Desires for Whispered Cantonese
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P67-C4
2025-09-26
300
Desires for Whispered Cantonese
Another linguistic dilemma or double bind facing students like Victor Yu can be found in the Canadian-born Chinese and non-Chinese students' desires for Chinese speech to be whispered when it was spoken and thus relegated to the private realm of intimate conversation. In the following interview excerpt, Tony, a Chinese-Canadian student who was born in China and came to Canada at a young age, expressed his feelings toward students who speak loudly in Cantonese:
Cantonese [speakers] tend to shout out—that annoys me. We [English speakers] don't shout... Many Chinese shout and the Cantonese accent—it always has the long tail, a stretched-out sound—it annoys me.
[Interview, April 30, 1998]
Tony's annoyance with the loudness of Cantonese resonates with writer Anne Jew's characterization of the way people talked in Chinatown. In the short story excerpt that opens Part I, Jew writes, "Everyone talked loudly and waved their arms. I couldn't understand why they had to be so loud. It seemed so uncivilized."1
At the same time, as many Hong Kong-born, Chinese students opened themselves up to possible disparagement for being "loud" speakers in Cantonese; when they spoke in English they were often considered to be inaudible. Like the narrator of Maxine Hong Kingston's book, The Woman Warrior, which also opens Part I, they were regularly exhorted by students and teachers to speak "louder."2 In other words, Cantonese speakers were caught in a bind where they were considered to be too loud in Cantonese and too quiet in English.
Tony's feelings about the loudness of Cantonese may reflect an internalization of racism and its disparagement of the peoples, cultures, and languages of "others." The literatures of Asian North America have long critiqued how North-American society and schools have served other Asian people. 3 The "othering" of Asian people has acted to produce in many Chinese youth, particularly among those born in North America, an ambivalence, even a loathing of "Chineseness," including the Chinese language.4 This ambivalence suggests that the double binds facing Cantonese-speaking students at Northside can be linked to dominant Western perspectives on speech and silence. On one hand, students at Northside admonished Cantonese-speaking students for being too quiet and passive. On the other hand, students devalued them when they spoke loudly and assertively in Cantonese. In this way, dominant perspectives on speech and silence function to valorize not all speech, but specifically, English speech. Speech in any language other than English was devalued and not regarded as powerful, worthy, or reflective of agency on the part of the speaker. Its utterance in the public realm had to be whispered so it could not be heard and disturb or embarrass others. Tony's own linguistic development over the course of his life also reflects the devaluation of languages other than English. He informed us that over the years since immigrating to Canada, he had become "not that good in Mandarin anymore" (Interview, April 30, 1998).
Tony's irritation on hearing loud Cantonese heightens the disenabling aspects of the linguistic dilemmas or double-binds discussed at the beginning of the Commentary. Not only did Hong Kong-born, Chinese students who chose to speak English and answer questions stand to lose friendships among their peers from Hong Kong, if they chose to speak Cantonese, they were "annoying" and often much too loud, according to some local-born Chinese. These tensions placed them in a trying bind, caught between an immigrant Cantonese youth culture that valued not showing off English and a dominant Eurocentric culture that only valued the use of English.
In this Commentary, we have suggested that the Cantonese-speaking students at Northside were continually engaged in a negotiation of linguistic double binds. These double-binds contributed to a reluctance to use English on the part of many students. The consequent silence of many Cantonese-speaking students caused some students to resent their classmates. In the pedagogical discussion that follows, we will explore what kinds of pedagogical interventions might better enable students to negotiate the linguistic dilemmas of inhibitive and attentive silences and alleviate the racial tensions that develop from the various double-binds, stereotypes, and academic pressures that frame the education of Hong Kong-born, Chinese Canadians.
1 See Jew (1992).
2 See Kingston (1989).
3 See, for example, Hogue (1996); Kim (1982); Kingston (1989); and Wong (1993).
4 See Hwang (1990); Jew (1992); and Ma (1998).
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