“What Did I Gain From Graduate Studies Abroad?”: An Autoethnographic Lens

Who Am I?

Born and raised in the city of Ningbo, a port city in East China, I gained access to different named languages at an early age. Because I was the only child in my family and because my parents did not receive full-time higher education themselves, they, especially my father, wanted to make sure that I can receive quality education which includes language education. Shortly after I was born, they decided to limit the use of their preferred language (i.e., the Ningbo Dialect) at home and tried to speak their less proficient standard Mandarin in front of me; they even hired a babysitter to teach me standard Mandarin in an attempt to guarantee that I can acquire the target mainstream language effectively. In a similar vein, after I reached the age of two, my parents purposefully chose a privately owned bilingual kindergarten for me to develop both Mandarin and English skills, which in their opinion might help me gain a competitive edge over my peers in terms of linguistic development.

Undoubtedly, I remain appreciative of my parents’ educational plans for me; however, their parenting style has indeed taken an unexpected toll on me. The kindergarten I attended was a boarding school, and I was only able to go home once a week to spend the weekend with my parents. This means that I had to spend most of my time living with unfamiliar staff members and peers at kindergarten. This early childhood separation from home has to a large extent forced me to accept the reality that I had to independently manage adversities in life and become a quick learner of linguistic and socio-cultural norms, thus taking good care of myself. In fact, this period of separation was just the beginning—living away from my parents was also a norm throughout my secondary and higher education. It would be safe to conclude that this life journey through independence has kept shaping me as a calm, practical, and strong-willed person.

Although I did not get to stay closely with my parents, their educational views and practices had a profound impact on me. As far as I can remember, my parents paid close if not excessive attention to my education, as if there was an arms race for me and also for them to win. My English tutoring experience at kindergarten was just one of the examples that showed my parents’ style of “tiger parenting”, similar to the style described in Chua (2011). From my Grade One onwards, I was often told to learn ‘to the best of my ability’ and to ‘not worry about things other than learning’ as long as I can stay physically healthy. As a young learner back then, I sometimes found their expectations difficult-to-meet and felt that the high-stakes learning and test preparation processes would never come to an end. Needless to say, that heavy pressure was real for a sustained period of time and reached its peak during my secondary education where I was forbidden from writing a Chinese fantasy novel in my leisure time or having a romantic relationship-my parents regarded these as distractions to my preparation for the National College Entrance Examination or Gaokao. Even after I started university, my parents kept discouraging me from novel writing as they considered my hobby unable to guarantee my future career success. Equally noteworthy, my parents strongly encouraged me to pursue hobbies that might contribute to my academic performance at school. For example, when I was an elementary-school student, my father required me to recite articles from the New Concept English book series on a weekly or biweekly basis. This requirement in his view must have boosted my level of English language proficiency, but to me this practice had led to my reduced willingness to learn English because of the tedious memorization processes and these articles’ personally irrelevant content. All these examples reinforced my resistance toward authoritative styles of education and became part of the reasons why I appreciated my studies abroad.