Open Collections

Chinese pride? searching between gendered diasporas and multicultural states

University of British Columbia

This research of pride is necessarily from but not limited to my own personal searching, as a Cantonese/Chinese migrant across (Northern Guangdong) mountains, (Pearl River) delta, and (East Pacific) waterfronts. To explore what (Chinese) pride means in context, who needs it, and how it relates to the learning of empowerment, privilege, and diversity, I deploy a multi-biographical method to explore the mixed productions and expressions of pride. These multi-biographical sources include: audio life history interviews with thirteen community activists in the East Pacific port of Greater Vancouver and specifically in Richmond where significant streams of Chinese diasporas locate, five autobiographical accounts in a national Chinese-Canadian online project, and audio-video clips of two Chinese-Canadian stories in a transnational Chinese television/online program. Searching and researching these life stories, I find (Chinese) pride articulable on two journeys. A journey of diaspora emphasizes the flux of pride, expressible in a trio of gendered stories from women’s heritage to both women and men in migration and further to queer and nonqueer immigrant youth collaboration. A journey of state emphasizes the stability of pride, expressible in a trio of multicultural stories from nation-state citizenship to local citizenship and further to a global state of mind. While this mix of life journey/storytelling speaks in its own way towards more soul-searching and politically-sensitive projects of learning, my conclusion is more modestly about bringing four small elements to cultural studies of education: namely, extramural education as collaborative praxis, aspirational learning in political literacy, critical education with place-based and mobile cultures, and a reflexive take on why (and in what ways) cultural studies of education matters to me. With all these tissues of pride alive, I hope primarily and modestly to create openings in what could be done between/with you and me.

Text

2017-08-08

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/62523

Educational Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/