| In 2000, upon the completion of my doctoral research on Chinese immigrant families’ bicultural literacy practices and socialization in Saskatoon, a small city in Western Canada, I moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, to continue my research on Chinese immigrant children’s school-home literacy connections at the University of British Columbia. When I landed in Vancouver, I found myself in a state of cultural shock. In Saskatoon, there were only about 4,000 Chinese residents; they were mostly manual laborers and were often scattered in the city without forming a solid ethnic community. The Asians were at the periphery of the heated racial and educational tensions between whites and native peoples. I was a member of an “invisible minority.” However, in Vancouver where Asians had become the majority, numerically surpassing the whites, I became part of a “visible majority.” Since more than one-third of its population is Chinese, Vancouver has been nicknamed “Hongcouver,” and the University of British Columbia (UBC) is called “University of Billion Chinese.” I was surprised that local media such as the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Courier were flooded with news about new middle-class Chinese immigrants and communities, especially issues such as their campaign for the legitimacy of the Chinese language in university admissions, their critical attitudes toward K–12 public school education, and their push for traditional teacher-centered schools. |