Call from the Stranger on a Journey Home

The Author: Hongyu Wang is Assistant Professor in Curriculum Studies at Oklahoma State University. She received her Ph.D. in curriculum theory from Louisiana State University. In addition to co-authored books and published articles in Chinese, she is a co-editor of The Internationalization of Curriculum Studies (Peter Lang, 2003).

«Hongyu Wang presents an elegant and insightful journey into cross-cultural self-formation. Readers travel with her through an unusual juxtapositioning of life and academic narrative, of prose and poetry, located in a central rendering of philosophies of Confucius, Foucault and Kristeva. The text is revolutionary for its multiplicity of writing forms and for its example of a postmodern self continually in the making. As for all of us, partial selves are Wang: there is no resolution of difference or dissonance either personally or theoretically even as one desires (subconsciously?) wholeness or harmony. This I applaud most of all.» (Lynda Stone, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)«Hongyu Wang’s voice is as clear as a bell in this text and yet, at the same time, the author helps me experience myself and my own presumptions and successes and blind-spots anew. It is always a sign of hermeneutic success when, through a ‘stranger’s’ eyes and words, one’s own culture begins to appears odd and unique and not simply ‘the way things are’. I believe that this is precisely the sort of text that vitally needed right now: new voices, new conversations, new unearthings of our shared and contested lives in education.» (David Jardine, University of Calgary)