Being and Becoming "A New Immigrant" in Canada: How Language Matters, or Not

Based on a four-year ethnography and informed by poststructuralist theories of identity and language, this article examines how, through lived settlement experiences in Canada, a young man from Mainland China gradually became an immigrant in the folk sense of the term. Though he was considered a success in terms of the diaspora community, he was disempowered in the host society. Highlighting one vignette, I illustrate how he came to understand that language, in the form of various texts and everyday interactions, constitutes an important terrain upon which socioeconomic inequality and immigrant identity are negotiated, resisted but reproduced.