Mother Tongue as the Language of Mothering and Homing Practice in Betty Quan’s Mother Tongue and Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms.Survival Strategies and Identity Construction of Migrant and Refugee Mothers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“I am my language. I speak Chinese. Your voices. Your words. You drown me out” (Quan 14) – says the Mother to her children in Betty Quan’s play Mother Tongue underlining the cru cial aspect of mothering in exile, the language of mothering , as a site in which the cultural/ethnic identity, the sense of self and maternal subjectivity intersect and are negotiated. This chapter explores the language of mothering through two fictional a ccounts of immigrant mothering both of which underscore the tension between mothering practices and linguistic difference. It aims to address this tension by suggesting that in the context of migration, the language of mothering can be conceptualised as a mothering and homing practice, which functions as a structuring, creative force that produces and shapes both migrant mothers’ and their children’s subjectivities. The chapter will consider two fictional texts: the play Mother Tongue (1996) by Chinese - Cana dian playwright Betty Quan and the novel Chorus of Mushrooms (1994) by Japanese - Canadian author Hiromi Goto , both featuring immigrant and refugee mothers who mother primarily in their own mother tongue rather than English, the language of the host country, Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".