“You Are No Longer Your Past Self”: Embodied Criticality in One Chinese Rural Student's Storyworlding

Abstract

This article explores how Chinese rural student Yi (pseudonym) nuancedly challenged dominant narratives surrounding school meritocracy, rural deficit, and success. The analysis centers Yi's narrative—tracing her journey from a rural village to a city high school situated within China's unequal education system and rural-urban divide—powerfully positioning it as a site of counter-storytelling. Building upon existing scholarship that adopts an affective approach to critical literacy, the researchers “became with” Yi's narrative in a culturally informed way, arriving at an understanding of her critical consciousness not as rational interrogation, but as visceral knowing deeply rooted in critical feeling, doing, and being—embodied ways of knowing that empowered Yi toward alternative worlding. The study ultimately argues that marginalized youth's counterstorytelling, as exemplified by Yi, must be understood within concrete contexts, and crucially, through the complexity, depth, fluidity, and even contradictions inherent in their lived realities.