (1992). The challenge to care in schools: An alternative approach to education. Teachers College Press. Noddings, N. (2002). Educating moral people: A caring alternative to character education. Teachers College Press. Schwab, J. J. (1973). The practical 3: Translation into curriculum. School Review, 81, 501–522. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1084423 Sung, B. L. (1967). Mountain of gold: The story of the Chinese in America. MacMillan Co. Takaki, R. T. (1993). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America. Little, Brown and Company. Tong, B. (2000). The Chinese Americans. Greenwood Press. Yung, J. (1995). Unbound feet: A social history of Chinese women in San Francisco. University of California Press.

CHAPTER 6

Seeking Gold Mountain: Grafted and Propagated

In agriculture, the technique of grafting, splicing, and joining two different varieties of trees aims to reproduce a stronger and higher quality crop. Through experimentation and trial and error over time, grafted varieties are cultivated to yield a quicker and fuller harvest. New varieties of bamboo have been developed through the propagation by root division and branch cuttings. These new bamboo varieties offer protection against soil erosion and improve the ecological conditions of watersheds while protecting the environment as well as supplying useful materials according to the Organization for the Rehabilitation of the Environment (2003), a non-profit and non-government organization. Like a bamboo that has been grafted and spliced, my Toishan roots and branches are joined to the life and culture of Gold Mountain over time for propagation. The nature and quality that have emerged from this grafting are also an experiment and often entail a process of trial and error that is the subject of inquiry in this chapter. The experiments in my cultural grafting, splicing, and joining sometimes result in surprises and discoveries that produce a hearty new variety. Sometimes, the results are incongruent and incompatible and are discarded or rejected. Sometimes, the process involves multiple grafting, splicing, and joining that diverge permanently from the original. The personal narratives in this chapter reflect a process that was first experienced through immigration from Toishan to Gold © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. C. Eng, Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82032-9_6

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Mountain. The tensions and contradictions that arose from my developing culture and identity became more apparent as our family strived to make Gold Mountain home. In this Chapter, I continue my personal narratives to explore how it is that I became a teacher and the kind of teacher I have become and am becoming.

A Family Reunited At the San Francisco International Airport on February 14, 1955, Valentine’s Day, we were finally reunited as a family. Based on conversations with my father (Interview Notes, August 20, 2003) and immigration documents, my father had first left Toishan in 1938, shortly after his marriage to my mother. He returned around 1947, stayed in Toishan, and saw the birth of me and my brother, born one year apart. However, with his return to California to work in 1949, he had missed our first steps and first words. There had been two long separations, for almost ten years after their marriage and for five years after our births. He had become a “bachelor father” with only our photographs sent to him by my mother from Toishan to keep him in touch with our early childhood years. As my father happily lifted me up and held me in his arms at our family reunion in 1955 at the airport, he beamed and gazed into my face. In an incident that has become part of my family’s narrative, my father mistook a tiny black mole I had at the corner of my mouth for a stain and tried, with some effort, to rub it clean with his handkerchief. In an interview (August 20, 2003), my parents re-told this event: Father: Why is it that this stain cannot be removed? Mother: Why, that is a beauty mark and not a stain! (laughing with amusement) Father: Oh, is that so! (laughing with a mixture of bewilderment and wonder)

My father tells me that while he ceased trying to clean the “stain,” he continued to study my face in earnest as if trying to capture and regain all the years of my childhood he had missed. My father had missed the daily and common occurrences that marked our early childhood in Toishan, but after being reunited as a family, we were eager to make up for lost time in our new home in Gold Mountain.

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My father had a driver’s license but he did not own a car and had to borrow a car from a cousin to meet us at the San Francisco airport. He was accompanied by Third Uncle, my grandfather’s younger brother, who had been working as a cook in a restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown. According to my father, Third Uncle had helped finance his passage to the United States in 1938 by paying for the cost of his immigration application and the fare for his travel from Toishan to Gold Mountain by ship. It was Third Uncle who found my father his first job in Gold Mountain as a janitor and housing with the Eng Family Association in San Francisco, an association formed to aid the settlement of new immigrants and composed of members who shared the “Eng” family surname. Third Uncle was a “bachelor father” himself, and due to complications with his immigration application, his wife and two children would not be reunited with him until almost ten years after our arrival. Third Uncle had informed other family members and friends in San Francisco of our arrival, and that evening our father invited about 20 well-wishers to a grand welcome dinner to celebrate our arrival to Gold Mountain. That night, we stayed in a San Francisco hotel, another first experience. San Francisco or tai fao which translates literally as “big city” in Chinese and is referred to as the “first city” of Chinese immigrants. I learned that our future home was to be in Sacramento or yih fao, which translates as the “second city” where many immigrants settled. Sacramento was about 90 miles away, another two-hour ride by car. In the meantime, we would spend a holiday in San Francisco the next day before setting out for our new home in Sacramento. Black-and-white photographs of that first San Francisco holiday in February 1955 show us at a San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and the zoo. Incongruently, my brother is still wearing his suit and tie, and I my new rose-colored dress that we had worn for the somber occasion of our departure from Hong Kong. It is in this somewhat formal attire that we are pictured running and laughing in the park as we tried out the swings and seesaws. The wardrobe we had prepared for this journey had not included play clothes or clothes for ordinary daily wear. Our Hong Kong wardrobe was fashioned for a grand entrance to Gold Mountain. What would we need to wear to negotiate our day-to-day life in our new home?

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Prosperous Market At the end of our brief holiday in San Francisco, we finally made our way home to Sacramento. Our first home was the loft space above “Prosperous Market,” the grocery store where my father had been living for the past two years according to an interview with my father (Interview Notes, October 6, 2003). This was to be a temporary home for us for about a month before we could move into the house my father had purchased for the family in advance of our arrival. The house my father had selected was in a neighborhood of predominantly Chinese families who were new or recent immigrants like us. It was only one block away, a few minutes’ walk, from our future school. Even though we lived in the loft of the grocery store for only a short time, my memory of it remains quite vivid as it was my first home in Gold Mountain. The grocery store was quite spacious and located in the heart of the city’s original Chinatown and Japan Town. Above the grocery store, we formed our living space with separate bedrooms and beds made of box springs and mattresses for my brother and me. This was quite a dramatic change from the single room we had in Hong Kong, where my brother and I slept together on each side of my mother, on a hard wooden board covered by a rattan mat to keep us cool during the hot summers. In this first home, we even had a bathroom for our private use, and the store’s aisles became our playground. Our home in Prosperous Market was so unlike what we had been accustomed to in Hong Kong where we had shared a common kitchen, bath, and living space with five other households. I recall my brother and me running excitedly up and down the grocery store aisles and marveling at all the new and strange foods for sale. The groceries that were sold at Prosperous Market were primarily Western foods. In a conversation with my father (Interview Notes, October 6, 2003), I was told that selling Western foods made the store more competitive to the others in the neighborhood that sold only Chinese foods. It was at this time that I first discovered Hostess brand chocolate cupcakes with cream filling, sandwich made with white bread, mayonnaise, cheese, and sodas. They were foods that I had never tasted before and for which I developed a craving. These foods were given to us as “treats” by my father at the store after a day at school, while our family home meals were the familiar Chinese dishes with rice. Thinking about the foods I first discovered at Prosperous Market and tasting these foods today remind me of the excitement of discovery that I experienced as an immigrant child.

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An Expanding Familial Village In an interview with my father (Interview Notes, October 6, 2003), my father tells of how he joined a partnership with family members and friends to establish Prosperous Market in the early 1950s. It was our Uncle Sam, my fathers’s first cousin, who invited my father to join in the grocery store business as a partner in Sacramento. Uncle Sam’s father was adopted, since there was no male heir who could inherit property and carry on the family name. The introduction to the grocery store business established my father’s work as a grocer that spanned over 40 years until his retirement. The partnership at the time included three other partners, and their families of spouses and children continued the expansion of our familial relations and extended the boundaries of our village in America. Uncle Sam was the first Chinese person I met who had served in the U.S. Army. His service in the U.S. Army was highly regarded because it symbolized successful entry and acceptance into mainstream America. It did not matter that he served primarily as a cook and barber in the army, for the military represented a fraternity that very few in the Chinese community had entered. Uncle Sam was one of the first Chinese who had gone beyond the boundaries of the Chinese community and successfully entered a U.S. government organization. Photographs of Uncle Sam in his younger days wearing his army uniform and medals were proudly displayed on the fireplace mantel in his home. Because of Uncle Sam’s experience in the military, he became the bridge that linked us from the Chinese community to the larger community. Moreover, as the elder in the partnership, Uncle Sam would help navigate the grocery store business and our family’s passage through the rites of obtaining acceptance in our new country. It was Uncle Sam who gave advice on our newly given American English names, Betty and Billy. Our Chinese names, meaning “distinguish and elegant orchid” and “heroic or fearless outstanding one,” respectively, would not be suitable for our American schools and would only be used at home and our Chinese community. Uncle Sam’s wife, whom we called “elder Auntie,” invited us to the Christian fundamentalist church that she helped established, and the congregation became yet another village of support for our family. Growing up, I do not believe I ever questioned our regular attendance at church. Billy and I obediently attended church services each Sunday morning followed by Sunday school classes, with summers spent at Bible

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school. Our father never attended church since Sunday was a work day for him, but our mother would attend church when the canning season ended for the summer. During the height of the canning season, the church attendance would be conspicuously absent of women my mother’s age. We did not have churches in China, and I probably assumed that this was just a way of life in America because everyone in our neighborhood attended church. The church introduced me to the religious significance of Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, which were celebrated with festive stage performances and dinner gatherings. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day were also celebrated at the church, with the oldest parent and the parent with the greatest number of children and grandchildren in the congregation getting a special corsage or boutonnière. Looking back, I realize my experiences with the church introduced me to fundamental values and beliefs that are rooted in religious teachings that have become embedded in my pedagogical thinking. More than anything, I believe, the church provided me with a sense of belonging and supportive care that reinforces the idea of an expanding village community. It was through the church that people obtained information about housing and referrals to jobs. The church introduced us to lifelong friendships and even to future spouses. I do not believe I ever wondered why or found it peculiar that we were an all-Chinese congregation. My church seemed a natural and integral part of our predominantly Chinese neighborhood. Herbert and Marilyn, Uncle Sam’s high school and college age children, whom we called “elder brother” and “elder sister,” had grown up in Sacramento and gave us the benefit of their experience. Herbert and Marilyn introduced us to swimming lessons and took us to the State Fair during the summer when my parents were unable to do so, due to their work. Marilyn, the future elementary school teacher, counseled us on the importance of an education and our choice of universities and future careers. It is from my expanding familial village relations that I learned a growing repertoire of essential life skills that guided my way.

Paper Son and Bachelor Father My father was a “paper son.” For about US$2,000, my father purchased false papers to become the “son” of a Mr. Lam, who had immigrated to the United States from China and had gained U.S. citizenship. Here,

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in a conversation with my father (Interview Notes, March 13, 2000), he re-told his experience: Buying false papers to the United States was the only way to immigrate in those days. Everyone did it. It cost about US$2,000, which was quite a huge sum at the time. My application to immigrate needed to be sponsored by a U.S. citizen who could qualify as an immediate family member such as a parent. Third Uncle, my father’s younger brother who was working in San Francisco, did not meet the qualifications to sponsor me but was able to make the arrangements for me to become a paper son. Third Uncle loaned me the money to buy my paper-son papers and for my passage to the U.S. by ship. It took me years of work in the U.S. to repay Uncle’s loan, but without his help, I would not have been able to enter Gold Mountain. In the process, I also gained a paper sister and several paper brothers who were also sponsored by Mr. Lam. This photograph is of my paper sister pictured holding you when you were a baby in Toishan. I think she immigrated to Los Angeles, but I have lost touch with her.

A series of exclusion laws and immigration acts from the 1800s to 1950s in the United States prevented or restricted the Chinese from entry as immigrants. Historians such as Sung (1967), Tong (2000), and others have condemned such laws as discriminatory and unjust, having their origin in the fear that the Chinese would rob jobs from whites and the belief that the Chinese were inassimilable. Tong contends that the Chinese exclusionary laws were racist and forced the Chinese to go underground so as to reunite families and to establish a financial livelihood to continue their support their families in China. As non-whites under these restrictions, Chinese were aliens ineligible for citizenship. Citizenship would be accorded, however, if one had been born in the United States, which then gave their children eligibility for citizenship. Sung (1967) has characterized the efforts of Chinese to circumvent the law by making false claims in their immigration applications as a justified “honorable deception.” While these exclusion and immigration laws were legal, they were ethically and morally wrong and unjust. The circumvention of the U.S. immigration laws have been liken to acts of non-violent civil disobedience as advocated by Pope Pius XII, Henry Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. When an earthquake struck San Francisco in 1906 and destroyed the city’s public records, many Chinese became “born in the United States.”

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Since, no public records existed due to the fire, government officials could not refute such claims. And once citizenship was established, they could make claim to the citizenship that was extended to their children who would then be entitled to enter the country. Men in the United States could send for their sons by birth. Slots for sons and sometimes daughters who did not have such relationships were sold to become “paper sons.” My father thus became a “paper son” to a Mr. Lam who lived in Los Angeles, and our family surname was Lam for about 26 years until we were forced to undergo a process of “confession” to reveal our true identity through a government program initiated by the U.S. Justice Department in 1955. My father was forced to reveal his true identity and had his citizenship revoked. In exchange for the “confession”, we were granted immunity from prosecution and deportation. This was a traumatizing and frightening time for our family, especially since we were one of the first Chinese families in our community to be exposed and forced to “confess.” We learned that one of the Lam “paper brothers” in Los Angeles had come forward to confess which then led to our family’s exposure. I still recall my mother’s tears and mournful wails, as she feared criminal charges and deportation to China. As a child, I did not know of the social and political reasons behind the “confession” program but clearly felt the terrifying alarm and pain my parents experienced. My parents studied for the citizenship test, passed, and became naturalized citizens. I realize now that passing the test was no small feat since my parents had very limited English or knowledge of American history. And because my brother and I were minors, we automatically became naturalized citizens when our parents obtained that status. When the family became naturalized citizens, we reverted to our true family name, “Eng,” in 1964. My mother and father spoke of that period (Interview Notes, March 13, 2000; August 10, 2003): Many participated in the confession program but we were the first in the neighborhood to be notified by the immigration authorities. We were terrified that we would be deported and lose everything that we had achieved: our jobs and home. And if we were deported back to China, we would lose face and honor before our family and would be unable to support our families. We had worked so hard to build our home in Gold Mountain. It seems that one of the Lam paper brothers came forward and confessed. As a result, everyone in our paper family was exposed. A Chinese immigration lawyer in Los Angeles was recommended to us who helped

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us with the papers and finally got everything straightened out. There were only two or three Chinese lawyers around at the time. We felt that we could only trust another Chinese who would understand and be sympathetic with our circumstances. Other Chinese in our neighborhood who were also forced to “confess” learned from our experience and did not suffer the anguish we felt. Because of our experience, they could see that even if they were forced to confess, it was possible to stay in Gold Mountain and gain citizenship through naturalization. It became such a common event that some of our Chinese neighbors would casually announce that they were going to the immigration offices in San Francisco to “confess” as if it were a holiday outing. Our family reverted to our true family surname, Eng, when we became naturalized citizens in 1964. Our lawyer advised us to spell our last name beginning with the letter “E” instead of the more commonly spelled “Ng,” which is closer to the sound of our family name when spoken in our Toishan dialect. By adding the letter “E,” it would accommodate and make it easier for non-Chinese speakers to pronounce our name. We also had the chance to correct our dates of birth and give ourselves new English language names in our naturalization papers.

Growing up, my brother Billy and I had two birthdays. We celebrated our Chinese birthdays, our dates of birth in Toishan based on the traditional Chinese lunar calendar, and our American birthdays as listed in our immigration papers. To correct our birthdays to reflect our true dates of birth from the lunar calendar to the Gregorian calendar required a comparison of the two calendars for the years we were born. This task was beyond my parents’ ability at the time, and we maintained our “false” American birthdays to this day. My father told me “it did not really matter, since the years of our birth are accurate; just let it go” (Interview Notes, October 15, 2002). I suppose I could have changed to my given Chinese name, Eng, Yan Lan. The family name comes first in Chinese to express the importance of the family. The other characters in my Chinese name brings together the Chinese character that means “distinguish” and the character “orchid,” which embodies purity and elegance. My mother chose my Chinese name with great care to portray the distinct qualities of strength and beauty she wished upon me. My brother Billy’s Chinese name, Bill and I share “Yan” as a common Chinese character in our names to link our familial relationship as brother and

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sister. However, changing to my Chinese name as an “official” one never occurred to me or to my parents at the time. It seemed understood that our Chinese names were ones used in the confines of our family and Chinese community and that our “Americanized” names of Betty and Billy were the proper ones that would appear in U.S. official government and school documents. I do not recall that our change of family surname from “Lam” to “Eng” was disruptive or confusing among our friends. It seemed that everyone in our Chinese immigrant neighborhood knew of the “confession” program and understood the reasons for the change, which required no explanation. But it also helped that our family’s change of name coincided with our move to a new home in a very different neighborhood with new schools that gave us a fresh start with our new family name.

Family Photos Photography was my father’s one extravagance. On Sundays, my father began his shift at the grocery store later in the day, and instead of attending church with us, he spent time with his camera and love of photograph. He would set up the tripod, mount his treasured Zeiss Ikon camera, and prepare the backdrop for the family photos. His picture-taking satisfied his keen interest in photography, and the mass of photographs provides a pictorial chronicle of our family life over the years. But it seemed to me that my father was snapping the many family photos to recover the many years he had missed and was intent on documenting our times together for fear of losing them. His photo taking seemed to be a kind of testimony to the role of photos in filling in a family life that had been forever torn apart and lost by his voyage to Gold Mountain in 1938. Dressed in our clothes for church, we would return home on Sundays to find our father preparing for our regular photo sessions. In family photographs, I can still pick out the tailored fancy wardrobe from the occasion of our farewell to Hong Kong. Some of my post-immigration clothes hang somewhat large and awkward on me, clothes probably purchased a size or two larger to accommodate my rapidly growing frame. On the rare and special occasion that called for a party dress, I found that I had outgrown the dress I had so solemnly worn at the Hong Kong airport. There were not many occasions nor did we find it appropriate to

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wear such extravagant attire in our immigrant and working-class community. Gatherings, whether for church or a Chinese New Year celebration at the family association, were quite casual with children wearing everyday school clothes, jeans, and sneakers.

From Silk Brocade to the Uniform of the Canneries My mother would soon put on the uniform of the canneries, dressed in a white nylon and polyester dress with her hair covered by a hair net and a plastic cap. She would carry a basket filled with the paraphernalia of her work: assorted paring knives, instruments to scoop out the pits of peaches, a hand stone for sharpening knives, a long clear plastic apron cleaned, dried, and neatly rolled and tied up by its apron strings in readiness for the next shift at the cannery. Years later, I found her paring knives with the blades shaped in a curvature. I thought these were specially designed knives for paring such crops as peaches and tomatoes. But upon closer inspection, I realized that the once straight-edge knives had become rounded through the relentless force of my mother’s labor in the canneries. My mother would bring along her dinner meal in her two-tiered thermos that she filled with rice, meats, and vegetables. During the long summer canning seasons, she sometimes brought home discarded tomatoes and peaches that became the ingredients for our meals. Depending on the crop in season and the demands of the cannery, my mother’s clothes and her hair would reek of tomatoes, peaches, spinach, olives, pears, or asparagus. The pungent and bittersweet aromas from the crops permeated her pores and clung to her hair, and the juices stained her clothes and hands. The aromas seemed sealed by the heat and steam from the cannery to immerse our home. My mother worked the odd hours of the swing shift, from late afternoon to the early morning hours. This was the least desirable shift because she had fewer years of service and less seniority than others. But her working hours worked out fine for our family. Bill and I, then ages eight and nine, would arrive home from school to care for our baby brother Daniel, who was born about one year after our arrival to Gold Mountain, until our father’s return from work at about nine o’clock in the evening. My mother was at the tail end of the list to be called to work during the season. She anxiously awaited the telephone calls from the canneries,

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straining to understand the English that would instruct her to come to work. She was grateful for the work, and her paycheck from the canneries was a much-needed income for our growing family. When we moved to a new neighborhood, some of the neighbors mistook her for a nurse, dressed as she was in white, as they glimpsed her dashing out the door at the sound of the honking horn of her carpool filled with other Chinese women workers like herself. Going to the grime and heat of the canneries, my mother maintained a proper decorum with her hair groomed, face carefully powdered, cheeks rouged, and wearing the bright red-colored lipstick she always wore. My mother would stand watch for her carpool at the living room window, ready early and considerate to not delay her friends and anxious to not be late reporting for her shift. I once brought her shoes that I thought would be comfortable for her, as her work required her to stand the long hours of her shift sorting or paring the slices of tomatoes or peaches as they passed on the conveyer belt. The shoes were made of soft leather and molded with a supporting and firm layer of crepe soles. But the soles were not firm enough, I discovered, because the bottom of the shoes began to stick to the cannery floor due to the intensity of the heat. My mother recalled: I was moving along the length of the swiftly-moving conveyor belt sorting the tomatoes. Suddenly, I found I had difficulty lifting up one of my feet. I discovered the soles of the shoes had begun to melt and stuck to the floor! The heat in the cannery was that strong and hot! (Interview Notes, April 5, 1973)

Such were the conditions of my mother’s work. My mother slept during my waking hours and returned home only when I was fast asleep. And when the canning season stopped in early fall each year, she would begin her work in the garment factory. She did not work during that first year in the United States since she was pregnant, but she began working at the canneries immediately after the birth of my youngest brother. My mother said of that time: Everyone else was working, and I felt I needed to as well. How could I not? I needed to help support the family. After Daniel was born, I really wanted to have another child. But your father objected because he did not

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think we could afford it financially. I regret not having more children but that is how it had to be. (Interview Notes, May 30, 2002)

Seeing others like her working at the canneries and in the garment factories seemed to compel her, with a sense of urgency, to do the same. Other women who were also immigrants and mothers with young children modeled for her a way of life to fit in and belong in Gold Mountain. Without my mother’s income from the canneries and then the garment factories during the off-season, it would have been quite difficult financially for a family of five. Being a recent immigrant, my mother felt a need to “catch up” with others who were more established. I do not recall my parents ever missing a single day of work, for my parents had a strong work ethic driven by the practical needs and responsibilities of their family. They believed that hard work would bring the family financial security, prosperity, and success. Surely, my parents must have been sick with at least the occasional cold or flu, but they never called in sick and never missed a day of work. When I ask my parents today how they were able to work so hard and relentlessly, they seemed puzzled by my question and declared in a succinct and understood kind of manner: “We just did!” I find my parents modeled for me the values of unquestioned duty and responsibility to family, perseverance, and strength. My parents were limited by their lack of formal education and job skills and had to endure the hardships of their labored work. Through their hard work and sacrifices, my parents hoped they would pave the way for a brighter future for their children.

Contentious: Sweatshops and Sweetshops My mother worked in the garment or sewing industry during the offseason of the canneries. I refer to these as sweatshops while my mother called them her sweetshops , a welcomed source of income for the family. Our differing view of the shops was another point of contention in our relationship. These sewing shops employed primarily women, mostly immigrants who possess little education and few job skills, who were forced to work in non-union jobs that pay below-minimum-wage, often working 10–12 hours days in crowded, poorly lit, and ventilated rooms. At these shops, women are paid by the number of pieces of garment completed rather than on an hourly basis. When my mother worked in these sweatshops in the 1960s and 1970s, she earned about 80 cents for a

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button-down, long-sleeved blouse with a collar that might take her half a day to complete. More complicated garments, such as a dress, could earn up to $2.00 but required more time. In a conversation with my mother, she described her experience: To provide income to the family, I worked in the sewing shops when I was no longer needed at the end of the canning season each year. All my friends worked there too. Being new to the US, I wanted to be like everyone else and work hard and be useful. I was not the fastest or most skillful of seamstress. The sewing required concentration and it strained my eyes. Big stacks of fabric were cut from patterns for the latest fashion. Do you remember how I would make copies of the patterns and sew blouses and dresses at home for you? Sometimes I would earn only $8.00 in a week after completing a dozen garments. This was very little money but it bought a bag of rice. More experienced women who were cleverer than I could make their industrial size sewing machines roar like a train at fierce speed. The owners of the shops encouraged us to continue working into the night and even arranged for a sewing machine for our use at home. I did not accept the offer, since sewing at home would mean increasing our electricity cost. Besides, I had you and your brothers to care along with the cleaning and cooking…. (Interview, May 30, 2001)

The labels of the garments represented some of the most fashionable designer brands, which were sold to consumers at a markup of many times over what my mother was paid. The wages she earned supplemented the family income, and she labored in the sweatshops until her retirement. With only a primary school education in China, limited English language skills and no job training, she was grateful for the work. I am genuinely grateful and beholden to my mother’s sacrifice and labor but continue to be outraged by the exploitation she was subjected. For my mother, the garment factories were her “sweet shop,” a source of muchneeded income, not the “sweatshops” I protested as a community activist. My identity as a community activist was developed during my university student days with the development of Asian American Studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Recorded in my personal journals of that period (January 17, 1972, and October 5, 1973), I participated in demonstrations and protests held in San Francisco’s garment industry and boycotted the clothing brands that were known to exploit their workers with sweatshop wages and working conditions. The tensions that my activist identity created between my mother and me over her work in

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the sweetshop/sweatshops were intense and deep. My mother thought my protests showed disrespect for her and her work and felt threatened that my participation in organized protests might jeopardize her job. My mother would often end our heated debates with: “You just don’t know any better! You are the juk sing who does not understand what it means to be Chinese.” Dean Lan (1971), writing in Amerasia Journal, refers to the garment shops as a ghetto in Chinatown that was a source of cheap labor. Almost all the workers were women with the median age of 47. The workers were paid on a piece-rate or per garment basis that earned from $78 biweekly to $140 during peak seasons. Nearly, half of the women worked in the garment shops because it was the only kind of work they could do. And though they were secondary wage earners to their husband, their combined wages remained below the poverty line. The “Sweetshop and Sweatshop” story is one I shared with my students in Asian American Studies. The story of my mother’s work is an example of how stories of experience become the curriculum. It is a story that was lived by my mother, a story which I experienced growing up, and which I, in turn, re-told to my students in Asian American Studies. It is a personal story that is analyzed and placed in context of the economic and social conditions of the time. The story is not an isolated one and is shared by women, daughter, minorities, and the working class. In this way, the experience of the community became the curriculum, and the curriculum became community.

When Children Were Parents Too At the ages of eight and nine, my brother and I became the “parents” responsible for the care of my baby brother, Daniel, who was born about a year after our immigration. Coming home directly after school, we became the “parents” until our father’s return from work around nine o’clock in the evening. Trying to be quiet while our mother slept, we waited for her to wake up to prepare our dinner meal before she set off for work at the cannery around five in the afternoon. Here are the family photographs of Bill feeding six months old Daniel his milk bottle, changing diapers, and playing with him in his crib. This was a period when children in our Chinese immigrant and working-class community were parents too.

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I reflect back to that period, and I wonder how we ever coped and managed. Our family experience was not unusual and was shared by most Chinese households in our neighborhood. Young children took on the responsibilities of the parents as caretakers of the family. With our newly acquired English language skills and our developing understanding of the culture and values of our new homeland, we took on the additional responsibility of negotiating safe passage for the family. We translated the English language letters my parents received in the mail, the school permission slips for class field trips, our report cards, and other notices from school. Nevertheless, there were oversights as I missed the deadline for signing up for a musical instrument and joining the Girl Scouts. I recall one such notice informing us about the change of time for the last day of school before the start of summer. I misread the time and reached the school just as it was being dismissed. I was surprised and embarrassed missing the day which ruined my perfect attendance for the year. As children, we became our parents’ translators and interpreters for their attendance at the school’s annual “Open House,” if their work schedules allowed them to attend. It would typically be my mother who attended this event, since my father would be working at the grocery store at that time. Open House, as I recall, included a welcome speech by the school principal, perhaps a choir performance, and a tour of the school where parents could visit the library and classrooms. My mother felt more comfortable attending this event than in individual meetings with our teachers. Open House was an opportunity for her to get a glimpse of the American school that her children experienced without being noticed while mingling and blending in with the crowds. Parent-teacher conferences, however, were another matter. The prospect of a personal one-on-one meeting with our non-Chinese speaking teachers proved too intimidating for my mother and father, and they never attended. This was the case for most parents in our neighborhood, and it was not because they did not care about their children and their children’s education. They cared deeply but felt awkward and inadequate and, worse still, feared they might embarrass their children because of their limited education and inability to speak proper English. American schools and the classroom were places our parents never felt comfortable or welcomed. As the eldest and the only daughter, I was taught how to prepare the daily rice for the family meal. This was before the availability of today’s convenient electric rice cookers, and burning the rice was easy

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to do. I have reconstructed a chanting rhyme, “Teaching Lessons from My Mother: Making Rice,” based on how I heard my mother’s voice instructing me on the step-by-step recipe to prepare a perfect bowl of rice. My mother strongly believes that a meal is incomplete and is not fulfilling without a bowl of rice. Intertwined in the lesson for rice making are scenes of our family life and history. The rendering of the piece draws on the rhythmic, singsong, chanting quality of how some Chinese village lessons are learned and taught in our Toishan dialect. Lessons from My Mother: Making Rice Without Rice, We Are Not Fulfilled Four cups of rice for a family of five, Mother, sister and two younger brothers. Save Father’s share for his return from work late evening. White, long grain rice from Texas in 50 lb. bag is best Do not waste a single grain of the precious rice. To satisfy our hunger and To nourish our spirits. In a pot, wash rice clean By rubbing vigorously between palms. Drain and wash again three times. Clean until the grains are white And the water clear. To satisfy our hunger and To nourish our spirits. Later, I would be taught By other voices that Such washing leaves the rice without nutrients. Not for my mother, who knows of rice From the fields of our village in China Covered with mud, flies and rats. For her, rice needs a thorough washing. To satisfy our hunger and

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To nourish our spirits. Add water, one inch above the rice line. Leave in an uncovered pot Two to four hours before cooking For fluffy and moist grains of rice. When ready to cook, Cover and bring to a boil. Don’t leave the rice unattended! Watch it come to a frothy boil in 15-20 minutes. To satisfy our hunger and To nourish our spirits. Stir with wooden chopsticks once or twice, Swiftly and gently to not disturb the delicate grains. Bring heat to low and Keep uncovered for a few minutes. Then, cover and simmer For another 10-15 minutes. Until fluffy and tender. Don’t over-cook, For the rice will lose its moisture and burn. Rice ought to be fragrant and tender. Scoop to fill rice bowls. Eat it hot and eat it at once! To satisfy our hunger and To nourish our spirits. Finishing your bowls of rice, Look for the rice That sticks to the bottom of the pot. If cooked properly, There lies a crisp and golden-brown crust Some say only the poor Who do not have enough to eat

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Bother with the crust. Don’t waste this! For it is food from the earth to our table. Add to this crust, boiling hot water. Lift out and place in your bowls. Eat and drink it like a meal To satisfy our hunger and To nourish our spirits.

Threshold: School On the next day of our arrival to Sacramento, my parents took me to register at my new school. I recall my first initiation to the elementary school I was to attend, just one block away and a five-minute walk from our new home. Leaving after registering at the school and being introduced to the principal and my future teacher, I walked between my parents as they each held one of my hands. My parents recalled that I had been subdued and quiet when I toured the school. But, on our way out of the school, it seemed I could no longer contain my confusion, fear, and outrage. They told me that I was terrified and screaming at the top of my lungs in my Toishan dialect that I did not understand a word these “white devils” were saying and refused to attend the school. In a conversation with my parents, they recalled my early school experiences: Father: You were so frightened and angry about having to attend the new school. You didn’t understand English, and you stubbornly refused to return to the school. I was afraid you might even run away. I bribed you with a visit to the park and zoo, and somehow you agreed to give the school a try. Betty: I remember feeling terrified, angry and outraged. I adamantly refused to attend a school where I did not understand the language and where I would not be understood. Looking back, I think I must have also been a little bold and brave to object so vehemently. Mother: But after only a few days at the school, you didn’t want to come home after school! It was because you made friends there. You were so excited and happy about going to school each day. Do you remember Kathy Fong and Joyce Yee? You would often go to their homes directly after school to play together. Betty: Yes, we were best of friends, the three of us, all through elementary school and junior high school. They were Chinese and were born in the

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United States. I remember that they didn’t speak Chinese but at least they could understand my Toishan dialect and helped me adjust to the school. Father: I don’t know what you did at the school because I never went there after arranging your enrollment. I don’t know why you were so happy to go each day. But, your grades on your report card and the comments from teachers were quite good. So, I was relieved and glad that you seemed to be doing so well. Betty: I remember going to a special education class for English remedial and speech lessons for the first few years. Billy and I were placed one grade level below our age to help us catch up. I learned to read in English and developed a love of books. Mother: Well, your English blossomed! You and Billy knew more English than your father and me. At home, we would speak in our Toishan dialect. While you understood our Chinese, more often than not, you replied in English. When a Chinese community organization began offering Chinese language lessons after school and on Saturdays, you did not want to attend. You thought learning English and becoming American were more important. (Interview Notes, August 5, 2000, and October 6, 2003)

Reflecting back at this traumatic experience of my entry to American school, I wonder about the effects on my parents. My father had completed high school in China, an accomplishment and a luxury at the time, and had been working in the United States for about 17 years so at least had a working knowledge of English. My mother, like her children, did not speak a word of English. How upsetting and alarming it must have been for my parents to experience my anger, outrage, and refusal to attend school. Who could they turn to resolve the conflict? They could appreciate the language barrier, but what choice or resources did they have to explain the need to attend school and reassure me that all would work out. Fortunately, my father’s “bribe” worked and I transitioned into school by making friends. These are issues and questions that many other immigrant parents must experience. After an abrupt introduction to my new school in Gold Mountain, everything seemed to have gone satisfactorily if not necessarily smoothly, if my grades from my report cards from elementary school and high school are an indication. My grades were good to mediocre but I was praised by my teachers for my cooperation, diligence, and hard work.

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Learning English, I developed a love of reading and books. Books became my friends and brought me to a world of fantasy, mystery, and adventure. I was an enthusiastic and voracious reader, reading a range of genres: fairy tales of Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Nancy Drew adventures, Greek mythology, Mysteries of Agatha Christie, Margaret Mitchell, and Shakespeare among others. The beginning readers of Dick and Jane with the dog Spot not only taught me English but introduced me to the culture of the American way. The American family was portrayed with a house with a white picket fence, a mother at home who always wore a dress and heels, an apron when she was cooking and even when she went shopping, and a father who came home from work wearing a suit. At the time, our community was primarily of immigrants and did not have entry to the “other” community of white families except through books and television. Tracing back on my reading list of that period, I realize the influence and impact of books informing my understanding of the dominant culture, its expectations, and shaping me into the person I am and should be. Television was also a powerful source of educating me about society and culture. This was the era of black and white television of the 1950s and 1960s with popular programs such as Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, I Love Lucy with the Miss America pageant an annual highlight. These television programs featured white characters lead by primarily male characters who espoused guidance and wisdom and moral values such as honesty, friendship, cooperation, and respect. Such moral values were integral in Chinese culture and were taught by parents, grandparents, elders, extended family, church among others in the community. Acknowledging and affirming the origin and authority of these values from the Asian culture is essential. In identifying this source, it recognizes and validates the authority of the Asian culture. Through systematic discrimination, this recognition has been lost to us and we have had to recover and reclaim the origin of our voices. When these values were expressed in the context of the Chinese community, there were different cultural meaning and significance. For instance, the relationship and commitment to family is a central and fundamental quality. Respect, not only for our parents, uncles and aunts, but anyone who is older commands our respect. Age, it is held, brings extensive and rich-life experiences that instill wisdom that is to be respected. Filial piety is another central concept in Chinese culture. It means humanity or benevolence and involves honoring and taking

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care of parents and grandparents as well as consulting elders for advice and permission. The concept of filial piety is grounded on the rationale that since parents gave you life and cared for you growing up, it is an eternal debt and obligation that must be reciprocated. And should you be dishonest, you bring shame not just to yourself but to the entire family and Chinese community. And conversely should you get all “As” in your report card or be promoted in your job, you bring honor to not only your family but to the entire community. The interests of the individual self are subsumed by the family and a collective community. Growing up, my standard of beauty was established by the annual Miss America pageant of the 1950s and 1960s, a favorite program of my mother. The pageant fostered the ideal qualities of being white, shapely, and svelte in swimsuits and ball gowns, talented, educated, and articulate. I now question who defines standards of beauty, how these standards are established and become entrenched in our culture, and in whose interest do standards of beauty serve. It would not be until 1984 that Vanessa Williams, a Black American, became the first non-white Miss America titleholder. Bonanza, a western set on a ranch in the 1880s was also a favorite program with a white and all-male cast. The head of the household was the father who had three sons served by a Chinese houseboy and cook. As an immigrant child, struggling to learn English and trying to be accepted and fit in to the majority culture, what I learned in my books and observed on television at the time was incongruent with the realities of our lives. Our family was working class where my father labored 12-hours days as a grocer and a mother who worked in the canneries and garment factories, spoke fractured English, and did not know how to swim nor own swimsuits and ball gowns. Looking back, I realize that the message conveyed in my books and television programs was that the life we were living was not good enough, we were inadequate, defeated, unwelcomed, invisible, and did not meet the dominant culture’s standards. Peggy McIntosh (McIntosh, 2020), educator and research scientist, describes this as feeling like a fraud, where the culture does not view us as a legitimate source of authority. As hard as we tried, we were never going to be good enough. Instead, society and culture reinforce a hierarchy of winners and losers and systemic discrimination. Nevertheless, the books and television programs held the authority to define the American dream that we fervently strived to achieve. We struggled, worked hard, and aspired to the American dream to become the

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“model minority,” an image of the Asian American community contrived and manufactured by social scientists that countered the harsh realities of poverty, suicides, and lack of health care in Chinatowns across the country. Moreover, the model minority concept serves to divide Asian Americans from other communities of color, as previous discussed. What my school report cards failed to show, and what my parents had little knowledge of, was my personal and emotional development. Like most children of that age, I strove to fit in and belong. I recall being very self-conscious when I realized I was singled out to work with the special education teacher because of my limited English language skills. And when I realized that I was placed a year behind my grade level, I felt inadequate and made an effort to “catch up” by graduating ahead of my assigned class in high school. And today, I deeply regret not having Chinese language lessons while growing up as a child. We were too immersed in becoming Americans to make room for Chinese language lessons in addition to our regular school day. While in high school, I enrolled in a variety of language classes: Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, and German. But Chinese was never an available option at the time and I would not have the opportunity to study Cantonese Chinese again until it was offered for the first time through the Asian American Studies at California State University, Sacramento in the late 1960s.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation Once, at the start of a new school year, in 3rd grade, as I recall, the teacher asked the class to write the usual essay on “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” The highpoint of my summer holiday that year was attending the grand opening of a department store selling household goods with my family. I thought it was quite a festive and fun event with the store decorated with streamers and balloons with give-away prizes. I read my essay in front of the class, and it must have seemed quite a hoot as one of my classmates yelped in disbelief and snickered in disdain that going to the grand opening of a store was the highpoint of my summer holiday. I remember him still, Jerry, a Japanese American classmate who was a class leader and admired as much for his cleverness as his good looks. I was initially bewildered, then embarrassed and jolted by his remark. His ridicule stays with me after all these years. He gave me one of my earliest social and cultural initiations into how a summer holiday is meant to be spent and what it means to live out the “American dream.”

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Vacations, I learned, were intended to be spent at Disneyland, a trip to the beach, a camping trip, or an airplane ride to another place. Such holidays were luxuries beyond the realm of experience and comprehension of my working-class parents. My parents’ demanding work schedule and limited budget did not allow for the extravagances of such holidays. Our arrival in San Francisco in 1955, when we immigrated and stayed in the city overnight at a hotel, was a rare and special event that would not be a common occurrence for our family. A stay in a hotel would not be repeated until many years later when we attended the funeral of Third Uncle in San Francisco. My classmates, who shared a working-class background similar to mine, must have been more sophisticated or culturally attuned than I. They also did not have costly and grand summer vacations, but they knew better than I to write about attending a grand opening of a store as the highpoint of a summer vacation. Jerry’s rude response to my essay on how I spent my summer vacation provided me with an abrupt lesson in the social norms and expectations of Gold Mountain.

On Becoming a Teacher: Competing Identities Growing up, my experiences in school and my parents’ view of education served to motivate me to be a teacher and shaped the kind of teacher I aspired to become. The identity I aspired for myself during this period, I believe, was to an identity that conformed to the qualities of the Asian model minority. At that time, the view of Asians as a model minority had not been fully articulated by the press or in the research. Nor was I consciously scripting out my life based on such a model. But my parents and school experiences, I believe, modeled for me the kind of qualities and attributes for the person I should become. Looking back, I seemed to exemplify the model minority success story of the child from an immigrant and working-class background who struggled to overcome economic hardships and obstacles to be the first in the family to achieve a college degree. Teaching as profession seemed to be a respectable job for a Chinese woman, and a career in education seemed to offer the prospects of job security and prosperity or an “iron rice bowl,” as it is referred in Hong Kong. This seemed to be the goal my parents sought as they labored in the grocery stores, canneries, and sweatshops. They hoped for a better life for their children, and my becoming a teacher would free me from the hard labors and long hours they experienced. I was in awe of my teachers in school, partly because they introduced me to the power

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of reading and love of books. Becoming a teacher and having my own classroom became a dream and goal I sought. As a result, I continued my graduate education to become a classroom teacher for Kindergarten to Grade 9 and acquired a teaching credential from the State of California. My report cards from my elementary school years seem to present a portrait of a Chinese model minority. The comments from my teachers described me as a pleasant, cooperative, and hard-working student year after year. My report cards showed mostly “A” and “B” grades in academic subjects such as reading, arithmetic, language, social studies, and science. In the area of “Citizenship,” as it was called in some of my schools, I consistently obtained “A” grades for such qualities as courtesy, respect for authority, independence, self-control, and ability to work in a group. What I found most notable is my attendance record in the report cards that I have been able to locate. In Grades 3, 5, and 6, for instance, I had a perfect attendance record and was never tardy during the year. In fact, for the duration of my elementary and high school years, I was rarely absent or tardy. This is puzzling to me. Surely, I must have had the usual childhood illnesses or the occasional cold. In a conversation with my mother (Transcript notes, October 6, 2003), I asked my mother about my attendance record, and she told me that I insisted on attending school, even if I was feeling sick. The message that had been instilled in me at a young age was that an education was important and that you went to school each day unless you were critically ill and in the hospital. Education was a means for obtaining a good job and ensuring security and prosperity. My parents modeled this work ethic for me for they never missed a day of work. In conversations with my parents today, they told me that they did not feel they could miss a single day of work because they desperately needed the money. My parents strongly believed that working hard and diligently would lead to success. Moreover, achieving the “iron rice bowl” and success was an expression of my duty, loyalty, and obligation to the family. These were how the qualities of western love were translated in my understanding of my culture. The bonds of my relationship with my parents were never expressed in terms of love, but as acts of duty and responsibility. My parents held the expectation that the children would practice filial piety and reciprocate the support they gave us once we became financially secure in our careers. Supporting them with money and care in their old age was an understood expectation. I had witnessed how my parents regularly sent money, gifts, care packages of canned meats, fish, and spices to

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support their parents and family in Toishan. Following the examples of my parents, I also contributed to the support of the family. But my parents and I came to hold competing views on my identity as a teacher. My participation in the Asian American student movement in the late 1960s and my teaching in Asian American Studies dramatically shifted my perception and understanding of how I viewed education and myself as a teacher. The shift was a source of tension between my parents and me. I no longer aspired to become the model minority or sought the job security or prosperity that they had hoped for me. I came to view education as a means for social change and my identity as a teacher who is an activist first. The classroom curriculum I sought to create and my subsequent work in the academic staff union and community-based organizations challenged, in various ways, the established understanding of Asians as a model minority. My parents must have felt alarmed, despair, and betrayal in this shift of direction. In shaping this identity for myself, in their minds, I was no longer fulfilling my duty and obligations to them and to the family.

Immigration as an Educative Experience Looking back, our experiences of immigration, gaining entry to the United States, and our passage on a journey in search of Gold Mountain, were an educative experience. At the time, however, I believe I wanted to shed my identity as an immigrant as quickly as possible to possess the qualities, as I understood them, to become a member of the majority culture. This was seen in my attempts to emulate Scarlett O’Hara’s green eyes, forget my eyes were brown, and speak proper English instead of my Toishan Chinese village dialect. Fulfilling the qualities of the model minority seemed to be a way of achieving membership and acceptance in the majority culture. I have discovered that immigration and my identity as an immigrant provide educative experiences that have become embedded in my pedagogical thinking and a way of thinking about the classroom. My experiences of immigration and being an immigrant student raise questions, puzzles, and challenges for me. In our schools and classrooms, who serves as our guide, preparing, coaching, and supporting us? In my experience, it was my growing extended family. My uncle Sam provided my father the opportunity to become a partner in a community grocery store and became the head of the family to advise and guide our passage in

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Gold Mountain. It was Uncle Sam’s wife, Elder Auntie, who introduced us to the community of the church that continued to expand our family village in Gold Mountain. In our schools and classrooms, who serves in such roles for the learner? Every school and classroom offer a cultural and social milieu that may be frightening, hazardous, and dangerous for our learners’ point of entry. What and how are the knowledge and skills needed to cope and effectively respond to the challenges that confront learners? Who attends to their emotional needs when they feel confused and lost and nurtures their spirits? For my family and me, many of the teachers and supporters have been from my extended family of Aunties, Uncles, cousins, and village clan. This “village clan” was extended and shared by other Chinese working-class immigrants we found in our neighborhood in Sacramento. At the time, it seemed unlikely that our village could be extended to the American classrooms I experienced given my initial introduction to the school of “devils” that spoke a strange language. Nor did my parents feel they were welcomed or could participate fully in the “Open House” and parent-teacher conferences at the school. Through viewing my school and classroom as a village, I am able to make sense of the responsibilities of the teacher and the relationship I endeavor to build with my students. My parents’ abiding love for us was measured in their hard work, sacrifices, diligence, and perseverance. I marvel at the courage that the first immigrants must have had to leave their family homes in China and venture to an unknown land, where they did not speak the language, to enter an alien culture and doubtful of the reception they would receive. Their narratives of immigration are educative and a source of inspiration, courage and hope.

Looking Back and Looking Forward I would not see my mother wearing the beautiful emerald silk brocade Chinese jacket that she wore at our farewell gathering at the Hong Kong airport again. It remained hanging in her closet in a clear plastic clothes bag and smelled of the mothballs that were regularly replenished to protect it. She would tell me that the jacket was a treasure to mark the occasion of the momentous journey from Toishan to Gold Mountain. Like a wedding gown, the silk brocade jacket was not intended to be worn again and was part of a transitional wardrobe in the journey to Gold Mountain. The family must look the part, be able to enter its culture with

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grace, elegance, and dignity while seeking its acceptance and bounty. Such grand finery would befit the life she envisioned for herself and her family in Gold Mountain. I do not believe the white uniform of the canneries was one she had expected. But my mother never dwelt on disappointments or regrets. She proceeded with her life with the understood “you just did” kind of determination. Two different birthdays, two different sets of names, two different languages, and children who were also parents all represent the multiple and complex daily crossings of cultures and identities we experienced. It seemed we were called upon to improvise and be one or the other person depending on the demands of the situation and context. It was another matter whether we had the appropriate wardrobe, metaphorically speaking, from which to draw, or were knowledgeable, or adept enough to select the attire from that wardrobe to fit the occasion. Being one or the other person became, over time, a plural, blended, and transmuted cultural identity that was to be tested and contested again and again. My shifting identity as a teacher presented tensions for my parents and me. For them, they saw my becoming a teacher as a fulfillment of a model minority success story. In turn, achieving this status would be an expression of my duty, loyalty, and obligation to them and my family. I, on the other hand, became to view my identity as a teacher who was an activist first who saw education as a means for social change that challenged the image of Asians as a model minority. I find immigration and being an immigrant an educative experience that is embedded in my pedagogical thinking that is reflected in my classroom practice. I discover in my various cultural crossings and milieus that there are those who have paved and guided our way. For me, they have been my family members and a growing extended familial village that have nurtured my learning and understanding. In the next chapter, “Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China: Transported with Multiple Grafts and Growths,” I tell of the opportunity to live and work in Hong Kong as a teacher educator and where I lived for almost 20 years. It is yet another cultural crossing into a milieu that holds complexities of its own, as I continue my quest for culture and identity. I explore how the multiple grafting and fusing of cultures bring more puzzles, tensions, and challenges to shape and inform my teacher knowledge.

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References Lan, D. (1971). The Chinatown sweatshops: Oppression and an alternative. Amerasia Journal, 1(3), 40–55. https://doi.org/10.17953/amer.1.3.q0526r 54t1n2q675 McIntosh, P. (2020). On priviledge, frauduence, and teaching as learning. Routlege. Sung, B. L. (1967). Mountain of gold: The story of the Chinese in America. Macmillan Co. Tong, B. (2000). The Chinese American. Greenwood Press.

CHAPTER 7

Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China: Transported with Multiple Grafts and Growths

Crossing and Crisscrossing The personal narratives of my research puzzle move forward in time to my life in Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China, and my role as a teacher educator at the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). From our immigration to the Gold Mountain of America in 1955 and family reunion to establish our home in Sacramento, California, my journey takes me back to Hong Kong, first in 1985–1990 as a counselor at an international school and then again in 1994 and later as a teacher educator. This invitation to work and live in a predominantly Chinese society seemed an exhilarating and golden opportunity to immerse myself in what I believed to be an authentic Chinese culture and to explore and discover the answers I had been seeking for understanding my culture and identity. And like a bamboo that has undergone multiple grafting from a variety of cuttings, my journey provides multiple, diverse, and complex networks of shoots that represent the growths experienced by me in my crossing and crisscrossing of continents to explore my culture and identity. A Lifeline or a brief chronology of significant events in my life records this crisscrossing and bridges some of the gaps in time that appear in my personal narrative. My decision to live in Hong Kong seemed a continuation and extension of this quest that was inspired by my mother’s lament of my being © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. C. Eng, Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82032-9_7

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a juk sing or “hollow bamboo,” whose exterior has the appearance of being Chinese but whose interior is devoid of Chinese values and beliefs. I envisioned it as an opportunity to diag deeper into my understanding of my Chinese American identity that was first explored during my university student days and my teaching in Asian American Studies. My parents’ response to my decision to live and work in Hong Kong, however, held quite a different view as expressed in this reconstructed conversation between my mother and I based on an interview (Interview Notes, March 13, 2000): Mother: You are going in the wrong direction! You must be mad to leave Gold Mountain for Hong Kong. Betty: But I will have a chance to learn Cantonese and become more Chinese and not be the juk sing you call me. Mother: Aiyaah People in Hong Kong and China dream and yearn to come to the United States. They desperately want to escape the hard life there, and many are unable to do so. Your father and I gave you the opportunity to grow up and prosper in America, and you turn away from it. You are going in the wrong direction! Betty: But I’ll return home regularly, and you can visit me in Hong Kong. We can even return to Toishan together. You’ll see. I will be a better Chinese daughter for you! Mother: Aiyaah If you were a good Chinese daughter, you would listen to me and do as I say. In our old age, we need you by our side to take care of us. Your life and home should be in Gold Mountain!

Nothing I could say or do could ever persuade my mother that I was not going in the “wrong direction.” My parents have visited me in Hong Kong on several occasions, and we have traveled to Toishan together over the years, but they continue in the belief that my home should be by their side in California. It was with my parents disheartening admonishments and my overriding quest for understanding my culture and identity that I came to Hong Kong. I will focus my personal narratives in this chapter to my experiences and role as a teacher educator and my development of teacher knowledge. Clandinin (1985) believe our experiences form a kind of knowledge that is refer to as personal practical knowledge. This chapter presents a way of understanding teacher knowledge through exploring and making meaning of my experiential histories. Much of the writings in this chapter was first begun in 1999 for the purposes of this book. The writings

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are based on personal journals, interviews, observations of learning and teaching, and experiences of my cultural crossings in Hong Kong. In this chapter, I introduce Alex and Suki, my former students, who inform my identity and teaching and become members of my extended family in Hong Kong. Alex and Suki have generously consented to participate in my book, and the writings in this chapter are based on notes from our tape-recorded interviews, conversations, e-mail correspondences, as well as my reflective journals that chronicle our evolving relationship. Alex and Suki have collaborated on the development of this chapter through reading the transcripts of our exchanges, reviewing the writing of this chapter as it evolved, and making changes, comments, and suggestions for the narratives in which they appear.

New Territories: The Education University of Hong Kong It would be helpful to have an understanding of the key points of the provision of Hong Kong’s education, as stated by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) Government Information Centre (2020) and some background and history of teacher education. According to the Education Department Bureau of the Hong Kong, SAR (2021), the vision of education is: To foster our students’ whole-person development and nurture their lifelong learning capabilities, primary and secondary schools provide students with a broad and balanced curriculum. The school curriculum provides diverse learning experiences inside and outside the classroom enabling our students to realise their potentials in the domains of moral, intellectual, physical, social and aesthetic development. The Government provides 12 years’ free primary and secondary education to all children through public sector schools…. In September 2019, 301 073 children were enrolled in 455 public sector primary schools; 256 126 students were enrolled in 392 public sector secondary schools….The total government expenditure on education in the 2020-21 estimates is $112.3 billion, making up 15.4 per cent of total government expenditure.

Professor Ruth Hayhoe, Director of the former HKIEd from 1997 to 2002 and a comparative education scholar, documented the dramatic expansion from two major universities in the mid-1980s, the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, to eight

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universities in the 1990s in her book Full Circle, A Life with Hong Kong and China (2004). This marked increase in the number of universities expanded the number university places for relevant age students from 2% to 18%. However, the training of teachers for primary and secondary schools continued to be offered by five sub-degree colleges. Those who attended the sub-degree colleges and became teachers during this period had not been able to enroll in the two universities. As a consequence, there was a falling quality of teachers and a critical decline in the status of the teaching profession. The former Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd), now awarded university status and renamed the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK), was established in April 1994 by a government ordinance to upgrade teacher education and professional development through an amalgamation of its Colleges of Education. HKIEd’s 2003– 2004 Calendar records its development: The historical roots of The Hong Kong Institute of Education (The HKIEd) can be traced back to 1853 when the first formalized programme of in-service teacher training was set up….With increasing interest and demand in teacher education from government and the public [to] provide formal teacher education in Hong Kong. In April 1994…The Hong Kong Institute of Education was formally established by amalgamating the five Colleges of Education with a view of upgrading teacher education and professional development programmes. The Institute provides initial and professional upgrading teacher education programmes….. (HKIEd, 2003–2004, p. 10)

Gaining university status and renamed the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) in 2016, its Vision and Mission statement (2021) states: …further enhance our role as a leading university in the Asia Pacific region…with a focus on educational research, development and innovation. We will continue to raise our profile and impact locally, regionally and internationally through our high quality research and scholarship. …to promote and support the strategic development of teaching, teacher education and disciplines complementary to education by preparing outstanding and morally responsible educators and professionals while supporting their lifelong learning.

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EdUHK expanded its scope of academic disciplines in addition to teacher education. Stephen Y. L. Cheung, EdUHK’s current President, states (2021): Immersed in a multidisciplinary learning and research environment conducive to the pursuit of knowledge….Our rapidly expanding academic scope is built on a traditional strength in teacher education and consolidated through offerings in the Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as Creative Arts and Culture.

The subsequent amalgamation of the Colleges of Education and the establishment of HKIEd presented an opportunity for my becoming a teacher educator in 1995. During this period, HKIEd actively recruited academic staff, particularly those who had international experience or were from overseas, to teach in their newly developed programs. As a result, I was invited to teach in the Department of Educational Psychology, Counselling and Learning Needs where my primary areas of teaching have been in school guidance and counseling, child and adolescent development, personal and social education, and inclusive education. A significant aspect of my responsibilities includes supervision and advising of students in teaching practice or student teaching. Research and scholarly activities, academic service and professional and community contribution are also included in my role as an academic staff. Becoming a teacher educator seemed to be a meaningful synthesis of my professional experiences as a teacher and counselor. What I found most exciting was the opportunity of being in the midst of the Hong Kong Chinese community. At the time, the student body and teaching staff were almost all ethnic Chinese, primarily Hong Kong-born. Its campus is located in a district called New Territories, on the other side of Hong Kong and in another world from the mostly non-Chinese expatriate community that I had grown to know in my former position as a counselor with an American international school. New Territories was an apt description of the direction my quest was leading me. And because HKIEd was in the early stages of its development, it would offer exciting opportunities to participate in creating a curriculum that reflects Hong Kong’s recent educational reforms aimed at upgrading teacher education programs. I was given the opportunity to propose and develop new courses and participate in the successful validation of a number of HKIEd’s degree programs. Because it did not have

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university status at the time, HKIEd required a process of validation or authorization of a course of study before it could be offered. This process involved a year-long rigorous review and justification of its modules or classes to be approved by established Hong Kong universities and international scholars. Importantly, I wanted to explore ways narrative inquiry could be reflected in our curriculum, as a new way of thinking and doing scholarly research in Hong Kong. In so many respects, I was embarking on new territories. Would becoming a teacher educator provide me with the answers to my quest for understanding my culture and identity? How would I be viewed and received by my students and colleagues? And would there be a place for me to belong? The narratives of my experiences as a teacher educator with my student and colleagues and my life in Hong Kong in this chapter explore these questions. As before, these narratives of experience in this chapter find me positioned at the threshold poised for yet another crossing.

Crossing Identities: Chinese American/American Chinese I had viewed my acceptance of a position as a teacher educator as an opportunity to be “in the midst” of Hong Kong people and culture. I thought that the position would offer me an immersion into an authentic Chinese community that would lead me to a fuller understanding of my Chinese culture and identity. My colleagues were predominantly ethnic Chinese with almost all of its student body composed of local Hong Kong-born Chinese. I found, however, that my colleagues viewed me as “in-between” and called me the American Chinese rather than Chinese American, an identity I had endeavored to become through my work in Asian American Studies. To them, I seem to be prominently American first who possesses American qualities that overshadow and subsume my Chineseness. I am startled and troubled to discover this perception of me from my colleagues. In a journal (January 10, 2001), I write about one such encounter: Colleague #1: “Are you the Chinese who speaks English so fluently? I have heard of you. I have been told that while you do not speak the proper British English, you speak English smoothly and with clarity.” A colleague from another department asks me this when we are introduced in the staff restaurant over lunch with two other Chinese colleagues.

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Betty: “Perhaps I am the one.” I answer with an uncertain and tentative nod. I am startled by her question and feel uneasy that I had been a topic of discussion and speculation among my colleagues. Colleague #2: “I had heard of such a person who seems not to speak Cantonese and wondered how this could be. Being Chinese but not speaking the Chinese language of Hong Kong. How could this be?” she said as she gave me a perplexing gaze.

My colleagues gazed at me intently, as if my appearance would reveal the answers they were seeking. Their questions were making me feel uncomfortable, though I believe they were not aware of this and were genuinely puzzled. Their questions were making me feel self-conscious and like a specimen under a microscope for examination. Colleague #3: “Your family name, ‘Eng,’ is spelled in an unusual way. The peculiar spelling makes me think you are from China or that you are married to a Westerner. Do you have a Chinese name?” Betty: “Yes, of course, I do! My family name, ‘Eng,’ which sounds like the number five in Cantonese followed by the Chinese characters ‘Yan’ that mean distinguished combined with ‘Lan’ the Chinese character for orchid.” Colleague #1: “Ahh, your family name should be spelled ‘Ng’ and not ‘Eng,’ she corrects me. That is how the Chinese character ought to be translated into English.” Betty: “Yes, I believe the ‘Ng’ spelling of my family name is more commonly used, but some find this difficult to pronounce, so my father added the ‘E’ to our family name.”

The spelling of my family name or last name is often questioned this way, as is my Chinese, spoken in my Toishan Chinese dialect. My Toishan village dialect sounds very similar to Hong Kong Cantonese but has its own distinct pronunciation, tones, and expressions. When I am speaking in my Toishan dialect, my colleagues often assume I am speaking Hong Kong Cantonese badly. My seeming mispronunciations are frequently and duly corrected by them with amused laughter, generally as a gesture of friendship. But increasingly to my perception, I hear a patronizing and condescension tone that accompanies their correction of my Chinese speech. Colleague #2: “Where are you from?” Betty: “Why don’t you guess?” I invite her.

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This invitation, I have learned, breaks the ice and temporarily interrupts their intent gaze and scrutiny by making a game of guessing my origins. Colleague #1: “Singapore or Malaysia?” Betty: No, shaking my head with an amused smile. Colleague #2: “Australia!” Colleague #3: “Canada!” Betty: “Not any of these places. Let me tell you. I was born in China but raised and educated in the United States. My first language is Chinese but I grew up speaking mostly English and have lived in Hong Kong for almost fifteen years.”

My response seems to satisfy their curiosity for the moment but I continue to be a subject of interest as they ask about my life in America and how I decided to come to Hong Kong. Introducing myself and then explaining myself was a novelty in the beginning but this has grown tiresome and frustrating. Over the years, I have become impatient and irritated by what has grown to feel like a defense to justify who I am and why I am in Hong Kong. Generally, I am tolerant of such questions among the non-Chinese expatriate community in Hong Kong, but not among my “own” people. I reflect on why this is the case that I do not extend by tolerance to my local Hong Kong Chinese colleagues. I suspect it is because I expect them to be more accepting of me and to acknowledge that I am one of them even though I am from overseas. Since we are all Chinese, are we not from the same family who share a common village? It is rare that my colleagues or students guess that I am from the United States. The international contacts that my colleagues and student have experienced in Hong Kong have been generally limited to the United Kingdom, its Commonwealth countries, and the surrounding Asian countries. For many of my colleagues and most of my students, I am the first Chinese from America they have ever met. Unlike other Hong Kong Chinese who have immigrated overseas after a stay to gain a foreign passport in, for example, Australia or Canada and returned to Hong Kong, I have been raised and educated since childhood in the United States. That I am often asked the “where are you from” question reminds me that I am a stranger and a foreigner among them, and I am abruptly alerted to how much I do not belong. I discover that rather than becoming part of the dominant Hong Kong Chinese people, I am often signaled out, isolated, and placed in the margins. I certainly feel this

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way in America, but this experience coming from my own people is unexpected and leaves me feeling disappointed and a deep sense of loss and sorrow. I often keep to myself and keep silent so as to “pass” to blend in. I also sense that my Hong Kong colleagues offer me their pity along with their contempt. They feel contempt, I believe, because I seem to be devoid of the proper Chinese language and culture. While I possess the physical Chinese features, I seem to corrupt Chinese values and espouse vulgarized Western behavior. I am often referred to as a “Qweilou” or “Qweil Po” meaning a Western foreign devil woman, a racially derogatory term. When I am called a Qweil Po by my colleagues, it is often in jest but with an underlying antagonism. Unlike most of my colleagues, I openly express my opinions and initiate suggestions in department meetings and academic forums, I laugh vigorously out loud rather than smiling discreetly, I wear jeans when I am not teaching, and I invite my students to call me by my American first name, Betty. This is deplorable, reprehensible, and shameful, particularly for a Chinese woman. How dare I, they seem to be saying, to behave so un-lady like and un-Chinese. I must surely insult and betray their Chinese sensibilities. In another exchange that is based on my personal journals (February 8, 2001), this is how I hear the escalating tensions of a strident exchange between my colleagues and me: Betty: “I was born in China, in a Chinese village and speak Toishaness, a dialect of Cantonese. Toishaness is my first language.” Colleagues: “Ahh, of the village.” They nod knowingly but do not offer me the understanding or the approval I seek. Chinese village people are poor and backward, I sense them re-evaluating me. They laugh and then imitate my dialect as a teasing non-Chinese speaker might mimic the sounds of the Chinese language: “Ching Chong Chinaman, Ching Chong Chinaman.” Their imitation of my Chinese dialect, if heard in the United States, would be considered blatantly racist. In Gold Mountain, I have learned to expect the racism and am prepared to mount a defense. But expressed by my own people in Hong Kong, it deeply wounds my heart. My hurt quickly turns to anger, and I counter my Chinese Hong Kong colleagues with my own accusatory attack. My retaliatory stance is not unlike those of young children who respond to a taunt or hurt by classmates who have suddenly turned on them.

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Betty: “You are the product of British colonization. You have been subjugated to being slaves who have no life or mind of their own! How Chinese do you think you really are? Many of you have never even been to China, the ‘real and genuine’ China where there are true Chinese people.”

I escape, feeling rejected and emotionally depleted. In different ways, this scene is played out regularly for me with colleagues, students, the women selling vegetables at the wet markets, the waiters at restaurants, and taxi drivers. Later, I will reflect on such encounters and feel shame and guilt, for I believe I have taken on the voice of the oppressive colonizer. I feel I have taken the superior tone and have been patronizing and judgmental. I am deeply shaken and left in despair by the experience and by what I discover about myself. After all, who determines what is Chinese and the many ways to be Chinese? What I discover about myself is that I have been holding a fixed expectation of how one ought to be Chinese. I discover that I have imposed upon my colleagues a frozen image of what it means to be a Chinese that is based on my experiences living in the United States. Though we are of the same ethnicity, I have not allowed for our individual and complex differences and the context in which we have lived. This perception suggests that we are a monolithic people. But in reality, we are a people of diverse linguistic backgrounds, cultures, and historical past whose culture and identity are in a state of flux. Contrary to my perception of a fixed Chinese culture and identity frozen in time, the reality is that our culture and identity are forever flowing. He (2002c), as a student from China studying in Canada, speaks of her own culture and identity that was shaped by the constancy of change that is forever flowing. She realized that the stories and contexts for her stories in China and Canada were changing and that the representation of the stories should also flow with the change. My fixed identity of being Chinese can probably be traced back to 1955 when we immigrated to Gold Mountain. Growing up in an immigrant Chinese community, I believe the fixed Chinese identity was our way of maintaining our Chinese values and traditions while separated from our homeland. It was a fixed but adapted way of being Chinese for the American context. The Chinese culture and identities in Hong Kong and China, in the meanwhile, continued to change and evolve in different directions. This fluid change of Chinese cultures and identities presents a

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very different reality to my fixed image. Because of this, I have often felt more comfortable being Chinese with a fixed image in Gold Mountain than in Hong Kong. Contrary to my image of them, my colleagues are also engaged in a state of transition and have undergone a complex journey of their own experimentations of grafting and growths. Their experimentations have created a fluid and blended culture and identity they have composed for themselves for the Hong Kong milieu. In many ways, my colleagues and I are engaged in a similar journey. My colleagues’ complex cultures and identities come from a variety of sources and connections. Many of my colleagues have studied abroad, particularly in the United Kingdom since Hong Kong was a former British colony for over 150 years. That colonial connection remains strong, and the experience of British rule permeates my Hong Kong Chinese colleagues’ values and influences their worldview. Others have lived or worked overseas in such countries as Australia, Canada, and United States with a growing number in China. These experiences must surely become embedded in their personal narratives that inform and shape an evolving personal practical knowledge. At this early stage of development of EdUHK, there was an increasing number of Chinese academic staff and students recruited from the People’s Republic of China. This was a recent development and is a sign of its fluid, dynamic, and evolving change. The Chinese from mainland China often come with Chinese dialects of their provinces as well as the official language of China, Putonghua, reading and writing in simplified Chinese characters instead of the more complicated and traditional Chinese character, and their own unique and individual values and worldviews that present me with yet another way of understanding being Chinese. Moreover, a new language policy for learning and teaching was introduced. The policy recognizes Hong Kong as an international city and an integral part of China. In so doing, the policy promotes a tri-lingual language learning environment with a flexible medium of instruction of Cantonese, English, and Putonghua on campus. This language policy represents yet another way the international and cross-cultural identity is unfolding for us at the Institute.

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“One Country, Two Systems” Hong Kong was a British colony for over 150 years until its return to the sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1997. The Basic Law of Hong Kong, SAR of the PRC serves as the de facto constitution and provides Hong Kong the autonomy to continue to function with its own distinct political, social, and economic systems, though it is a part of China. The Basic Law ensures a high degree of autonomy and safeguards the rights and freedoms of its residents, among other rights. As such, Hong Kong is governed by the principle of “one country, two systems” until 2047. Heightened by the events of this historical and dramatic handover, the people of Hong Kong were presented with questions that challenged their culture, identity, and sense of belonging. This challenge was commonly represented in the question: “Are you a Chinese or a Hong Konger?” Simply put, one had to identify with the Chinese of China or the identity of Hong Kong. Some continue to associate themselves with the British. Implied in the question was a challenge to choose not only an identity but also an alliance and affiliation. The British colonial rule in Hong Kong was pressed to become increasingly democratic in its practices during the years prior to the handover with the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong on the Future of Hong Kong in 1984. During this period, political reforms that called for a representative government, voting rights, and guidelines for civic education in schools were introduced. According to Postiglone and Lee (1995) educators were encouraged to promote a “democratization” of their classroom. This democratization provided opportunities to recognize the voices of the learner and teachers as stakeholders in curriculum deliberations. How might the voices of my pre-service education students view their place in the curriculum, and how might their personal experience be viewed as it relates to teacher knowledge and teacher education? How might my students’ culture and identity be reflected during the handover and beyond? Their discussions raised such puzzles as “What does it mean to be Chinese?” How can I reconcile my British education and culture with the new Hong Kong? “Who is it that I wish to become?” and “How, who or what determines who I am to become?” Their questions resonate with my own experiences

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of self-exploration I encountered during my student activist days in the universities in the United States. Here, I reconstruct a narrative that conveys my students’ understanding of their place in the curriculum and on the relationship of personal experience to becoming a teacher. My student’s narrative provides the resonance for me to reflect on my own teacher training and my quest for culture and identity. Resonance, as described by Conle (1996) in her research with pre-service teacher inquiry, is the process of seeing my own experience in terms of another. I find resonance provides an effective way of learning and understanding narratives.

Absence of Authority: “Students Listen, Teachers Talk” “But teacher, I have no experiences to tell. This is my first year as a preservice student and I am not a qualified teacher. How can my experiences matter? Besides, students listen, and teachers talk.” This is a statement made by one of my first-year pre-service students, who, when asked to share a meaningful or important personal experience, claimed she had no experience to share. Initially I thought my student’s response might be attributed to being too shy or self-conscious to share a personal experience in front of the class. I called on other students but received similar responses. After class, I spoke to several students individually and learned that they were puzzled and bewildered by my question. I discovered that they believed they did not have the authority to talk or to recognize the value of their experiences and how they are connected to shaping one’s professional identity and a teacher knowledge. Unless the experiences, my students reasoned, were as a trained or certified teacher in the classroom, her personal experiences were not relevant or valued in the classroom. She felt that her personal experiences did not have a “legitimate” voice or place in the classroom. My student’s opinions and personal experiences are rarely encouraged since the understanding is that “students listen, and teachers talk.” Government policy makers determine the curriculum in a process that Cheng (1997) has characterized as a “consultative autocracy.” But my students do have experiences that are genuinely and positively educative. With a more focus and specific question, I asked the students to recall their experiences with their favorite teacher and to reflect on what it was about the teacher that was special. I found that most of the students

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have rich experiences and stories to tell. Even those students who declared that they did not have any favorite teachers have other experiences that serve to educate. Based on journal notes and reconstructed here, their stories are of care and sustained bonding with their favorite teachers. In a journal entry (November 23, 1999): My favorite secondary school teacher spent time after the school day tutoring me in subjects I was experiencing difficulty. She organized special outings on the weekends to go hiking or trips to the surrounding islands. ‘Misseee’ invited me to her home for dinner with her family and regularly telephoned me to ask me about my studies and my personal life. She listened to me talking about my difficulties communicating with my father, my relationship with my boyfriend, and my career plans. Knowing that she cared for me has motivated me to be a better student and a better person. Even after all these years, she still calls and writes me to ask about my progress in my teacher training and gives me advice on my assignments. I am grateful and indebted to her and am deeply touched by how she cares for me like an older sister or mother. I asked her advice about my future husband and invited her to my wedding. It is a relationship that I treasure and one that will endure a lifetime.

My student’s personal experiences with her favorite teacher are a part of her personal practical knowledge that shapes her development as a teacher. From these experiences, she possesses an understanding of the care and nurturing a teacher can provide for her future students. My student’s story, in turn, becomes a part of my personal practical knowledge as I relate and interact with her experiences. Her experiences serve to educate me as I strive to understand how to be a teacher educator in the Hong Kong cultural context. Connelly and Clandinin (1988) present a case for teachers to understand their own experiences in order to understand the experiences of their learners. If I were to understand how to be a teacher educator, I needed to understand first my own culture and identity. The student’s story challenges me to reflect on my own values, beliefs, and experiences embedded in my teacher knowledge as a Westernized Chinese American woman. In reflecting on my student’s story, I wrote in my journal (November 23, 1999): For ethical and legal reasons, I was taught to maintain a professional distance from my students. I am uneasy about “crossing the line” to enter into the personal and intimate lives of my students. If I view my classroom

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and students as a family, can I maintain professional objectivity? Would there be repercussions or reprimands from the administration or parents? I feel the tensions between my individualized western self and my collective Chinese self. I discover my students are also on a quest to learn of their culture and identity. Displaced from a colonized self under British rule and now living in the Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, my students question whether they are Hong Kongners or Chinese. It is a complex question that implies political loyalties and allegiances and has historical and social roots. Might we embrace multiply cultures and identities?

Noddings (1992) believes in an ethics of care for students and believes that this care be extended beyond the classroom. My student’s story of her favorite teacher informs her personal practical knowledge to becoming a teacher. Her story is drawn from her past, reflected and re-told in the present context of her student education. Alex and Suki, also my students, offered me the narratives that follow to explore my identity and role as a teacher educator.

Alex and Suki: Pre-service Alex and Suki are former pre-service students at EdUHK whom I have known since 1998. I became their “personal tutor” or mentor who provides academic advising and personal support in their three-year program of teacher education for becoming primary school teachers. When I first met them in their first year of study, they were enthusiastic and excited about learning new subjects and meeting new people. Alex’s major subject of study was English and Suki’s was Mandarin, and they were both eager to improve their English language skills. They requested an opportunity to meet with me beyond the scheduled personal tutor meetings to practice their English through informal conversations. We held weekly informal English language lessons as we conversed over lunch or afternoon tea. When I became clearer about the direction of my teacher knowledge narratives, I knew that the voices of Alex and Suki held an essential place in my book. I came to realize how they had become my teachers and source of knowledge who informed me about my Chinese identity in Hong Kong and about how to be a teacher educator. Once, when I installed a larger bulletin board above my desk and was in the process

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of arranging and pinning up my family photographs to remind me of home on the board, I realized that Alex and Suki had become part of my extended family in Hong Kong. It seemed natural that the school photos Alex and Suki had given me be positioned within the same circle of photos that included my mother, father, brothers, in-laws, nieces, and nephews. When Alex and Suki finally graduated after completing their three-year teacher education program in 2001, our relationship evolved into one of colleagues in the teaching profession and sustained through a growing friendship. When they became teachers and received their first “salary” as first year teachers, they invited me for the traditional Chinese celebratory meal. I was excited by the gathering and felt deeply honored and touched by their invitation. We had not seen each other over the summer months and since they started their teaching positions. Here, written in a narrative and conversational form, Alex and Suki share the challenges they face in their first year of teaching. Their experiences pose many challenges for me as a teacher educator as I question the preparation and support in our curriculum we provide our future teachers.

Alex and Suki: First Year Based on notes (October 26, 2001) of our gathering, I write: “Meet in front of the ‘Body Shop’ (name of a retail store) in the shopping plaza at the Shatin train station, and we will go from there to dinner,” Alex instructed me in a telephone call. She told me that if we met at this station, I would not get lost. After all these years, she still doubts my familiarity with Hong Kong, and I am touched by her consideration and care of me. I rushed from campus after a day of teaching, and I am the first to arrive and found that the ‘Body Shop’ is a popular meeting point for many others. There seems to be a crowd of people waiting for their own rendezvous. I looked amongst the crowd but there is no Alex and Suki. After waiting for about 10 minutes, I began to wonder if I have misunderstood the instructions. I am relieved when Alex and Suki finally arrive after another 10 minutes, and we enthusiastically hug and greet each other. I am conscious we embrace in the familiar the westernize hug in greeting and wonder if Alex and Suki are doing so for my benefit. I am thrilled to see them but I hear myself scolding them like an affectionate ‘mother hen’ about being late and about their dress. Alex and Suki suggest

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a restaurant nearby, and we shoulder our way out of the crowd. When we are seated at the restaurant, there is a rush of conversation. Betty: “I hope you are never late for teaching at your school! And look at the way you are dressed. You are dressed so casually in trousers and jean. You still look like students and not the teachers you have become!” Alex: “All the teachers in my school dress this way. But, Suki, you are wearing open-toed sandals and jeans. Now, that is not allowed in our school! I can wear trousers but definitely not jeans. We have a much stricter dress code at our school it seems.” Suki: “Yes, my school principal is quite liberal and relaxed about our dress. We are a new school with a fairly young teaching staff. Because it is new, I think it is more accepting and open to differences. I learned how to dress by observing what the other teachers wore. But I spent quite a lot of my first paycheck buying new clothes for my teaching post. I am sorry to be so late, but my teaching workload is quite heavy, and I was delayed at school.” Alex: “Me too! I begin the day at 6:00 in morning and do not leave the school until 7:00 in the evening each day. I was marking the many student papers and preparing for the next day. As you know, my main subject or major was English but I am also teaching Mandarin. I have no formal training at all in Mandarin and am familiar with the language only because of my holiday travels in China. I also have to teach a fencing class as an extracurricular activity after school as well as prepare my students for an English recital competition. I feel a lot of pressure for my students to win in the competition. If they can do well in the competition, it will improve my chances of getting another contract to continue my teaching post.” Suki: “Yes, I was surprised by the long day and unexpected heavy workload too. I primarily teach Mandarin but I also have to assist coaching fieldand-track and head a scout’s group even though I have no training in physical education. I also stay regularly at the school until late in the evenings in the staff room marking papers and preparing the next day’s lessons. But I am not alone, and I appreciate this quiet time. About seven other new or experienced teachers are there too, and it is at this time that the experienced teachers share with me the expectations of the principal, about how to handle a difficult student or how to work with a particular parent. I really find their advice valuable and helpful.” Betty: “The quiet moments in the staff room in the evenings you speak of, Suki, are sometimes the most valuable for teachers. You seem to have formed friendly relationships with other teachers whom you can trust and who can support your teaching.”

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Alex: “I also find the teachers and my school very supportive. The school provided a helpful orientation week prior to the start of the school year. In the orientation, we were presented with a hypothetical case of a teacher who had some difficulties with her principal. We were asked to discuss the conflict and ways to solve the problem. The case was of a principal who required all his teachers to participate in a weekly karaoke sing-along. The principal thought these weekly sessions a good teambuilding activity. But one teacher found this too horrible and thought the principal was crazy! The teacher in the case described the principal getting too close, touching her hands, draping his arm around her shoulders and putting his face up to her as he sang. This made the teacher really uncomfortable, and she would leave school early to escape the karaoke sessions.” Betty: “This case sounds like a difficult and sensitive situation. You have to fulfill your teaching responsibilities but also have to balance a professional and friendly relationship with your principal. I can see how this teacher might feel uncomfortable. What suggestions did you come up with to resolve this case?” Alex: “I suggest attending the karaoke sessions for part of the time and leaving with an excuse of another appointment. Some of my colleagues thought the karaoke singing a fun and relaxing activity and could not understand the teacher’s reaction. Others thought this was a part of their job responsibility and that they should attend for the sake of building team spirit.” Betty: “Yes, I can see how there might be different views and responses to the case. It is a case to consider and a good problem-solving activity for the group to share.”

By this time, I am feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the challenges Alex and Suki face daily in their schools as first year teachers. The heavy workload, the unexpected assignment to teaching subjects they are not trained to teach, responsibilities beyond teaching the syllabus, and establishing a supportive community of teachers are demanding challenges that confront them. Their personal narratives forcefully inform my understanding of some of the realities of the Hong Kong classroom. But I am feeling overwhelmed not because such demands are new or surprising, since similar demands are shared by other first year and experienced teachers in Hong Kong and other countries. I feel overwhelmed because of the challenges Alex and Suki pose for me as a teacher educator. As a teacher educator, I question the preparation we are providing for our

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future teachers. Are we providing our future teachers with the capabilities to adapt and to improvise and create new ways of responding to such challenges? Where in our teacher education curriculum do we prepare them for the conversation of the “quiet time” that Suki finds helpful and valuable among a community of teachers? How are such relationships formed and sustained to support a sense of community that nurtures trust, respect, and care? Alex’s and Suki’s experiences enable me to reflect and ponder such questions for my teaching and for our teacher education curriculum. When I left the gathering with Alex and Suki, I also feel a deep sense of gratitude because their friendship to me is a gift. We began our relationship as learner/teacher that has evolved over time into colleagues and friends. Perhaps this is the truest of all meanings of education.

Judy, Phyllis, and Alex When I first met Alex, her name was Judy. This was during Alex’s first semester in the teacher education program when I was assigned to be her personal tutor or mentor. During that first semester, Judy became Phyllis. Alex’s multiple names that represent her multiple identities remind me how fluid and constantly evolving are our identities, relationships, and milieu that shape how we see ourselves. In an interview (November 8, 2000), I asked Alex about her various names. To maintain confidentiality, all the names used by Alex in this conversation are pseudonyms. Alex: “I was given the name Judy by my mother because she once heard it in a song and liked the sound of it. It is a name I have been called in school by my teachers since I was a child. Judy is not an official name. It does not appear in any official documents like my birth certificate or Hong Kong identification card.” Betty: “How did you become Phyllis?” Alex: “I really hated my name Judy! This was because my teachers in primary and secondary school did not like me and thought I was stupid and lazy. They thought I would never get accepted to a high-ranking or famous school at the next higher level. All the teachers wanted their students to graduate to a prestigious school. If their students were admitted to a high-ranking or famous school, it would enhance their own school’s reputation. My teachers never even tried to understand me and only pushed me to recite essays and formulas. When I could not do this successfully, I would get upset and cry. Every time my name was called, it was a very bad experience. Every time I heard my name,

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‘Judy’, it triggered a bad feeling. My impressions of teachers are that they are selfish and ill-tempered. I came to hate teachers!” Betty: “I see. That is why you changed your name. When and why did you select the name Phyllis?” Alex: “I changed my name shortly after enrolling in teacher education. I thought it was a good time to change my name to give me a fresh start. I found the name Phyllis through the Internet. I surfed a dictionaryof-names web site and found the name. I wanted to choose a common name for myself which is simple, very common and not very smart. According to the dictionary, Phyllis means green leaf. It says that green leaf plants are very tough, survive in different environments and produce their own food. I guess the name is a kind of inspiration to my life and my future career and reminds me to work hard. I also don’t think the name Phyllis is too feminine because it makes me think of the name Phillip. I don’t do the things that females ordinarily enjoy such as shopping for clothes. I only like to shop for sweets or candies. I like to wear my hair short like a boy because it is easier to take care of this way, and I rather wear trousers than dresses because it is more comfortable. But it is only my teachers and classmates in the English Department who know me as Phyllis. Actually, most of classmates prefer to call me by my Chinese nickname.” Betty: “Oh, what is your nickname?” Alex: “‘Ngan’ is one of the characters in my Chinese name and is a kind of bird, a wild goose, I think. ‘Tsai’ means small or little and is used as a term of endearment. So, my classmates call me ‘Ngan Tsai’. I like it when I am called this because it expresses the familiar and affectionate bond of our friendship. And being a bird expresses my wish to be free and to fly to explore the world.” Betty: “Does your family call you ‘Ngan Tsai’ too?” Alex: “Sometimes, but they have yet another Chinese nickname for me. They call me ‘little pig’ because I like to eat so much! But even though I eat a lot, I am still very short and small.” Betty: “So, you seem to have many names and faces depending on where you are and your relationship. And how did you decide on the name of Alex for the purposes of this research study? I wanted to maintain your confidentiality and privacy by using a name that was not your own and asked you to select a name.” Alex: “I selected the name Alex because it was neutral and simple. It could be a male or female name and seemed to suit my character. The name is short and simple like me.”

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Betty: “I see. Now, if you hated your teachers all through primary and secondary school, how is it that you came to a teacher education program to become a teacher?” Alex: “I really didn’t like to enter the teacher education program because I don’t like teachers, and I didn’t want to become the teachers I had disliked so much. But I had no choice. My examination results were not good enough to qualify me for admissions to the universities in Hong Kong. I didn’t have any expectations of studying teacher education and becoming a teacher. However, when I began to meet some of my classmates and lecturers, I began to change my point of view about teachers. I learned that not all teachers are bad. I have learned the kind of attitudes that a teacher should have. Just because students are not meeting our expectations, we should not neglect them. I have learned that we need to develop different approaches to meet the individual needs of students. I was not a clever or smart student in school. As a result, I did not arouse the interest or attention of my teachers. I won’t let that happen in my teaching! I will do my best to become a good teacher.” Betty: “Do you see yourself being a teacher for the rest of your life?” Alex: “I don’t think so. I think I may lose interest after a number of years and want a change. I might want to teach drama or science or become a researcher. And I know I want to travel and maybe live and work in another country. Remember, I am like a bird who wishes to be free to fly to see the world!”

Like the experience of Alex, I have learned that many of the EdUHK students have been disappointed by their failure to be admitted to another academic field. For most of my students, pursuing a teaching career was not their first choice, or second or even third choice. This trend is changing somewhat as the teaching gains professional status and recognition. This trend is a result of some dramatic educational reforms, which reminds me, once again, that I am entering a place that is fluid, unfolding and in a state of transition. But in the meantime, I am confronted with the challenge of generating the excitement and commitment to the teaching profession to a reluctant and disappointed class of entering students. In Alex’s narrative, she begins her enrollment at EdUHK hating teachers because of her own negative and traumatizing school experience with teachers. Alex did not want to become the teacher she had so intensely disliked. But through her classes in teacher education, she learns that she can change this experience for others by developing a positive attitude toward her students and by recognizing their individual needs. Alex’s past

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experience or personal practical knowledge seems to contribute to shaping and informing her understanding of the qualities that create the “good” teacher she hopes to be.

Suki’s Stories In an interview with Suki, also a pseudonym, she tells of her own personal experiences growing up in China and her separations from family members. Her separations from her family, similar to mine as a child, are a result of immigration restrictions and economic factors. Written here in a conversational form, Suki told her story that is based on my personal journals and an interview that took place on November 22, 2000: Suki: “I was born in Guangdong Province in China and came to Hong Kong at the age of fifteen in 1990. My first language is Cantonese and was the spoken at home. But I learned Putonghua in school in China since it is a compulsory subject in primary school.” Betty: “So, you know three languages, Cantonese, Putonghua, and English. That is quite an accomplishment!” Suki: “Well, it was easy to learn Cantonese and Putonghua while I was young in China. I did not learn English until I came to Hong Kong, and that was extremely difficult.” Betty: “I understand you were separated from your parents and your older brother. Can you tell me about this?” Suki: “Yes, this is a very bad memory for me. My father was working in Hong Kong when I was born. He worked in a button-making factory for over twenty years in Hong Kong. He would visit the family in China about three or four times a year so I did not really grow up knowing him. Then, when I was ten years of age, my mother joined my father to work in Hong Kong in a sewing factory, packing the clothes in preparation for shipment. The wages were so much higher in Hong Kong than China that they could not refuse the opportunity even though it meant further separation of the family. My parents sent us money to support us. My brother and I were not allowed to join them because of immigration restrictions. While my brother attended school in the city, I was forced to live with a distant relative in the countryside. My relatives took good care of me but I missed my mother very much. My mother would come from Hong Kong to visit me when she could, and each time she left, I would cry huge tears for days afterwards.” Betty: “When did you come to Hong Kong?”

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Suki: “I was finally able to come to Hong Kong when I was fifteen years old. My brother chose to stay behind in China since he had a good job, married and had a child.” Betty: “Can you recall your first experience at school in Hong Kong?” Suki: “Oh! I hid in the toilet and cried on my first and second days at school during the break. I was so frightened by the new environment, and I felt no one supported me. Everyone and everything were strange to me. But I knew I could only cry for 5 min before I had to compose myself and return to class.” Betty: “Can you tell me more about what you found so strange and frightening?” Suki: “EVERYTHING was strange and frightening! I was very shy and found it difficult to meet new people. I was afraid that my previous academic studies in China would not prepare me for my studies in Hong Kong. I thought I would not be as good as my classmates and that I would fall behind in my studies. English was especially difficult. In China, I had only learned the basic letters of the alphabet while my classmates in Hong Kong were much more fluent and capable in English than me. There were also subjects about the Hong Kong government and history that I had never had in China. I was afraid I would not fit in and would fail!” Betty: “How long did it take you to adjust?” Suki: “About half a year. By then I had made a few friends who helped me. There was also a very kind teacher, Miss Lee, who was my class mistress or homeroom teacher. She arranged for a classmate to help me with my homework.” Betty: “Were your parents concerned about you?” Suki: “They didn’t know. I didn’t tell them because I wanted to be brave and strong in front of them.” Betty: “I see. What did you find meaningful from this experience, and what did you discover about yourself, especially as it relates to your future career as a teacher?” Suki: “From these experiences, I learned that I could adapt to a new environment and challenges. I learned to be resourceful and independent and was successful in finally catching up with my classmates! Also, I think I can have a better understanding of the experiences of the new immigrant children from China in our schools in Hong Kong. I can empathize with their need for academic and emotional support. I think they may also feel strange and frightened as I did. As a teacher, I should give them special attention and care to adjust.” Betty: “Yes, it sounds like this was a very significant experience for you. In your case, you have been raised and educated in both China and Hong

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Kong. Many of my students are faced with the question of their identity and ask themselves if they are a Chinese or a Hong Konger. What are you views on this?” Suki: “I am becoming a Hong Kong person.” Betty: “After all these years since your arrival to Hong Kong in 1990, you are still becoming a Hong Kong person?” Suki: “Yes, still becoming. I cannot deny that I am a Chinese person because I am Chinese but have experienced my adulthood in Hong Kong. My classmates often remind me that I am not a local Hong Kong person when they point out my accent when I speak my village Cantonese. How can I ever be a complete Hong Kong person? But I have very strong Chinese values and beliefs like filial piety as well as Western thinking. I believe that women can have high achievements in a career but when she gets marry, she should help her husband and care for her children too.” Betty: “I see. This is an interesting blend of values. Tell me, where do you feel at home?” Suki: “I feel that home is within myself. I achieve a state of home when I feel a sense of calm and serenity within myself.”

I find Suki’s last statement about where she considers home revealing and deeply profound. A home that is contained within oneself is one that will always be true and a constant. No matter where I am situated, I can locate that space called home within myself. In many ways, Suki’s journey from China to Hong Kong parallels my own journey on a quest for culture and identity. “Still becoming” Suki asserts, which provides the resonance for my own quest. My identity is also in a state of becoming, and I am not just a Chinese or an American or a Hong Konger. It is not necessary and makes no sense to be forced to choose only one identity or one over the other as if an identity were static and a neatly compartmentalized entity. I have discovered through Suki’s stories that we both experience multiple and fluid cultures and identities.

Alex and Suki: Teachers 2021 After leaving EdUHK and Hong Kong, Alex, Suki and I have had several occasions to get together, usually over a “reunion” meal. Our gatherings have been enthusiastic and filled with laughter as we catch up on each other’s lives. And getting together over a meal makes it a festive and celebratory event. I asked if they also keep in touch with their other

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teachers, and they tell me they have not, which makes me feel very grateful for our endearing friendship. Reflecting on conversations over the years and moving forward to 2021, about 23 years later, I explore their lives and careers. Both Alex and Suki have continued their careers teaching in primary schools since 2001. They have yet to marry and continue to live at home and contribute to the support of their families. More recently, with my return to California, our conversations have been through e-mail and posted letters. Alex teaches English as a core subject and Computer Studies and leads drama activities. She is also responsible for the learning and promoting of English reading in the school. Alex reflects on her career in teaching and comments on the response to COVID-19: “After all these years of teaching and meeting with children and parents, I found that children are really a mirror of their parents. As their “parents” in school, that the class teacher, I found that students are also a mirror of the class teacher. So I always be polite, responsible and considerate in front of them, hope that they can learn in their daily school life. But sometimes I am not confident because many parents are not reasonable and not cooperative. Some of them even don’t love their kids. So, we have to work harder.”

When asked about what she might change in her career teaching, Alex responds: “I think I don’t change much. but I think I understand my mum more as i meet more parents and students. I have less negative feelings on my mum now. I think it’s great!”

Alex often feels the stress of the demands of meeting the goals of the curriculum in order to prepare her students for “assessments,” the regular exams that will determine the students’ placement for the following year. Alex writes: “Finally, I have finished the drama competition and finished teaching all the assessment content before the assessment. I was sweating all for a month in rushing all the learning objectives. We are too greedy. Teachers in Hong Kong really want to teach the little kids everything within the school year.” (Alex, personal communication, March 7, 2018)

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Alex organizes drama competitions, devotes time for extracurricular activities, and initiates gatherings for parents and students during Chinese holidays such as the Mid-Autumn Festival. Moreover, Alex has not lost interest in teaching as she thought she might at the beginning of her career and continues to be challenged, engaged, and charmed by her young students. What I find particularly impressive is Alex’s nuanced, vast, and complex understanding and curiosity of the world, admirable qualities for a teacher. Alex has written asking about US political parties and how voting for a president is decided. I can appreciate her interest in the voting process since in Hong Kong, most people do not have the right to vote. The voting of the Chief Executive (CE) or head of Hong Kong, for instance, is done by a select few and with China’s authorization. Alex also has a strong sense of adventure and curiosity for exploring and understanding the world and has traveled to Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. Alex has taken a special interest in Japan and has taken advance Japanese language classes. And to strengthen her knowledge and competence teaching English, she completed a Master Degree in English while working full-time. Alex also expresses a strong concern for global climate change and has incorporated practices of re-using and recycling in her teaching. She has expanded her interests with advance art classes and trained extensively to participate in marathons in Hong Kong and in Kyoto, Japan. Suki has also continued her career as a teacher and has been teaching for 20 years. We regularly exchange messages for holiday greetings, especially for the Chinese Lunar New Year. As a native speaker of Putonghua and Cantonese, she is very much valued as a language teacher. This was especially the true when primary schools began to introduce Mandarin in the curriculum and there were few native speakers at the time. Suki writes (Suki, personal communications, April 28, 2021): “I teach Cantonese and Mandarin as a core subject as well as serve as a leader of the school’s Moral and National Education. I am also responsible for leading the Cub Scouts, though I originally had no training in this extracurricular activity.”

Asked what surprised her or found unexpected in teaching, Suk replied: “I discovered that every student has different characteristics and that I must adapt different teaching methods for each child to meet their learning

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needs. My teaching attitude has changed since I started teaching. I found it is important teachers play different roles for students. I am sometimes a friend, a parent, and a teacher. Because of COVID-19, lessons were conducted through Zoom when in-person instructions were suspended and schools closed. I had to quickly learn how to teach virtually, preparing power points and learning different online platform or electronic resources. But the relationship between students and teachers is not as personal or close as face-to-face contacts. I was very concerned that some students became lazy had less self-disciplined. What was also demanding was adapting to the constant change in school practice and policy depending on the status of COVID-19. At one time, all classes were held virtually, then there was a relaxing of restrictions, and there was a combination of in-person teaching and Zoom, then it was full school closure again when COVID-19 cases surged. Since early April 2021, the school has reopened and all students have returned to in-person lessons. I was thrilled and happy seeing my students and feel that my relationship with her students became more ‘normal’, was more personal and students’ motivation improved.”

Suki also has a sense of adventure and has traveled to Taiwan and Japan during her summer holidays. With her language skills and travel experience, she has been selected by her school to lead travel study tours to China for her students.

COVID-19 Pandemic and Anti-Asian American Attacks The Corona Virus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19), as named by the World Health Organization (WHO), became a worldwide pandemic and continues to be rampant in most countries in 2021. COVID-19 is another compelling and urgent issue that requires understanding, compassion, and learning ways to working together collaboratively worldwide. The alleged link of the origins of COVID-19 to China fuels the attacks that lead Asians around the world to declare: “I am not a Virus.” The increase of anti-Asian American attacks, violence, and killings that coincide with COVID-19 are unacceptable, despicable, and shameful. The violence targeting and blaming Asian Americans is not new and is grounded in historical and systematical roots. These roots have long been intrenched

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in US politics and culture and require radical systemic eradicated to create a genuine democracy that serves us all.

COVID-19 Pandemic and Hong Kong Schools With the emergence of COVID-19 in late 2019, Alex, Suki and I write how the pandemic has affected our daily lives. Being in contact with them and keeping informed of news in Hong Kong and my experience with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2002–2003 prepared me to be alert to the seriousness and dangers of the virus. By late 2019, most people in Hong Kong were wearing face masks and there was a shortage of masks and hand sanitizer. I offered to send these to Alex and Suki, not realizing that the United States was also experiencing a shortage of masks with no availability in sight. I found that masks were out of stock in stores, pharmacies, and even online. This was at a time when people in the United States were not wearing masks and the public health officials had not made a recommendation for wearing masks so I was taken aback by how pervasive and serious the situation. Alarmed by events in Hong Kong, I stopped attending exercise classes, the library and community center workshops, postponed routine medical appointments, and canceled family gatherings about three weeks prior to the COVID-19 “Stay-at-Home” mandate in California in early March 2020. Alex writes to warn me about the influenza and COVID-19: “Experts say the new strike of Influenza is going to hit us this winter. With the attack of COVID-19 and influenza, many people will be infected and suffer. Please wear a mask when you are out and keep social distance from the crowd!” (Alex, personal communication, October 13, 2020). By December 2020, COVID-19 is seriously impacting Hong Kong and schools. “It’s almost the end of Year 2020. What an awful year! Hope all the bad and evil are sent away. People in HK spent more money on buying Christmas trees and ornaments since they could not travel overseas in the holiday. The condition of COVID-19 is quite serious in December. Schools have stopped teaching in classrooms since early December. We will keep teaching online in January. People can only gather and dine out in pairs, so no family gatherings in the holiday. Serious situation of COVID-19 in the US is also reported. And the new mutated COVID-19 in the UK is affecting the world, seems that there’s no safe place in the world! Please stay safe.

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Since having online lessons(zoom) is the only way we have now, we are spending lots of lots of time in preparing ourselves using different software, apps and online resources. We need time to try and test. Need to take good care of our eyesight. Primary students need to stay in front of the computers or iPad screens for a long time, it’s not easy for them to focus on the lessons, even though interactive games have been prepared for them. Also, Hong Kong students’ learning initiative is not high, they keep playing online games and watching videos during the lessons, we need to think of more ideas in encouraging them to focus in the lessons. Different positive reinforcement is prepared for students! Therefor less time to rest. Actually, students and their parents spend more time together, then there are more conflicts between them. We have to spend more time working on the peace between them. I am a peace maker now! Studying in school is very important for young children. As there is only one or two kids in a family, they have limited chances in chatting and communicating with children at their age, seems that they can’t express themselves now. Also, they keep their feelings in them, that’s why we are hoping students to come back to school as soon as possible.” (Alex, personal communication, April 2, 2021)

Schools in Hong Kong were partially reopened for in-person learning in March 2021 with students requiring to wear masks and temperature checks. In the event that COVID-19 cases are found, schools would be required to close for quarantined for two weeks. Hong Kong has also experienced mandatory lockdowns of the city, offered mass COVID-19 testing, and more recently, what the locals refer to as “ambush” lockdowns. When a cluster of residents have been identified with COVID-19, there is an immediate lockdown with mandatory COVID-19 testing of residents in their high-rise buildings or district. To ensure that residents will undergo the testing, no warning is given for the lockdown and buildings or districts are cordoned off by the police restricting residents from leaving their flats or apartments. These ambushes have lasted 1–2 days depending on the size of affected area while residents are being tested. Should residents be unavailable, they are served notice for testing and fined HK$5,000 or US$641 if they do not comply. Basic foods such as instant noodles, water, and canned foods are provided by the government during the lockdown. Once residents have tested negative and free from the infection, they are released from the lockdown. People in Hong Kong have generally been cooperative with the testing and lockdowns, finding it understandable but “inconvenient and disruptive.”

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The pandemic discouraged family gatherings for the traditional Chinese Lunar New Year celebration but I adapt to the situation and improvise a festive but simple celebration in 2021. I feel the preparations for the New Year are an act of honoring and sustaining my culture and identity. I continue to clean and cleanse for the Lunar New Year to ensure a prosperous new beginning.

Crossing Cultures: Cleaning and Cleansing The following narratives express the multiple and fluid identities and cultures that I experience living in Hong Kong and in California. The narratives are of my preparations for Chinese New Year and are based on selective journal writings (February 25, 1985, Year of the Ox, February 15, 2001, Year of the Horse, February 13, 2021, Year of the Ox): It is only two days before the Chinese Lunar New Year and frenzied preparations for the New Year have been made to pave the way for a happy and prosperous new beginning. There seemed to be so little time to complete all the necessary preparations. I had begun the work in earnest weeks before, but the last-minute tasks remain. My efforts seemed to be geared toward cleaning and cleansing. I attend to the “realities and dreams” of my home, or the physical being of my home and the wish and hope of what it could be. It is to the realities of cleaning that I first direct my attention as I set out to clean the many windows in my home. Cleaning the windows, I have been taught, allows the good luck to shine through to bless our home. Clean windows provide a clear path for good fortune to find and surround us. Cleaning the windows, all of them, including the large balcony glass sliding doors, is a rigorous exercise. Cleaning windows is not one of my favorite activities, and they go wanting all year long until this moment. And in Hong Kong, cleaning windows for those who live on the upper reaches of a 20 or 30 floors high-rise building, as I once did, is a precarious task. In readiness, I had scouted the shops for a window sponge squeegee with a handle that can be extended to reach the outside panes. It is the kind of window squeegee that I am accustomed to using to wash our cars in my California home, where weekend car washing and waxing takes on a kind of cultural ritual. Under the California sun, it is not unusual to make car washing an all-day event, after selecting exactly the right kind of detergent, an expensive soft wipe, and wax to give it the right shine with the songs of the “Beach Boys” accompanying the ritual.

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I apply and adapt these skills to my ten windows and balcony doors of the ground level flat we call home this year. I dressed up in my jeans and an old t-shirt, carrying my bucket of water, squeegee, and rags in hand ready for the task. I felt quite accomplished as I managed to get around the security grills bolted to each window to sponge and scrape clean each windowpane. While cleaning my windows, I am mistaken for an “amah” or a maid by my Chinese neighbors. My neighbors’ startled expression told me they are first surprised and then embarrassed to see me, a professional woman, engaged in dirty manual labor. I let the awkward moment pass as I waved them a quick hello. I thought their embarrassment a silly sentiment and attributed their reaction to a view that one’s professional or class status ought to determine one’s behavior. My farming ancestors in my village in China and my parents’ labors in the grocery stores, canneries, and garment factories have instilled in me a kind of pride and dignity for honest hard labor. Many Hong Kong residents of my professional class can readily afford the services of a full-time and live-in maid. A maid or a helper can be hired for as little as HK$3,500 per month, about $US450, in addition to room and board at the employer’s residence. I can afford to hire a helper but have chosen not to for a variety of reasons. I have never felt comfortable with the idea of someone serving me in my home. And there is the question of our relationship. Do I treat the helper as an employee, a member of the family, or a friend? Can I maintain the privacy of our home, with a helper living with us? And more importantly, I feel the concern of exploiting a helper’s labor for cheap wages. Should the helper’s labors not be treated as importantly as those of other professionals, such as a teacher, and paid accordingly? I once calculated how much a helper’s services might cost if I paid her the minimum wage level of the United States and found the cost prohibitive. “Hire an amah,” I am often advised by my colleagues and friends. Their urging to employ an amah, it seems to me, is given not only as a well-intended helpful advice on managing my household but also as a mark of my status as a member of the educated class. “Do as we do, if you want to fit in or belong,” their urging seems to say to me. I continued with my cleaning, and the kitchen floors got a vigorous mopping, while the parquet floor was dusted and the rugs vacuumed. I have been taught to sweep the floors clean before the Chinese New Year; otherwise, you will have to sweep away the good luck that the New Year will bring you. I follow this teaching diligently, and my flurry of cleaning

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continued. And with detergent, sponge, and bucket in hand to wash my two cars, I discovered that I had a flat tire. Get this repaired, too, before the New Year. If this is a sign of bad luck, let this bad fortune be one that occurs in the year of the snake and not carried over to the year of the horse. It seems this year of the snake has been destined to be a mean one even in its final days. The car was jacked up and the punctured tire removed and taken to a repair shop. The day was now late on a Saturday afternoon, and I was hopeful that a tire repair shop remained open. I was relieved to find that there were many such shops opened, and my tire was efficiently and professionally repaired. Ahh, I thought, this was an auspicious sign that the year of the horse would be a good one. Earlier in the day we had done our food shopping, the stores crowded with other shoppers intent on making the same preparations. It would be best to wait until the last minute to do the food shopping to ensure getting the freshest foods and getting the best prices since vendors would begin to mark down the prices as New Year Eve approached. All the necessary foods for family and friends and the traditional New Year’s meal and gatherings were purchased. In our first Lunar New Year’s Eve family celebration in Hong Kong in 1985, I prepared the traditional meal for the family under the direction and supervision of my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law took me in hand to ensure I would make all the right preparations for the meal. Beginning early in the day, she took me to the wet market where we found ourselves shoulder-to-shoulder with other shoppers also intent on preparing a lavish New Year Eve’s meal. The wet market was an entirely different experience from the shopping I would do in the supermarkets in California, and my mother-in-law navigated my way. The floors of the market were wet from the spillage of soiled waters, and we walked gingerly over the puddles. The smells of the wet market formed a bouquet of aromatic fragrances from the tanks of briny water that hold the swimming fish, the sharp sting of spices from ginger, fermented salty black beans, and anise, the perfumed sweetness from delicate pink orchids and long-stemmed roses along with the pungent odors of debris. The noise was lively and festive as the hawking shopkeepers heralded their fresh stock, while the shoppers recognized their neighbors and greeted each other with New Year’s wishes of “Sun Nin Fai Lok!” “Gung Hei Fat Choy!” or a “Happy and Prosperous New Year!” My mother-in-law first took me to select the best live plump chickens for slaughter. She instructed me to be vigilant and to watch closely so

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that the two chickens she had selected were not switched for others of a lower quality. The “lo bann” or “boss” of the chicken stall skillfully and swiftly slit the throats of the chickens and drained the gushing blood into a metal drum. Repulsed, I instinctively squeezed my eyes shut and quickly turned away. My mother-in-law urged me back in time to see the chickens placed in a fast-whirling drum that efficiently plucked all the feathers, and the chickens we had purchased were plopped in plastic bags and sealed. My mother-in-law then selected a fish big enough to serve the fourteen members of our family who would be coming to the New Year Eve dinner. The fish, on the other hand, was kept alive in a bucket we have brought along and filled with water. The fish should be alive and swimming until the very last moment in order to achieve its fresh taste. All of these purchases were filling my shopping bag. I felt their weight on my shoulders and felt anxious about the preparations needed for this special meal. My mother-in-law, sensing my uneasiness, reassured me, “Don’t worry. I will show you how all these purchases will be prepared and cooked for the New Year Eve dinner. We will be in the kitchen together, and you can watch and learn while I teach you step-by-step how to prepare each dish. I’ll show you how to pound the fish senseless, scrape clean its scales and pull out its guts. The freshness from a swimming fish just cooked is so delicious!”. My mother-in-law’s instructions continued, “And don’t forget to purchase slippers for the children and adults who will be spending the day and evening. You will want them to take off their street shoes to keep our home clean and to make them feel comfortable.” I purchased ten pairs in a variety of sizes, with my mother-in-law bargaining for a discounted price because we were buying so many. The traditional Chinese foods for the Chinese New Year Eve meal are dishes that represent good fortune and prosperity. There are the rice noodles to represent long life, the vegetable whose Chinese name “fat choy” sounds like the word for prosperity, and the sweet sesame-filled round dumplings “tong yuen” that represents the unity and togetherness of the family. The dishes must be varied and served in abundance. There must be a dish of steamed chicken, fresh fish, minced pork, slices of tender beef, precious abalone soup along with golden oranges piled high to represent the hope and wishes for a brilliant New Year.

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And I mustn’t forget the incense for the prayers that must be made before the meal to pay respect to the gods of good fortune and our ancestors. My narcissuses plant, a traditional Chinese New Year’s flower and first purchased as a small shoot with flowing roots, had bloomed tall and just in time for the celebration. I had prepared my red “lai see” packet filled with brand-new bills, the amount in each packet determined by the importance of our relationship. Twenty Hong Kong dollars would go to the person tending the counter at the dry cleaners or the gas station attendant. HK$100 would be fitting for my nieces, nephews, and the children of friends. Our family clan of fourteen that included in-laws, four young children along with my husband and me gathered round the table with much talking and excitement. But before we began our meal, we each lit sticks of incense, and with incense in hand, solemnly bowed our heads in gratitude to pay our respect to the gods and our ancestors. When this ritual was completed, there were toasts of good wishes, shouts of “Gung Hei Fat Choy!” or a “Happy and Prosperous New Year!” laughter, and talk of the grand fireworks display over the harbor later in the evening that we planned to view. We complimented each other on our new clothes purchased especially for the New Year and our recently trimmed tresses, and everyone praised the food. Everyone took care to speak good words and think good thoughts to make way for a bright New Year. No swearing or mean or unpleasant thoughts, I had been taught. Avoid talking about possible unemployment, the depressing state of the economy, or of illnesses or death. We had settled all grievances, paid our debts, and resolved any misunderstandings in preparation for a New Year. The explosions from the fireworks and the “pop-pop” from the firecrackers made a piercing and boisterous sound to ward off the evil spirits and to welcome the New Year. Practicing these rituals and preparations engaged me in a spiritual and inner cleansing that had become an imperative that held the hopes and dreams of my home for the future. With my return to California in 2021, the year of the Ox is marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders. There are no extended family gatherings and New Year’s Eve is a simple and quiet celebration with the traditional feast. The house is decorated with kumquats, pomelo, and flowers, symbols of good fortune for the New Year. Shoppers in Sacramento are also in rush at Chinese grocery stores three weeks in advance to gather all the preparations for the holiday and family feast. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused food shortages, such as rice and

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noodles, and there seems a heighten sense of urgency to purchase the necessary ingredients. I no longer have my parents, my mother-in-law, and the Hong Kong milieu to guide and teach me and I improvise and adapt the best I can. I feel it important to maintain the Chinese traditions, as I understand them, to sustain and preserve our culture and identity. I send lucky money wrapped in lai see or red envelope with wishes for a preposterous New Year to my nieces and nephews. The second-generation children in the family are even less likely to know of the holidays and my greetings to them are a wish and a yearning for their nurturance of their Chinese culture and identity.

Upon Quiet Reflection Upon quiet reflection, I ponder why I faithfully practice these rituals and embrace them in my life in Hong Kong and in California? Do the rituals make me Chinese? What is it that I am seeking? How is it that this came to be? Surely, these customs and beliefs have been instilled in me by the experiences of my own childhood growing up in a traditional immigrant Chinese family in California. They are what my parents, especially my mother, have passed on to me and that I have extended to my life in Hong Kong and California. My mother and my mother-in-law became my guides and navigator to cleaning and cleansing to instill the values and practices of Chinese culture. How is it that I can reconcile my fundamentalist Christian upbringing with worshiping what my church would consider pagan gods and deities? How is it that I can practice these customs that seem to defy individual rights and determinism and rely on the power of the spirits? How is my celebration of Chinese New Year in Hong Kong and in California a part of my dream and quest for culture and identity? The dialectics of these seemingly competing and contradictory practices and beliefs form a fluid and improvised fusion of my cultural West and East for the life I have improvised for myself. The fusion is like the multiple bamboo grafting that provides experimentations necessitating a process of trial and error to create the best possible growth. But I realize this is not a scientific experiment that will provide a blueprint with predictable cause-and-effect relationship to yield universal truths. I find myself in un-chartered territory, and the culture and identity that emerges for me is complex, fluid, and ever changing. The growths created in my culture and identity are multiply, surprising, and unfolding.

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Upon quiet reflection, I find that while I know the “realities” or facts of these practices for Chinese New Year, I do not understand their full meaning, significance, or their historical origins. When I ask of my students and Hong Kong-born colleagues and friends of my generation, they too acknowledge a lack of understanding of each of these New Year cultural practices. While they can recall carrying out these rituals as children, they also have a limited understanding of their meaning even though they dutifully practice them each year. What I have discovered is that I have given, consciously or unconsciously, my own transformative meaning and significance to these rituals to celebrate this occasion. It seems that more than anything, I practice these rituals to honor the place of tradition, my parents, and family to nurture and sustain the realities and dreams of my Chinese identity. I discover that traditions are not static and that they seem to possess an organic life that changes over time to become a new tradition. Improvisations and adaptations of these traditions seem to be central to how I navigate my cultural crossings in Hong Kong and in my classroom practices as a teacher educator. My improvisations take the fundamental bamboo timbers, scatter them, and reconstruct them to form something altogether different and new. It is a transformative journey that resonates in my classroom practice as I twine and entwine together a variety of bamboo timbers that form the scaffolding of a fluid personal practical knowledge. My teachers are the mothers in the family who sustain the family traditions. It is the voice of my mother who teaches me how to cook a perfect bowl of rice and my mother-in-law who guides me with the step-by-step instructions for a New Year meal. The abundant food during the Lunar New Year celebration is symbolic to nourishing my physical hunger as well as my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual hunger. As the traditional caregivers, mothers and teachers serve to nourish and sustain a cultural tradition, and that is how I have come to see myself as a teacher in my classroom. However, the voices of my mother-teachers, while instructive and powerful, are not always ones I concur. I cannot readily acquiesce to the lessons they teach or the way they teach. To my hearing of their voices, they sometimes seem discordantly dictatorial and critical that may have roots in their own experiences of their own mother-teachers in their village culture in China. From my mother’s village schooling, as told by my mother, the traditional voice of the teacher is all knowing

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and authoritative. Learning is by rote and memorization, like the chant on rice-making that my mother has passed on to me or the step-bystep instructions on how to prepare a Chinese New Year meal from my mother-in-law. It doesn’t make sense for me to embrace this way learning and teaching even though it stems from traditional Chinese practices. Selecting and adapting from tradition to improvise new and evolving identities and cultures becomes the distinguishing quality of my journey. I find I view myself the “amah,” a helper or caregiver that is translated into my classroom practice. I see myself as the caregiver to my students’ learning to becoming a teacher. Viewing myself as a helper and caregiver in my story challenges the conventional hierarchical relationship between my students and myself as it did with my neighbors who felt awkward and embarrassed when they spotted me, a professional, cleaning the windows. I believe we are participants in a curriculum as facilitators with shared, interchanging, and reciprocal roles as learners and teachers. My mothers have taught me to honor the place of mother-teachers. They have planted the seeds of learning to flourish in rich and abundant soil to develop my own way of becoming a teacher and my own way of becoming Chinese. Their teachings challenge me to explore and discover a multitude of ways for cooking a perfect bowl of rice and a multitude of ways for knowing.

Looking Back and Looking Forward This chapter provided the personal narratives of my crossing and crisscrossing of identities and cultures that bring me to Hong Kong and to the present. I am invited to become a teacher educator with the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK), an opportunity that I thought would bring me into the midst of the predominantly Chinese Hong Kong community. I had anticipated EdUHK to provide the immersion I wanted that might lead me to the answers on my quest for understanding my culture and identity. I discovered, however, the perception and reception of me from my colleagues and students a jarring and disturbing surprise. Contrary to my expectation of becoming a member of the Chinese Hong Kong community, I discovered how my “American” qualities, as perceived by them, leave me feeling isolated and in the margins. My mother’s lament of my being a juk sing seemed to be echoed in their view of me.

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My students have been my teachers, particularly Alex and Suki who have generously shared their experiences with me. Their personal narratives of experience served to shape and inform my teacher knowledge for the Hong Kong milieu, and they have become members of my extended family in Hong Kong and endearing friends. What I discovered about myself is also a surprise. I confronted a fundamental need to be accepted and belong—but on terms as defined and determined by me. These terms have been based on my assumption and expectation that because we are of the same ethnicity who share the common bond represented by our yellow skin, I would be welcomed and embraced by my “own people.” Abruptly, I discovered how unlike I am to my Chinese Hong Kong colleagues. I found myself viewing my colleagues as a stereotypic and monolithic entity. I discovered, instead, that their culture and identity are also fluid and in a state of becoming. Might my differences be a source of strength that bridges both Chinese and American identities and cultures? Might being in the “in between spaces” that He (2002a) refers be a place for home and a source of strength? My next chapter, “Uprooted and Transplanted Redux: From Hong Kong to Reentry to United States” narrates the transitions of cultural revelations and surprises I encounter upon reentry to the United States after living and working in Hong Kong for almost 20 years. I explore how my multiple cultures and identities can serve to interact and reciprocate to understand and educate. I bring the autobiographical to the current and urgent issues of COVID-19 pandemic that coincides with anti-Asian American killings and attacks and xenophobia or fear and hatred of the different or foreign that are intertwined with the growing economic and political tensions between the United States and China. Drawing on my experiences in Hong Kong now with reentry to the United States brings a new and fuller understanding from both continents to inform and foster a world view.

References Cheng, K. M. (1997). The policymaking process. In G. A. Postiglione & W. O. Lee (Eds.), Schooling in Hong Kong (pp. 65–78). Hong Kong University Press. Clandinin, D. J. (1985). Personal practical knowledge: A study of teachers’ classroom images. Curriculum Inquiry, 15(4), 362–385. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/03626784.1985.11075976

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Conle, C. (1996). Resonance in perservice teacher inquiry. American Educational Research Journal, 33(2), 297–325. https://doi.org/10.2307/116 3286 Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1988). Teachers as curriculum planners. The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Press. Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau, The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (2021, May 23). Joint declaration of the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the government of the People’s Republic of China on the question of Hong Kong. https://www.cmab.gov.hk/en/issues/ jd2.htm Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). (2021, May 27). President’s Welcome. https://www.eduhk.hk/en/about/president-s-welcome Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). (2021, May 27). Vision and Mission. https://www.eduhk.hk/en/about/vision-and-mission Hayhoe, R. (2004). Full circle, a life with Hong Kong and China. Comparative Education Research Centre. He, M. F. (2002a). A narrative inquiry of cross-cultural lives: Lives in China. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 34(3), 301–321. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 002202701101108196 He, M. F. (2002c). A narrative inquiry of cross-cultural lives: Lives in the North American academy. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 34(5), 513–533. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00220270110114090 Hong Kong Institute of Education (2003). The Hong Kong Institute of Education calendar, 2003–2004. The Hong Kong Institute of Education. Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government Information Centre (2020). Provisions of education. Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China Government. Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government of the People’s Republic of China. (2021, May 20). Basic Law. https://www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/bas iclaw/chapter1.html Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, Education Bureau. (2021, May 27). Vision and Mission. https://www.edb.gov.hk Noddings, N. (1992). The challenge to care in schools: An alternative approach to education. Teachers College Press. Postiglione, G. A., & Lee, W. O. (Eds.). (1995). Social change and educational development. The University of Hong Kong Press.

CHAPTER 8

Uprooted, Transplanted Grafted Redux: From Hong Kong to Reentry to the United States

Upon my retirement and after living in Hong Kong for about 20 years, I returned to Sacramento, California, in 2015, the place where I had grown up. Crossing and crisscrossing, I felt the draw of my roots, sense of belonging and community in Sacramento, and another place I call home. During the periods when I had been overseas and away from Sacramento, I had returned about every six months, for conferences and during the summer and holidays and importantly, reunions with my parents and family. My stays have been relatively brief and while I felt a sense of connection and touching base, my experience and understanding of the United States were selective and, most likely, distorted and flawed. With my return to my “hometown,” I sought to become acclimated and reacquainted with the US culture, my place in it, while shaping another new identity. I now write in the present, in 2021 in retrospect, in a backand-forth, crossing and crisscrossing between Hong Kong and United States in a state of reciprocal remembering that bring vivid memories and understandings. Here I recount what I miss, welcome, and rediscover. And, again, I get a sense of what Geertz, in “After the Fact, Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist” (1995), means about coming too late, just missing the moment, never being in a place long enough. It never seems just right. My visits to my California home are brief and are not extended immersions. When and where I enter during © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. C. Eng, Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82032-9_8

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my visits marks the extent and quality of the experience I am able to embrace. I realize the moment is fluid, but I do not have the “over time” kind of experience that could bring me “in the midst.” During my absence, I had missed my parents’ excitement and recognition for their accomplishment of accumulating 5,000 miles walking in the mall. Their framed certificates and trophies proudly lined the fireplace mantel. I missed birthdays, graduations of nieces and nephews, celebration of first jobs, marriages, and births. I celebrated and gave gifts after the fact, but it was belated and felt incongruous. I had also been unaware of the sad and sudden death of a cousin’s teenage son from a drug overdose, an event that is kept a family secret. I am heartened to learn of the vigorous growth and power of Asian American Studies across the country. There are now graduate degrees in Asian American Studies with a professional organization, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), that hold annual national conferences to support the research and teaching of Asian American Studies. My former department at the University of California, Davis, where I taught in the 1980s has expanded its faculty to include a broader diversity of Asian Americans to include Korean, Filipino, Arab, and Muslim American who are conducting important community and international research with impressive scholarly publications. Getting re-acquainted with Asian American Studies during an alumni celebration in 2019, I find that I have become an “elder” and offered to contribute to a historical narrative of the founding of Asian American Studies. I am impressed by the expansion of organizations such as the Asian Community Center in Sacramento to serve the elderly and the growing number of Asian American organizations on the national level such as the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum and the National Association of Asian American Professionals, among others, that advocate for policy and structural changes that promote social and economic justice and political empowerment as well as provide essential social services. There is a history of systematic attacks and violence against Asian Americans in the United States: lynching, burning of Chinatowns, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian hate crimes have increased 149% increase in 16 of America’s largest cities in 2020, according to the Center for Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. And according to the United Nations (2020), the rising wave of racist and xenophobic attacks against Asian Americans are serious and alarming.

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More than 1,800 racist incidents against Asian Americans in the United States have been reported over an 8-week period from March to May 2020. Attacks include physical assaults, vandalism, verbal harassment, denial of access to services and public spaces. I believe that incendiary and racist references to COVID-19 as the “China Virus” and “Kung Flu” have legitimized and fostered the anti-Asian hate crimes.

Systemic Culture of Racism, Hate, and Gun Violence The brutal shooting and killing of eight victims, six of whom were of Asian descent, in Georgia on March 16, 2021, was what I feared. I had been bracing for such attacks and was stunned, though not surprised, pained, and outraged by the killings. The culture of racism and gun violence in the United States is one that I anticipated and dread. I am heartened and inspired that Asian American communities across the nation have organized protests which have received local and national media coverage. Asian Americans as individuals and community organizations have issued statements powerfully condemning hate crimes motivated by racism against Asian Americans. Many, particularly elderly Asian Americans living in Chinatowns across the United States, have been killed, attacked, and bullied, but kept silent for fear of retaliation. The silence to such incidents is understandable but also seen as an act of complicity that can no longer be acceptable. And with the support of Asian American organizations, people are encouraged to speak up. It has also been encouraging to have President Joseph Biden President Joe Biden issue an executive action to combat xenophobia, particularly against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community on January 26, 2021. Along with Kamala Harris, Biden met with Asian Americans in Georgia and condemned the killings and characterized the attacks as “wrong” and “un-American.” Such statements have been encouraging and countered the statements made by former President Donald Trump that blamed China for the COVID-19 pandemic which incited the targeting of Asian Americans. Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, the first female Asian American to become a senator in 2017, and representative Grace Meng of New York, the first and only Asian American Member of Congress from New York State, introduced the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act which was passed by an overwhelming bipartisan vote and signed into law on May 20, 2021.

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I am heartened and proud that the act was initiated by the leadership of strong, courageous, and intelligent Asian American women. These are positive and encouraging developments, but I remain cautiously optimistic. There is so much more work to be done. My hope is that such measures become sustaining acts to remedy and resolve the systematic issues of racism and discrimination that are deeply entrenched in our society. At the heart of the issue is the fundamental question: In whose interest do racism and discrimination serve? How can these interests become unnecessary and eliminated to move forward to reimagine and recreate alternative interests that serve us all? As an educator, I believe I have a role and a responsibility to contribute to this social change and hope this book invites learners and readers to reflect, examine, and collectively act on such question.

Hong Kong and Personal Safety Hong Kong is a place I have always appreciated for its relative safety. With reasonable care, I felt comfortable being out in the early morning hours since it is a 24-hours city and I have the company of others who are also about at any time of day and night. There is no gun violence in Hong Kong. Why? For a simple reason, guns are outlawed. To be sure, there is the occasional gun that slips through the borders, but there are no mass shootings and killings with weapons designed for mass destruction. With the ongoing mass killing by guns, I am often asked by my former Hong Kong students who are genuinely bewildered and puzzled by the gun violence. My students ask: “Why do people in the United States shoot to kill and why are they so violent?” I often feel overwhelmed by such questions and don’t know how to explain in a way to be understood. I tell them it is a very sad and alarming culture of violence and that there is much be learned from Hong Kong’s practice of outlawing guns.

In the Midst: Expanding Asian Americans in Political Office Since returning to the United States, I also learned that many Asian Americans have been elected to local, state, and national office. A diverse and broad spectrum of Asian Americans elected official includes Hawaiians, Vietnamese, Hmong, Filipinos, Indians, as well as Chinese and Japanese. Of significance is the election of Kamala Harris, the first woman, the first

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Black American, and the first Asian American as Vice President. In this remarkable election of Harris, I was engaged in her campaign for higher office, observed her press conferences, researched her background and credentials, and “felt in the midst.” She had been California’s Attorney General before she was elected to the Senate and then became a presidential candidate during the 2020 election. I watched Harris’ forceful debate among other candidates and was extremely impressed by her intelligence and passion for social justice. I was elated when Harris was selected by Joseph Biden to be his vice presidential running mate. Her election as Vice President was a joyous and tearful occasion. What made me feel “in the midst” was that at every step of the election process, I participated with other Americans to reflect, analyze, and debate about each controversial turn. I was present, felt like an insider, shared the same experience with other Americans, though we may not have held the same views, over time. I was also elated to learn of numerous other Asian Americans who are serving in political office at the state and federal level.

Experiencing There Here and Here There I experienced major events such as September 11, 2001, and the election of the first Black President, Barack Obama, in 2009–2017, as an Asian American living overseas and missed the full force and momentum of the nation’s response. To be sure, people of Hong Kong responded to the catastrophic events of September 11 and to the first Black President, but I was in a community that did not have a shared and common history of the United States. Having lived in New York, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were my landmarks and I could not convey my deep sense of loss for my home in New York or my connection to the United States to my friends and colleagues in Hong Kong. Growing up in a country that is systematically racist and discriminatory and having participated in the civil rights movement, I was deeply moved by the remarkable election of Obama. I felt a personal victory and celebration that I could not be readily understood or shared by my Chinese Hong Kong community. In fact, some of my Chinese friends were puzzled and somewhat bewildered by how a Black person, a minority, could become a US President. But I continue to be reminded by anthropologist Geertz (1995) that whether an insider or outsider, neither position suffices in the formidable work of retelling of the story or the interpretation of the culture. Though

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I had returned to my home where I had grown up in the United States and felt familiar, I am cautious and mindful that I am unable to grasp the vastness of an entire community or find the words to describe its people and culture. Geertz wisely counsels me to fully welcome and embrace its people and life. I embraced those things I did not experience in Hong Kong: California’s blue skies and sun, hanging out clothes to dry just for the sun-kissed smell, an impossibility with Hong Kong’s mostly overcast skies and humility, eating Mexican food, a rarity in Hong Kong, and the expansive spaces for parks and walks to name a few of the experiences I welcomed in California. But there is also much that I miss and yearn for in Hong Kong. I miss the daily abundant “wet markets” or outdoor markets for grocery shopping. It is called a wet market because the floors are constantly wet from water splashed from tubs of seafood, blood from fish that are gutted and filleted when purchased, and from washing down for cleaning. I discovered a rich variety of items new to me and not so common in the United States at the time. There are stalls selling fresh vegetables of “Choi Sum” and “Gai Lan,” which are similar to the more familiar “Bok Choy” but with distinct sweetness and texture. I discover fruits such as Dragon Fruit, Star Fruit, and Mangos that arrive daily from China or surrounding countries in Southeast Asia. In Hong Kong, fresh fish is fish that is still alive and swimming in its tank, never frozen. I have always had bamboo shoots already cooked and serve in a dish or bought canned. I had never seen fresh bamboo shoots in its natural state before and did not recognize it rounded shape still encased in its leaves. There are fragrant fresh flowers of orchids and narcissist that bloom just in time for the Lunar New Year. There are the conventional grocery stores, but I prefer the wet markets for it is sounds, smells, and its people. Other shoppers like myself crowd the streets carrying shopping baskets. The vendors compete with each other with calls to shoppers about the merits of their produce. I chat with vendors that I regularly patronize for their recommendations for fresh seasonal produce. I am expected to “bargain” and usually get stalks of green onions as a bonus. I find the wet markets represent a vibrant cultural tradition and a simpler way of life that allows for getting in touch with a sense of community that is being lost amid skyscrapers, malls, and rapid development in Hong Kong. For me, the wet market is nurturing and satisfying.

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It is, therefore, concerning that one of the hypotheses of the origin of COVID-19 is the wet markets in China with calls for their closure. Further investigations are to be conducted, but I hope that a comprehensive and scientific report will provide some definite answers and ways to resolve the issues and preserve the cultural practice of wet markets. I view the pandemic as a world and public health issue that should not be politicized to attack a country or its people. If the purpose of the investigations is to learn and understand the cause of the virus and, importantly, how to prevent and respond to future pandemics, it is counterproductive and divisive to lay blame and accusations.

Majority Minority Culture and Identity Most of all, I am reminded of the power relationship of being a member of majority/minority culture. In the United States, there are 18.9 million Asian Americans, which constitute 5.7% of the US population, according to estimated 2019 Census Bureau. While in Hong Kong, about 92% of its people are Chinese according to its 2016 census report. The numbers make a difference. How I am defined, perceived, and treated because of my majority status as a Chinese in Hong Kong is fundamentally different from being a minority and “outsider” in the United States. As a member of the majority culture in Hong Kong, it would be inconceivable that I would be subject to hate crimes resulting from racism. But as a minority in the United States, I am vulnerable, marginalized, and subject to personal, racist, and systemic attacks.

Looking Back and Looking Forward This chapter has explored my return to my “hometown” where I grew up in California after having lived and worked overseas for almost 20 years. Though I have roots in California, I find I have to get re-acquainted and re-enculturated to explore its culture and shape a new identity. In reflection and remembering in retrospect, I shift back-and-forth, cross and crisscross the west and east between United States and Hong Kong. I discover both welcoming and positive experiences along with startling disparities and tensions that challenge me. My final chapter provides a summary of the narratives in the book, revisits the originating roots of the journey, and re-examines the significance of the book. Puzzles and stories for future narratives are explored.

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References Center for Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. (2021, May 27). Report to the nation: Anti-Asian prejudice and hate crime. https://www.csusb.edu/hate-and-extremism-center Congress.Gov. (2021, May 20). S.937 COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act. https:// www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/937/text Geertz, C. (1995). After the fact. Harvard University Press. Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government of the People’s Republic of China. Census and Statistics Department. (2021, May 23). https://www. censtatd.gov.hk/en/ United States Census Bureau. (2021, May 23). Asian American Data Links. https://www.census.gov/about/partners/cic/resources/data-links/asian. html

CHAPTER 9

Looking Back and Looking Forward

This chapter summarizes my journey and provides a re-visitation of the significance of this book that was presented at the beginning book. Specifically, this chapter will “look back” to the originating narrative inquiry to discuss why I explored this puzzle and how and what I accomplished through a summary of each chapter. Finally, I will discuss the contributions I believe I have made and “look forward” to further puzzles for exploration.

Looking Back: Originating Narrative Puzzle The purpose of this inquiry has been to explore and make meaning of my personal experience to understanding how they shape and inform teacher knowledge or personal practical knowledge as termed by Connelly and Clandinin (1988). They describe personal practical knowledge as knowledge that is imbued with and understood in terms of a person’s experiential history and is knowledge that is “blended by the personal background and characteristics of the teacher and expressed by her in particular situations” (Clandinin, 1985, p. 361). Guided by Dewey’s (1938) thinking that to study education and life is to study experience, I began the inquiry of my personal practical knowledge by exploring my experiences of culture and identity. Exploring these experiences in my © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. C. Eng, Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82032-9_9

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research puzzle flourished from my experiences of growing up Chinese in America. My personal experiences are rooted in China, the place of my birth, and shaped by the experiences of the home my family had made in America. I questioned who I had become, how I became the person I am, and the person I am becoming. My research puzzle becomes a quest that takes me on a journey of cultural crossings to the soils of three landscapes: China, United States, and Hong Kong. The research puzzle explores a journey of self-awareness and discoveries that contributes to understanding how experience and personal histories can shape and inform teacher knowledge.

Looking Back: A Summary In Chapter 1, “A Hollow Bamboo,” I begin my journey with a scene from my past that provided the seeds for my personal narrative. My mother’s criticism and lament of my being a juk sing or hollow bamboo, who had the exterior appearance of being Chinese or Asian but is empty and hollow inside and devoid of the honored traditional Chinese values and beliefs, provide the seeds for this research. My mother’s characterization of me as a juk sing growing up Chinese in America formed an indelible impression that has become a seminal and originating question for this research study. What had growing up Chinese in America done to me, and who had I become? Expressing my experiences in stories and narratives creates a mode of knowing that creates teacher knowledge according to Carter (1993). To understand the place of experience, Chapter 1 provides selected literature of how experience is key to education and to the importance of experience across the disciplines. My exploration takes place in the context of emerging narratives from the “in-between” spaces as developed by He (2003) on cross-cultural lives and in the multicultural landscape that Phillion (2002) created for understanding multicultural teaching and learning. Chapter 1 discusses the significance of the study and its methodology within the context of Hong Kong education as well as its relevance internationally. Later in this chapter, I elaborate on this discussion with a re-visitation of the significance of the research study. Following the thinking of experience as key to education, I explore my experiences through my narratives in Chapter 2, “All I Have Are My Experiences: The Soil from Which the Inquiry Flourishes.” This chapter provides the platform from which succeeding chapters trace the

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experiences of my quest for culture and identity. Reflecting on my participation as a student activist in the Asian American movement, this chapter provides the context in which I first pursued my quest to understand who I am and who I was becoming that later shaped and informed my teacher knowledge as a teacher educator in Hong Kong. As a pioneer and neophyte teacher in Asian American Studies in universities in California in the 1970s, I did not come to classroom with theories and conceptual frameworks, for all I had were my experiences as a young Chinese woman growing up in America. During this period, I engaged in acts of recovery and reclamation of our Asian American experiences through the writing of autobiographies and interviews with family members. I discovered that these stories of experience had been lost or made invisible in our curriculum but served as a basis for our attempts to develop theoretical frameworks to understand our experiences. My participation in the Asian American movement and Asian American Studies raised my consciousness about my culture and identity and led me to a systematic study of my roots and family history. It was during this period that I began recording and chronicling my personal and family experiences through interview notes and journals. These were writings that were shared with my students in Asian American Studies that became the texts for our classes. To understand these personal experiences, it was also essential to place them in the context of the social, historical, and political conditions of the time. With this period serving as a platform for my study, it is then important to discuss the conceptual framework that would be used to explore this journey in the following chapter. Chapter 3, “Giving Definition to the Contours of the Landscape: The Bamboo Scaffolding That Frames the Inquiry,” discusses how the research puzzle will be explored. The chapter provides the conceptual framework for exploring the research puzzle by examining narrative inquiry as a research method and phenomenon. Like the bamboo that is used as scaffolding in constructing Hong Kong’s skyscrapers, narrative inquiry guides and supports this research journey. I find in narrative inquiry a recognized and established scholarly framework that provides an entrée to writing self as an act of writing of my community that reaffirms my assertions to acts of recovery and reclamation first experienced in Asian American Studies. Chapter 4, “A Sojourner in a Village Landscape: The Earth That Seeds,” depicts how my quest for understanding who I am, inspired by my mother’s lament of my being a juk sing or hollow bamboo and later extended to the Asian American movement, took me to Toishan, China,

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the place of my birth. This chapter reconstructs my journey to Toishan as a quest to understand who I am by understanding my roots in China. Here, I tell and retell the stories of experience with my grandmother, uncles, and village clan. I discovered my journeys to Toishan gave me a deeper understanding of my roots, and I felt reconnected to the land of my village. I found in Toishan a complex and tangled network of roots that led me to tracing our family’s journey from Toishan to “Gold Mountain” or the United States in Chapter 5, “Journeying to Gold Mountain: Uprooted and Transplanted to New Soil.” This chapter reaches back in time to chronicle my parent’s experiential histories and provides the backdrop for our immigration to “Gold Mountain.” I find my parent’s experiences inform how and why I became the person I have become and am becoming. In this chapter, I place our family’s narratives, such as my father being a “paper son and bachelor father” and my mother’s work in the canneries of the California, in the historical, social, and political context of the United States through a review of Asian American literature. I find in each crossing guides, coaches, conduits, and facilitators from a familial village community and come to view my classroom as a village and explore the role of teachers as caregivers. Chapter 6, “Seeking Gold Mountain: Grafted and Propagated,” continues the narratives of our immersion into Gold Mountain. Immigration is portrayed as an educative experience that provides grafts and propagation to form new identities and cultures in our new home. I reflect back to my mother’s work in the canneries and garment factories and my father’s work in the grocery stores and discover that their experiences composed stories that are characterized by persistence, courage, and inspiration of our immigrant Chinese community. As we began our life in Gold Mountain, we ably navigated and improvised our way in our daily crossing by developing plural identities and cultures as represented by our having both Chinese and American names and birthdays. Continuing my quest to understanding who I am by exploring my culture and identity, I return to Hong Kong. Chapter 7, “Hong Kong, China: Transported with Multiple Grafts and Growth,” tells of my return to Hong Kong as a daughter of China, a Chinese American expatriate in a former British colony in my role as a teacher educator at the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). This invitation to work and live in a predominately Chinese society seemed an exhilarating and golden opportunity to immerse myself in what I believed to be an authentic Chinese

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culture to discover who I am. I explore how the multiple grafting and fusing of identities and cultures bring more tensions and challenges to shape and inform my teacher knowledge. I discover that we are not a monolithic people and that though we share a common bond of being Chinese, we have diverse histories, identities, cultures, and languages. I discover that there is a multitude of ways of being an “authentic” Chinese. The Chinese of Hong Kong has its own authentic and real-life culture that has evolved with special qualities of its context. But they, too, are not a homogeneous group or a static community. Like the tensions of my being a juk sing or a hollow bamboo, I discover that their culture and identity are also being contested and in a state of flux. Chapter 8, “Uprooted, Transplanted Grafted Redux: From Hong Kong to Reentry to the United States,” narrates my return to California, where I grew up, after living and working overseas for almost 20 years in Hong Kong. Though I have roots here, I find I must get re-acquainted and re-enculturated to understand its current culture and my place in it. Reflecting, reminiscing, shifting back-and-forth, crossing, and crisscrossing between the two continents, I explore and discover commonalities, unities, disparities, and tensions that challenge and inform who I am. This chapter, “Looking Back and Looking Forward,” provides a summary and revisits the significance of the book and contribution to the field. The chapter also looks forward to future research puzzles yet to be explored and developed. Finally, the epilogue, “A Gathering Harvest,” provides the quietude of being in the midst of a bamboo grove for a deeper and extended reflection on the meaning and significances that emerged from my personal narratives and a “narrativist struggle” that I experienced as a beginning narrative inquirer. Each chapter presents a threshold of entry and a passage of experience. I discovered each threshold of experience forcefully and indelibly shapes, forms, reshapes, and reforms a fluid and multiplicity of cultures and identities. These experiences are embedded in my pedagogical perspective, which shape and inform my teacher knowledge and make me the kind of teacher I am and am becoming.

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A Re-visitation: Significance of Exploration In Chapter 1, a number of significant reasons for this research puzzle that explores teacher knowledge through personal narratives of culture and identity are discussed. Let me re-visit these reasons, reflect on how they are carried out in the course of this journey, and respond to how this study makes a difference by providing new knowledge or illumination on a subject. First, the study is significant as an invitation to explore how teacher knowledge is formed through lifelong experiential learning. According to Clandinin and Connelly (2000), “teacher knowledge” or knowledge that is embedded in our personal histories rather than “knowledge for teachers” provides an alternative model and way of learning that can contribute to our understanding of how to prepare future teachers and serve experienced teachers. As discussed in Chapter 1, this is particularly significant for countries such as Hong Kong that have a history of viewing the primary role of education as one of transmission or “funneling” of information, which has in turn established a predominantly “knowledge for teacher” approach in teacher education. In Hong Kong, this transmission or funneling of knowledge for teacher approach has emphasized learning and teaching through rote learning, memorization, and examination. A dramatic shift in Hong Kong’s educational policies in the 2000s promoted a “learning to learn” approach, and a curriculum that embraced the all-round development of the child provides timely and potent opportunities for the introduction of personal experiential narratives. Hong Kong’s educational reforms seek to engage learners’ critical thinking and reflection and to design a curriculum that embraces not only the intellectual and cognitive development of a child but also the child’s personal and social development in a learning culture that is lifelong. In the midst of Hong Kong’s dramatic educational reforms, my book fills a void and provides a response that addresses a new and alternative way for learning and teaching through personal narratives. While the significance of my study has focused on the educational reforms and needs of Hong Kong, this study can also provide illumination for other countries and other contexts. By using my own life as the script for this research, the study contributes to an alternative way of understanding how our teacher knowledge flourishes from our experiential histories. This process of

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understanding our own experiential histories enables us to facilitate the personal and social development of our students. Many have established the primacy of experience (Dewey, 1938; Eisner, 1988) and presented a compelling case for teacher knowledge (Carter, 1993; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Elbaz, 1983). My personal narratives contribute to this body of literature. How my personal narrative is unique is that it provides a cross-cultural and international perspective from the experiences of a China-born Chinese American woman living and working in Hong Kong, China as a teacher educator. I believe the particularities of my experiences provide new illumination to the subject by taking the research study on an inquiry that explores the complexities and multiplicity of my unique identities and cultures. Based on a review of literature in teacher education conducted through a search through the databases of Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), Academic Search Elite, which has a database dating from 1985 and updated daily, and the Professional Development Collection of academic journals dating to 1965, there is no other study such as mine. Based on this search, I find that no other study has been conducted by a Chinese American in the discipline of education or teacher education based in Hong Kong using narrative inquiry as a way of doing research. Secondly, as an extension of the significance of a teacher knowledge model described in the previous discussion, my chronicling of my personal experiential narratives in this journey is significant by providing a self-awareness and understanding that flows into our professional development and pedagogical thinking. Storying my experiences and making meaning and significance from them help me understand the kind of teacher I am. This study builds on and extends the work of scholars such as Li (2002) and He (2003), who chronicle their personal narratives from China to North America, and Phillion (2002), who explores teaching and learning in a multicultural landscape. But unlike He and Li who came to North America as adults, I have the immigrant experiences of childhood growing up in the Americas in an immigrant Chinese American community. These experiences bring yet another set of lenses and perspectives to explore my self-awareness and understanding. Mine is of a cultural crossing with a different quality that is shaped by being a Chinese and American in the same instance. And as an immigrant child and student, I might very well have appeared in the multicultural classroom that is portrayed in Phillion’s research.

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As an immigrant child who did not speak the language or understand the culture entering the thresholds of the American school system, I recall being bewildered and fearful of the strangeness of the classroom. By telling and retelling of this story and making meaning of the significance of this experience, I have discovered the emphatic understanding needed for all new students who enter our classroom. I also find the familial kinship of my village in China flows into how I come to view my classroom as a village community. I begin to see teachers and learners as members of an extended family or a village clan in a kinship where my student and I are related by a common bond of the classroom experience and school culture. I find the experiences of my village roots in Toishan, China, and the village community that we established in our immigrant community in California flow into the teacher knowledge that I bring to my classroom as a teacher educator. By viewing my classroom as a village community, it provides a new set of lenses in which to view myself and my relationship to my students as well as a way of positioning my classroom in relations to others in a larger global community. Thirdly, why this study is significant is that the personal narratives in this research study involve cross-cultural experiences of a kind that is immensely relevant and critical in an increasingly diversified and global community. During the period of the research and writing of my book, I was confronted, more than ever, with the interconnectedness of every person as a member of a global village. People from around the world felt the magnitude of the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001 that resulted in the brutal loss of lives and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. We also shared the anguish and bewilderment of events that led to September 11 and struggled to understand why the attackers hate the U.S. so much. Moreover, the threats of biological warfare, and the feared worldwide spread of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and the pandemic of Corona Virus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) to the present urgently challenge and compel us to understand cultural differences and ways of relating to self, others, and the world. In 2003, SARS and “bird flu” caused my mother to remark that Hong Kong is an uninhabitable and dangerous place and that she would never travel to Hong Kong again. In a telephone conversation (April 6, 2003), my mother says, “How can I come to visit Hong Kong when dangers lurk everywhere? I can’t eat chicken because of bird flu, and I better not get sick since seeing a doctor or going to a hospital there

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might give me SARS.” It could be said that the fears from the unknown causes of SARS are understandable, but even with SARS and bird flu contained the following year in Hong Kong, my mother has remained adamant that Hong Kong is inhabitable and dangerous. For my mother, COVID-19 pandemic would reinforce her perception of Hong Kong. This perception and image of Hong Kong would remain for my mother even though the realities do not necessarily warrant it. These events have a direct and immediate impact for each of us regardless of where we call home. The enormity of such events compels us to develop ways of understanding ourselves as members within a connected and changing global community. Placed in this context, my research study provides a way of understanding cultures, others, and ourselves and contributes to the body of literature that affirms cross-cultural understanding. Fourthly, my personal narrative is significant in that it suggests a direction and role for educators as “builders of bridges” in a global community. As educators, we are positioned in a critical role as builders of bridges that can facilitate and nurture an awareness and understanding of cultural diversity and an acceptance of others. We can help to develop tolerance, respect, and compassion to cultivate a world community. The narratives seek to present my cross-cultural experience as one example of a process of developing empathic understanding of others and of coming to know oneself as a member of a changing and expanding world community. In so doing, my book invites educators and policy makers to reflect on the cross-cultural lives of our students and to develop culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally responsive teachers. A fifth way my journey is significant is that it provides a way of thinking to create a more inclusive, diverse, and multicultural curriculum by representing the “bodies of experience” that Schwab (1973), the curriculum theorist, has identified. Essential to the curriculum deliberations, according to Schwab, are the subject matter, learners, milieus , teachers, and the curriculum-making process. Though my journey has been limited to my personal narratives as a “body of experience” from a teacher’s perspective, the way I have asserted acts of recovery and reclamation can be extended and applied to a diversity of voices and all bodies of experience within our curriculum. My assertions of reclamation and recovery of my culture and identity were first explored in my work in Asian American Studies and extended to my role as a teacher educator in Hong Kong. I discover in the Narrative Inquiry of Connelly and Clandinin a reaffirmation of this assertion that teacher knowledge and what it

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means to teach and being a teacher flows organically from the teacher. It is not something to be given or taught. Finally, the significance of this study is that it provides an alternative way of thinking about and doing research in education for Hong Kong. Few studies in Hong Kong have positioned the experiences of culture and identity in the context of teacher education, nor have there been many studies using the personal experience method of narrative inquiry. Narrative inquiry presents transforming possibilities for education and the research landscape in Hong Kong. The use of narrative inquiry in Hong Kong provides a challenging alternative to a research history that has been characterized as an instrument-driven activity that is dominated by a quantitative-oriented approach, according to a survey of research in Hong Kong conducted by Ho et al. (1989). But with the recent and dramatic and changing politics and laws of Hong Kong alternative ways of thinking about education must be creatively adapted and situated in context. It is reasonable to think that the National Security Law, aimed to safeguard Hong Kong’s national security and introduced in 2020, will influence this methodological history.

Contribution to the Field Given the nature of my journey, my book contributes to the broad field of education and teacher education in particular as it explores how personal experiences are embedded in our teacher knowledge. This contribution is particularly important for Hong Kong, given the limited research in teacher knowledge. My research inquiry can serve as a classroom text for pre-service students and experienced teachers in teacher education. Moreover, my research suggests ways of re-thinking and reconstructing teacher education programs toward a teacher knowledge orientation. As a narrative inquirer, I have come to appreciate the complex layers and dimensions of any story and find resonance or relevance for multiple disciplines and fields. As such, I believe my book also contributes to the field of multicultural education, cross-cultural studies, and comparative education through developing a way of understanding teaching and learning that invites the narratives of “in-between” spaces of cultural boundaries. Narrative inquiry as an alternative way of doing research contributes to an emerging genre that portrays the narratives from the “in-between” spaces. As a research method and a way of thinking, narrative inquiry

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offers ways to link and bridge complex, fluid, and multiple cultures and identities. That a genre of “in-between” personal narratives that uses “in-between” approaches that floats between fact and fiction is a subject for further exploration. He’s (2003) narrative cross-cultural approach offers new ways to think about cross-cultural lives and crosscultural identities in multicultural contexts. He believes that our identities are evolving, shifting as the whole world is also being changing and transformed and proposes to bridge and establish linkage between cross-cultural lives and cross-cultural teacher education. Moreover, this book contributes to the field of counseling, the field where I had completed my M.S. degree. In counseling, there is a growing trend toward developing narrative therapies and hearing the stories of our clients. John McLeod (1997) in his book, Narrative and Psychotherapy, believes that all therapies are narrative therapies and that “Whatever you are doing, or think you are doing, as therapist or client can be understood in terms of telling and retelling stories” (p. x). For McLeod, the story represents the basic means by which people organize and communicate the meaning of events and experiences. McLeod believes that the therapist needs to allow the space for the client to tell new or different stories and emphasizes the importance of listening to the stories rather than using listening for clues to analyze and summarize a case. In Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990), White and Epston see psychology as a cultural discipline and that culture shapes who we are and our theories. Narratives, they believe, bridge culture and self. My research inquiry brings a personal narrative that can be a narrative for the field of counseling. Finally, my personal narratives also contribute to the body of literature in the fields of Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, and Women’s Studies. My book explores the complex journey of a Chinese American woman who negotiates and improvises multiply cultures and identities and provides an original personal multicultural response to the seminal quest for self-understanding and our place in society.

Looking Forward I had intended Chapter 8 to be the final and concluding chapter to my book. The number eight in Cantonese resembles the sound of the Chinese word for prosperity, and I had thought that a good sign in which to bring my book to a close. But my narrative journey continues to

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flourish, cross, and crisscross with a return to California after my retirement from the universities in Hong Kong that inspired more narrative writing. I have also included a summary chapter which has now become this chapter, “Looking Back and Looking Forward,” before concluding with an Epilogue: “A Gathering Harvest.” But I continued to write, what seemed to be sub-narratives to my larger narratives. I lingered and meandered about in order to delay the final chapter. I found I did not want the book to come to an end. To be sure, the research and narratives continue to be unfolding and lifelong, and the narratives I have just begun are more complex and richer than I have been able to convey in this book. But any writing journey must necessarily come to a close, at least for now. Many of the narratives relevant to this research study have not been included in this book, and the narratives suggest other narratives that have been left unexplored. I now have a collection of materials that form a book of “Could Be” stories. From my “Could Be” collection, the following are some stories, themes, and threads. Many writings in this collection are poised as exploratory questions, derived from my journey, to “look forward” to future research inquiries.

“Could Be” Stories This collection of “Could Be” stories includes the dramatic shifting changes in my village with the introduction of Chinese “foreigners” from other provinces of China who do not speak my Toishan dialect and have been relocated by the government to occupy abandoned houses and to cultivate the untilled land in an attempt to revive our village and to redistribute the country’s resources. No longer is my village clan a community bound by the same family surname of “Eng” in my father’s village or “Wong” in my mother’s village in Toishan. These “foreigners” from a common motherland shift and change forever the identity and continuity that have been there since the beginning of our family village. There is also construction of a nuclear reactor in 2009 which commenced operation in 2018 in Toishan. This must surely dramatically change the agricultural landscape and future of my village. These changes are probably how it should be for the village life to be sustained, renewed, and regenerated and are topics for further exploration. The personal and family narratives in this book are a legacy from my parents that I hope to pass on to the next generation. It is heartening that

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my nephew, my parents’ grandson, shows an interest in Toishan and has made his own journey, documented as a photographic journal, to learn of his roots. I am also encouraged that my niece, cousins and other members of the next generation have also expressed a genuine interest in exploring their roots and hope that my book can serve as their guide and navigator. Also remaining untold is the story of my parents’ lack of preparation and understanding of my dating during my adolescence and my claim to independence. Having gone through an arranged marriage themselves and married with barely an introduction, they were bewildered and distressed by the dating ritual and customs in the United States. And when I decided to move out of the house in my early 20s while remaining in the same city, they were alarmed and felt a loss of face. To their understanding, this was a highly improper and an unconventional act for a young Chinese woman unless she was attending college out of town or married off to another family. I might have also further developed the ways I have introduced to my students in Hong Kong the role of experience and narratives as an alternative way of learning. Having my students write about their significant personal experiences growing up and reading classroom stories from multicultural classrooms in North America to reflect on their personal understanding of learning and teaching have been a challenging and exciting approach. All these materials and field notes remain for another book. All such stories are highly relevant to the research inquiry to explore culture and identity and how they inform and shape my teacher knowledge but remain untold. As I look at the narratives in the “Could Be” collection, it reflects the richness and diversity of the work. It also reflects how my personal life narrative could be cast in so many different ways depending on the composition of experiences I assembled for the book. Further themes and threads from the collection of “Could Be” stories include: 1. The Legacy of Talking Stories. There appears to be a rich tradition of “talking stories” in Chinese culture as a way of conveying personal narratives, family histories, and social changes. I found this to be the case when my journey took me to my village in Toishan, China, where members of my village clan responded to my many questions through storytelling. How might this tradition be recaptured and reflected in the curriculum and research in Hong Kong?

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2. Teacher Knowledge for Teacher Education. This book has provided the opportunity for exploring and re-thinking teacher education. What might be ways to introduce a “teacher knowledge” approach that provides an alternative and a balance to “knowledge for teachers” in our preparation of teachers? How might we reconstruct teacher education programs, the subjects we teach, and how we go about teaching these subjects to reflect a teacher knowledge orientation? I am also mindful to place in context such an approach to Hong Kong’s recent and evolving political reforms to education. 3. Fluid and Evolving Identities and Cultures. Much discussion and research have addressed the recent and dramatic shifts in cultures and identities in Hong Kong and China as it moved toward “one country, two system” in the run-up to the handover of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The topic has also been the subject of research in comparative studies in Southeast Asia that includes Singapore, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong. Much of this research relies on surveys and statistical analysis and tends to adopt a quantitative approach as its research method and is couched in the terminology and method of established disciplines. Further research in the themes of culture and identity using narrative would cast further illumination by bringing us into the “midst of lives” to develop a new way of understanding these themes in the Asian context. 4. Mothers as Teachers. My mother and my evolving relationship with her could have been a book in itself. “At my mother’s knees” is where I might begin the listing of my educational experiences in my curriculum vita, because my mother is an inextricable force for my learning and for shaping the person I am today. How might the voices of our mothers serve to educate and how might these experiences be integrated into our curriculum? My mother came to live with us in Hong Kong, first as a visitor then long term, for about 11 years. This is ironic, since my mother thought I was “going the wrong way” by living in Hong Kong. But her increasing need for daily care required the attention of family. I was unaware of the term “caregiver” but found yet another identity to fulfill and challenge. 5. Narrative Inquiry for the Chinese Milieu. I have found the Narrative Inquiry of Connelly and Clandinin a powerful and fluid way of thinking and for conducting scholarly research. As more research studies in Hong Kong are being conducted using narrative inquiry,

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might there be unique ways or qualities of how narrative inquiry is being transformed for the Chinese Hong Kong context?

Looking Back and Looking Forward This chapter summarizes the journey and provides a re-visitation of the significance of the research study. This chapter looks back to the originating purpose to discuss why I explored this puzzle and how and what I accomplished. It continues with a discussion of the contribution to the field and suggests a study of future narratives. My making meaning of the narratives provides additional themes for a collection of “Could Be” stories for further studies. An epilogue, “A Gathering Harvest,” concludes my personal narrative. In the epilogue, I seek the quietude of the bamboo landscape to reflect further on the journey I have undertaken for this book. My reflections draw deeper meaning and significance from my narratives, and I discuss a “narrativist struggle” I experienced as a beginning narrative inquirer during this journey.

References Carter, K. (1993). The place of story in the study of teaching and teacher education. Educational Researcher, 22(1), 5–12, 18. https://doi.org/10.3102/001 3189X022001005 Clandinin, D. J. (1985). Personal practical knowledge: A study of teachers’ classroom images. Curriculum Inquiry, 15(4), 362–385. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/03626784.1985.11075976 Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1988). Teachers as curriculum planners. The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Press. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Simon & Schuster. Eisner, E. (1988, June/July). The primacy of experience and the politics of method. Educational Researcher, 15–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/1175100 Elbaz, F. (1983). Teacher thinking: A study of practical knowledge. Croom Helm. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429454615 He, M. F. (2003). A river forever flowing: Cross-cultural lives and identities in the multicultural landscape. Information Age. Ho, D. Y. F., Spinks, J. A., & Yeung, C. S. H. (Eds.). (1989). Chinese pattern of behavior: A sourcebook of psychological and psychiatric studies. Praeger Press.

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Li, X. (2002). The Tao of life stories: Chinese language, poetry, and culture in education. Peter Lang Publishing. McLeod, J. (1997). Narrative and psychotherapy. Sage. Phillion, J. (2002). Narrative inquiry in a multicultural landscape: Multicultural teaching and learning. Ablex Publishing. Schwab, J. J. (1973). The practical 3: Translation into curriculum. School Review, 81, 501–522. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1084423 White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. W.W. Norton & Company.

Epilogue: A Gathering Harvest

The bamboo has been harvested for centuries to yield new shoots for eating and the culms or timbers for building material such as the scaffolding to construct Hong Kong’s skyscrapers. Once harvested, bamboo is transformed in a multitude of ways—as a chair, a basket, a flute, or as medicine or a weapon, to name but a few forms the bamboo can take. The bamboo is vital, abundant, strong, resilient and has served as a prominent and guiding metaphor throughout this research study. The qualities of the bamboo have guided my thinking by providing the supporting links that connect my narratives to explore teacher knowledge through personal narratives of culture and identity. I discover bamboo also seems to possess a soul and have human-like qualities. Chinese poets have expressed the pleasure of being in the midst of a bamboo grove to listen for the classical sounds of bamboo as it rustles in a gentle breeze or in a snowfall, for the tinkling sound of ice crystals bouncing from leaf to leaf. These poets often sought nature’s landscapes for the tranquility that brings tranquility to the heart and mind for the inspiration to create their art. Like being in the midst of a bamboo grove, this epilogue seeks the quietude of this landscape to hear the “sounds” from personal narratives in this book to reflect on their meaning and significance. This epilogue also reflects back to a “narrativist struggle” that was experienced in crafting this research study as a beginning narrative inquirer. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2021 B. C. Eng, Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82032-9

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Somethingness in Nothingness The hollow core of the bamboo or the part that is not there becomes a kind of useful and flexible emptiness as portrayed by Chinese philosophers. Zen masters regarded this the center for spiritual development, and it is from this “nothingness” that all things flow. I discover somethingness in nothingness. What I learn through this journey is that there is vitality and strength in “nothingness” or hollowness. It is the bamboo’s very hollowness that is its source of flexibility, resilience, and abundance. Bamboo is flexible because of its hollowness and is resilient because it is hollow. Its hollowness provides the elasticity that allows it to bend, sway, adapt, and improvise to withstand and endure the harshest climates and landscapes. The bamboo’s hollow center makes it possible for its abundant and rapid growth to reach its full height in a very brief time, unlike the slow and solid growth of other kinds of trees. My journeys crossing and crisscrossing China, America then Hong Kong over time have been marked by these qualities of the bamboo. In the journeying, I discover I have transformed my mother’s lament of being a juk sing or a hollow bamboo into a vital and enduring strength. The journey has helped me realize that I have always possessed a culture and identity. My culture and identity can be traced back to my childhood, even though I may not have been aware or conscious of who I was or where I belonged. The book has been a journey that gave me the opportunity to trace my experiences, from my place of birth in China to our family’s emigration to the United States, to my student activist days, as a teacher educator in Hong Kong to my return to the United States. The narratives of experience in this book have illuminated and heightened my understanding of who I am. I discover that my mother and father have cultivated an essential core of Chinese-ness from the moment of my birth that has flourished and is forever changing in the hollow of the bamboo. In this way, I realize that I am not hollow. The core has been filled by my parents with such Chinese values as filial piety, respect for elders and teachers, duty, and obligation. This core also contains my experiences as a student activist that has instilled a belief in equality and social justice that I bring to the classroom at as a teacher educator. I come to practice a philosophy that learners and teachers are collaborators where our roles are engaged in a mutual and reciprocal exchange.

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Perhaps my mother’s assertion that I was “going the wrong way” when I re-located to Hong Kong was apropos, but certainly for different reasons. For my mother, she thought my move an act of ignorance and a rejection of the promises of Gold Mountain. For me, the move was a quest in search of my roots. In a sense, I was agreeing with my mother that I was, indeed, a juk sing , devoid of Chinese culture and identity. To be more Chinese and to be a better Chinese is what I sought in my move to Hong Kong. I felt I was not getting the essence or authenticity of being Chinese in the United States that I thought an immersion in Hong Kong would provide. But I discover, coming full circle and on the other side of the world, that I have always possessed a strong culture and identity that is fluid and in a constant state of change. While the outer shell of bamboo is strong and hard, the emptiness of its core allows for movement and fluidity. Narrative inquiry has led me to dig and excavate deep into the core of the bamboo and uncover and make meaning of what has always been there. As stated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), metaphors we live by are pervasive and govern our everyday functions. With this in mind and viewing the bamboo metaphor in yet another dimension, the bamboo metaphor that I live by may also possess negative or harmful qualities. The hardness of the bamboo’s exterior, while it can be bent and adapted to form different shapes, may not be readily flexible or as fluid as needed to reach the in-between spaces when crossing cultures. The bamboo metaphor that I live by may actually be a harmful metaphor that restricts or locks me into a dichotomous position. I am confronted with a point of view that directs me to choose from this or that. The educator, He, refutes such a position and instead, characterizes her experiences as “in-betweenness” of fluid movements between cross-cultural landscapes. My experiences are not one of being in-between Eastern and Western cultures but, rather, something more complex and historically and culturally contextualized. As such, the bamboo metaphor may have limitations to expressing the fluid in-betweenness sense of the self.

My Mother’s Journey I believe that my mother lost herself in our journey from China to Gold Mountain. She too was transplanted and her culture and identity transformed to adapt to a new home. She lost her home in China, her mother and lost me as the Chinese daughter she wished me to be. I discover that

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my mother and I yearned for many of the same things and suffered in many of the same ways. I believe she did not know what to teach me or ask of me, wanting me to be American but wanting me to stay Chinese. I am aware that my journey has been guided by a persistent debate with my mother who was herself divided and splintered even though she desperately wanted me not to be. There is a contradictory and contentious relationship between what my mother wanted for me and what I did. My mother wanted me to live in Gold Mountain and remain Chinese. What I did was to leave the United States in an attempt to become more Chinese by moving to Hong Kong. My departure, though not intended to be permanent, must have deeply pained her in the same way when she was separated from her own mother in Toishan on her journey to join my father in Gold Mountain. What I discover in crisscrossing continents and cultures is the multitude ways to be Chinese and that I need to creatively improvise to remain true and authentic to my roots. I find my identity is fluid, contested and in a constant state of change. Might I have heard my mother’s juk sing lament as a challenge and answered it in a way that stunned her with my move to Hong Kong to find my roots? I find in Hong Kong, an international and multi-lingual home, that accords me to be both Chinese and English speaking for an East/West milieu. For my mother, I will always be “going the wrong way.” We have different expectations and understanding of how to achieve our aspirations. Throughout this book, my mother has been a loyal and constant companion and the prominence and pervasiveness of my mother’s voice has been a welcomed surprise. “Eat a sumptuous feast for me and on my behalf ,” my mother would urge me. She would press a lai see or red packet filled with money for good fortune and safe journey whenever I ventured from home. She would tell me this whether my travels took me to Shanghai, Paris, Sydney, Moscow, a camping trip to Yosemite, or even to San Francisco, just a few hours by car from our Sacramento home. My journeying has been in her place and on her behalf. I often feel that my mother is in awe of my adventures, is proud that I am bold in my quest and might even have a secret yearning to be me. But in her own place through this journey, my mother has been my guide and navigator through my relentless and probing questions and conversations of her life in China and our life as immigrants to form the narratives that appear here. I believe that through this journey, she too has been recovering an understanding of her displacement and

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loss in our move from China to Gold Mountain and trying to understand how she became the person she has become. Through this book, my mother and I have been sharing a sumptuous feast together.

A Fluid Bamboo Bridge I discover that with my cross-cultural experiences of being a Chinese American in Hong Kong, China, I can serve as a bamboo bridge that connects the East and the West. My experiences provide me the opportunity to link and connect these cultures to facilitate understanding from a cross-cultural perspective. With the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019 to the present, I also realize how essential it is for students to have the skills to adapt and improvise for the situation and context. During the pandemic, we have been required to adapt by keeping a social distance and to wear a face covering. A handshake is not recommended for risk of transmission of germs and a simple nod of acknowledgment from a distance, is better suited for the situation. My students often remind me how teachers can serve as a bridge to understanding, as in this classroom story based on a journal entry (November 20, 2003): “Should I shake the hands of my host family when I meet them for the first time when I arrive in Toronto, Canada? This is not a common practice in Chinese culture, and I am uncertain of how to shake hands,” my student asks.

Though not a topic of the class, this question is asked by my students as they prepare for a six-week English language overseas immersion program. The English language immersion program has taken our students to England, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. I realize that this common practice in the West has a set of complex rules as I give an impromptu explanation of the social skills involved in the greeting. I was mindful of providing not only the factual instructions that could be readily obtained from an etiquette manual but also conveying the subtle and cultural significance of the act from a cross-cultural perspective from both the Western and the Hong Kong contexts. A student asks: “Why do they shake hands? This seems like a very personal and intimate practice, to touch someone so closely. I prefer the traditional Chinese practice of nodding my head with a small bow as a

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greeting instead. My parents have also taught me to cup my hand over the other, raise to eye level, and shake together as a sign of gratitude and respect. Besides, as a precaution from germs and viruses, is it not more hygienic to keep a certain distance?” I respond with: “What you say makes sense. When I meet my Chinese Big Uncle in Hong Kong at a family gathering, I smile and nod my head in greeting. My Big Uncle would be startled and might even be offended by a handshake from me. Such close physical contact is not proper. Once, a Chinese mother came to see me because she was extremely upset that I was teaching her son to give direct eye contact to the person they are speaking. To their way of thinking, such direct eye contact was rude, intrusive and a sign of disrespect. In that instance, I was abruptly reminded of cultural differences and the misunderstanding and conflicts that can easily arise. If you are worried about germs and viruses, you might not want to touch hands. The outbreak of viral infections in Hong Kong and Asia has forced us to change the habit of handshaking as a form of greeting. During SARS (2002–2003), I found this to be the case with graduation ceremonies at universities in Canada. The usual handshake by the President of the university to the students was to be replaced by a congratulatory and respectful nod of the head as the students crossed the stage to receive their diploma, very much like the traditional Chinese way. And during COVID-19, large gatherings are eliminated, postponed or held as virtual ceremonies. I do not know that you will have an occasion to shake hands, but if you should, I hope you are prepared. In some situation or cultures, you may also be given a hug, a kiss on both cheeks or a nose-to-nose rub as a form of greeting.” This last remark is received with a resounding “Whaaa” from my students that indicate they are feeling overwhelmed by the range of possibilities that they may not be prepared to handle. I continue: “Develop your own views and decide on the appropriateness of the practice for the setting you find yourself. What I hope for you is a repertory of skills that you can call upon as needed. In your host country, you will be encountering many cultural differences, and the experience will probably present surprises, puzzles, and tensions.” In this story, find myself serving as a bridge between cultures in preparing my students’ journey on their immersion program overseas. I also realize that I provide but one kind of bridge. There are diverse bridges that others can seek on their journey for understanding and that the particular bridge I offer is not necessarily the one they will select.

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The nature and qualities of the bridge that I offer are a composition of my experiential history that informs my personal practical knowledge that I share with my students. I also come to realize that the bridges we construct are contested, fluid, changing, and improvised even as they are crossed as in the instance of our forms of greetings. As much as my students may seek a detailed map with clear signposts and directions to guide their journey, I find it is knowing how to journey that is essential. The landscape I describe to them is constantly shifting, ambiguous, and not readily captured or represented in a map. This provides a new way of knowing for my students who have been accustomed to memorization, rote learning, and universal truths. I encourage them to welcome and embrace diversity, exploration, and inquiry. As a Chinese American teacher educator in Hong Kong, I have the opportunity to be a builder of bridges that can facilitate crosscultural understanding in an expanding and fluid global community. In turn, my students will hopefully return from their overseas studies with a cross-cultural understanding that can also serve to bridge cultural understanding for their future students and for the Hong Kong milieu.

An Educative Lifelong Journey The exploration of my experiences in this journey has been an educative one. The journey is one that has positioned my inquiry to an exploration of my experiences to reflect on how they shape and inform my teacher knowledge. These experiences that shape and inform my teacher knowledge are lifelong and will continue to change, grow, and evolve throughout my life. The process of my journeying is also one that my students in teacher education program are engaged. They too have an experiential history that they bring to the curriculum, and the purpose of a teacher knowledge program is to orient the knowledge they hold to teaching. As I begin the gathering harvest in this chapter, I am confronted with the challenge that this is an on-going, unfolding, and lifelong journey that extends beyond the completion of my book. Each bamboo culm or stem I gather leads me to another yet-to-be-explored tangent of my journey and engages me in the resonance of the voices from the narratives that I have experienced. The voices that seek further exploration come from my grandmother and my village clan in Toishan, Alex, and Suki, who are my former students and now colleagues and friends, my collaborators in

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activism in the teachers’ union and the women’s community in Hong Kong, who while written about in copious field notes, are not presented in the narratives of this book. All these voices, and more, are embedded in my teacher knowledge. These voices from my past inform and shape who I am in the present and guide and move me toward the future.

A Narrativist Struggle The process of selecting and composing the voices that form the narratives of this book was challenging and difficult. I found that the narratives could be positioned in so many ways to serve a multitude of purposes and audiences. I realized that the stories I selected served to make a certain point for the purpose of the story. As such, my stories may in fact be artifacts of the text as written. Might I be practicing self-deception, as described by Crites (1979), in my portrayal of my mother and my relationship with her? Might I be portraying a relationship with my mother of how I wish or imagine it to be rather than what it actually has been and how it is now? Have my stories of experience been fact or fiction? These have been persistent questions in my narrativist struggle. I do not claim I have answers to these questions, and when they arise, they are addressed and resolved tentatively and temporarily for the given situation. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) encourage narrative inquirers to be thoughtful and to maintain a wakefulness of awareness to such concerns. The process of selecting whose stories to include and to delete was sometimes puzzling and excruciatingly painful. For a period, the confusion and apprehensions I felt at this stage of my journey halted the writing of my first chapter and was indicative of the dread I expressed in my Prologue. The dread I expressed was for my faltering courage and vision to undertake the gravity and magnitude of the journey before me. What an enormous and presumptuous journey I seemed to be embarking to think that I could articulate the essential clarifying narratives of the communities my research study was intended to serve. My academic sisters and colleagues in the Narrative Inquiry community, Dr. Ming Fang He and Dr. JoAnn Phillion, understood completely. They shared with me the narrativist struggle common among narrative inquirers and that they too had experienced this in their own journey. The struggle was resolved with the reassurance from Dr. F. Michael Connelly in an e-mail message (January 31, 2002):

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In narrative inquiry, everything is important. But remember that the stories you put aside are not lost, they are still there for another research day. You also need to step back from being in the midst and from yourself to position your inquiry for the audience.

Nevertheless, I was confronted with the task of selecting and assembling from a full harvest of my experiential life history those narratives relevant to the research puzzle to form a coherent text for the book. The enormity of the work before me also compelled me to change the title of my book from an “autobiographical narrative” to a “personal narrative.” As I immersed myself in the literature and in the midst of the field, I began to feel that an autobiographical narrative was too immense and epic in its scope. Instead, I felt more comfortable with changing the title of my book to a “personal narrative” while maintaining the autobiographical nature of the research puzzle. I realized my personal narrative was bound by the three landscapes of China, United States, and Hong Kong over a selected span of time from my childhood to the present as a teacher educator. The landscapes depicted the distinct and dramatic cultural crossings I experienced and multiple identities I was developing that were embedded in my teacher knowledge. Experiences of culture and identity were markers that further framed the text of my book. I often lost myself in the midst of the narratives. I found this to be particularly true with my journeys to my village in Toishan. The village experiences and stories were profoundly important and personally meaningful to me. But what might be the reactions of my intended audience and readership? The “how is this educational?” and the “so what?” questions pulled me back to the purpose of my book to keep me focused and guided my selection and positioning of my narratives. Dr. Connelly, in our regular conversations during my research in Toronto, teleconference appointments and numerous e-mail messages, generously and patiently “pulled and pushed” me to reflect on the significance and meaning of each story and to connect it to the research inquiry. These were the broad guiding markers in the landscape that I followed in my selection of narratives that compose the book. Nevertheless, the undertaking remains imposingly huge to give a definitive answer to whose stories to include. Within each landscape, why did I choose certain scenes to portray and why others remain untold? I am uncertain. Sometimes it was an intuitive sense that guided me. Stories that remain untold are composed in a collection of materials that form a book of “Could Be”

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stories that provide the basis for future research studies as discussed in the previous chapter.

Looking Back and Looking Forward This epilogue has provided the “quietude” of being in the midst of a bamboo grove to reflect and extend the meaning and significance drawn from my personal narratives. I discover that there is “somethingness in nothingness” in the hollow of the bamboo that turns my mother’s lament and criticism of me as a juk sing or hollow bamboo into a strength. My mother has been a constant companion for me on this research journey, and I reflect on how she too has also been transformed by our immigration from China in search of Gold Mountain. I also discover that being of multiple cultures and identities from the East and West, I can provide a bridge of understanding for my Hong Kong students. The bridge I provide, composed of my personal experiential history, is but of one kind of bridge for a journey that is lifelong. Finally, I have discussed a “narrativist struggle” of selecting and assembling those narratives to compose the text that was to become the book.

From Dread to Hope My prologue began with a dread that flowed to hope. I dread that I would not find the voice to give expression to narratives that shaped and informed my teacher knowledge. I was undertaking an awesome and presumptuous task, it seemed to me. My inquiry engaged me in the telling and retelling of the narratives of experience of my family, students, my Asian American community, and the Hong Kong milieu. I cannot say that I have been entirely successful in this endeavor or that my inquiry is not flawed. But here it is, with the hope that my research puzzle will continue the conversation and inspire the narratives of others.

References Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass. Crites, S. (1979). The aesthetics of self-deception. Soundings, 62, 107–129. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41178114 Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/414069

Index

A Alex, 15, 87, 145, 157–163, 166–168, 170, 171, 180, 213 Anti-Asian hate crime, 12, 185 Act, 184 Arranged marriage, 41, 43, 45, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 203 Asian American artists, 34 in political office, 186 literature, 34, 70, 194 movement, 7, 8, 21, 24, 34, 43–46, 56, 58, 66, 69–71, 79, 88, 90, 96, 193 Asian American Studies, 7, 15, 17, 21–23, 27–29, 31–39, 42–44, 46, 47, 54, 58, 66, 69–71, 79, 88, 90, 126, 127, 135, 138, 144, 148, 184, 193, 199, 201 Autobiography, 5, 15, 22, 34, 58, 65 B Bamboo

bridge, 211 scaffolding, 51, 66, 67, 93, 178, 193, 207 transplanted, 16, 67 uprooted, 16, 67 Banding in Hong Kong schools, 10 Basic Law, 154 Biden, Joseph, 185, 187 Bird flu, 198, 199 British colony, Hong Kong, 7, 10, 18, 153, 154, 194

C Canneries, 18, 57, 62, 78, 91, 96, 123–125, 134, 136, 140, 173, 194 China, 2, 4, 6–8, 10, 12–14, 16, 31, 41, 47, 52, 54, 63, 64, 69–73, 77, 80, 81, 83–85, 88–90, 93–98, 101, 105, 109, 118–120, 126, 132, 139, 149–154, 159, 164–166, 168, 169, 173, 178,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2021 B. C. Eng, Personal Narratives of Teacher Knowledge, Intercultural Reciprocal Learning in Chinese and Western Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82032-9

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INDEX

180, 185, 188, 189, 192–194, 197, 198, 202–204, 208–211, 215, 216 Chinese American, 7, 11, 12, 18, 21, 37, 54, 66, 95, 144, 148, 156, 194, 197, 201, 211, 213 banana, 24 coolies, 27, 33 New Year, 78, 123, 172, 173, 175–179 Chinese Exclusion Act, 43, 97, 184 Civil rights movement, 17, 23, 24, 56, 57, 187 Clandinin, D. Jean, 3–6, 9, 14, 22, 23, 37, 51, 52, 54–56, 59, 65, 66, 69, 86, 109, 144, 156, 191, 196, 197, 199, 204, 214 Classroom as family, 4, 36, 88, 95, 109, 198 continuities, 89 Hong Kong, 32, 59, 89, 160 tradition, 89 Commonplaces, 38, 59, 106, 109, 110 Community, 2–7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 21, 24, 26, 29, 30, 32–34, 36–39, 41, 42, 44–47, 52, 54, 56–65, 84, 85, 89, 91, 95, 101, 108–110, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 126, 127, 132–135, 138, 139, 147, 148, 150, 152, 160, 161, 170, 179, 183–185, 187, 188, 193–195, 197–199, 202, 213, 214, 216 Connelly, F. Michael, 3–6, 9, 13, 14, 22, 23, 37, 51, 52, 54, 55, 59, 65, 66, 69, 86, 109, 156, 191, 196, 197, 199, 204, 214, 215 Corona Virus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19), 11, 12, 167, 169–171, 185, 189, 198, 212

pandemic, 169, 176, 180, 184, 185, 199, 211 Cosmetic surgery, 33, 40 Counseling, 36, 37, 39, 46, 52, 147 cross-cultural, 201 narrative, 201 Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act, 185 Crisscross(ed), 6, 21, 51, 189, 202 Cross-cultural, 4, 6, 8, 11–13, 52, 53, 95, 153, 192, 197–201, 209, 211, 213 Cultural relevant, 4, 12, 35, 199 pedagogy, 4, 12, 199 responsive, 4, 12, 199 Culture gun violence, 185 hate, 185 racism, 185 Curriculum community, 32, 33, 38, 39, 127 in Whose Interest?, 56 planning, 4 D Dewey, John, 5, 6, 14, 54, 55, 191, 197 Discrimination, 6, 35, 43, 96, 97, 133, 134, 186 Diversity, 12, 53, 59, 110, 184, 199, 203, 213 E Education examination, 9 Hong Kong, 9, 87, 145, 146, 192, 196, 197, 200 placement, 9 Education Department Bureau of the Hong Kong, 145 SAR of the People’s Republic of China, 145

INDEX

Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) aka Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd), 7, 14, 18, 143, 145–147, 179, 194 Educative experience, 6, 24, 95, 107, 138, 140, 194 immigration, 95, 107, 110, 138–140, 194 landscape, 28, 86, 200, 215 English learning, 132–134, 164 readers, 133, 167 Ethnic Studies, 24, 27–32, 201 Examination, 10, 25, 44, 149, 163, 196 driven, 9 Experience, 3, 4, 6, 9–18, 21–24, 26–28, 31, 33, 34, 36–39, 42–44, 47, 52–56, 58–62, 64, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 85–91, 93–98, 106, 107, 109–111, 115, 117–119, 126–128, 132, 133, 136, 138, 144, 145, 147, 148, 151–156, 158, 161, 163, 164, 166, 169, 170, 172, 174, 177, 178, 180, 183, 184, 187–189, 191–195, 197–201, 203, 204, 208, 209, 211–216 F Family, 2, 3, 6, 8, 14, 15, 17, 23, 26, 30, 34, 39–41, 43, 47, 54, 55, 57, 59, 62–65, 70–72, 75–81, 83, 84, 86–89, 91, 94–96, 98–110, 114–117, 119–129, 133–140, 143, 145, 149, 150, 156–158, 162, 164, 170–178, 180, 183, 184, 192–194, 202–204, 208, 211, 212, 216 classroom, 4, 36, 88, 95, 109, 198

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village, 75, 83 Father, 8, 26, 40, 41, 43, 60, 62, 64, 71, 77, 81–83, 89, 94, 96, 98–106, 108, 109, 114–124, 127, 128, 132–134, 138, 144, 149, 156, 158, 164, 194, 202, 208, 210 Footbinding, 45, 79–81, 97, 98

G Garment factory, 124 sewing, 125, 164 sweatshop, 18, 57, 125 sweetshop, 125, 126 Gold Mountain, 2, 7, 40, 41, 43, 74, 76–82, 91, 94, 95, 97–100, 104– 107, 110, 113–116, 119–123, 125, 132, 136, 138, 139, 143, 144, 151, 152, 194, 209–211, 216 Gold rush, 7, 42, 76, 97 Grandmother, 75–81, 86, 87, 90, 94, 95, 97, 98, 194, 213 Grocery store, 18, 41, 62, 63, 91, 96, 116, 117, 122, 128, 136, 138, 173, 176, 188, 194

H Handover 1997, 7, 10, 204 return to China, 10, 204 Harris, Kamala, 185–187 Hong Kong Curriculum Development Council, 10 Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China, 18, 143

I Identity, 3, 4, 6–9, 12, 16–18, 21, 23, 25, 26, 30, 31, 33, 34, 40, 41,

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44–47, 54, 56, 58, 59, 62, 65, 66, 69, 70, 72, 76, 79, 88–90, 94, 95, 98, 107, 114, 120, 126, 136, 138, 140, 143–145, 148, 152–157, 166, 172, 177–180, 189, 191, 193–196, 199, 200, 202–204, 207–210, 215 forging a new identity, 27 Ideologies, 30, 37, 38, 46 Asian American movement, 44, 45 political, 44, 45 Immigration, 17, 41, 42, 94, 96, 97, 99–101, 106, 109, 113, 115, 119–121, 127, 138, 164, 216 family, 6, 17 immigrant children, 165 “in the midst”, 85, 148, 184, 187 In-betweenness, 209 in-between space, 8, 62, 180, 209 Insider/outsider, 60, 61, 63 J Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong, 154 Journeying, 91, 94, 95, 107, 110, 194, 208, 210, 213 Juk Sing (Hollow Bamboo), 1, 2, 4, 21, 29, 46, 47, 66, 70, 72, 90, 98, 127, 144, 179, 192, 193, 195, 208–210, 216 K Knowledge for teachers, 5, 9, 196, 204 L Laundryman, 43

Learning to learn, 10, 11, 196 Legacy, 34, 59, 81, 89, 202 Lifeline, 18, 52, 143 Life long journey, 4, 213 learning, 9 Loss of face, 3, 31, 203

M Majority, 134, 138, 189 Making Rice, 129 Memory, 22, 24, 58, 65, 86, 99, 106, 116, 183 Metaphor, 3, 15–17, 93, 207, 209 Milieu, 4, 7, 9, 14, 18, 31, 39, 52, 54, 59, 90, 98, 107, 110, 139, 140, 153, 161, 177, 180, 199, 210, 213, 216 Minority, 23, 24, 37, 43, 46, 56, 57, 63, 97, 127, 187, 189 model minority, 24–27, 33, 38, 43, 44, 46, 56, 57, 135–138, 140 Mother, 1–3, 14–16, 21, 26, 29–31, 39, 40, 46, 47, 57, 60–62, 64, 66, 70–72, 74, 75, 79, 81, 86, 88, 90, 94, 95, 98–101, 103–106, 108, 114, 116, 118, 120, 121, 123–129, 132–134, 137, 139, 140, 143, 144, 158, 177–179, 192–194, 198, 199, 202, 204, 208–212, 214, 216 Multicultural, 4, 52, 88, 192, 197, 199–201, 203

N Name, 8, 9, 87, 96, 117, 120–122, 140, 149, 151, 158, 161, 175, 188, 194, 207 in Chinese, 121 paper son, 96 Narrative inquiry

INDEX

framework, 17, 47, 51, 56, 59, 66, 193 narrative thinking, 6, 55 struggle, 195, 205, 207, 214 National Security Law, 11, 200 Neophytes, 28, 45, 193 O O’Hara, Scarlett, 25, 39–41, 72, 138 “One country, two systems”, 18, 88, 154 Basic Law, 154 P Paper son, paper marriage, 43, 96, 99, 109, 118, 120, 194 People’s Republic of China (PRC), 7, 13, 18, 67, 71, 140, 153, 154, 157 Personal narratives, 3–5, 7–11, 14, 17, 18, 21–23, 26, 32, 33, 38, 52, 54, 58, 60, 64–66, 82, 88, 113, 114, 143, 144, 153, 160, 179, 180, 192, 195–199, 201, 203, 205, 207, 215, 216 Personal practical knowledge, 3–5, 7–9, 17, 22, 39, 44, 47, 53, 54, 56, 59, 65, 67, 69, 86, 89, 91, 153, 156, 157, 164, 178, 191, 213 Q Qualitative, 13, 23, 37, 55 Quantitative, 37, 65, 204 R Racism, 42, 151, 185, 186, 189 Railroads, 42 Reciprocal, 6, 8, 12, 13, 33, 35, 36, 179, 183, 208

221

Reclaim histories, 27, 42 of voices, 133 stories, 27, 33, 54 Recovery, 17, 21, 24, 47, 52, 193, 199 of stories, 21, 54, 193 Red egg and ginger party, 1, 2 Reentry, 18, 180, 195 Research, 3, 4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 15–17, 21, 23, 27, 28, 32, 33, 36–38, 42, 51–61, 63–65, 70, 72, 79, 97, 134, 136, 143, 146–148, 155, 184, 192, 193, 195–205, 207, 214–216 Rote learning, 9, 196, 213 S Sacramento, California USA, 2, 25, 27, 29, 33, 36, 39, 43, 59, 62, 63, 66, 109, 110, 115–118, 131, 135, 139, 143, 176, 183, 184, 210 San Francisco State (SFS), 24, 25, 27, 29, 58, 59 strike, 24, 27, 29, 58 Schwab, Joseph J., 59, 109, 110, 199 Segregation, 43 Self-deception, 22, 65, 214 subjective, 5 Sense of belonging, 8, 15, 46, 82, 88, 118, 154, 183 September 11, 2001, 11, 12, 187, 198 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), 170, 198, 199, 212 Stories, 3–6, 14, 15, 18, 21–23, 25, 27, 33, 34, 37, 39, 41, 43, 44, 52–58, 60, 61, 64, 69, 71, 72, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84–90, 94, 95, 103, 109, 127, 136, 140, 152, 156, 157, 164,

222

INDEX

166, 179, 187, 189, 192–194, 198, 200–203, 205, 211, 212, 214–216 storytelling, 6, 22, 88, 203 Students, role, 9, 53, 108, 157, 203 Suki, 15, 87, 145, 157–161, 164, 166–170, 180, 213 Sweatshop/sweetshop, 125–127, 136 T Teacher, 2–9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 22, 27–31, 33, 35–37, 39, 43, 44, 52–55, 57, 59, 64, 66, 67, 71, 73, 86–91, 94, 95, 107–110, 114, 118, 128, 131, 132, 135–140, 143–148, 154– 165, 167–169, 173, 178–180, 191, 193–201, 204, 208, 211, 213–215 bridge building, 211 education, 4, 5, 9, 13, 18, 29, 53, 59, 64, 66, 86–88, 91, 118, 135, 136, 138, 140, 145–147, 154, 157, 158, 161, 163, 196, 197, 200, 201, 204 Teacher knowledge, 4, 5, 8, 9, 15, 16, 21, 22, 54, 58, 64, 66, 69, 86, 94, 95, 107, 110, 111, 140, 144, 154–157, 180, 191–193, 195–200, 203, 204, 207, 213–216 knowledge for teachers, 5, 204 Telling, 14, 44, 52, 66, 78, 85, 86, 90, 198, 201, 216 retelling, 14, 22, 23, 44, 55, 64, 81, 85, 86, 90, 187, 198, 201, 216 Theorizing, 36 Asian American Studies, 36 Third World Asian Americans, 24

Black, 24 community, 24 Hispanic, 24 Native Americans, 24 Three-dimensional space, 14, 56, 109 Toishan, 8, 14, 15, 17, 40, 41, 47, 61, 63, 67, 69–75, 77, 79, 81–86, 88–91, 94–96, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 106, 107, 113–115, 119, 121, 129, 131, 132, 138, 139, 144, 149, 193, 194, 198, 202, 203, 210, 213, 215 locating, 72 roots, 17, 69, 70, 86, 88, 113, 194, 198 Tolerance, 12, 150, 199

U Uncle, Big, Sam, 109, 117, 118, 138, 139

V Violence, 11, 90, 97, 169, 184, 186 gun, 185, 186 safety, 186 Vision stigmatism, 39 astigmatism, 39

W Wet market, 152, 174, 188, 189 Whole person learning, 10 Working class, 6, 109, 110, 127, 134, 139 family, 6, 109, 110, 134 World Trade Center, 11, 187, 198

X Xenophobia, 180, 185