Week 6 A04 Lele Bian

In Akiko Takeyama‘s reading, she doesn't talk much about the discrimination against Asian American, instead, she focuses on the difficulties she had during the tenure process. The main difficulty she points up is the language problem, which leads her research not as efficient as if she would do it in her native language. She says that no matter how many times she edited her book, there will always be readers and publications saying that the reading is obviously written by a non-native speaker, and some of the contents are confusing. This reminds me of the time when I first came to the US. I am from the northeast part of China, where the accent is really strong, which means the English I learned and heard were also with a strong accent. When I started high school in Houston, I was afraid of speaking up because of my accent, and when I write essays for my classes, I always found difficult to find a perfect word to describe my feeling or a way to express my thinking. 

In her article, she also mentioned that she felts the inequality in the tenure process. While I was reading this part, this reminds me of one of my professors, who is from Singapore and now is a professor in the United States. He told me that he never thought about being a professor, and he didn't want to be; After he graduated from college in the US, he wanted to stay rather than going back to Singapore; therefore, he decided to become a professor because he said that at that time "being a professor is the easiest way to get a green card and to stay in the US. This leads me to tend to think that one of the reasons that international scholars are being treated differently is because that the school has to provide more benefits to the international scholars than they do to the native scholars.  

At the end of her article, she also mentioned that she didn't really want to write this paragraph because she was afraid of retaliation from school. However, she did it because she wants to share her experience; I really admire her courage and I think writing out the article is better and more efficient than protesting. Her previous concern leads me to question that after she writes this article, did she get any "punishment" from school, or getting any retaliation from her colleagues? 

Reference: 

Valverde, Kieu-Linh Caroline, and Wei Ming Dariotis. Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars' Resistance and Renewal in the Academy. Rutgers University Press, 2020.

Victoria Casal-Data. (2017, June 21). Discriminatory Practices in the Hiring of Non­-Native English Language Teachers. Retrieved from http://www.vcdwrites.com/journal/2017/6/15/discriminatory-practices-in-the-hiring-of-non-native-english-language-teachers