This group focused on closely reading the text in order to understand the perspective of a very different "other". Because their standards grow out of an orientation toward service to those outside the academy, they approached the essay as students rather than as evaluators.

A second paper, by a student named Kieu, elicited a very different response, in a discussion with graduate students and faculty from the English Department. In her paper, titled, "Misconceptions of Child Abuse in the United States," Kieu points out what she calls "a deep misunderstanding in the way Westerners define child abuse and the way Asians understand it." She maintains:

In Eastern languages there is no such phrase as "child abuse", ...Disciplining a child by striking him/her is not considered child abuse by Asian parents because discipline plays an important role in the cultural customs and traditions which have existed for hundreds of years. For Vietnamese parents, when their children have behaved well they are applauded, rewarded, encouraged, or motivated; but if they are naughty or make mistakes, it is believed that they deserve to be punished by their parents. Punishment can be a verbal warning, a threat, a slap on the face, hands, or butt with a ruler or a stick. It certainly makes the children feel pain at that moment.
But to American parents, such actions are considered abusive and are not allowed by law. If American parents strike their children for some good reasons, they may be summoned to court to face the judicial system or be questioned by social workers (7).

In this discussion of Kieu's paper amongst University English Department grad students and faculty, much was revealed about the conflicts this group felt about the need to enforce "academic" standards, as well as about their interests in cultivating diverse perspectives and styles:

Joan: I sometimes read papers and feel I need somebody else to recognize what's going on, because maybe there's something outside my culture going on in that paper. I don't think we're trained to recognize those boundaries all the time. We know what we think is "good writing." At least, all of us English Department students are taught what those standards are, but sometimes...

Rod: No, we're not! (Everyone laughs.)

Joan: I don't think we see what students are doing. How do we hear these voices when they're screaming at us?

Martha: Kieu's essay I found incredibly troubling for a lot of these reasons. Maybe I can't grasp her logic, but I feel there's bad logic going on here? There's a slipping between hurting a child and slaps on the butt, and harsh treatment and beating. The terms aren't being defined. But maybe it's another example of how I don't have the skills to read it.

Candy: This is a terrific essay to me. I really want to defend her. I'm not sure that she has enough command of the English language to...she's bound to terms she hears in the current cultural language in Anglo-America today. If we could read this in her own language what a difference that everything that she says might...In my first reading I was having a little bit of trouble, so I read it over and over again. She's coming from such a completely different...perhaps even religious... completely socially different culture... and she's having difficulty with our terms, which she is bound to use. And I thought it was interesting, bless her heart, that one of the articles she's using is Mayhall and Norgard, 'Child Abuse and Neglect: Sharing Responsibility'--so what vocabulary did she have to work with? It came from current psychological language concerning what Americans call child abuse. And to me she's learning, she's thinking, 'Oh, is this how white, middle-class Americans define this? Is this what they call child abuse?' This brings up wonderful issues in how I read this and grade this to increase her...

Joan brings up important questions about the standards we use to evaluate our students' writing which can silence them. The INVEST group, which has chosen to work with the community outside the university, seems to have a standard that can embrace these texts. For the University graduate student and faculty group, however, the problems are quite different.

The standards of the English grads grow out of an orientation to evaluate in the name of the academy. At the same time, they acknowledge the limitations of this orientation when looking at culturally diverse perspectives. Martha talks about what is missing in the essay for her: namely, logic and definitions. However, she does entertain the possibility that what is missing might be absent in her ability to read the work, rather than in the essay itself.

I find Candy's remarks to be troubling because, while presented as a defense of Kieu, they are more of an apology. Her assumption that Kieu doesn't know enough English amounts to a kind of argument that this type of critical argument wouldn't be acceptable from a native speaker, but from an ESL student it's okay. There is faulty logic in the assumption that the essay would be better, if in the author's native language, on the basis that the topic is aimed for an English-speaking audience who "misunderstands" Vietnamese attitudes toward child discipline, not a Vietnamese audience. Furthermore, and not incidentally, English is, in this case, the author's native language. If it were written in Vietnamese, it would be a Vietnamese critique of America. In English, it is an American's critique of America. Candy doesn't argue that Kieu's essay has its own specificity and logic; she argues that we shouldn't expect more from this student. There is a paternalistic tone to Candy's remarks which diminish, rather than "defend," Kieu's writing; again, it is a case of sympathy rather than empathy.

The dialogue continued:

Alphonse (to Martha): Would you ask Kieu not to present these ideas in her essay?

Martha: That's not what I'm getting at. I don't think it's presented effectively. I feel like she says things as facts that she doesn't back up. It's very different from [Jerold's] essay, which is incredibly richly documented. He backs up every...I mean he's learned how to play the game of being...you can be angry, but if you document it well and follow the rules, it's pretty convincing. Kieu doesn't define her terms in a lot of places. She says you can get sent to jail for getting slapped on the butt in the U.S., which I know for a fact isn't true because otherwise my parents would have been in jail all the time. I feel angry because she wasn't given..I don't know if I feel angry because I felt like an editor should have been more rigorous with her? This is probably a terrible thing to say, but I wish there had been more copy editing. There were grammatical errors. I just felt really troubled by it. Maybe I'm just censoring, but maybe I feel like she's not giving herself a fair shot here? It's hard to listen to her. It's hard to give her that audience if she's got these contradictions and sloppy thinking, or what seems to be sloppy thinking.

Candy: This is such a good thing to talk about because probably this is where she is. Probably she wasn't born and raised here. If you had no knowledge of life in a typical [U.S.] family, when your own dad whacks you on the bottom, and you come to a culture completely different from your own and you look at the media and people are in court for striking their children. This writing is her way of defining herself and the culture she has found herself in. I think we have to be real careful about editing this.

Martha: I guess I'm having a hard time how it fits into this presentation in this book. I'm thinking back to what Susan was saying earlier, "Don't patronize them by not demanding a lot as writers." And there's a troublesome issue here. It's a fascinating piece of writing and it's obviously powerful. It obviously affected me really strongly. The things you're saying, Candy, are obviously true. This is her perception. It's a very educational essay to read about what it looks like to her, but it's following a different set of rules than, say, Jerold's essay is. And I'm just curious. I mean you could say that about anything. What are we doing here? Are we encouraging voice and no holds barred other than that? Or are we, at the same time, trying to ensure that this voice will be heard by as many audiences as possible without them discounting it because of... I don't understand how rigor translates into something like this. We have a less critical response to something like Jerold's [paper] because the emotion takes over. Here [in Kieu's paper] our emotion takes over and makes us more critical.

While Martha wants to value Kieu's ideas, she seems to require that they spend a bit of time in the U.S. "melting pot" first. It is curious that the English Dept. folks were able to buy into Jerold's paper and not Kieu's. I suspect that most of these people had enough background in African-American literature to bring a context to Jerold's piece, but not enough background in Asian cultures to bring to Kieu's piece. It's interesting that when readers are bewildered by Shakespeare, we expect them to build sufficient background to enable themselves to understand it. We don't expect Shakespeare to "define his terms" for us; the burden is on the reader. However, in the case of Kieu's essay, the reader (for example, Martha) puts the entire burden of providing a context for her perspective on the author. Robin points this out very clearly:

Robin: You get lines like, "As I see it, in America the family seems to be unimportant." And if I got an essay with that line in it, I would be responding, "If that's the way you see it, then maybe you need to do more research," because there are different ways of looking at structure, and while I'm hearing everything that Candy says, that this is someone who is expressing the generalities of America as she sees it--and that's very worthwhile--I still have to figure out what do I say to this piece. Do I say, "Go do more research" or do I say "I need to do more research"?

Alphonse: There's that moment for criticality. That's exactly what we're asking ourselves to do here. We're looking at ways to aid the student in being able to broaden what they think they understand through our interactions with them: the discussion on the page, in recitations, when we see them in the corridor, whatever.

Robin: And certainly being able to say, "Where did you get this [idea] from?" instead of writing "incorrect" "clumsy" "no" or "NO!" Here's where I'm coming from in questioning this line: What do we do now?

Candy: This is really about educating ourselves and not just our students. Asian-Americans' writing is so unrepresented [everywhere]. But there is a huge population of them...Kieu's whole way of thinking and creating is so different than ours.

Mahnuma: As an Asian woman, I understand what Kieu is saying very well. I, too, feel that the breakdown of the family is very strong in this society.

What I have realized as a crucially important aspect of Belonging is how much it points out that we don't live in a society where the Jerolds and the TJ's, the Kieus and Marthas, can yet speak directly to each other. A student journal, such as Belonging, can serve as a bridge that allows people to begin to examine some of the vast gulf of inequitable social conditions and conflicting value systems that continue to get in the way of personal relationships between students from different races and classes, and between students and teachers.

While it would be inappropriate to over-generalize about these particular discussions, it seems especially significant that members of both discussion groups were led to articulate their own conflicting feelings about the content and/or the inadequacy of their evaluation processes. Both groups recognized the limited nature of their training, their responses, and their understanding regarding the style or perspectives of the writing.

The publication of the works in Belonging caused some readers to question and analyze their methods of evaluating and understanding, and of how they may be working to maintain the status quo; to maintain standards which exclude certain ideas and expressions while exclusionary assumptions to go unexamined. What long term effect such a discussion will have, I can't say. But an accumulation of such doubts can cause ideological shifts which may foster further shifts, which might eventually reposition the way the academy sets standards.