This chapter examines the ideologies of language use in the context of an EMI university in multilingual Hong Kong from the perspectives of a group of international students. Based on the findings of the study, the chapter shows that international students’ ideologies of language use in the EMI university classroom are much more complex and nuanced than what is written in the institution’s official language policy documents. The majority of international students are found to hold ideologies of English as the default language for university education and English monolingualism as the norm in the EMI classroom. However, there is also evidence of varying degrees of acceptability of multilingual language practices in the classroom. The chapter draws attention to the complex ways in which international students’ language ideologies intersect with their concerns about social exclusion, linguistic disadvantage and educational inequality in the EMI classroom. It also demonstrates how their language ideologies contribute to sustaining and reproducing linguistic hegemony and social injustice in EMI higher education.

Saum Song Bo, a Chinese man in the United States, published an open letter in 1885 to express consternation about being asked to donate to the construction of the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal.The solicitation came three years after the Chinese Exclusion Act.Saum was not subjected to exclusion himself, because he entered the United States as a student, an exempted class.Yet he was able to effect cross-class solidarities on the basis of the United States’ race-based immigration restrictions.Additionally, the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France to the United States, and France had imperial leverage over Vietnam.Saum’s letter effected a comparative condemnation of US and French inequities -exposing the ironies behind the vision of liberty the statue represents.This chapter argues that in bringing together US racism and French imperialism, Saum produced an early form of Asian Americanist critique most closely associated with movements that took place much later in the 1960s and 1970s.