Hmong students. This global imaginary offers a common sense: we can all be full citizens of California and America if, like the Teacher and her pupils in The King and I, we all speak and write the same particular brand of English. But this set of relations demands a racial hierarchy, one that imagines a white (female) teacher in charge of helping her Asian students learn English, while she “gets to know them.” Thus we have the EPT and Early Start programs, which spawn from sentimental, maternal logic. It’s only logical and right, even fair, that the state provide an Early Start experience for underprepared students in Fresno, which happens to include almost the entire Hmong student population in Fresno. These students need more help with English so that they can succeed in college. This global imaginary functioning in the EPT writing assessment assumes that one key to success in college (and perhaps elsewhere) is a particular kind of English fluency, which is a dominant white middle class English, similar to the kind that Deborah Kerr teaches her Siamese charges in the film (she invokes a British accent in the film). Without this white hegemonic English, students will fail at their work in and out of school. This is the script, the common sense, a part of a global imaginary that reinforces a sense of maternal duty and obligation to straighten out those twisted tongues and words of all Hmong students. I argue this same sensibility, this global imaginary of sentimental education, grounded in past race relations, is alive and thriving in many college writing classrooms, affecting (or infecting) their writing assessments because it determines the ways teachers read and judge writing and create the larger mechanisms for assessment. In one sense, our writing classrooms could be labeled, “The Hmong and I,” with the “I” being the teacher, who often is a white female.18
It should be remembered that Klein’s theory of a global imaginary comes from Edward Said’s (1979) powerful and explanatory concept of Orientalism. And the theory is instructive for understanding the Hmong racial formation’s position in classroom writing assessments at Fresno State. Through an exhaustive account of various Western scholars, the academy, and government institutions, Said demonstrates how the West generally has constructed and dominated the orient (our Middle East), what it means, what it is, etc. He explains that Orientalism offers the orient as a “system of representations,” which can be understood as a “discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it.” Academics and their related institutions primarily create this discourse and grant it authority and “prestige” by their act of articulation and ethos as Western specialists. Orientalism, as a discourse, perpetuates itself by collecting, organizing, and recycling a “catalogue of idées reçues,” or “received ideas” (Said, 1979, p. 94).
It isn’t that far-fetched to see writing teachers (from high school to college) in Fresno participating in such Orientalist discourse when they read their Hmong students and their writing. Who knows best how to understand and describe the literacy practices of Hmong students? Apparently, the EPT, and those who translate and use its scores: schools and writing teachers in California. This isn’t to deny the expertise that many writing teachers develop by teaching multilingual students in classrooms, instead I’m suggesting we question the nature of our expertise in and methods for assessing multilingual and locally diverse students and their writing. We question what informs the judgments we make and what those judgments tell us we should do as teachers, what decisions they seem to demand. Not only might we find a global imaginary of sentimental education functioning in our writing assessments’ discourses, processes, and methods, but we may also be constructing our locally diverse students and their writings by a set of racist received ideas that determine the quality of their writing. If Orientalism is anything, it is a discursive field of assessment. It provides its specialists with automatic judgments of the Orient and the Oriental. It is the discourse of Asian and Middle Eastern racial stigmata. Is it possible, then, that there might be an Orientalism occurring in our classroom writing assessments around Hmong students’ and their writing, around other Asian racial formations?
In his discussion on early Twentieth century Orientalism, Said shows how Orientalism accomplishes its tasks of consumption, manipulation, and domination by Western academics’ “visions” of the oriental and the orient, which has a clear analogue to Hmong taking the EPT and writing teachers’ discourses on their writing in college classrooms. Said provides an example in John Buchan, a Scottish born classicist at Oxford in 1922. Buchan illustrates how vision works, and displays several key features of American visions of Chinese during the same period:
The earth is seething with incoherent power and unorganized intelligence. Have you ever reflected on the case of China? There you have millions of quick brains stifled in trumpery crafts. They have no direction, no driving power, so the sum of their efforts is futile, and the world laughs at China. (Said, 1979, p. 251)
Buchan’s “clarity of vision and analysis,” common during this part of the twentieth century, “selectively organize[s]” the orient and its objects (including its inhabitants). The Chinese of Buchan’s vision is a massive horde of unorganized, incoherent, half-crazed, quick-brained, brown-skinned devils, who might, as Said says, “destroy ‘our’ [the Occidental] world” (Said, 1979, p. 251). The details that build this analysis are not really details at all but the commonplaces that hold currency in the Western mind, prefabricated judgments, predetermined assessments, serving to uplift the West and suppress the Far East, recreating hierarchical relations of power between whites and Asians. Buchan’s passage and its commonplaces are driven by his vision. In fact, Orientalism, in all its manifestations (for Said acknowledges that it’s not uniform), is always guided by the Western scholar’s vision, coloring all that he sees, helping him make judgments, assess, augmenting his analyses and conclusions.
One might make a similar critique of the way Hmong student writing, or any multilingual student writing, gets typically judged in classrooms, or on the EPT? They are remedial because visions similar to the ones operating in Orientalism determine what is most valuable, visions that are a part of a global imaginary that privileges a particular dominant English and its dispositions, then assumes a parental role toward students. Take the sample 2-essay from the EPT guide previously discussed. The ideal reader described in the guide sees the discussion of the “Great American Boycott” in paragraph three as merely “stream of consciousness,” an unorganized, off-topic, and perhaps illogical discussion. The vision required to see such details as stream of consciousness is similar to Said’s Orientalist vision since it is reasonable to understand why a Latino/a or Hmong student with a particular relation to advertisements and consumer consumption in California might include this information. This vision fulfills the needs that the narratives of sentimental education create and that circulate in California and the U.S. generally.
The fact that Fresno Hmong students who take the EPT have parents who recently immigrated to California in the last few decades from Laos as political refugees, and who only spoke their native Hmong language upon arrival, and are mostly low-income or living in poverty (Asian-American Center for Advancing Justice, 2013, pp. 20-21) seem not to matter to those who might judge their writing, seem not to matter to those designing or reading the EPT. By the logic of this global imaginary, which uses an Orientalist set of received ideas, these historical exigencies are irrelevant to the assessment of English competency. These historical structures that continue to structure Hmong lives, while not racial in the old-fashion sense of being essential to Hmong (similar factors affect Chinese, Vietnamese, and other students), not biological, pool consistently in Hmong populations in Fresno because they are structuring in nature, perpetuating themselves. But the structures are both subjective, as in the case of Hmong literacies, and projective, as in the case of how those literacies are read and judged by teachers who read them through a global imaginary of sentimental education. Seeing these structures as a part of Hmong racial habitus that then work in concert with Orientalist visions of multilingual Asian students and a global imaginary that cast teachers into parental roles in scripts of sentimental education can help teachers rethink and reconstruct classroom writing assessments that do not play power games with students based on factors in their lives they simply cannot control. So to be poor and multilingual are not ethnic or cultural structures, but they are racialized as Hmong in Fresno, which is not to say they are essential but deployed in ways that end up harming Hmong
