53: A Life Long Inquiry Forever Flowing Between China and Canada: Crafting a Composite Auto/Biographical Narrative Method to Represent Three Chinese Women Teachers’ Cultural Experiences¹

Well (Ming Fang), when you write this chapter you make it sound like it is a fixed rock again, the Chinese culture. And then you make Canada sound like a fixed rock, the Canadian multicultural society. Then you say: Bingo, they go together, bang, and we get discontinuities. Now I am trying to build the idea if you want to write something very narrative…. You will have to find the words. You are trying to give a sense of rivers flowing together, you know. Not a mountain banging against a mountain which is the way it sounds now, but a river. This Chinese landscape, this ever growing, ever changing landscape flows, it is more like a river, it flows together with the Canadian river and these three delicate Chinese flowers, you know, bobbing along like lily pads, bouncing along…. The Chinese river flows into the Canadian river and it intermingles and they mingle and there are discontinuities and there are eddies and ripples and backflows as the two rivers come together. These three little lily pads bounce back and forth and so on and so forth. They can’t go backup the Chinese river anymore, or when they do they don’t fit and they can’t in a sense go up the Canadian river but they can flow with the merged river. (Michael Connelly’s Thesis Talk with Ming Fang He; in He, 1998, p. 204)