The Classroom and the Wilder Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition

lucas w.

Fan Shen’s “The Classroom and the Wilder Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition” confronts how learning to write English in the U.S. was not merely an education in sentence structure and word translation from one language to the next, but much more than that and life changing too, for Shen had to completely rebuild his identity as a Chinese student.

From the start Shen makes it known that English helped to redefine his way of writing, and consequently certain ideologies needed for writing in English or Chinese. When redefining himself he felt that he needed to change both his “ideological and logical identities”. “Starting with the first English paper I wrote, I found that learning to compose in English is not an isolated activity, but a social and cultural experience.” This cultural experience that Shen speaks of is the eventual immersion into the English language that he had to take. The biggest challenge for him was simply the word “I”, I and all of its related terms, my, me, myself, ect. In Shen’s Chinese writing experience, the self imposed “I” was always lesser to the “we”. Out of respect for the ancestors that came before, out of respect for the party that “we” all are working together to maintain, and out of cultural imprint telling Shen that anything individual was bad. In Chinese, the word for “individualism” has become synonymous with “bad”. It was this cultural identity he knew that hindered his ability to compose well in English. Without the ability to simply express “his” ideas and to accept self in his writing, Shen then began to start writing himself as consciously and forcefully as one could in his position. But as he states, “..writing as many “I’s” was only the beginning of the process of redefining myself.” He then began to formulate that in order to truly express himself in his composition, he needed to change how he saw the world and to step out of his Chinese “self” completely. To help this redefining along, it was a simple game of compare and contrast on paper the features of his Chinese writing self and the features associated with his new English writing identity. This helped to bring out best how Shen could shed the Chinese identity in his English composition.

The next step that Shen had to take to complete the transition was now to change his pattern of writing. In traditional Chinese, Shen tells us that the subject cannot be merely stated, but must be worked towards, slowly working around it until it can blossom. In contrast to this Chinese “beat around the bush” style, Shen noticed the pinnacle of the English “I” and how the subject, much like how he felt that the self is to be treated in English composition, is first and loud. Instead of gradually and systematically working towards the topic, he had to learn to put it first. Working with the topic sentence became his focus, and learning how to create a piece of writing around the topic, and more importantly about the topic, was what helped to separate his two identities. Shen then concludes his change on a note about the logic of his Chinese self and how it is very non-western to write in yijing, or rather, write in such a pictorial sense. Being determined to write as his English self, Shen abandoned the idea of writing in the Chinese pictorial logic and tried better to adapt the western verbal logic.

Shen ends describing his ability to maintain both identities, using a certain one depending on what language he is writing in. He simply sheds one and dons on another, this more than anything to help preserve both identities. His last note is hope for future students who must make this transition, all wrapped around a piece of advice he tries to give to teachers having to be there when this transition of cultural identities happens telling them to be patient.