Living against the Wind: Pathways Chosen by Chinese Immigrants

ABSTRACT/RESUME This article documents an ethnographic study that makes explicit how two Chinese immigrant families lived their literate lives as they moved within the liminal spaces between Canadian and Chinese cultures in a small prairie city. The families arrived in Canada as family class immigrants to seek their dreams and hopes, but lack of English and trying to survive financially prevented them from integrating easily into the new culture and its literacy practices. The study focuses on the distances travelled by their children, ESL learners, who were learning to function within the family, in the outside community, and in urban inner-city school settings. In school encounters, the children became aware that school knowledge, unlike family and community knowledge, was a commodity, while the cultural capital of their parents and their multi-generational learning environments contained little that resonated with the curriculum. Threaded throughout the families' stories were the dominant themes of isolatio n, oppression, and apprehension, an apprehension that they could not help their children enjoy a better life through educational opportunities. By exploring the ways in which these families experience literacy as social practice, the study provides a basis for understanding how educators and policy makers can provide parents and their children with a relevant education that effectively meshes their schooling and lived experiences. Cet article porte sur une etude ethnographique qui decrit en detail comment deux families d'emigres chinois vivaient leur vie lettree alors qu'ils etaient [much lesser than]en transition.[much greater than] dans les espaces liminaux entre les cultures canadienne et chinoise d'une petite ville des Prairies. Ces families sont arrivees au Canada en tant qu' immigrants de la categorie des parents pleins de reves et d'espoirs, mais sans connaitre l'anglais. Leur desir de survivre financierement les a empeches de s'integrer facilement dans la nouvelle culture et ses pratiques litteraires. L'etude focalise sur les [much lesser than]distances parcourues[much greater than] par leurs enfants, qui ont appris l'anglais comme langue seconde, ont appris fonctionner au sein de la famille, dans la collectivite et dans les establissements scolaires des vieux quartiers pauvres. A l'ecole, les enfants ont ete sensibilises au fait que ce qu'ils y apprenaient, contrairement ce qu'ils apprenaient en famille et dans la collectivite , representait un bien en quelque sorte, alors que le capital culturel de leurs parents et leurs environnements d'apprentissage sur plusieurs generations n'avaient que peu de valeur dans le programme academique. Les histoires des familles etaient marquees par les grands themes de l'isolation, de l'oppression et de l'apprehension; ils craignaient de ne pouvoir aider leurs enfants a profiter d'une vie meilleure avec des possibilities educatives. En explorant comment ces familles vivaient la litteratie en tant que pratique sociale, l'etude permet de comprendre comment les educateurs et les responsables des politiques peuvent donner aux parents et aux enfants une education pertinente qui engrene les experiences de l'ecole avec celles de la vie. Family life is a distinct domain that is quite different from school. In home life, literacy is intricately woven into the everyday world of families where the purposes, values, and roles families take may differ from formal schooling. A family's way of learning literacy is complexly structured and highly dependent upon on the cultures to which they belong, the languages they speak, and the social, cultural, and economic circumstances of their daily lives. Across cultures, researchers have pointed out that families engage in literacy integrated in socially significant ways on a regular basis (Taylor, 1983; Fishman, 1988; Heath, 1983; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988). Yet few researchers (Guerra, 1998; Valdes, 1996; Gibson, 1988) have addressed the family literacy practices of immigrant households. …

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