Min-zhan Lu’s experience with conflict between her home and school language/ writing has shaped her into the person she is today after she was finally able to form her own voice. After reading her article “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle,” it is apparent Lu tried her best to separate her thoughts engrained in her from home and the radical thoughts enforced on her at school. Her experience with language began as a pleasant one that came with the forewarning that English equated to success. Her parents told Lu how her grandfather kept losing jobs because he couldn’t speak and attributed Lu’s father’s success to his ability to speak English. Lu makes this journey from resenting English lessons after school to feeling proud of her ability to speak English and then ashamed for ever speaking English and only using it at home. This newfound pride after Lu’s homeroom teacher asked for help. She says, “It was only after my homeroom teacher had “sanctified” English that I began to connect English with my education. I became a much more eager student in my tutorials” (Lu 438).
Eventually in high school, her educators made it a point to single her out for being part of an upper class and shamed her and her family for not being members of the working class. China was transitioning into a socialist country and these social identities that arose were very significant. After Lu’s aunt was criticized for speaking English and labeled as a Rightist by her colleagues, Lu made the connection that since China’s enemies were the Americans and British, so was the English language. She goes on to say, “I began to see my parents’ choice of a family language as an anti-Revolutionary act and was alarmed that I had participated in such an act” (Lu 439).
Lu made it a point to only speak English at home and Standard Chinese at school. She connected English with the Bourgiouse and Standard Chinese with the working class. Even though she rejected communist thinking and was told by her father to only learn math and science from school, she found herself having an issue balancing her own thoughts and writing. She realized this struggle when she reported on The Revolutionary Family and realized she couldn’t hand in the first version because she emphasized and analyzed the wife’s moment of weakness as she deliberated sending encouraging her son to join the revolution. She wrote a new copy that would fulfill the communist standards her school enforced but kept the first copy in her desk. She also couldn’t show it to her family because they would be shocked to hear she enjoyed such a book. “My parents would have been shocked to learn that I could like such a book in the same way they liked Dickens” (Lu 443). She sets this standard that if she could still tell right from wrong in these readings that she had a good sense of control over the two. This became more and more difficult for her and Lu fears the impurities she produced in her writings whether she was careful or not. Lu began second-guessing her words and their meanings. However, this loss of “spontaneity” was a product of her conflict.
She realizes eventually that writing is a tool that can be used to maneuver through educated arguments and readily available when needed. It is this struggle with her thoughts and writing that made her realize how is she able to navigate writing through a “discourse.” Lu refrains from putting this pressure on her own daughter who she believes is handling the cross of languages a lot better than she did growing up.
I have never had this conflict, but these were different times and depending on a student’s country of origin I’m sure there are students today who feel strongly about this subject and the conflict engrossed in feuding languages/ their political meanings.
Source: Lu, Min-Zhan. “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle.” College English, vol. 49, no. 4, 1987, p. 437., doi:10.2307/377860.
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