| Description |
Reclaiming "Pretty Girl": A Critical Reflection on Heritage Chinese Voices, Identities, and Third Places urges a broadening of how we perceive, and therefore teach, heritage Chinese students in our composition classrooms. Historically, these students have been pedagogically underrepresented and treated as a monolith. Whether explicitly or latently, the belief that there is a singular "Chinese learner" identity continues to be upheld in traditional learning spaces. This not only tokenizes all heritage Chinese students' English proficiency as "deficient" and "developmental"; it also ignores their individual experiences with literacy, institutionalized racism, and heritage language and identity negotiation. Alongside sustained privileging of "Standard English" ideologies, this can create feelings of inadequacy that lead to a disavowal of one's heritage language and cultural knowledges. In response, I denaturalize notions of "the Chinese learner" and, more broadly, "Chineseness" in my work. I use the term "heritage Chinese student" instead of "Chinese student" to emphasize individual students' self-identifications which may extend beyond nationality, and to expand the geographical range of my research: unlike much of the literature on this student population, my participants or their parents come from East and Southeast Asian countries not limited to the People's Republic of China. Yet importantly, they are bound by common linguistic and historical ties as a result of China's longstanding influence throughout these regions. iv Additional nuance is found in my consideration of heritage Chinese students across generations "1," "1.5," and "2." I examine how they act as agents in their language and identity practices amid an unfamiliar United States "host" culture, whether to resist hegemonic language attitudes in U.S. education, to self-invent, or to forge solidarity among peers. This project advances the field of rhetoric and composition with a new understanding of the ways marginalized heritage language learners practice, invent, and circulate communicative practices across linguistic and cultural backgrounds. |
