My aim is to change my students’ perception of the U.S. There is a hegemony of whiteness in English language teaching, and I want to represent how diverse and multifaceted the American identity truly is.”

When I wrote this to enter The JET Program as a high school English teacher in 2014, I was not aware of how much this would impact my life in Japan. As I began to crack open textbooks, wake up sleepy students, and navigate the enigma that was the old-school Japanese copy machine, I slowly built a consciousness for the parallels that thrived in the rice fields and smoky factories of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka.

Hamamatsu has one of the largest immigrant populations in Japan. As of 2018, there are approximately 9,200 Brazilian residents. Other residents hail from Peru, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, and are migrant workers.

After moving to my Japanese hometown, I learned that Japan had a long history of migration between Brazil and Peru, dating back to as early as 1873. However, although many of my students and friends carried rich multicultural identities, they often saw their non-Japanese roots as a hindrance instead of an advantage. Some of my students would hide their mixed heritage if they physically passed as Japanese, and most of my returnee and bilingual/trilingual students would downplay their English proficiency to avoid standing out.

I wanted to find a way to bridge the gap between who they were and what their communities pressured them to be, and I was able to start this conversation with them. Instead of assigning academic papers or chapter books that only held text alone, I showed them Hafu, a documentary that followed five families navigating the intricacies of their mixed-race identities in a Japanese context. Hearing the voices and seeing the faces of intercultural families can help students realize how real and relevant minority experiences are.

Continue reading here.

Becoming a champion for Syrian youth

Muyi Yang, Rotary Peace Fellow, Uppsala University, 2019-21

If you told me ten years ago that I would be running a non-profit school in a post-conflict country, I would have laughed out loud. At the time, I was working as a business representative for a commodity trading company, visiting clients and inspecting their coal mines.

Visiting one client, colleagues and I found several unbelievably young workers at several mines. Some of them looked even under 10 years old. The client admitted to us that the workers were indeed below the legal age to be working in the mines, but they were keeping it secret because, “what else can we do?”

The village had only one primary school with two teachers – one full-time, the other part-time. If somehow a child managed to graduate from this primary school and was able to enroll in a junior high and could afford it, the nearest one was in a town more than an hour away by tuk-tuk, a small three-wheeled motorcycle. The truth is, most children work on the coal mine from an early age and stay there the rest of their lives just like their parents.

Turning points

Once I saw those young faces covered with coal dust I could not unsee them. After witnessing these young workers, I decided to quit my job, go back to college, and intern at a public defender’s office in Illinois, representing incarcerated juveniles. After that, I worked with underprivileged children in different countries before applying for and receiving a Rotary Peace Fellowship. One thing led to another, and now I have established and am running a non-profit school for marginalized children in Syria.