But I was unable to acknowledge, grasp, or grapple with what I was experiencing, for both my parents and my teachers had suggested that, if I were a good student, such interference would and should not take place.
Minzhan Lu, From Silence to Words, pg. 443
This quote, sourced from deep within the text, encompasses the overall theme of the work: Lu’s identity in this narrative is student in every one of her environments, and she was being taught conflicting lessons while being expected to reconcile them. This task, obviously, is too much to ask of any adult, let alone a sponge-like child. Lu’s experience allowed her to become a critical reader and writer in her later years, but taught her isolation as a child.
Lu faced a struggle larger than conflicting political ideologies, such as anti-revolution versus revolution. Lu’s struggle was of trying to unify a completely different culture with that of her home country’s, stripping her of the right to choose her ideals both at home and in school.
Many children struggle with this separation between home and school, especially immigrant children who enter the United States. In a way, Lu was like an immigrant in her home country. She spoke a different language and had a fully opposite way of living at home than that at school, and the home culture, or “language,” as she says, she had never experienced first-hand, only academically. She was almost being forced to assimilate to two opposing cultures, inciting the struggle.
“Through the metaphor of the survival tool,” she writes, “my parents and teachers had led me to assume I could automatically reproduce the official stance of the discourse I used.” This quote proves that she never had the chance to formulate her own stances and opinions as a child or young adult because she spent her energy trying to be two cultures at once. Who should a child reject, her parents or her teachers? The answer should be neither, they shouldn’t have to choose, but Lu wasn’t awarded that liberty.
Towards the end of this passage, we see that this childhood struggle pervaded into her adult life as a parent, when she says she worries that the use of language as a “survival tool” will silence her daughter later on in her academic career. She worries the same for her students, but her ending quote perfectly describes her new perspective on teaching her writing class:
“Don’t teach them to ‘survive’ the whirlpool of crosscurrents by avoiding it. Use the classroom to moderate the currents. Moderate the currents, but teach them from the beginning to struggle,” proving that, while her struggle was a struggle, the skills she derived from it, literacy, purposeful discourse, and resilience, may have outweighed the negatives.
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