An opinion piece appeared in both Sydney Morning Herald and the Age on 27th August revealing her frustration about the assistance that she has to provide to Chinese international students during the group work. While Laurie raises some valid concerns including the lack of institutional support for international students have been expressed, as someone who has lived through the experience of being a postgraduate Chinese international student in the exact field that Laurie is studying, I see her story as wrongheaded.
Many of us would know what it is like to be a student who has shared a classroom with a student like Meshel Laurie. I have faced them my whole career as an international student in Australia. Bullying is common. Trashing international students seems to be in vogue. This sentiment has brought many to represent Chinese international students as inattentive and incompetent only by measuring our English proficiency. A lot of this happens in online spaces and public forums, plain for us to see.
When I see myself and my peers represented in this way, I want to say: “excuse me, are we now back in the 19th century with Chinese people being represented as ‘inferior’ to the Europeans or somehow perversely corrupting a white society”? But I don’t. People like Ms. Laurie talk up some aspects of multicultural (trans-cultural or inter-cultural) communication while bracketing away others and in doing so relegating to the bullshit parlance of “I’m not racist but …” . As demonstrated in her article, it is the most meagre, insufficient and half-hearted idea of trying to bridge a cultural divide. I wonder, how quickly Ms. Laurie waited before she had started to think about ‘how good will this be for my comedy and podcast show?’
Ms Laurie, you talk mostly about how frustrated you were in the past five weeks for having to help Chinese international students in class catch up with the course instructions. Harsh words like “overloaded” “burden” “racial divide” and “barely-beyond-teenage” have been lined up in your article. Have you perhaps considered if the problem is on you, a white English-speaker living in Australia, taking much for granted, mistaking it for superiority of moral high ground and viewing your privilege as natural and invisible? At the same time, you are criticising that people who are different from you in a public forum. Is this really a ‘problem’ with the class that holds you back? I doubt it. Your line-cutting angers me. While expressing your frustration with a furious tone in your article (and email to your instructor, a professional educator who I’m sure is well versed in matters pertaining to classroom dynamics beyond your mere five weeks), please pause for a second to think about how opinions of this kind can further alienate Chinese international students, reinforcing the view that international students pose risks and threats on Australian universities.
Your next issue then goes to show what is really in your heart. You talk about racial exclusion under the guise of language proficiency. Admittedly, for students like us whose first language is not English, proficiency in English plays a crucial role in completing our studies in an English-speaking learning environment. However, the overstatement of English language proficiency to non-English speakers means that you, as an English speaker who unconsciously consider your privilege as normative and normal — meaning, the classroom should privilege you and the daily privileges that you receive never register as special. This has exposed your hypocrisy. Yes, you did indeed mention that you are a committed multiculturalist but why you are unable to accept differences and diversities in your classroom? As a Chinese international student, I have faith in my teachers and I believe English proficiency is not the only measurement for our academic performance and our academic achievement shouldn’t be undermined by our capacity of English-speaking. So please do not stereotype students from Asian and non-English backgrounds as passive or rote learners because that is discriminative, disrespectful and racist.
You go on and complain about how you are drained by having to help make the class content accessible to your Chinese peers. Isn’t this also what they call ‘whitexplanation’? I think I can possibly imagine what your class is like — it’s probably your young Chinese friends are not in control of the conversation and the conversation is not showing them in a good light because you are an English speaker and you believe what you have understood is all right. You may say it is for their own good by helping them understand the course but how many times have you started off the conversation with “what do you think?” “how do you find” “would you like to tell us about your thoughts or experience” or “how are you going to approach that?”. Do you think you will be able to learn something from intercultural encountering and respect your peer Chinese friends while refusing to listen deeply to what Chinese international students think? In an intercultural classroom setting, I believe we learn from cultural exchange instead of acculturation. Come on, be a conversation facilitator not a dominator if you truly want to help!
Let’s be honest. As a white student in the classroom, you are not looking for more helpful conversation or deep class engagement, you are looking for your life to be left undisturbed. When you complain about the division in the classroom, you are ignoring international students are also feeling being isolated from the local Australian classmates; when you are exhausted by explaining the course to the students, your peer classmates are experiencing an even higher level of stress from the course and the greater pressure from families to succeed. However, you are already successful in your chosen career.
This article wouldn’t be possible without help and encouragement from my friends.
