#4 The Discourse of Home: A Reaction to Min-Zhan Lu

In Min-Zhan Lu’s text “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle,” Lu describes her experiences growing up in China in a family that spoke predominantly English at home. From an early age, she was taught by her family that English was what made her father successful. She therefore began to equate her ability to speak English with her status as a member of a higher class of society. This ability to speak English set her apart from her peers, and Lu reflects on her experience speaking English with her teacher in her second grade classroom in saying, “I began to take pride in my ability to speak it” (Lu 438). At first, her experience with English was a positive one because it made her feel intelligent. However, when the 1949 Communist Revolution took hold of China, Lu became increasingly aware of how her status negatively impacted how others viewed her. It was then that English became a shameful, secret experience for her.

She then felt that her identity was something she had to hide. She constantly became aware of what she was writing and how she was writing it, censoring herself at every step of the process, and in doing so, losing her own voice. She has turned her own experience into a lens with which she should approach her own work as an educator. Even still, she sees the way in which the pressures she felt at the time manifest themselves into problems her students face. She recounts her experience, saying, “I am especially concerned with the way some composition classes focus on turning the classroom into a monological scene for the students’ reading and writing” (Lu 447). She feels that in instructing students to think in one way, it limits their ability to think for themselves and to generate new thoughts. In this way, they are cut off and removed from themselves. This type of learning leaves no room for self-expression and no room for originality or voice. They become one of a hive mind.

In my own educational experience, I cannot say that I have ever experienced anything to the degree that Lu has. Growing up a white girl in an upper-middle class suburban area (which was also predominantly white) afforded me many more privileges and freedoms with my language than some have. I am also fortunate enough to have grown up in a family where questions and free-thinking were always encouraged. It was seldom that my brother and I were ever told what to do without room for explanation. There was always, at least to a certain extent, an open dialogue that occurred between my parents and me. That being said, there were still certain environments in which I felt that my voice was not valued, that this idea of creative, free thinking was the sign of something incorrect or morally wrong. Surprisingly, it was often in the areas where I believed I could be the most creative that I felt the most constrained. In my art class in elementary school, I was told not to include certain images in my drawing because they were not conventionally attractive. I was instead to model my art after what the teacher had shown us. In poetry classes I was told that I must stick to a form, and when my words did not align themselves with those conventions, I was told to rework them. In argumentative essays, I was told not to use personal pronouns or biased language. Most recently, I took up writing a blog for Her Campus, a space in which I felt I would be able to express my opinions and my personal feelings towards the music I was writing about, but I was told that I had to maintain the voice of the chapter. None of these conventions are inherently wrong, and I understand the reason for their being there, but it has made me come to wonder what we see so non-credible about the personal voice.

Lu, Min-Zhan. “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle.” JStor, 1987.