ABSTRACT
Live in Hong Kong long enough and you begin to notice how often people toggle between languages, namely, Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, depending on the situation. You might enter a taxi and the driver will start off in Cantonese and then switch to Mandarin, if you are struggling to respond, and the driver may turn finally to English. The reverse is just as possible, depending on how you “present.” This kind of linguistic dexterity occurs in shops, at restaurants, and even in subway announcements and signs—Chinese and English are both official languages in Hong Kong, and whereas Cantonese is a spoken form of Chinese that most people speak, Mandarin is ever more present in recent years, as Beijing draws Hong Kong closer to the mainland. The implications of this interrelationship between languages for the Creative Writing classroom are that students can use translation methods, including self-translation strategies, as an integral part of their writing process, one that engages the aural, cultural, and semantic dimensions of language. Over eight years of teaching undergraduate poetry workshops in Hong Kong, instead of treating the English-language Creative Writing classroom as a site for English-only instruction, I have tried to find ways to incorporate my students’ knowledge of Chinese. Multilingual instruction extends to my international students on exchange as well, many of whom speak more than one language.
