Inhibitive and Attentive Silences
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P65-C4
2025-09-26
315
Inhibitive and Attentive Silences
After reading through a variety of different literatures on student silences, we found that Asian-American scholar King-Kok Cheung offered us new ways of understanding the silences that troubled students like Mina and Marilyn. In her book, Articulate Silences, Cheung proposes at least five differing, and often overlapping, modes or tonalities of silences.1 They are stoic, protective, attentive, inhibitive, and oppressive.
Attentive silence is a form of silence in which there is acute listening, empathy for others, and awareness of even the subtlest signs from a speaker. In essence, attentive silence is a quiet understanding. Such a mode of silence, argues Cheung, is empowering and thus the antithesis of passivity. Oppressive modes of silence include forms of racism that arise at the confluence of social policy and hatred. The infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923, which barred Chinese immigration to Canada until its repeal in 1947, is one example of oppressive silence.2 The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in the United States is another example. Stoic modalities of silence include the quiet forms of suffering exhibited by Chinese immigrants, such as the Issei, in Joy Kogawa's novel titled, Obasan ...3 Cheung asserts that this stoic silence is characterized not by weakness but rather by endurance and tremendous fortitude.
Cheung argues, however, that all modes of silence can fluctuate between being enabling and debilitating. For this reason, she warns against romanticizing or eroticizing silences. For instance, she notes that the desire among some Asian, North-American parents to shield their children from harsh histories of racism exercise a mode of silence that she calls protective. Cheung believes that although this variety of silence can certainly enable children when they are young, it can infantilize them through an enforced innocence as they get older. A fifth silence, inhibitive silence, can also be debilitating and is of particular relevance to this commentary.
The general silence of some of the Cantonese-speaking students in Mrs. Yee's class may have been attributable to their fears that their English pronunciation and Cantonese accent would be laughed at. This self-imposed or inhibitive silence is articulated by the words of Cathy Lee, a Hong Kong-born student in Mrs. Yee's English class, who was interviewed earlier. In the interview excerpt now presented, Cathy described why she believed many of the Cantonese-speaking students were silent:
They're embarrassing of the English. They can't speak. They scared that people will laugh at them, because I try that—I'm in that stage before—right? So I know how they think and how they feel.
[Interview, April 30, 1998]4
Alternatively, as Victor explained both in his aforementioned interview and in the Introduction, Cantonese-speaking students might be silent in class because speaking English and answering questions could be perceived by their peers as showing off. This form of silence resonates with Cheung's term, attentive silence, which is also inhibitive. Also of interest is the suggestion made by Barbara Ishii, the current principal at Northside, that some Asian students feel that there is no need to reiterate an opinion that has already been aired by another student. Here, the silence of Asian students would also be an attentive silence. Through their silence students would be demonstrating to their teacher that they had been listening to their class mates' opinions and had nothing new to add. Such attentive silence, however, traps students into a linguistic dilemma or double bind. They are caught in a "lose—-lose" situation. On one hand, they stand to lose grades and also risk the resentment of their non-Chinese and some Canadian-born Chinese classmates if they do not speak English, answer questions, and express their opinions in class. On the other hand, if they do use English with their Cantonese-speaking classmates in group work, answer the teacher's questions in front of other students, or reiterate an opinion that has already been offered, they stand to draw the negative reactions from their Hong Kong-born friends.
The negative reactions on the part of Hong Kong-born Chinese toward their English-speaking Chinese peers may in part relate to friendship formations that are staked in racial identity politics. For example, when we asked Charles, who is a Hong Kong-born Chinese student at Northside, about how his Cantonese-speaking friends would react if he spoke to them in English, he replied: "They'd think I'm Whitewashed."
[Interview, April 30, 1998]
Charles' association of English with being "Whitewashed" is similar to the association of English with being "too Canadianized," discussed in the Introduction. In our research at Northside, we found that Hong Kong-born, Chinese-Canadian youth sometimes referred to Chinese peers who did not speak Cantonese as "juk-sing" This was a pejorative term used by these youth to describe the Canadian-born Chinese. It literally means the empty spaces in bamboo that obstruct the flow of water. The term alludes to the manner in which Canadian-born, Chinese youth are considered to be stuck in a void; neither fully Chinese nor fully Canadian. This term is conceptually analogous to the label banana which is also used by Chinese people to refer to someone who is considered to be "yellow on the outside but White on the inside."5 It is possible that the attentive and inhibitive silences experienced by Victor were linked to identity politics and his desire to not be considered juk sing. Such a desire can also be linked to the ambivalence some Canadian students from Hong Kong feel about investing in English.
1 See Cheung (1993).
2 See Chan (1983) for further discussion of Chinese immigration to Canada.
3 See Kogawa (1981).
4 Related to our own discussion on inhibitive silence is Cristina Igoa's book, The Inner World of the Immigrant Child, where she outlines the psychological stages many immigrant children seem to go through as they integrate into North-American classrooms.
5 See Yang, Gan, and Hong (1997) and Yee (1993) for further discussion of the terms juk-sing and banana.
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