English as an International Language – Term Paper

Article review 

English of My Story

The article “The English of My Story” has a lot of aspects that have been covered in the linguistic class. To begin with, “The English of My Story” is a creative piece of writing that was done by Xu XI an ESL (English as Second Language) author. The creativity of this piece of work is culturally influenced as the author’s first book to be published discussed her life “My writer’s life.”

The writer portrays the Bi-lingual concepts in her writing. She learns English as her mother tongue but later learns Chinese. The author also mentions that her parents taught her Cantonese and English but not Indonesian, forcing her to leave her Indonesia nationality. In her writing she kept mentioning “Hong-Kong English” bring in the concept of World Englishes (WE) “But I was an arrogant young fiction writer in English never mind the world or Hong Kong English……”. The author also dwells on the notion of World Englishes stating that “I once ascribed to World English, the notion of English as a plural forced me……. P.2”

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The author also adopts the idea of trans-languaging in her writing. In her writing, the author mixes different languages writing from English to Chinese “… Wonderful Chinese-English term “talk-story” ( ) P.5.

The bi-lingual and the trans-languaging abilities give her the meta-cultural competence advantage. As the author states, she is a child born in Hong-Kong to Indonesian parents. Much later she moved to the New York City in the USA where she has been living. Her writing has been affected by the Chinese culture, Hong-Kong Culture and that of the USA besides her Indonesian parental Culture. She manages to draw various cultural aspects ranging from China to Indonesia to the USA. Her living in different cultural phenomena forced her to use English as her mother tongue. “… Being born to Indonesian parents who made English our mother tongue at an early stage giving a near-native English fluency assisted an entrée o the elite world”.  

Later in her writing, the author embarks in self-translations. She gets attracted to the works of Lin Yutang and C.Y. Lee who engages in Chinese-English or English-Chinese translation. The author uses translation in her quest to find global literary language that would host other languages including the Chinese.