●DJ●
By Daniel P. Jenne
(United States – Taiwan)
Editor's note:
An intelligent and humble man of action, Daniel P. Jenne is responsible for changing the lives of young learners in ways beyond anything he could imagine. He lives his word – both as a teacher and student of life – with unwavering dignity, all the while bringing truth and joy to all that he does.
I'M AN AVERAGE WHITE MALE from the American Midwest. I was never the tallest in my class, nor the shortest. Never the fastest, nor the slowest. Never the smartest, nor the dumbest. We were poor but had enough food to eat, clothes, and televisions to consume our culture eagerly. I was very much your stereotypical average American kid. This was the 1980s.
As I grew out of childhood, I hated this. I never felt I fit into the American cultural norm: I was painfully shy, hated parties, didn't drink or do drugs, didn't chase girls, and felt like I was very much a square peg being pounded into a cultural round hole. I tried to express my lack of roundness by growing my hair long (as my big brother did), listening to glam rock and heavy metal (as my big brother did), and delving deeply into roleplaying games (as my big brother did). I never really had an original idea. I probably never really had an original emotion. Aside from inflicting myself with long hair in junior high and high school (and thereby saddling myself with laughably petty discrimination from slightly better-off white people), I was caught tightly in a boring life trajectory that so many Americans exist within: suburban malaise marked by minor drug and alcohol use which ultimately leads to an achingly slow, relatively meaningless death.
Luckily, I managed to open my eyes to certain possibilities that neither my very average public-school education nor my very average family life had revealed to me. Coincidences aligned, and, with less than a hundred dollars in my pocket, I found myself moving (with two boxes crammed full of American material existence) to China. This was 1998.
My short stint in China was packed full of stories, experiences, eye-openers, near misses, and unending personal discovery. That aside, for the first time in my life, I was a minority. I was always the tallest, the whitest, and generally considered much smarter than I'm sure I was. This was fine with me. It was white-male privilege on full volume, and I wasn't complaining. After growing up painfully average, I simply loved all the attention. In hindsight, however, I didn't take full advantage of my privilege due to my angsty lower-middle-class American upbringing, but at least I felt like an individual for the first time in my life.
There was always one rubbing point in China, though. Along with my whiteness came the expectation of wealth. I grew up poor. I could never afford the cool stuff other kids had. Our family had the basic American "starter set", like a television, VCR, and video game console. However, my mother had to save her spare change for a year to buy the VCR. My dad was slightly better off but remained laughably frugal from growing up on a farm. In China, my whiteness was equated with something I'd never experienced: fabulous wealth.
In China, I always paid more than the locals. Even after haggling for two weeks and getting what I thought was a hard-won deal, my Chinese roommate laughed at me for spending three times the normal amount for a set of bedsheets. Things were still incredibly cheap by American standards, and I was making enough money teaching to fund all my endeavors without batting an eye. Still, it was the principle of the matter. And growing up white in America, everything was about principle.
I taught for a few months but quit on principle. I saw too much scamming by the administration, witnessed too much unfairness directed at students, and had a Canadian buddy who wanted to show me the world. I had always been a justice warrior at heart, but the average American adventure-minded kid in me also wanted his time in the sun.
After traveling for a couple of months, the constant "otherness" started to get under my skin. The fact that I always had to pay more for things, was required to rent the more expensive rooms, and was always a target of scams and pickpockets grew too much to bear. It got to the point where I was dangerously close to physical altercations at an alarming rate, and I knew that I needed to get out of China. I had to go back home and decompress. I needed to get out, get my head together, get my life together, and try again.
In China, I realized what it feels like to be in a position of constant discrimination. I learned what it feels like to have people follow you around stores. I lived with what it was like to have people assume things about you because of your skin color. I realized that all those things my Mexican and Black and racially-ambiguous friends had told me back in high school were absolutely true. However, I still had the option of leaving. I could leave China, stop standing out, and immediately become an average white guy back in America. All those other friends I mentioned: they couldn't.
By the by, I was no longer an average white guy back in my hometown. I was "that guy who went to China." I had developed a twist to my accent, I had stories to tell, and I had experienced things most people in the American Midwest could only dream of. These experiences, though, had transformed my perspective on the world, and that has continued to evolve until now, twenty-plus years later.
A couple of years after returning home, finishing college, and getting back out as soon as possible, I landed in Taiwan. I knew very little about this island country, aside from it making Chinese people feel uncomfortable when discussing it. I came here because it was Chinese enough to keep learning Mandarin and sufficiently western for me to work a job where my students weren't scammed daily, and life wasn't an all-out battle against discrimination. I wanted to find a place where I was different but still more-or-less accepted.
I like to think that I've used my privilege in responsible ways throughout my twenty-plus years in Taiwan. I have always recognized my advantages but never tried to abuse them. As I have matured and become knowledgeable about the place where I've put down new roots, I have attempted to improve myself and the situation of my students.
Nothing I do can be removed from cultural imperialism, however. I was an English teacher, so I was actively working against (at the very least, taking time away from) traditional Taiwanese culture. I was teaching Western culture, which, for the most part, is always presented in a positive and often superior light.
Most private English-teaching kindergartens and cram schools give kids English names because it looks good to parents, who pay considerable money while expecting ostentatious results. Most foreign (i.e., non-Taiwanese) teachers like to give kids English names because they typically can't speak Chinese, struggle to remember names they're not familiar with, or simply don't wish to pronounce them.
Throughout my time in Taiwan, I've always pushed for allowing kids to use their Chinese names instead of forcing them to adopt an "English" (western) name. I never liked the concept of people of various countries adopting western names, subjugating themselves to the idea that "western is better". I have always felt it incredibly disrespectful to insist that someone change their name for show or someone else's convenience. A person's name is closely tied to their identity; if you insist on them changing their name, you are forcing them to adjust to fit your frame of convenience better. After finally getting into the public school system, I put this idea into practice. In the end, I would estimate that about half of my students continued using their "real" names. Students who came to school with an English name were welcomed to continue using their English name; students who wanted an English name were given the option of choosing one from a list I had made. However, all students were provided their Chinese name written in the English alphabet. If they didn't already have an English name or actively sought one out, that was the name they were expected to use. I still feel this bit of cultural appreciation made a lasting impact on many of my students.
I got into the public school system because I became very frustrated with teaching in private schools. I got tired of teaching the often arrogant upper-crust kids who usually didn't appreciate the time and effort I invested. To be fair, I was just another foreigner to many of them, and most of the wealthy kids grew up with multiple foreign teachers. As many foreign teachers in Taiwan are short-term teachers, they don't invest deeply in the kids as students or human beings. I had grown up poor, and I wanted to teach poor kids; I wanted to teach kids who didn't have access to a revolving door of foreign teachers, tutors, and family friends. I wanted to teach kids I could actually make a difference for.
I'm still conflicted about whether helping the kids least exposed to westernization exacerbates cultural imperialism. I hope that by "helping" them in earnest and respecting their cultural background in the process, I am, at the very least, doing less damage than if someone else were in that role.
While doing my master's degree in Taiwan, I was taken aback by the lack of locally-developed education research and structures. Much of Taiwanese academia is built upon western research and theory. I constantly promoted to my classmates and professors the concept of developing locally-grounded theories based on local research. As I am neither a native nor, at the time of my studies, was more than superficially aware of the history of the education system in Taiwan, I did not pursue this myself. However, I have continued promoting the concept to my teachers-in-training, workshop participants, etc. While I have not been part of the solution to this issue, I have hopefully turned the eyes and ears of some people who now serve these roles.
I have recently begun teaching at an ostensibly "bilingual" school. I am no longer an English-language teacher, although I still use English to teach. In fact, I use English more now than at any point previously because my students are from diverse backgrounds that often don't include Chinese (or English, for that matter). I teach two subjects at this school: World Geography and Taiwanese Social Studies, both of which deal directly with colonialization.
Coincidentally, I have spent the past several weeks teaching African geography and history. A good portion of time was spent exploring the concepts of colonization, decolonization, and what types of people and groups become involved in these processes. I have pushed myself in my limited capacity to challenge my thinking to move, again within my own contextual limitations, beyond generic textbook narratives to see globally broader strokes. Throughout learning about Africa, I've constantly tried to recognize and help students recognize parallels between colonization in Africa and Taiwan's history of colonization. While we are all different peoples from different parts of the world, I hope to build some understanding, and therefore respect, for the situations of others around the world.
After living in Taiwan for twenty years, I am now finally able to teach Taiwanese (and other nationalities) about Taiwanese culture and history. I am in a fairly unique position of teaching Taiwanese history and culture, in Taiwan, to Taiwanese students. However, in addition to my Taiwanese students, I'm also blessed with teaching students of many other nationalities, such as Korean, Mongolian, Canadian, American, South African, Indian, and Malaysian, who live in Taiwan. If I do my job well, there is the potential that people moving around globally will see the world through a lens less blurred by mainstream American- and Eurocentric thinking and bias.
The more informed I have become about those topics, the more I have worked them into my Taiwanese Social Studies course. Again, coincidentally, the beginning of this semester began with the Japanese colonial era in Taiwan. We explored that topic with regular crossings between this and the World Geography course. However, most pertinent is our recent move into the Republic of China era, which Taiwan is still enmeshed within. We have looked at the current governmental situation in Taiwan compared to when the Japanese ruled Taiwan and have found that, essentially, Taiwan is currently colonized by the Republic of China. This reality is complicated by the ROC losing a civil war in China and retreating to Taiwan, making the colonizing power and the colonized territory one and the same. It's extremely complicated but equally fascinating.
Many parallels exist between Taiwan's recent history and that of African colonization. This is probably because Japan consciously imitated the colonizer model of Europeans to avoid being colonized themselves. Under Japanese rule, Qing Dynasty Chinese residents and natives of Taiwan were relegated to second-class status. When the ROC was given control of Taiwan after WWII, the Hoklo and Hakkanese peoples, as well as the aboriginals, were excluded from positions of power in favor of Mandarin-speaking mainlanders. Taiwanese people who had fully invested themselves in the Japanese identity promoted during Japanese rule – in other words, the people who accepted the previous colonizers – ended up being dealt with particularly harshly.
I've come to realize that even though Taiwan's recorded history is relatively short, it is essentially a cycle of colonization by different powers. Its modern history is that of being colonized (by Japan, the only non-western colonizing power in history), then stripped from its colonizer (as a result of losing WWII) before immediately being gifted to another overtly brutal colonizer (the ROC, under the stewardship of the KMT). Its current status is essentially still under colonization, although the majority of the citizens are relatively unaware of this fact. Ironically, it is under constant threat of another colonizer (the PRC) overthrowing its current colonizers (the ROC). This complex reality provides endless material for discussion during class.
One goal of my teaching Taiwanese Social Studies is to reveal to my students that Taiwan, regardless of other aspects of its culture and history, is essentially governed by a colonizing power, albeit currently an amicable one. However, this could immediately change with the election of a leader that leans far enough to the "unification" side or a military invasion from the mainland.
It's interesting how the original (current) colonizers (the ROC via the KMT) have evolved after the removal of martial law. The current political debate, although it is never framed in these terms, is about whether the colonizers (the KMT) or the "relative" locals (the DPP) should have more control.
The irony is that if the KMT has more control, Taiwan will drift more toward PRC colonization. In contrast, if the DPP has more power, Taiwan will drift more toward western colonization to counterbalance the PRC military threat. I have mentioned as a thought project that one option to resolve the current standoff would be for the current president to "give back" Taiwan to the USA and the UK, who took Taiwan from Japan at the end of WWII. The UK and USA could then, theoretically, return the island of Taiwan to local Taiwanese and thus resolve the colonization issue.
Since I teach at a "bilingual" school, I have taken it upon myself to begin the process of slowly integrating native languages into the curriculum. As I am disappointingly only human, this has started by integrating Mandarin into lessons (since I am fluent in the language). Ironically, I realize that this is integrating the language of the direct, if unrecognized, colonizer (China) into the confusingly international-yet-local curriculum. Nevertheless, it hopefully lessens the perceived omnipotence of the indirect colonizer (America, or western powers in general) by not edifying only standard English in the curriculum. In the future, with more time invested, I hope to increasingly integrate other local languages, such as Minnan, Hakka, and aboriginal languages, where appropriate.
Through this all, I realize I am and will always be a white, straight man given the privilege to play the white hero through educating largely non-white students. I hope my life means more than that cliched stereotype. Hopefully, by actively respecting students' cultural backgrounds, by journeying with them on critical examinations of both world and local history, by being "not just another white guy," I can move beyond the life of an archetype. My greatest hope is that I have and will continue to inspire young minds from around the world to keep the struggle alive. But, at the end of it all, as my students say, "It is what it is."
Questions for Reflection:
Daniel is a passionate and dedicated teacher whose core goal is to inform accurately and comprehensively. With knowledge being integral to informing and hence mobilizing people toward a common understanding and/or goal, what can you do – formally or informally – to propagate what you know about Decoloniality, and in doing so, stir up more minds and voices calling for active change to the coloniality-based status quo?