Into the Dragon's Mouth: Sylvia Tiwon's Keynote Address at the 2014 COTSEAL Conference

Into the Dragon’s Mouth: The precarity of language work

Sylvia Tiwon

Hang Tuah—also known as Laksamana, after the brother of king Rama in the Ramayana-- is the hero of a classical Malay work, the Hikayat Hang Tuah. He is generally invoked mainly for his courage as a warrior, skilled in the art of silat (martial arts) and the embodiment of loyalty to the Malay king and nation. I argue, however, that his is a story about the central importance of negotiating the lingustically diverse world of the 16^th-17^th centuries, at the height of the flowering of trade and knowledge, at that shimmering moment when the Ferenggi—the European foreigners—have yet to establish a strong foothold in Asia. It is the story of the dangerous but necessary quest for knowledge: a quest upon which we all as teachers and as students are embarked.

Hang Tuah is sent by the king of Malacca to explore the stretch of significant space from Constantinople in the west to India and eastwards to China, south to Java. On several occasions he acts as an emissary not only from the Malay world but also to represent the South Asian kingdom of Nagapatam. Everywhere he goes, he takes time to find a native speaker to teach him the local language and customs.¹ His linguistic explorations are often fraught with danger. Acquiring and practicing foreign languages are thus the finest form of silat, for which the prize is not wealth but knowledge. The following is a brief excerpt from one of the most important episodes in Hang Tuah’s travels, the mission to gaze upon the hidden face of the emperor of China.

Hang Tuah’s knowledge of the language and customs of China endear him to the royals, and even the emperor has heard about them and expresses his desire to see how these foreign visiters eat. Hang Tuah’s situation is placed in stark contrast to the Feringgi who remain stuck in the harbour and can’t even approach the palace. The story continues: “Yet after many attempts, Laksamana is still unable to see the emperor, hidden in the mouth of a golden dragon. The emperor invites Laksamana to a banquet. “At that banquest I shall finally gaze upon the emperor of China,”Hang Tuah declares. To the four ministers of empire he says,. “If you wish to offer dinner to these Tamil people, they eat neither fish nor flesh. All of them eat only vegetables, which are to be cooked. However, they should not be sliced up but must be left whole and long.”

As the emperor approaches, a loud fanfare of instruments is raised, a sign of the imperial entrance. And so all 12 thousand royals clasp their arms and bow down in silence. The emperor emerges, carried within the mouth of the golden dragon. The four ministers kneel down and prostrate themselves before the emperor, who speaks, “O ministers four, protect the people, protect our customs.” And the ministers reply, “As you will, lord.” The emperor speaks again, “O ministers four, where is the emissary from India? Serve them food.”

And so the food is brought in before Laksamana. In Malay and Indian style, he washes his hands and begins to eat, and all the Malays and Indians also eat two or three mouthfuls. But Laksamana then picks up a pair of golden chopsticks, to show that he knows the Chinese custom; with the chopsticks he grasps a length of kangkung (water cabbage) and raises the long vegetable up to the height of his forehead, to put it into his mouth. As he does so, he raises his face and looks straight into the mouth of the dragon to see the face of the Emperor of China. The golden dragon has scales made from nine types of gemstones, and inside its open mouth the emperor is seated on a jewelled throne with curtains of pearl. He is like the flame in a lamp: a sight as brilliant as the full moon.

When the royals and the ministers see that Laksamana has laid eyes upon the emperor, they rush towards him with drawn swords. But the emperor says, “Do not cut off his head; he is a wise man.”

It is knowledge of languages that leads Hang Tuah into extreme danger but at the same time leads him into a higher level of knowledge. Language work often involves dancing in this kind of precarity.

Let us now bring Hang Tuah’s glorious trickery into the 21^st century, for which I would like to use a passage from “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses” by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, a text on the precarious nature of the labour of teaching:

“The subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong. ” This 21^st century tale of the search for knowledge continues by raising a question: “What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be performing the work of the university…. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters.” (“The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses” by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, In Social Text 79, Vo. 22, No.2, Summer 2004. )

Ask instructors of language what they think of their work and most will let you know without hesitation that they love teaching language. They feel that it is the most important way not just to learn a culture but to learn to live it: its rhythms, its intonations, its postures, its memories, its feelings. It's not just how one learns to say "I am afraid" or "I love you" in a new language but also how to feel afraid and how to love in that new place. Learning a new language is almost like learning to live in a different body: at first the slightest movements are jerky as your body resists this alien thing that's taking you over. No, you don't learn to master a language -- you let it to master you.

But we're still with our composite language instructors who have just told us how they love teaching--even at the generally mean wages language teaching offers. A deep breath or so later that expression of love--even dedication to the profession-- almost invariably turns to the concerns and worries that frame the work language teachers do; for precarity has become the sign under which this labor, this area of teaching--this profession-- which forms much of the bedrock of the humanities and gives meaning to the claim to universality.

Over the decades, language teaching has undergone a remarkable devaluation at the university, at the same time that the need for more foreign language specialists has grown. Few tenured or tenure track faculty teach language, and when they do it is normally at the advanced level in graduate seminars engaging with "difficult" texts. There is an strong message emanating from both budgetary decisions and hiring choices that language teaching is not a properly "scholarly" pursuit: it does not involve research (no?), one or another theoretical apparatus (no?), or critical perspective (really, no?). Language teaching is thus constructed as the "applied" part of a field: a practice rather than a theory-informed praxis; a work of reproduction rather than scholarly production. In many departments, language instructors--only a very select few of whom make it to "security of employment" through a vetting process that used to be called "the eye of the needle"--are women, and minority men and women. The overwhelming majority are contingent labor whose careers and lives are subject to the arrhythmics of boom and bust capitalism and national/global security considerations. In the case of language work “foreign” is a term of entanglement that may run in different, deeply chiastic directions. The closer the sense of threat, the more cultural and linguistic distance and difference is emphasized in post 9/11 biopolitics.

As is the case with much reproductive labor, adjunct language teaching helps ensure that various branches of the humanities (in addition to social and political sciences, legal studies, economics, business, environmental studies, health and bio-sciences, etc.) keep up with global developments and enable field and archival work. Indeed, this work rendered invisible and mute offers even more than that: If a language instructor teaching one class of a vital "under-represented" language is paid one third of a semester's pay and gets no benefits, that instructor (or her/his family) might actually be offering a form of hidden subsidy to the university, that isn't liable for the full cost of this reproductive work. There isn't that much distance in form between this type of subsidy and the covert subsidies from workers and their families that make the commodities we buy "cheap."

"Lecturers / adjunct professors play an essential role in the teaching needs of a university. However, the salaries paid to adjuncts are not adequate to meet the basic needs of an individual (I know from experience as a UC instructor). There is a big push right now in the academic community to properly respect the contribution of adjuncts by appropriately monetarily valuing their contribution. I think that designating certain faculty as teaching oriented and having appropriate benchmarks would vastly improve the education that we provide. Not all faculty should be research faculty and not being research faculty should not mean that we devalue them!" - Patrick, UC Lecturer

This comment was posted in response to the discussion at the California Education Leaders Forum on February 1, 2013. Audio from the Forum is available at the link above. http://ucaft.org/category/unit/lecturers

In some departments, an informal but telling distinction is made between lecturers who teach language and lecturers who teach “content.” Many of the “content lecturers” have Ph.Ds, while many language lecturers have M.As, and almost all are “native speakers.” [this is perhaps one of the few remaining niches of acceptability for the word “native” applied to humans].

Since “foreign language” acquisition has gained recognition as an important tool in the global economy and security-related sectors, schools such as business or public health which usually do not themselves engage in language teaching may decide to set up ] language courses designed to fulfill a specified need (“business”; “medical", “legal”), especially when departments that have a traditional claim to teaching languages do not offer (or refuse to offer) this “service.” Foreign language departments (or area studies departments) may well find themselves in the problematic position of wishing to claim the labor of language teaching for themselves whilst ignoring the servitude inherent in the work they have relegated to the departmental galleys.

At a February 2014 colloquium organized by the Berkeley Language Center, Claire Kramsch and Lihua Zhang presented an eye-opening study of native language instructors in the University of California syste,. Titled "The legitimacy gap: Native language teachers in an era of globalization" (to be released on the Berkeley Language Center's website March 31st, 2014), the study shows that most native language instructors are women, most have graduate degrees, and the overwhelming majority know more than two languages. The study further indicates that the demands of globalization introduce a new kind of precarity to the subject positions of native language instructors whose legitimacy is no longer derived primarily from their status as "native speaker" of a single language, but rather from the very vulnerabilities of their "translingual/transcultural" positions as they negotiate the complex language, cultural, and even political boundaries they frequently cross in the classrooms, in their working and living habitus, in memory and affect. This makes them truly global citizens. Ironically, given the global aspirations of the UC system, this intimate knowledge of both opportunities and vulnerabilities of globalization has yet to be recognized and rewarded by the institution that the bearers of this knowledge. Could it be that this multilingual, translingual entails a rejection of the limits imposed on the idea of nation-state by imperial spatialization and current security regimes? A disarticulated insurgency against disciplinary singularity? As Moten and Harney remind us, who are ensconced in the negligence of the profession: "Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings" (101-2).

Much language teaching relies heavily on the labor of those who have acquired native speaker fluency, -- this presents an interest twist: where Moten and Harney – the authors of the second narrative—say that adjunct instructors cannot reproduce themselves. In the case of language teaching however, since universities no longer invest seriously in advanced language teaching, language teachers must reproduce themselves.

Translation as a dimension that is folded into language teaching.

Translation used to be a major part of the work of knowledge production and circulation. Today, the work of translation--like language teaching--is devalued within the university (although outside--especially in security circles--translation , whether written or oral/simultaneous, is considered essential, though it is possibly not very highly regarded either.)

There was a time, after the fall of Byzantium, when Arab translations of Greek, Sanskrit, Pahlavi thought and knowledge enabled a worlding of the knowledge that Byzantium had eschewed for its pagan roots. In Andalusia, the work of translators--Muslim, Jewish, Christian--made Europe open and flexible: a shifting, concept until reconquista and expulsions turned borders into policed barriers and fixed a white, Christian, masculinist identity poised to wrest control of world markets and labor.

Those who work between languages always put themselves at risk: politically, ethically, creatively. We must constantly attend to the deep games played at different levels.

In the age of orientalist scholarship, language work was the work of the humanities did: translating (and transcribing) ancient, obscure texts to make them legible, literally, figuratively, and politically. language work also involved teaching languages, generally serving the practical needs of colonial regimes of subjugation and exploitation.

A good example of the deep politics of language teaching is a Javanese language manual, published in the early twentieth century at Leiden, intended to teach Dutch people conversational skills.. Covering areas of linguistic engagement from the marketplace to the plantations, criminal investigations, the courts of law and points in-between, the conversations provide an acute representation of the guilty entanglement of language work with colonial constructions of difference and deep biopower, training the Dutch to occupy a superior language position and the natives to assume linguistic and politically subservience. Samples of conversations:

Master: “Overseer, where is Ali? Why is that coolie not working today? "
Servant: "Forgiveness your humble slave begs of thee, great master, illness has betaken Ali."
Master: "Go to the market and get someone to replace him,
[damn you to hell].”

This last, ‘damn you to hell” was not in the conversation; nor was it translated in the manual. It did get translated into the languages of the colonies: GODVERDOMME (Dutch--usually in a loud voice, thus the caps), became “perdom”, whispered in Malay, in Javanese, in Sundanese, and came to mean “the master is angry”. Thus whispered, it spread fear but also generated a kind of contempt for the red-faced “Tuan” ("Master" -- another misappropriation through translation) and his unbridled emotions and unrestrained power.

European woman is interpellated into this lingua-racial superiority at the same time that the subject position as housewife is cemented into colonial society, in the colonies and the motherland. Most of the women who accompanied their husbands to the Indies were not of high social status in their hometowns; their transition to the East, however, put them in charge of native servants occupying a variety of subservient positions. Conversations in the manual explicitly train Dutch housewives to speak as superiors (addressing the Javanese in "ngoko", the low register), and to learn to hear the servant address them in the exalted vocabulary of the "high" ("krama") register:

Mistress: "Hey Djaja, the tables and chairs are a mess; you didn’t clean them."
Servant: "Begging thy pardon great mistress; thy humble servant wiped them the day before."
Mistress: "Clean them again."

Such exercises in Javanese conversation are language lessons on the surface only; underneath, they translate what the West had identified as a peculiarly Javanese language hierarchy into Dutch thought, action, policy and law. Fashioning the Other as the transparent subject of domestication is but part of the solipsistic nature of language work in its colonial (and postcolonial) form. We might assume that Dutch wives did not address their Dutch husbands in Javanese, but we might wonder whether asymmetric language usage translated into marital and sexual relations as well. Language work carries contamination in whichever direction it goes.

These conversations clearly sprang from the position of power and looked upon the other language as inferior. Do the remnants of these hierarchies remain? Does teaching language then require a consciousness of position within a particular hierarchy? Or, in the end, will linguistic diversity be represented in the global world by “englishes”: hinglish, singlish, chinglish, etc….? What will that mean?

As you can see, this leads to ever expanding circles of questions.

What is clear today is that when language work is reduced to a "service," with language instrumentalized, stripped of heteroglossia, in order to make the Other penetrable, the institution does not need to invest directly in the reproduction of instructors with native language skills; it simply engages in a hidden and guilty outsourcing.

1 In the traditional Malay language, “bahasa” does not mean only language but also customs and accepted behaviour. And the mark of a civilized person is that he or she be well-spoken. “   

Making a Beginning Letter-Writing Activity "Real"

By Frank Smith, Khmer Instructor
University of California-Berkeley

Since I haven't received any submissions from anyone else yet, I thought I'd get the ball rolling with a brief description of something I'm currently trying with my Beginning Khmer class for the first time...

The Background

In my Beginning and Intermediate Khmer classes (and in the first few weeks of the first semester of my Advanced class), I have students write “dialog journals”. This is something I learned about back in my ESL-teaching days, and like many of those techniques, I adapted it for Southeast Asian language teaching.

Dialog journals--at least in the way I conceive of them--are an every-other-week writing assignment (at SEASSI, students have to write one every week) which must fill one page, on any topic (with some exceptions--see below), in the target language. Students are told not to spend a lot of time on this assignment; the writing they produce is supposed to represent their current level of writing proficiency in the language: no more, no less. What I don't want them to do is look up every fancy English word that comes into their heads in the dictionary, which as we all know, often ends up being unreadable, when they choose totally inappropriate words that seem to “match” an English term they're thinking of.

The purpose of this activity is that students try their hand at being creative with the language in order to express themselves, but only using vocabulary and grammatical structures they've already mastered (or are in the process of mastering). They can be adventurous (to a degree), but what they write does need to make grammatical sense, at least inasmuch as they're capable of that particular week.

Of course, the first few weeks--during which students are first learning the Khmer alphabet--their dialog journals fall a bit short of, as I like to say, “the great Khmer novel”...their first few efforts are necessarily limited to very basic sentences using sightwords and simple functional vocabulary learned in their speaking lessons. But fairly quickly--especially at SEASSI, where students tend to be more highly motivated than my academic year students--they progress to creative, often humorous commentaries on their daily lives, families, school social life.

To stimulate (and provide some structure to) students who have trouble filling an entire page with text every other week, in recent years I've taken to, beginning about halfway through the first semester, assigning students topics to write their journals on: food, when we're in the food unit in class; family, when we're covering the family unit; writing about the action in various movies we watch (for which they're given extra vocabulary, including the names of the characters). Such topic-assigned journals often get integrated into speaking activities as well, in which they're called up to, say, summarize orally a movie they've already written about (without the written journal in front of them!).

The Initial Assignment

All of this is a rather long preamble to the specific assignment I'm here to tell you about today: practical letter-writing, which becomes the topic for my Beginning students' dialog journals late in the Spring semester.

After going through the basics of writing simple letters in Khmer, one type to a friend one's own age, and another semi-formal type to a respected family member or older person, students are given a dialog journal assignment to write a letter of their own, preferably to a real person they actually intend to send it to. Since about 96% of my academic year students are from Khmer families, this usually means writing a letter to a family member in Cambodia.

This year, I had a new idea. After receiving students' initial letter-writing attempts (containing quite a few typos and some awkward grammar, as could be expected), which happened to be their final writing assignment for the semester, I decided to extend the assignment as an extra-credit “bonus” exercise.

The grading in all of my language classes is done on a “subtractive” basis. That is, all students begin the semester with 100 points (A+). Every time they “do something wrong,” they lose points. This can be from non-health-related absences, lateness, failure to turn in an assignment on time (or at all), not being prepared for class, low scores on quizzes and exams, etc. Suffice it to say that this semester, all of my Beginning students are in need of a few extra points as the semester comes to an end!

The Post-Assignment (for Bonus Points)

So here's the assignment I gave them: edit their letters, incorporating my corrections, and submit the final version to me in an envelope, addressed to the intended recipient in Cambodia. They have until the Monday following the final exam (over the weekend) to do this. If they choose to do so--the assignment is optional--they'll receive 3 bonus points (to replace various points they've lost over the course of the semester), I'll pay the postage and send the letter to Cambodia, and their relatives will actually get to read what they've written.  Here's a page from one student's first draft, with my suggestions for edits:

The Final Result:

Exactly one student (the one who needed the extra points the most!) took me up on the bonus assignment offer. Here's her final revision of the draft you see above, including a photo she included in the envelope she turned in:

And finally, here's the note she gave me with the letter and photo, including the address of her grandmother in Cambodia, which I copied onto the outside of the envelope and mailed:

Hopefully, the letter will reach its recipient, and some actual communication will have come out of this classroom activity!

Feel free to post your questions/observations in the comments section.

Southeast Language Instructor Reports from the Classroom and Beyond

This blog, still under construction, will feature writings by instructors of Southeast Asian languages around the US (and hopefully, the world!).  Articles by various instructors will be solicited and edited by the COTSEAL President, and posted here.

These articles could be descriptions of a classroom activity created or adopted by the instructor, reporting of classroom or other Southeast Asian language-related research the instructor is involved with, descriptions of new language teaching materials which have been (or are being) created, or simply musings on various challenges and issues in Southeast Asian language teaching.

If you're an instructor and would like to contribute a piece--however short or long--to this blog, please contact me!  fjsmith@wisc.edu