Culturally Contested Pedagogy: Battles of Literacy and Schooling between Mainstream Teachers and Asian Immigrant Parents

2. The City, the School, and the Families

CHAPTER TWO The City, the School, and the Families The City: Richmond The city in which this study was carried out is called Richmond. It is in the lower mainland of Vancouver, British Columbia. Before 1980, it was a quiet farming and fishing community. It is now a significant suburb of the Greater Vancouver area. The high influx of Asian immigrants since 1980, particularly from Hong Kong and Mainland China since 1997, has significantly changed the demographics of the city. Statistics Canada 2001 Census reports that 101,765 Chinese immigrants came to settle in Greater Vancouver, an increase of more than 42% since 1991. According to the 2001 Census, more than half of them (65,325) chose to settle in Richmond. This number comprises more than one third of the total Richmond population (164,345). After 1997, with the rapid economic growth and more opening up of Mainland China, the number of Mandarin-speaking Chinese was also increasing in Richmond. Since 1998, Mainland China has become a leading source of British Columbia immigrants, representing 16% of the total landing in British Columbia and 11% in Canada (British Columbia STATS, 2001). It is said that Richmond became attractive to Chinese immigrants because of its good “feng shui” (geomantic omen): a map of lower mainland Vancouver looks almost like a dragon’s head, and Richmond’s location occupies the coveted position in the dragon’s mouth. The drastically changing demographics have had a significant impact on the sociolinguistic, sociocultural, and socioeconomic face of Greater Vancouver, especially in Richmond. The 2001 census results already show that nearly half (46.8%) of the total population in British Columbia speak Chinese as their first language. Chinese has become 39 English Canada’s second language—it has replaced French as the second most common language spoken in homes outside Quebec (Klotz, 1999). Richmond, nicknamed Vancouver’s Hong Kong, is unique in its own linguistic representation: the street and business signs are in Chinese and English. In Chinese shopping malls and businesses such as karaoke bars, many signs are monolingual Chinese and very few non-Chinese customers are spotted. The influx of Chinese immigrants has also changed the economic sector of Vancouver. It was largely the money of the Hong Kong immigrants that helped the province of British Columbia begin an economic recovery while the rest of Canada continued to languish in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Gibbon, 1999). The investment of these new Chinese immigrants has caused the prices of the real estate market to skyrocket. The new Chinese immigrants built many large Chinese shopping malls and businesses as well as mansions that nonAsians call “monster houses.” In addition, they penetrated into the city’s high-paying white-collar job market. For example, in 1996, more Chinese Vancouverites went into finance, insurance, and real estate (13,585 versus 10,740 Canadians), and more Chinese Vancouverites had a bachelor’s degree or higher than Canadians (46,105 versus 35,375) (Gibbon, 1999). The children and their families who are the focus of this study were part of these changes. Along with the changing economic structure of the city, new racial tensions surfaced (P. S. Li, 1997, 1998). Many local non-Asian residents had been forced to move out of the city due to the socioeconomic changes. These new immigrants were not the stereotypical “railway Chinese,” who settled in the ghetto of Chinatown known to many Canadians (K. J. Anderson, 1991; P. S. Li, 1997, 1998). They were relatively well-to-do middle- to upper-middle-class citizens from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China, who settled in the suburbs and drove BMWs and Mercedes. Their presence had changed the status quo of the non-Asians in their communities: “In Vancouver, local residents who had considered themselves well off suddenly realized that with the arrival of the newly rich Hong Kong immigrants, and the sky high real estate prices they triggered, their own economic standing had dropped to middle class. ‘Immigration is OK when someone comes over to work as a domestic or in a laundry because the local people can feel superior to them,’ said Jack Austin, a senator for British Columbia. ‘But it’s pretty hard to feel superior to someone in a Mercedes’” (DePalma, 1997, p. 3). 40 Culturally Contested Pedagogy In Richmond, Chinese-only signs in some shopping malls and the availability of Chinese books in the libraries have evoked several...