Language Brokering at the Doctor During COVID-19: An Asian American College Student’s Autoethnography

• In Event: Language Brokering in Diverse Contexts: Implications for Schools

Abstract

Objective
Through a college student’s autoethnographic account of language brokering with her immigrant father and his doctor, this study: 1) offers a first-person perspective of language brokering, and 2) investigates how writing a language brokering autoethnography could benefit students. The study demonstrates how language brokering occurs within social and political contexts, which both inform the brokering interactions and demonstrate underlying power structures in which brokers and their kin operate (Orellana et al., 2003). Reflecting on a journal entry from 2020, the author retrospectively narrates the scene of a language brokering experience five years later, adding context from the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 election to explore language brokering during a period of heightened anti-Asian racism (Gover et al., 2020; Lim et al., 2022).

Framework
This study uses a narrative theory framework to examine how a language broker’s autoethnography is constructed through “culturally mediated, social interactions” (Uzun & LeBlanc, 2017, p. 2191). Through narrative theory, we understand what autoethnography affords students and researchers as a method of first-person storytelling.

Methods and Data Sources
The method of this paper is autoethnography, in which the researcher repositions herself as “an object of inquiry” in a detail-rich and emotional first-person account of “a particular socio-cultural setting in terms of personal awareness and experience” (Lucero, 2018, p. 765-6). I combine evocative and analytic autoethnography to illuminate the emotional and personal dimensions of language brokering, as well as its social and political contexts (Ellingson & Ellis, 2008). In doing so, I produce a “stor[y] of experience” marked by emotions and meaning making (Orellana & Phoenix, 2017, p. 185).

Results
In line with previous research, this paper shows that storytellers reshape their memories of language brokering events in ways salient to their contemporary selves, demonstrating how there may be no single ‘truth’ when recalling past experiences (Orellana & Phoenix, 2017). Results also illustrate how re-storying past brokering through political and social commentary can be empowering and affirming educational experiences. Writing an autoethnography can also allow a student’s present and past selves to communicate feelings of empowerment, anger, and care to and from each other. Autoethnography, therefore, can be a useful methodology for student self-affirmation and future language brokering studies. It can guide students to uncover connections between embodied emotions that arise in situ during language brokering and emotions that arise during language brokering retellings (Hochschild, 1990).

Significance
Autoethnography provides an opportunity to bring rich stories of experience to light in research and classrooms. This is especially necessary for college student language brokering research, which is largely understudied (Dorner, 2017). This autoethnography of a Korean-English college student language broker is the first of its kind in academic literature. It contributes to the study of the hidden injury of class in Korean language brokers’ experiences (Kwon, 2014) while analyzing additional factors such as gender and political climate. It also demonstrates that autoethnographies of language brokering can be a powerful force for education, allowing brokering students to more clearly understand their emotions, social positions, and past and present selves.

Author

• Gloria Choi