The Voices of Asian Transnational MotherScholars of Emergent Bilinguals

• In Event: Breaking the Silence: Amplifying Asian/Asian American Voices in Bilingual Education

Abstract

Many children from Asian immigrant households in the United States, who are exposed to languages other than English at home, eventually transition to speaking only English as they adapt to schools, where English is considered the normative language (Wong Fillmore, 2000). Language shift and language loss frequently occur among immigrant children, especially those with Asian heritage (Pew Research Center, 2012), despite the exhaustive efforts of immigrant parents to pass down their heritage language and culture at home (Author, 2022). When children of Asian immigrants attend school and realize that English is prioritized and valued, they often struggle to recognize the value of maintaining their home language and eventually give up on it (Wong Fillmore, 2000). Consequently, Asian immigrant parents encounter complex tensions and doubts when nurturing their children’s bilingual potential, further burdened by navigating monolingual ideologies, English hegemony, and nativistic racism (Author, 2022; Choi, 2018).

Asian Immigrant MotherScholars in the field of language and literacy education, who are expected to be knowledgeable about the benefits of bilingualism and biliteracy, also face significant frustrations and tensions when raising their children in the United States, particularly concerning their children’s bilingual learning. The language and literacy experiences and perspectives of Asian and Asian American are often absent or invisible in academic discourse due to the model minority myth and perpetual foreigner stereotype (Jang, 2017; Kim, 2020). As Zhu (2020) observed, Asian “immigrant mothers’ ways of learning, mothering, and knowing have been overlooked” (p. 378), and little attention has been given to the experiences of Asian MotherScholars in education (Lapayese, 2012) and teacher educators with Asian heritage (Kim et al., 2017).

In this presentation, we aim to share our critical reflection and experience based on our recent collaborative self-study (Bullock & Ritter, 2011) to explore the following questions: 1) What have we, as Asian transnational MotherScholars, experienced, and what do we continue to encounter as we raise emergent bilinguals? 2) How have our experiences shaped our ways of promoting bilingualism and biliteracy? 3) What emerges when Asian transnational MotherScholars engage in collaborative self-reflection?
Through our collaborative self-study, we realized that our experiences as Asian transnational MotherScholars raising emergent bilingual children require a continuous effort to capitalize multiplied assets and navigate doubled burdens while we “live within, between, and at the margins or boundaries of nation-states around the globe” (Enns et al., 2020, p. 1). Yet, we also realized that the practice of mothering emergent bilinguals with Asian heritage is a constant battle, as schools consider our children’s linguistic assets to be deficits, and as a result, our children internalize monolingual ideologies and nativistic racism and refuse to use languages other than English. Sharing our unique experiences of mothering as Asian scholars, we came to realize the rarity of exploring voices and experiences like ours. Given that neither transnational mothers nor mothers of emergent bilinguals are monolithic groups, it is crucial to recognize that each mother has her own unique experiences and stories interwoven among her multiple assets and double burdens.

Authors

• Jungmin Kwon, Michigan State University

• Wenyang Sun, University of Utah

• Minhye Son, California State University - Dominguez Hills