Becoming Asian American: The Politics of Languaging, Re-membering, and Belonging

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Coming Home: Stories of Building Spaces for Asian Americans in Language and Literacies Education (Table 8)

Abstract

Objectives:
In this presentation, I use translanguaging poetic autoethnography to trace my own academic journey from being a Vietnamese bilingual student learning how to write in English to an early childhood immigrant teacher learning America, from being a doctoral student learning academia to an educator-scholar learning with and within my community. These poetic entries reflect my own struggles with multiple labels: English learner, immigrant, childcare worker; and my reckoning with being Vietnamese and being racialized as Asian American. In making visible the complexity of my own experiences, I hope to shed light into how engaging in this self-reflexive inquiry has forced me to confront colonial history, political tensions, and conflicts in Vietnamese diasporic communities and most importantly, helped me learn how to heal by engaging in Asian American-centric education research.

Perspectives:
In my autoethnography, I recognize the contested nature of the Asian American label. It was created with good intentions: to gain political power and build unity among Asian American ethnic groups during the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s. However, this label also comes with bad consequences: it is often used to privilege East Asian experiences, resulting in marginalizing and silencing the “Brown Asians” such as South Asian and Southeast Asian Americans (Nadal, 2019). Because of racial labeling, Asian American students from diverse ethnic/linguistic/religious groups are lumped into a monolithic category and are stereotyped as model minorities and perpetual foreigners, masking the nuances of their multilingual practices, transnational experiences, academic struggles, and unsettled belonging (Ngo & Lee, 2007; Lee at el., 2017).

Modes of Inquiry:
I use translanguaging poetic autoethnography (Faulkner, 2017; Hanauer, 2021; García, O., & Kleifgen, 2020) to honor poetic traditions in Vietnamese oral storytelling and embrace common languaging practices of a bilingual mind.

Results:
Through a collection of Viet-English poems, I explain the politics of languaging in different English-dominant spaces, remembering and re-membering through languages, and fostering belonging for both myself and my students in schools and communities. I confront the false narratives that have been forced on me throughout my academic journey to provide evidence for the phenomenon called “story violence”, the prevalent committed crime against different communities of Color, that functions to sustain cultural hegemony and racial hierarchy. In this presentation, I argue that, in order to stop story violence, we must unlearn these false narratives to reclaim the right to study ourselves with and within our communities, in our own terms, and reclaim the right to write about ourselves with our full linguistic repertoire.

Scholarly Significance: This proposal aims to contribute to education research by (i) offering a counter-narrative on the experiences of a Vietnamese student-teacher-scholar, (ii) complicating Asian American label with its good intentions and bad consequences, (iii) embracing translanguaging poetic autoethnography as legitimate qualitative research methodologies in education research.

Author

• Alisha Nguyen, Lesley University