This book explores the fascinating topic of heritage language learning, looking in particular at Chinese Australians’ learning of Chinese. The author studies the investment, challenges and benefits of heritage language learning across varied contexts including school, work, home and in the community. The book investigates how Chinese Australians navigate and negotiate their Chineseness and how resources are used to support their learning. The book is based on a mixed methods study which uses Bourdieu’s sociological theory, and offers implications for sociologists of language and education, Chinese heritage language learners and teachers, as well as language and cultural policy makers.
This book explores the fascinating topic of heritage language learning, looking in particular at Chinese Australians’ learning of Chinese. The author studies the investment, challenges and benefits of heritage language learning across varied contexts including school, work, home and in the community. The book investigates how Chinese Australians navigate and negotiate their Chineseness and how resources are used to support their learning. The book is based on a mixed methods study which uses Bourdieu’s sociological theory, and offers implications for sociologists of language and education, Chinese heritage language learners and teachers, as well as language and cultural policy makers.
Learning Chinese as a Heritage Language: An Australian Perspective
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Overview
This book explores the fascinating topic of heritage language learning, looking in particular at Chinese Australians’ learning of Chinese. The author studies the investment, challenges and benefits of heritage language learning across varied contexts including school, work, home and in the community. The book investigates how Chinese Australians navigate and negotiate their Chineseness and how resources are used to support their learning. The book is based on a mixed methods study which uses Bourdieu’s sociological theory, and offers implications for sociologists of language and education, Chinese heritage language learners and teachers, as well as language and cultural policy makers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783094301 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Channel View Publications |
| Publication date: | 10/06/2015 |
| Series: | Multilingual Matters , #162 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 173 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Guanglun Michael Mu is Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. His research interests include mixed methods research, diversity and inclusion and Chinese in diaspora. He is also Associate Editor for the International Journal of Disability, Development, and Education.
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Learning Chinese as a Heritage Language
An Australian Perspective
By Guanglun Michael Mu
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2016 Guanglun Michael MuAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78309-430-1
CHAPTER 1
From the White Australia Policy to Multiculturalism: Chinese Immigrants and Chinese Language in Australia
Historically, human beings have never been constrained within territorial borders. The exclusion of Jews from Europe, the exile of Messenians under the Spartan rule, the African trans-Atlantic and the Chinese trans-Pacific slave trade, and the Eurocentric colonial migration are all early forms of human dispersion. Contemporarily, the compression of time and space by the innovation of science and technology has unprecedentedly facilitated and intensified the transnational mobility and connections of people, which is creating a more or less borderless world. The world is thus moving from territorially distant and mutually distinct spaces towards a multidimensional space of overlapping layers. There is a transition underway from a geographically separate, socially distinct, culturally heterogeneous and linguistically unintelligible world of nations to an interconnected and intermingled one. People are intersecting and interacting in such a world where they are on the move as they have never been before. This migration has shaped the present time as an era of growing dynamics. It has introduced new cultures and languages to destination regions, and rapidly increased the cultural and linguistic diversity of modern societies.
Against this background of regional and global migration as well as transnational communications and interactions, the opening chapter will set the scene for the book. It will diachronically elaborate on how past and present come to shape the cultural and linguistic diversity of Australia, a space of complicated entanglement. Specifically, the chapter will introduce the diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, needs, aspirations and potentials of Chinese immigrants and their descendants, who are faced with the challenges and opportunities in Australia, a place of 'togetherness-in-difference' (Ang, 2001: 17). Before I explicate how the shifting Australian cultural and social orders come to shape Chinese Australians' being, doing and thinking, I would like to invite the reader to have a taste of the status quo of the Chinese community in Australia.
Sunnybank: A Chinese-Populated Community in Queensland, Australia
Figures 1.1 and 1.2 demonstrate some Chinese elements omnipresent in a suburb in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. This is Sunnybank, a vigorous and dynamic community with a proliferating population of Chinese. What you see in the photos is the epitome of Sunnybank. If you visit the place, you will catch sight of a whole bunch of Chinese people, Chinese characters, Chinese cultural activities, Chinese restaurants, Chinese supermarkets, Chinese agencies and Chinese weekend schools, amongst many other Chinese elements. Each time I visited Sunnybank, I thought I was somewhere in China. Hence, it is hard to believe that only three decades ago, Sunnybank was a very white area.
The first settlers of Sunnybank were believed to be the Jagera indigenous people who came to inhabit the area over 20,000 years ago. Over the centuries, this beautiful loamy land and its adequate precipitation have produced rich displays of natural plants and flowers. The attributes of this area were discovered by the white settlers in the early 19th century soon after their arrival in Queensland. Hence, they developed Sunnybank into a farming area.
With the growth of the population, farmland in Sunnybank gradually gave way to suburbia during the first half of the 20th century. With the 1982 Commonwealth Games and the 1988 World Expo held in Brisbane, suburbs like Sunnybank were given the opportunity to speak to the world about their prosperity. Since then, an increasing number of Asian immigrants have started to settle in Sunnybank and neighbouring suburbs. This has transformed Sunnybank from a white suburb into a thriving multicultural residential area, particularly with a strong Chinese influence in the community design and development. Today, 30.62% of Sunnybank residents are of Chinese ancestry (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011). Many Chinese living in Brisbane or even across Queensland come to visit Sunnybank frequently, for food, party, business and cultural activities. My friends Jenny, Ryan and Helen are among those Sunnybank-lovers. My considerable contact with them has given me opportunities to witness and document their life experiences that are of particular relevance to the main themes of this book: Chinese ethnic identities and CHL learning.
My friend Jenny is successful in her career. She opened her housing agency in Sunnybank in 2012. Jenny was originally from Fujian, a neighbouring province of Canton. At the age of nine, Jenny's parents brought her to Australia. The family firstly lived in Sydney and then moved to Brisbane. Jenny is now a mother of three. She always feels proud of having three sons, as she said, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (I made a big contribution to the prosperity of our clan.)' This attitude is a traditional Chinese one, a particular disposition of Chineseness rooted in Confucianism, which only entitles males to continue the family line. I will explicitly debate Confucian dispositions in Chapter 3. For the time being, let's go on with Jenny's story. Indeed, Jenny considers herself to be very Chinese. Once, she said to me,
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
(I am happy to be Chinese. Chinese have to be able to speak Chinese. I speak Chinese to Chinese people. I work in a completely Chinese way because I do business with Chinese immigrants here [in Brisbane] and Chinese people in China. Chinese are rich and they want to buy houses no matter where they live. It's really good for my business. Hahaha ...)
Jenny has seen the value of her Chinese language, a language that facilitates her business. In recognition of the instrumentality of Chinese language, Jenny sends her three sons to Miao Miao Chinese School in Sunnybank every Saturday morning, with the hope that her sons can maintain their Chinese language in Australia for better career opportunities in future. Miao Miao Chinese School is close to my rented house. Sometimes she sneaked away to meet me while her sons were bound to Chinese lessons. She often lamented over the conflict between the boys and her, saying
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
(They don't like learning Chinese, but I have to push them. It's painful not only for the kids but also for myself. Every week I have to tutor them for another hour after their Saturday school. It's a heavy training because they are not motivated to learn Chinese at all. They keep complaining to me, but who can I complain to? They just don't understand I do this for them not for myself. There are more and more connections between Australia and China. Chinese language may open up job opportunities for them in future. In addition, it's ridiculous if a Chinese person can't speak Chinese. They don't understand this now, but I hope one day they will understand.)
The parent-child conflict over language policy is common in Chinese immigrant families. My own research participants also recalled their strong resistance to, and their parents' consistent investment in, their Chinese learning when they were small. Despite this conflict, Chinese immigrant parents often impose their language policy on their children because they tend to believe that the Chinese language will bring their children better job prospects in the labour market. Moreover, Jenny spoke of Chinese language with respect to Chinese identity. She seems to consider it is hard to claim Chinese identity without Chinese language proficiency.
Like Jenny, my friend Ryan also runs his own business – a Chinese acupuncture and massage shop. Ryan's family was from Shandong and Ryan was brought to Australia by his parent when he was 12. I often eat with Ryan in Sunnybank because we are both Chinese food lovers. Ryan's Chinese listening, speaking, reading and writing are all very good, given his six years of schooling in China and his continuous commitment to Chinese learning in Australia. However, both his younger brothers, who are university students, are Chinese illiterate, given that their education was primarily received in English and given their limited formal Chinese learning. Ryan recently went to China with his brothers, travelling around the country. Upon his return, he met me and told me a story.
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
(In a park, I lost my brothers. I called them but they couldn't figure out where they were because they don't understand the road signs in Chinese. It took me a while to find them. Stressed and angry, I gave them a good bullocking, 'you don't speak Chinese and why don't you follow me! I've told you to learn Chinese but you don't listen to me. Now you are dumbfounded. It is when you want to use the knowledge that you wish to have more [a Chinese saying]. You are almost a "banana man" now, yellow outside but white inside. You look Chinese but you can't speak Chinese.')
It is interesting that Ryan talked about Chinese language in relation to the physical dimension of Chinese identity. He seems to have the stereotype that Chinese-looking people have to be able to speak Chinese. My research participants reported similar stereotypical perceptions, which I will analyse in detail in Chapter 4. Of further relevance to the topic of my book was Ryan's strong sense of being Chinese. In our everyday conversations, Ryan repeatedly said [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (We Shandong people are very traditional.)' This does make sense to me because Shandong is the origin of Confucianism and Shandong people have the reputation of being traditional and Confucian. It is likely because of Ryan's strong sense of Chineseness that he always considers sons to be of genealogical importance in a family. He once explicitly said to me [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (I must have a son in future).' The term 'must' connotes a strong gendered perspective that is shaped by Confucianism. This attitude is similar to Jenny's account – a Confucian disposition that I will explain in subsequent chapters.
Compared to Jenny and Ryan, my friend Helen seems to have more bewilderment and predicaments associated with her own identities and language choices due in part to her complex personal and familial life trajectories. Helen is a third-generation Vietnamese Chinese, but she can add many other elements to her identity 'label'. Her grandparents are native Cantonese speakers. For some political reasons, they had to flee Vietnam by boat after the Vietnam War. Also on the boat were Helen's parents and Helen, who was an infant at that time. Her family landed in Malaysia. This was followed by a transient stay in the country. A few months later, the family was cruelly pushed back to the sea. After long, gruelling days at sea, they arrived in Australia. Many years later, her family claimed Australian citizenship. Helen wondered, 'What kind of Chinese am I? Indonesian Chinese, Indonesian-Malaysian Chinese, Australian Chinese with a refugee background or "Vietnamese Boat People"?' She also confessed to me,
It pains me to admit that I am Chinese illiterate. How I wished I could have opportunities to learn some Chinese when I was small. Because of my refugee background, it was way too luxurious for me to learn Chinese back then. Now I have the opportunity and I won't miss it. I am learning Chinese calligraphy and I so much love it. I've found I love it with a passion, like it's something really for me. I also need to catch up with my Chinese learning so that I can better understand the meaning of the calligraphy I write. I think this is something I belong to, something I lost in the past and reclaim now.
I use the above three vignettes to suggest the fact that Chinese identity requires a foundational basis. Chinese language can be the cultural foundation of Chinese identity. Chinese identity is indispensable to Chinese culture and Chinese language is an embodied form of Chinese culture. Nevertheless, culture is a perplexing notion that deserves some more scrutiny. For this reason, I will spend some space here to explain the notion of culture.
What Does 'Culture' Mean?
Culture is one of the most complicated concepts in the English language mainly because it has come to be used across several distinct intellectual disciplines. Given the abstruseness of culture, I do not intend to define it here but to debate some elements that culture denotes and connotes.
The discipline of sociology has engaged in extensive and intensive debates with culture. For German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918),culture refers to the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms that have been objectified in the course of history (Frisby & Featherstone, 1997). Simmel's understanding indicates that culture is a historically inherited, not genetically inherited, system of objectified forms that come to shape individuals. However, some notes of caveat are in order here. Although culture is indispensable to history, it does not stay fossilised in the past. Instead, it has ubiquity at present and may have continuity into the future, with maintenance, enrichment, modification, improvisation, evolution or involution. Although culture does present itself in objectified forms, such as physical artefacts and written texts, it also exists in intangible, non-objectified forms, such as languages, traditions and propensities. In this way, culture can be considered as an ensemble of symbolic codes of material and non-material being that comes to shape, and is shaped by, people's ways of thinking and doing. Since the current book is largely built on Bourdieu's sociology, I will now turn to a brief discussion of culture within a Bourdieusian framework.
For Bourdieu, culture does not only refer to the objectified cultural entities and cultural goods that belong to consumers, but also refers to consumers' embodied competence in the consumption of these objectified cultural forms. Culture thereby constitutes appropriate and legitimate tastes for these cultural goods, where taste is 'the faculty of perceiving flavours' and 'the capacity to discern aesthetic values' (Bourdieu, 1984: 474). It is a 'gift of nature' born from a family and 'the product of upbringing and education' (Bourdieu, 1984: 1). To clarify, although culture is given by the past (e.g. born from a family), it is not a static or fixed attribute because it is constantly informed by ongoing external structures (e.g. upbringing and education). Due to the socially recognised hierarchy of familial origin and educational system, taste, 'a system of classificatory schemes' (Bourdieu, 1984: 174) or 'an acquired disposition to differentiate and appreciate' (Bourdieu, 1984: 466), is predisposed to classify people into different cultural groups. It should be noted, however, that tastes are cultural schemes of dispositions, instead of culturally schemed dispositions. That is to say, it is a logical and epistemological fallacy to assume members within each group are miniature replicas moulded by the same cultural taste. Instead, each group is a heterogeneous one, with diversities, differences, variances and deviants. Consequently, people with different tastes are marked to have different culture, from the 'authentic' culture to the 'imitation', from the 'true' culture to the 'popularisation', or from the 'high culture' to the 'middle-brow culture' (Bourdieu, 1984: 250). This hierarchy is what Bourdieu meant by 'distinction' (Bourdieu, 1984). In this sense, to have the authentic, true and high culture is to 'know the best that has been said and thought in the world' (Arnold, 1999: xxxiii).
Arnold's elitist conception of culture, though concise, is problematic. What is considered 'the best' is not fixed but highly contingent on time and space. While the colonial age purported European culture to be the most advanced form of civilisation, the two World Wars shook this complacency. Those wars in concert with subsequent anti-colonialist movements contributed to changes in attitudes toward culture and how it was understood (Louie, 2008). Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), the German philosopher, argued against the high and dominant position of European culture purported by the colonial age, 'the very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of Nature' (Williams, 1988: 89). Within European culture, different tastes may be used to distinguish culture considered to be of higher value from that considered to be of lower value. However, these tastes should not give more value to European culture than non-European cultures. Along the cultural spectrum, there are different cultures of the same value. Within each culture, there will be a hierarchy of 'high' to 'low' culture. In Williams' term, this is culture conceived as 'a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development' (1988: 90). In this book I speak of culture not only in the hierarchical sense of certain social and economic groups within a particular social space, but also in the specific and variable cultures of different nations and periods across spaces. In Williams' term, this is culture conceived as 'a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group' (1988: 90). In what follows, it will soon become clear how a (dominant) culture distinguishes itself from other cultures through political power, social orders and legitimate verdict.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgement
Foreword
Preface
Chapter One: From the White Australia Policy to Multiculturalism: Chinese Immigrants and Chinese Language in Australia
Chapter Two: Chinese Heritage Language and its Learners in the West: Empirical Knowledge, Theoretical Framework, and Research Method
Chapter Three: Sociological Mechanism for Learning Chinese as a Heritage Language in Australia: A Quantitative Investigation
Chapter Four: A Qualitative Exploration of the Profits of Chinese Heritage Language Learning: You Reap What You Sow!
Chapter Five: Learning Chinese as a Heritage Language: A Perplexed Project