Janan Chan陳臻, our guest blogger this week, lives in Shanghai. His poems are published in The Mitre (118, 122, 126, 128), yolk. (1.1), Soliloquies Anthology (25.2), Warm Milk (3), and the chapbook “Water Lines”. Janan’s poems explore themes such as identity, place and belonging (Chinatown, Montreal, pg. 62-63); feelings of mundanity and ephemerality (Cavity Sonnet, describing a cavity filling during the pandemic); and feelings of nostalgia and longing (On Track, pg. 15, Knowing Few People in Early Semesters, and 15.) Janan is a graduate of Concordia University in Montreal and Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec.

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In 2004, my mom and I left Hong Kong for Toronto. I was seven years old. Although I cannot recall this, she tells me I struggled in English class. My weekend Chinese lessons were no better. I could not see the use of the language, and the lessons reminded me of a community and identity I no longer wished to be a part of. In school, I refused Chinese dishes for lunch, preferring instead the white bread sandwiches that my classmates ate. Later, in high school, I would even try my best to distance myself from the Chinese international students. In university, I completed a BA Honours in English Lit. with a Minor in Creative Writing and Journalism, and an MA in English Lit. and Creative Writing.  These achievements and how I lived allowed me to insulate myself within an English-speaking identity.

This self-identification, however, was put into question when I applied for a position as an ESL teacher with a company pairing expatriate teachers with Shanghai universities. After a preliminary interview, I was asked to record a video of myself speaking a paragraph of English. I thought nothing of it. I was new to the job market and was happy for the opportunity. My mom and step-father, however, considered this video as an “accent test”. Despite my lifelong efforts to become my idealized English-speaking person, my last name, face and appearance could cause the university hiring committee to doubt my English teaching abilities.

During the initial training session, I delivered a mock lesson while my colleagues hyperbolized and roleplayed as misbehaving Chinese students. My Senior Teacher, who acted as my supervisor throughout the semester, later advised me that I was a “foreigner” now, within the Chinese context. I am and look Chinese, but growing up in Canada makes me “foreign” and this descriptor should give me the confidence to be a good teacher. I felt confused as to who I was. In Canada, I am always visibly an other, but I have dedicated time to being like the locals, and in many ways, I am. In China, I am visibly like the locals, but I lack the speaking, reading, writing and language skills of locals. I felt in all places unbelonging.

Sharing the advice of my Senior Teacher with my mother, she reminds me that a good teacher is not simply determined by their being born in or educated in a “foreign” country. There were certain knowledge or skill sets that could make for a better second- or foreign-language educator: pedagogical knowledge and practice, familiarity with students’ own linguistic and cultural backgrounds, understanding and empathizing with second language learners and their learning processes, awareness of sociocultural and sociopolitical aspects of language learning and teaching, and much more.

At first, I reminded myself of being “foreign” in order to gain confidence in the classroom, but I later began genuinely relating with my students. And in many ways, they taught me more about myself and our shared culture than I could have ever imagined.

For example, during a class on culture, one student elaborated that culture includes formative stories, folktales and myths which continue to be passed down and inform our everyday beliefs and traditions. Although I had taught this lesson eight times that week, and this would be my last, for some reason, hearing my student mention myths and folktales this time brought to me an involuntary flashback.

I was a young boy again. In the basement of a church or community center in Richmond Hill, a suburb of Toronto. Taking Chinese lessons. I am distracted and irreverent. But I see in my mind the story that my teacher is telling me. It is the myth behind the mid-autumn festival:

There were once ten suns which rose one by one. But one day they all rise together. Scorching the earth. An archer revered as a god, half-god or god-like, fires his arrows and knocks out of the sky nine of the ten suns. In one version, he is celebrated as a hero-king. But becomes tyrannical and corrupt. Someone offers him a drink of immortality. But his wife, not wanting the people to suffer his unending torment, drinks it herself and ascends to the sky to become a moon deity.

This image of an archer shooting down celestial bodies in the sky with bow and arrows was ingrained in my mind, quiet and unthought of. For years this image and story lay resting in my memory. Only in the context of this classroom, this discussion and this particular mention of myths, did this memory awaken for me, and in a way, I recovered a part of my identity and myself: the child unconcerned with appearances and what others thought.

In another instance, I was teaching at a university which my colleagues warned me about, saying that the students’ English levels were “subpar” and that they often misbehaved. In all my classes then, I introduced myself as Janan Chan. On my WeChat account however – a messaging, social media and payment platform that almost every person in China has – I name myself “Janan Chan 陳臻”, choosing to include the Chinese name that my parents gave me. It is a name that I am unfamiliar with, something that even my mother rarely calls me. Only when I go back to Hong Kong and I meet with my family whose primary language is Cantonese do I become 陳臻. Even my friends in Canada do not really know me by this name.

It was surprising then when a student called me 陳臻 during class. The way he said it, however, made me think he was not asking a question but trying to divert my attention. I was writing on the board in the middle of class when I heard two sounds which were ever so dearly familiar to me, associated with family and dinners together and a language that I rarely had the chance to practice. The student giggled to himself and those close to him who heard laughed a little bit too. I felt angry at first, undermined and false, as if my student had broken through my defenses and found the truth I had wanted to hide so deeply: I was not so different from them. I recovered, thinking that he likely wanted to become closer, to know me more, and for me to meet him at his level rather than me always asking him to meet me at mine.

I do not speak Mandarin, and my Cantonese is intermediate at best. I can read about a dozen simple characters and when I write I do it all incorrectly, drawing the words rather than writing them in the correct, assigned stroke order. Because I lack the language skill, perhaps this student calling me 陳臻 was a way for him to connect. And a way to remind me of who I am. At that moment, stupefied and caught off guard, I plainly replied, “Yes, that is my name.” And I’m beginning to reconcile with being Janan Chan 陳臻.