“Westerners” of Chinese Descent: Exploring the Intersection of Language, Race, Religion and Immigrantization

• In Event: Race and Language Learning in Multicultural Canada

Abstract

This paper explores how language, race, religion, and immigrant status, among other social categorizations, intersect to shape individual and group identities at an English-medium minority church in East Canada which mainly attracted recent immigrants.

I see race as a socially and epistemologically constructed category (Kubota & Lin, 2006), and social actors’ views of racial matters as corresponding to their systemic locations (Bonilla-Silva, 2010). The notion of intersectionality (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001) is particularly helpful in understanding how the combination of a variety of social categorizations, mentioned above, plays out at this church.
A qualitative inquiry situated in the interpretive paradigm, this study is based on a larger ethnography. The main data for this paper come from observations of and fieldnotes taken at an Evangelical Christian church from 2003 to 2004. I interviewed key actors and collected relevant texts throughout. Critical discourse analysis (Blackledge, 2005) and interactional sociolinguistic analysis (Gumperz, 1982, 1999; Heller, 1999) were applied to analyze texts and transcripts.
A major finding is a discrepancy in the (implicit) racial labeling of the church leaders. When a young immigrant couple from Mainland China joined this church to “practice English,” they referred to the 1.5 generation leaders, who were of Chinese descent, born elsewhere but grew up in Canada and spoke native-like English, as laowai (foreigners) or xifang ren (Westerners), terms that are used to refer to Whites exclusively in Mandarin-Chinese. Conversely, observations and interviews revealed that the leaders saw themselves as in-between “immigrants” and “Western people.”
I suggest that these two ways of labeling the church leaders need to be understood in relation to the two sets of individuals’ different positions in Canada, where hierarchical citizenship has been established by legitimizing English and French as the official languages and racial Others have been marginalized (Haque, 2010). Within this context, lack of English proficiency marks immigrants the Others within Canada, and understandably, the immigrant couple homogenized all those who spoke native-like English as Canadians, or Westerners, which signals Whiteness. However, growing up in Canada, the 1.5 generation were demanded to master English at the expense of their home languages, and were acutely aware that they were not “Western people”. Having internalized structural racism (Kubota & Lin, 2006), the 1.5 generation leaders intuitively judged Chinese immigrants as lacking proficiency in English and thus having low spiritual levels, which unintentionally limited immigrants’ access to leadership roles at the church. By categorizing “Western people”, themselves and “immigrants” into a hierarchy, the 1.5 generation leaders enjoyed psychic benefits (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001) over immigrants.

This study reveals how the seemingly neutral and flexible language (e.g., supposedly everyone can learn English if they are willing and hardworking) marks racialized immigrants as the inferior Other within a racialized group. It contributes to the exploration of language as proxy for race (Monzo & Rueda, 2009) and immigrant status, and discusses the role of language in perpetuating structural racism within nation-states in the age of globalization.

Author

• Huamei Han, Simon Fraser University