A new face of homelessness? Researching the experience of “home” with Chinese high school students in Canadian homes

Introduction

In my professional social work practice, I help Chinese high school students in Canada who encounter psychological distress in dealing with the loss of home. Working with these students as a counselor, I have had the privilege of listening to their silenced stories. I am troubled by their distress as I also feel their loss of home vicariously. Sometimes I feel helpless when I’m unable to help them and they stare back at me as though they were looking at a complete stranger. Often I feel like a complete stranger to their loss of home even when I have heard their stories of distress over and over again. Often this is because I have buried my own homelessness so deep that I cannot connect to their loss. However, I strive to understand the deeper layers of their distress because I genuinely want my help to be effective and beneficial to them. This striving to enhance my understanding is also the genuine desire that brought me to the doctoral program. For my dissertation research, I want to conduct a qualitative research to explore the lived experiences of home among these students. What does home mean to them? How do they experience home? What is it like to experience the loss of home?

It is clear to me that my motivation and drive to pursue a doctoral study derives from my own passion and professional social work practice with Chinese high school international students in Canadian homes. However, this epistemology course prompts me to reflect deeper and think more critically about my research. I find affirmation in seasoned researchers who document that their research interests are influenced by their own life experiences, including both positive and negative emotions (Gunaratnam and Lewis, 2001). I wonder like them if, at the base of my longing to understand the experience of homelessness in these students, there is also my need to understand myself and my own feelings of homelessness (Gunaratnam, 2003). These works invite me to look deep inside myself, not only for the conscious and rational aspects of my research interest but also the unconscious and irrational knowledge that I have interiorized over the years. So I’m prompted to ask: What embodied knowledge do I bring to the research process? How does this knowledge influence my relationship with the research inquiry, the research participants and the further knowledge that I will produce? If I don’t interrogate all of these, I may do more harm than good and my research may not be transparent or ethical (Ahmed, 2000; Myerhoff and Ruby, 1982; Scott, 1992).

In the process of supporting the Chinese high school international students to cope with loss of home, I was also experiencing a tight connection with them emotionally (Gunaratnam and Lewis, 2001). I too was experiencing their sense of loss. As a Chinese immigrant, I have always felt a sense of homelessness in Canada. Listening to the stories of these students evokes that deep sense of loss in me. Edward Said (1978) speaks to me deeply when he talks about how diasporic people experience a generalized sense of homelessness. Reflecting on my social work practice with these students, a new face of homelessness haunts me. They are the invisible new homeless members in our community. It is an increasing homeless population whose stories are unheard or neglected. Yes, comparatively, they seem financially secured regarding daily living, and they are not in the streets, as they have a “home” under the roofs of Canadian houses. Please believe me, I am not minimizing the severe experiences of homelessness. I am acutely aware of that. No one articulates that sense of street involved homelessness better than Samira Kawash (1998). Kawash helps me understand the depth and intensity of the suffering involved in that face of homelessness. I believe that the Chinese high school international students experience a new sense of homelessness that lies somewhere between Said’s globality and Kawash’s sense of severe homelessness.

In this article, I reflect on the professional and lived experiences of homelessness that I bring into my qualitative research with Chinese high school international students. I see it as a new face of homelessness far beyond the nationality of a country or the roof of a house. It is a homelessness rooted deep in the hearts and embedded deep in the minds. I will organize my reflexive journey into three themes: Why do they come? Peeling the banana and Way-finding. From the lens of decolonization, I engage in a dialogue of homelessness that both I and the students have sensed. I use the metaphor of the navigator to represent my social work education and practice. I use peeling the banana as a metaphor to represent my struggle to decolonize my internalized whiteness. I use way-finding to represent my search for home and my qualitative social work research methodology.

Why do they come?

I am a bilingual social worker owning a private practice. It is in this capacity that I assist high school international students, mostly from Mainland China, who are referred to me by their schools. Most of these students come through the home-stay care model—an arrangement where unaccompanied high-school-aged Chinese adolescents live with unrelated home-stay Canadian host families while pursuing their education in Canadian high schools. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement based on business transaction model where the students pay an established fee and the home-stay families provide home and basic necessities of life as well as guardianship and supportive inter-personal interaction to help the students with linguistic and cultural integration (Erlenawati et al., 2008). However, modeled on business transactions, the home-stay care arrangement often fails to meet the students’ social, cultural, emotional and psychological needs. Conflict is common between international students and their host families, especially in the early periods of culture shock. Most of the students referred to me come with intense emotional and psychological suffering, homesickness, loneliness and alienation.

When international students are placed with Canadian host families, they are supposed to be treated as family members and intimate family relationship is expected. However, interaction between host families and students is often constrained because of language barriers and racial and cultural differences. Students feel ignored, rejected or excluded, which often leads to intense negative feelings of loneliness, anxiety, depression, loss and grief (Baumeister and Leary, 1995; Osterman, 2001). When conflict occurs between students and host parents, likely both parties withdraw from interaction, leading to communication breakdown. When the need for belonging is not satisfied, the resulting emotional, social and cultural loneliness very directly leads to impoverished life (Erlenawati et al., 2008; Weiss, 1973). Necessary human relationship includes family relationships, social networks and same-culture networks (Erlenawati et al., 2008; Weiss, 1973). That means, if there is a breakdown in family relationships students could draw on their social networks and create stronger bonds with their peers and teachers at school. However, international students find it challenging to build friendships with local students and bond with their teachers because of language barriers, racial discrimination and white privilege entrenched in educational settings (Lee et al., 2006; Yeh and Inose, 2003). When family relationships and social networks fail, international students are left only with same-culture networks. With the coldness and boredom at host homes and schools, these students spend less and less time there. Noticeably, Chinese restaurants become their gathering places where they seek solace in cultural and social connections and emotional comfort.

As I sit with these students in my practice, I wonder why they come to Canada. As I witness their distress and anguish, I can’t help but keep asking myself why do they come? If this experience is so full of pain, why do they invest amounts to go through this suffering? Every year, I see increasing number of distressed Chinese students. Why do these students keep coming? And why do their parents keep sending them? What makes them invest all this money on putting their children through Western education as early in their lives as possible? They have excellent schools in China. These children have a beautiful country, beautiful culture, beautiful people and beautiful homes. Why is Chinese education not as valued as Western education? Why is English preferred to Chinese languages? Why do these children leave behind all this and travel to a foreign land where they suffer discrimination, isolation and alienation?

Of course there are many reasons! Western education is viewed as the cornerstone of building up a successful life and financial investment in their children’s international education is often a top priority for many Chinese families (Xiaoying and Abbott, 2006). Based on the value their parents place on Western education, Chinese students typically believe that it will help them to achieve high social status, wealth and respect. At the personal level, international students may seek a chance to develop new outlooks, increase their self-esteem and confidence and mature as result of their independent life experience in another culture (Mark et al., 2010). Often they seek to learn a different language and culture, to learn new ways of thinking and behaving, to make new friends and improve their cross-cultural knowledge and skills (Andrade, 2006; McClure, 2007). However, I keep asking myself: Are these good enough reasons to go through all this suffering? Does this justify the painful experience of this emerging homelessness? Is it worth all the financial and emotional investment?

These questions continued to bother me as long as I was pointing to the Chinese students and asking why they come to Canada. But what about me? Why did I come to Canada in the first place? Why did I leave my relatives, my friends, my career and my homeland? Why do I learn English so hard and put so much effort on my Canadian education? Time to point that finger to myself.

Peeling the banana

In a dark and windy night 13 years ago, I landed at Pearson International Airport, Toronto, Canada. I was full of excitement about coming to a new home in a new country. Like many Chinese international students’ parents, I believe my children will have a better education and a brighter future here in Canada than if they stayed in China. I believe that this is worth leaving my well-established life in China. This belief sustains me in my resettlement process, no matter what obstacles I face in my journey towards becoming a “Banana,” which many Chinese still work hard to achieve.

Banana is a common metaphor referring to Chinese-Canadians who physically appear Chinese with especially identified visible skin color but hold inside Canadian values and legal status such as citizenship or permanent residence. Before my epistemology course, I had no bad feelings about being called “Banana.” When I took my two children back to China to visit my relatives and friends, people made jokes and called us “Bananas.” I perceived this as a compliment because there is a general belief that becoming a Chinese-Canadian is a pivotal achievement towards a better life. I was one of many. My children speak limited Chinese but they are fluent in both English and French. They are praised by my friends in China. Speaking English represents higher social status. Chinese as a mother tongue is overlooked in their education. However, the epistemology course challenged my assumptions and ways of thinking. Now being called a “Banana” feels uncomfortable. This unsettlement has ignited in me a strong desire of peeling away this “Banana” and exposing the whiteness, although this may be messy and painful. This desire has also pushed me to pay more attention to my children’s Chinese study.

Through my personal interaction with many Chinese-Canadian families, I know it is common for Chinese parents and their children to fight over learning and speaking Chinese at home here in Canada. This is also an ongoing tension in my conversations with my children almost on a daily basis. One day, I was irritated by my children talking with each other in English the whole day, and I demanded that they speak Chinese at home. They put on a funny facial expression and shouted, “Mom, we are Bananas! We speak English and French!” I replied with an angry tone, “I’d rather you were Oranges!” My children knew what I meant by being an orange. An orange is orange both inside and outside, unlike a banana’s white inside and yellow outside. I want them to be orange means that I want them to keep their Chinese identity and feel proud of it. In response to my outrage, my son looked at me seriously and asked, “Mom, if you want us to be oranges, why did you come to Canada? Why did you bring us here?” I was shocked and speechless. It took the innocence of a child’s question to expose the power of my hidden internalized whiteness. I can’t escape from this questioning. Why am I here? Nobody forced me. I applied as an independent skilled immigrant and went through a rigorous immigration process to come.

Underlying my motivations and desires to come to Canada and build a better future for my children is the centrality of whiteness and the supremacy of white values. Whiteness has ridden the whirlwinds of colonialism and neocolonialism to travel around the world, including the half-colonized China. It has been historically constructed as the standard of success, intelligence, credibility and happiness. As Orelus (2012: 115) notes:

Whiteness has been socially constructed as the standard of beauty, purity, innocence, and safety. As a result, whiteness has taken the centre stage of attention through positive lenses. In contrast, what is associated with blackness or brownness is often represented as ugly, negative, and even dangerous.

Way-finding

I have a beautiful home in Canada but I feel a deep sense of homelessness at the same time. I must be feeling the postcolonial uncanny that Gelder and Jacobs (1998) talk about. I am filled with unsettling ambiguities. My life is full of contradictions but Haraway’s words encourage me when she says: “The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate and be accountable” (1998: 586). Peeling my “Banana” has been a painful decolonizing work for me but I feel affirmed when Kathy Absolon says: “Decolonizing is arduous work and full of contradiction. At a personal level decolonization means examining the inherent conflicts within myself” (2011: 19). Following Gunaratnam (2003), I am persuaded that this learning of my inner self is also a way of learning the others around me, especially the Chinese international students I intend to invite into my research. I also realize that such learning of Self and Others happens at a deeper and subjective level. Therefore, through our inter-subjective interaction with these research participants, I hope we will achieve a deeper understanding of each other (Ahmed, 2000; Gunaratnam, 2003). The self is vessel from and to which knowledge flows, as Kathy Absolon nicely reveals the importance of knowing this inner self: “learning about the inner self is the doorway to understanding and gaining knowledge of how to be in mind, body, Spirit and heart in the outer world” (2011: 67).

All the years I’ve been in Canada, I’ve been struggling to find a sense of belonging so desperately, although this struggle has been at the subconscious level. Now I think I know why the Chinese international students feel so lonely and lost. This is a deep sense of loss—being lost in the world, being left out in the cold. I can relate to their experience very deeply. I have a home in Canada; they have homes at the houses of their Canadian hosts. Notwithstanding the roofs we have over our heads, our hearts are roofless. In our hearts, we all feel a sense of homelessness deeply and painfully. We experience being in place and out of place simultaneously (Ahmed, 2000).

I never thought that my reflexive journey of peeling the “Banana” would bring me to this epiphany of searching for home or examining this new face of homelessness, this new face of loss and being lost at sea, being lost in the world. Now I want to dedicate my social work research to finding a way out of this state of being lost. I want to develop Greg Dening’s (2008) metaphor of way-finding as my qualitative research methodology. I want to quote Dening’s words in great detail here where he compares and contrasts the metaphors of navigation and way-finding:

They [the way-finders] shun the term navigation. Navigation is a more universal science of instruments and an application of systems of time and space as broad as the cosmos itself. Way-finding is a more interpretive craft closer to the signs the systems of the cosmos imprint on the environment. The navigator has the security that the knowledge he applies to his voyaging has a life outside himself – in books, instruments and maps. For a way-finder, no knowledge, no image is stilled in either time or space. The temperature of the water, the movements of the winds, the habits of the birds are all in his head. And this knowledge comes to him, not through his own experience alone, but through the eyes of a long line of ancestral masters and apprentices. Way-finder finds his way with style. No voyage is the same. His way is always different but ruled by his confidence that he will find it.

Let me say that I prefer to be a way-finder than a navigator in all my voyaging through learning and knowledge. Metaphors are the trade winds of my mind. Models the doldrums (147–148).

Reflecting on my social work practice with Chinese international students, I see how my being a navigator may hurt my clients. To cite an example related to the theme of homelessness, most of the students face difficulties with conforming to “home rules.” My job as a social worker is to help them navigate their home rules and the new Canadian education system. I position myself as anti-oppressive visible minority social work practitioner, but I have never questioned the whiteness of my training or the ways in which it may creep into my practice. As Eunjung and Rupaleem (2013) argue, however, whiteness is not only a social identity but also a standpoint that is present in clinical settings. I have been practicing white knowledge that I have been learning so hard with the well intention of better helping my clients. As a bilingual social worker, I have always wanted to become a bridge between the two cultures; a navigator for the newcomers.

Now I question if my well-intentioned navigation of “home rules” is helpful for Chinese international students who are distressed by their feeling of being lost in the world. I even wonder if my anti-oppressive practice of navigating “home rules” does more harm than help for the students who are already feeling homeless and searching for home. I now think that “home rule” is white knowledge further isolating and alienating them from their own sense of home. In my clinical practice with these students, I can see how way-finding will be more helpful for those who feel lost in the world of homelessness. I work very hard to help students take individual responsibility to learn Canadian language and culture and develop intercultural competency, to better adjust to their new environment. However, my intervention is often ineffective. Although we speak same language, I can’t engage them. Trust is minimal between us. Either they hide their true stories from me or they simply refuse to talk. When their silence frustrates me, as a navigator, I ask what’s wrong with them. As a way-finder, now I ask myself: what’s wrong with my approach? I notice that they shut down because they do not want to talk about “home rule.” When they open up and share is only when I am able to listen to their inner voice and ask them: “OK, tell me your stories about your host home.” That is when some gloomy faces burst into beautiful smiles.

A few of these observations in my practice made me shift my clinical approach from correctness to narrative approaches (Eunjung and Rupaleem, 2013). In a similar way, my reflexive peeling of the “Banana” is guiding me towards a research methodology of way-finding. Way-finding will help me draw out the rich qualitative stories of the students. It will be fraudulent if I claim that these stories are only theirs. I need to acknowledge my part in co-constructing these stories (Ahmed, 2000; Gunaratnam, 2003). These are also my stories. They are our stories. From the breath of our heritage, together, we will search for home, for the knowledge that is local, holistic and oral. It is equally fraudulent if I claim that our stories are similar. We are all way-finders searching for our homes and, as Dening (2008) argues in the above quote, no two voyages are the same. As I enter the students’ worlds, I will listen to their stories with a humble heart and respectfully, as Dening advises: “We live others’ lives so vicariously. We enter others’ metaphors so superficially. We need to be humble. We need to be respectful” (2008: 149). In order to listen humbly, I need to bow down first. As a way-finder, I will be a bow-down listener to hear Dening (2008: 154) say, “To listen you have to be silent. To enter otherness you have to be respectful.”

Conclusion

This paper is based on the epistemology course I took to explore the epistemological aspects of my doctoral research. The aim of the course is to prepare me for the applied qualitative methods course that follows it. So I am using it to think about my research in anticipation of my encounters with the Chinese international high school students, the potential research participants I will invite to join my research. I am not even close to developing the methodology of my dissertation research yet. However, after going through the reflexive processes of exploring why we as Chinese students and parents come to Canada only to be lost, and after experiencing the painful decolonizing processes of peeling the banana, I am almost certain that way-finding promises a suitable methodology for my dissertation research. Way-finding allows for rich qualitative data. It creates space for the narratives of fellow way-finders to flow together, both in harmony and in discord. Way-finding is deeply interpretive and intersubjective as it involves subjective processes of sense making and meaning making. However, I want to make it clear that, by choosing way-finding, I do not mean to reject objectivist and positivist ways of knowing. I believe that all these ways have their own unique places in the production of knowledge. What I mean is that way-finding is the best fit for the qualitative research I am anticipating for my doctoral research. I also want to be clear that I will not hesitate to use objectivist and quantitative research if a specific research project calls for it. I believe methods and methodologies are tools and means, not ends in themselves. For right now, however, way-finding is where I am at and it is the most suitable methodology I will develop for my dissertation research.