The literacy event analyzed here was one of the tutoring sessions I had with a Korean social work student, Hyuna. This event took place at the Writing Center in Thaw Hall. The stairs and corridors leading to the Center were like a maze as they connected Thaw Hall with the Old Engineering Building; students often got lost on their way to tutoring. Although the Writing Center was not located at an accessible spot, it was according to some seasoned writing consultants, much better than its previous location—an inconspicuous, tiny and suffocating room in the Cathedral of Learning. It seemed that the university did not think much of the riting Center. The current Writing Center, with big glass windows and photographs on the walls, was cozy but not shabby. The front desk was located in the middle of the room, with the cubicle of the Directors’ behind. There were six set of tables and chairs on the right, and four long tables on the left arranged in a square. The book shelf was stocked with manuals, academic journals, and writing sourcebooks, while the receptionist’s drawer stored a well-kept folder with handouts and exercises pertaining to different kinds of sentence-level issues.

The Writing Center had an eclectic staff body: faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduates. On 16 October, I went in in the morning, greeted the receptionist Sandy, chatted with some fellow peer tutors and a faculty member who just came in, and then I proceeded to check the online appointment schedule. I was excited to find out that Hyuna was my first client of the day. I had had several tutoring sessions with Hyuna before; most of the time we worked on the weekly reflection papers she wrote for a class. The topics were mainly about sexuality and ethnicity. A few minutes later, Hyuna came in. She was greeted by Sandy, who at the same time handed her a pink sheet of paper—the tutor evaluation form. Every time Hyuna would just circle “Satisfactory” for all items without reading the form. While Hyuna used the computer to print out her paper, Sandy walked towards my desk and informed me that my 10AM appointment was here. Sandy was in her late 50s and had been working at the Writing Center for decades. Not only was she responsible for keeping track of the tutees and consultants, she was also the Main Administrator of the newly launched online appointment system. At the end of the semester, Sandy would also type up all the tutor evaluation forms and report the results to all the consultants and the Directors; those forms were our report cards. On a light day with few tutees, we would go up to the front desk to talk to Sandy. Her presence made the Writing Center seemed almost like a home.

Soon after Hyuna gathered her printouts and her backpack, she smiled and sat right next to me. As usual, I asked, “so what are we working on today?” Hyuna explained that she was asked to reflect on her experience of racial discrimination. Pen in hand, I began reading out loud Hyuna’s paper. Instead of recounting an explicit instance of racial discrimination, Hyuna argued in her writing that most Korean women were discriminated against and were dominated by the Western culture. The spread of “American White culture” altered the perception of beauty in the Korean society; as a result, a lot of Korean women underwent plastic surgery so that they could have more Western physical features. Hyuna even went as far to argue that, “it is necessary for the women to undergo plastic surgery to gain self-esteem.” I was taken aback by that sentence, but when I raised my concern, Hyuna insisted that she was telling the “truth.” If it was in a classroom context, I would without a doubt challenge this statement with all the sound arguments I could think of. However, my identity as a writing tutor prevented me from doing that. As a tutor, I was supposed to engage in a collaborative project with Hyuna: we are working towards a common goal so there was no point for me to be antagonistic. I suggested to her some possible modifications we could make to that sentence, but ultimately it was her call whether she wanted to make the change or not. I believed that some tutors, in a similar situation where the she was unconvinced by the tutee’s argument or her use of language, might authoritatively “suggest” the tutee to change the sentence. Usually, the tutees, particularly if they were ESL students, would comply. It was the implicit rule that they should follow the advice of the writing consultant. This is mainly because tutors were associated with the academy, that is, the authority that set the standards for academic writing. I, however, tended to let my tutees express their thoughts with very little intervention. In “Postcolonialism and the Idea of a Writing Center,” Bawarshi and Pelkowski argue that the tutors should not act as a proxy of the authority to modify some of the ideas of the students in order for them to fit into the academy; otherwise, academic discourse would one day, if not already, become homogenous. For a non-traditional student like Hyuna, I believed that it was my responsibility as a tutor to help her articulate her cultural related ideas, not to modify them.

I went on reading Hyuna’s paper, asking for clarifications and marking minor grammatical mistakes. Hyuna arrived in the U.S. only a few months ago, so she was not familiar with the English syntax yet. Often, she would write in long run-on sentences with unclear pronouns and very little punctuation. I would ask her to verbally tell me what she meant before I started revising her sentences. Most of the time, Hyuna was able to eloquently tell me what she wanted to convey, but she felt challenged when she attempted to put those thoughts into written words. She had the academic literacy to interpret her reading materials and to analyze her experience in a theoretical framework; however, she lacked the literacy to turn those complex ideas into writing. Colloquial expressions, prepositional phrases, and phrasal verbs were particularly challenging for Hyuna who lacked knowledge of the pragmatics of English. Although I was trained to adopt what Jeff Brooks termed as “minimalist tutoring” to avoid helping the student fix mistakes, I could hardly follow this hands-off approach when I was in Hyuna and other ESL students. As a tutoring session was supposed to be contextual and individualized, I took the liberty to tweak the “rule”: I directively revised some of Hyuna’s sentences for her if they failed to convey a clear message. At the same time, I explained to Hyuna why I made those modifications, and she immediately jotted down the composition conventions I just explained—she was acquiring literacy in the semantics of English. However, even though I always made my best effort to grasp Hyuna’s idea, on one instance I misinterpreted her, and wrote down a sentence that failed to capture her argument. She did not say anything, but I could tell from her perplexed facial expression that the sentence I wrote was not what she wanted. Hyuna, like a lot of ESL students from Asian countries, avoided posing questions which they thought would challenge the tutor’s authority. Their cultural experience had prevented them from actively voicing out their concerns and doubts. It therefore required a form of literacy on my part to interpret her gestures, tones, and facial expressions. At the beginning when I first started tutoring Hyuna, she would apologize profusely whenever I said I was sorry that I had misunderstood her. Now that our relationship was stronger, she became less apologetic and we could collaborate on a more equal footing.

Out of curiosity, I asked Hyuna why she kept scheduling appointments with me and even introduced me to her fellow Korean classmates. “You are really good at guessing what I mean, and are so efficient in giving me what I want,” she said with a grin. I did not realize my literacy on Asian culture had helped me decode Hyuna’s writing. However, my familiarity with a different culture used to be my source of insecurity when I first started tutoring: I was familiar with my tutee’s Asian writing style because I was an ESL student myself, and the only international student in the Writing Center’s staff body. I was not a native speaker and even though I could give professional writing advice, my Cantonese accent continued to linger; what exactly gave me the authority to be a writing tutor?

Although earlier I explicitly criticized the homogenization of academic discourse because of the power imbalance between the academy and student writers, I had to admit that my authority stemmed from the university. In other words, my academic literacy gave me the authority to be a writing tutor because I had already internalized what the academy’s expectation and standard of writing. My identity as both an international student and a writing tutor therefore presented me with a dilemma: I could either encourage diversity by subtly (I dared not do it openly) defy certain academic writing conventions, or I could be the gatekeeper of the authority by rigidly correcting my tutees’ writing so that they fit into the mold of the academy. The decision was hard to make because its consequences would affect my tutees. If I made the decision to maintain the cultural element of Hyuna’s writing by not revising her word choice to make it fit better into the American academic discourse, her instructor might think that she was a poor writer or maybe a bad student even. Academic literacy, in this sense, seemed to be a perpetuation of the university’s authority and the negligence of the diverse writing styles that came from various cultures. To thrive in this habitat, we must learn to use language according to its conventions. Maybe, after all, I did not really have a dilemma, because in reality I had no choice.

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       When I was three, my daily outings with my mother were nothing less than a language lesson: carrying me in her arms, my mother would point to any posters and billboards she saw on the street and sounded out those words for me.  Every day, we had to go through a long escalator in the subway station with eye-catching advertisements on both sides—that very station was my first classroom.    I do not know how significant this memory is in my experience of literacy acquisition, but I do know that when I entered kindergarten, I immediately developed a liking towards books.  My mother would read the story out loud, while I gazed at the colorful pictures in the books.  She would point to the words one by one as she read, and complement the stories with her own elaborations.  However, my mother had a strange habit: she always set the book aside when the story reached its climax.  Anxious to find out what will happen next, I started picking up the book and reading it by myself.  Since then, I developed an insatiable appetite for Chinese books. 

            Acquiring literacy in English was nothing less than a torture for me.  Because I grew up in a city where the majority of texts were written in Chinese, I had little opportunity to familiarize myself with the semantics of English.  The pragmatics of the language was also foreign to me because as an elementary school student, I interacted with only people who grew up in Hong Kong.  Reading and writing in English was immensely frustrating for me.  I was able to grapple with complex ideas but I lacked the vocabularies to articulate my thoughts; I could only understand simple English, but books at that language level were not at all engaging to me.  My mother would take me to the library but I was always drawn towards the Chinese books because the English books there were all dull and dense.  Growing up in colonial Hong Kong, my mother saw literacy and proficiency in English as the way to success; therefore she began to worry when I was in third grade and still abhorred the language. 

            Before finding a way to enhance my interest in English, my mother first had to deal with my school work, which entailed a weekly dictation of English passages and vocabularies.  She gathered teaching materials, and gave me lessons on phonics, grammar, part of speech, and morphology every morning before I went to school.  By observing the patterns, memorizing generalized rules, and doing a lot of practice questions, I did exceptionally well on spelling and I was able to construct grammatically correct sentences.  However, these extra lessons inevitably increased the tension between my mother and me.  I remembered whenever she started pulling out the exercise books, I would begin to fidget in my seat.  “So, in this sentence, which are the noun, verb, and the adjective?” My mom would ask.  I could always get the answers right but these questions bored me out of my mind. 

            I could identify different parts of speech but I could not finish reading an English children’s book.  My mother then enrolled me into summer classes organized by the British Council.  “I wanted you to interact more with white people; then at least you wouldn’t be scared of using English in daily life,” my mother later recounted.  The concept of learning from the white people sounds colonial to me now but nonetheless that experience did enhance my interest in acquiring a higher level of literacy in English.  After taking me to the British Council several times, my mother discovered the library there which stocked English books of different language levels (the British Council divided books into Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced based on the number of words and the difficulties of vocabularies).  She checked out a variety of genres and began reading them to me; I was particularly interested in ghost stories.  My mother then began reading stories word by word without any explanation on the meaning, but she made sure that she pronounced every word clearly and correctly.  At first, I was very frustrated because even though Edgar Allan Poe’s abridged mystery tales seemed fascinating, I was clueless in decoding his writing.  My mother was persistent in borrowing and reading books to me though, and gradually I was able to finish a short story book by myself. 

            Writing in English, however, was another struggle.  Although I was familiar with the modern English structure and with the prescriptive grammar, I could not use the language to articulate myself.  At elementary school, we were required to compose short pieces of writing for Chinese class but for English class, all we needed to do was to construct a few simple sentences.  My mother’s perseverance again emerged: she encouraged and urged me to compose in English.  At first, I was enthusiastic about that idea because I thought this would be a chance for me to become a famous writer.  I took out my notepad and began writing short stories about a princess who was married to be pauper, and about witches who burned down the whole forest.  While I was writing, I would constantly look into my electronic dictionary for a Chinese to English translation and for synonyms which I could use to show off my English skills.  My passion for writing in English, however, was crushed by my mother.  She started lecturing me on grammar rules before she finished the first sentence of my draft; my mother was so meticulous about sentence-level issues that she thought the mechanics could trump the meaning of the text.  I was discouraged and I stopped writing for a while.  But the urge was hard to resist; I began writing in English again without letting my mother know. 

            These memories about acquiring literacy are very distant to me now and I have long been communicating in English as if it is my native language.  I begin to forget the terminology of grammar and sentence structure but at least, I can appropriately glean information and convey ideas in the language. 

I have left three places already--Pittsburgh, Karagwe, and London; and now, the fourth one, Hong Kong.  Coming and going has never been easy when there are culture shocsk (and reverse-culture shocks), coupled with the intricate human relationships.  Hong Kong, so far, has always been the most ambivalent place for me. 

I revisited my home three times after going to the US and had always been scrutinizing it and its people (I may or may not include myself) since then.  This time I was less judgmental, but I still criticized a great deal: the people were calculating and inconsiderate, there were only luxurious shopping malls but no space for recreation, there was open racial discrimination but no very few people paid attention because they didn't even notice that they were being racist.  For the first few weeks, I kept questioning myself why I couldn't be more tolerant towards the culture in Hong Kong; I asked myself why I could accept and be willing to comply (at least while I was in the country) to the social practice in Tanzania but denounced so vehemently the culture I grew up in and the people I grew up with.  I was being motherly towards Hong Kong--daughter, you disappointed me because I knew you could do better.  Maybe I was assuming that my vision was more insightful; maybe I was having too many presumptions about what was good and what was bad for Hong Kong and the people here.  But after all, I could not deny that I was judgmental and captious because I care about my home. 

But then, the sense of futility struck me: could I alone make a change here?  Is my idea of a change really beneficial to the Hong Kongese?  I was ambivalent and sometimes I wanted to leave but I also wanted a home. 

My experience in Tanzania gave me a even graver sense of futility.  People in Karagwe welcomed us, embraced us into their community and helped us with our research, but when they asked us for help, we could only answered, "sorry, we can't help; we are only students."  I arranged two sharing sessions at the Rotary Clubs here; I might have interested many, impressed some, or I might just have reinforced the stereotypes they held about developing countries in Africa.  After the first presentation, one Rotarian asked me, "how could you stand their smell over there?  I once had several classmates from Mozambique; we never sat close to them because their body odor was horrible."  Later, another member said she was very impressed, she said, "it was really kind of you to go there and visit those poor people; not a lot of people like going to those places."  As if I was superior to all the local individuals, as if one single visit could mitigate all the effects of AIDS and poverty. 

But somehow I still felt that I had accomplished something: after the second presentation, some Rotarians proposed a plan of donating food to Karagwe; some asked for the contacts of the Rotary Club there.  Imperialist rhetoric aside, the wealthy and influential people in Hong Kong still possess the resource to assist Karagwe. 

I think I can go back to Pittsburgh now; I have done what I intended to, and most importantly, I have developed and reestablished valuable relationships here.  I am particularly glad that I have spent much time with two of my best friends.  The three of us are all studying abroad now and the geographical distance somehow draws us closer; we know how it feels to be at the margin in both societies.  We are eclectic, confused, and driven.  Sometimes it seems like we are undergoing a slow metamorphorsis; we wonder what we will become ten years, no, may three years from now.