Narratives of Globalization by Julian C. H. Lee

Author:Julian C. H. Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Chapter 9

On Diversity and Language

My Route through Different Cultures, Languages, and Ideologies

Lynne N. Li

Before I migrated to Australia in the 1990s, I lived through China’s ten-year Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) as a primary school pupil. I was later swept up as a secondary school and university undergraduate student in the tide of China’s initial forays into greater global engagement when in 1977 it embarked on its Open Door Policy. Later, as a postgraduate, in 1989, I cried out for democracy and was swept into a ‘sandstorm’, the term that I have used in my personal journals to describe my experience of globalization during the post-Tianamen Square convulsions in China. I have been keeping these journals since my arrival in Australia in 1996. They contain recollections of my childhood and young adulthood, and I share excerpts from them with you in this chapter as I explore my experiences as an English-language learner in China and as a newly arrived migrant in Australia. My experiences enable me then to share my observations about how China’s and Australia’s approaches to language reflect their attitudes towards cultural and linguistic diversity within their borders and their engagement with the wider world. But first, let me begin with an accident of fate that started me on my journey as a learner of English, and which ultimately blew me across the seas to Australia.

In June 1976, when I was about to complete my primary school years, there came the news which was passed onto us from our teachers: a nomination of a student, preferably male, was being sought from the graduating pupils to study in Chongqing Foreign Language School. This news swept through the grounds of my primary school, through every school teachers’ mind, and those of about 50 graduating children. This was the first time such a nomination had been sought from this primary school. A male student was nominated and sent for the selection interview, but he failed to go through due to a medical condition, I heard people say. Then my teacher told me, ‘Now it is your turn. Go and get it!’ Even today I can still remember how two interviewers showed me a few worm-shaped symbols which I had never seen before (which later [I] knew to be words using the English alphabet) and asked me to read them. Then I went through a medical checkup. From the moment of the interview I had a feeling that I had made it through. A couple of months later, without knowing what it would really mean to me, I made the move to study in that foreign language school. (Entry dated 10 December 1996)

This happened in the same year that Mao Zedong died and when the ten-year Cultural Revolution was declared ‘accomplished’. One year later, China, perceiving the benefits of greater engagement with processes that have come to be known as globalization, opened itself to the outside world with its ‘Open Door Policy’ (Guo 2001). What happened to me in June 1976 opened doors for

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