| Chapter 1: | Autobiographical Self |
After settling in Ottawa, I enrolled in a Canadian University’s ESL program in Ontario. I found myself, in this class, surrounded by people much younger than me from many different cultural backgrounds. In Japan, I was very confident about my English; however, when I moved to Canada, suddenly my confidence began to wane and I found myself having more and more difficulties writing. What I thought was good quality writing in Japan was not up to par here in Canada. That which is valued as good writing in Japan—ambiguity, passive sentence structures, and subject omission—is often frowned upon in Western-style essays. I would frequently, in an attempt to be ambiguous, scatter hints about the subject in my English essays, but my teachers would always mention that they were not able to fully grasp what I was referring to in several different contexts. This difference in approach to writing truly reflects the Western tendency to be direct and the Japanese style to be indirect—the language itself holds up the cultural ideology of the culture to which it belongs.
Like a bamboo tree
Willing to be flexible
The postmodern me
As a student at a Canadian University, I had many problems passing my courses. I molded myself to fit into the Western academic world a change from ambiguity to clarity. Many teachers said, “Clarify, articulate, spell it out…” I was paralyzed by a tsunami of words. I vividly remember going to a writing tutorial center and a young woman corrected my sentence, “I understand this” to “I fully understand this.” She said that this was an academic sentence and it did not matter whether you fully understood this or not. This was the way of passing courses, at least at the ESL level—the Western academic ideology that I had to accept at that time as an international student in order to survive. I felt like I was coerced to be more positive, aggressive, and assertive.
Using passive tense
Shows my concealed female voice
Feeling alien