During the COVID-19 pandemic, increased measures of information control were implemented in China to manage the flow of sensitive information that may contradict the official narrative of national sacrifice, perseverance, and triumph. Building on previous scholarship on the subversive potential of translanguaging practices, the present study analyzes key moments during the initial outbreak of the pandemic, when Chinese netizens creatively combined linguistic and semiotic symbols to circumvent censorship measures. It demonstrates how these practices highlight the innovative and multimodal nature of netizens’ linguistic tactics and illustrate how translanguaging and trans-semiotizing both enabled and profoundly disrupted the process of meaning-making. This article shows that the use of creative code-meshing strategies is a powerful means of challenging the centralized governance of social media spaces in pursuit of freedom of expression.

In this chapter, I reflect on my academic journey, with a particular focus on my PhD years, to show how I grappled with native-speakerism as an international multilingual scholar. I went from eagerly seeking to acquire standard, native-like English to accepting my non-native identity and finally reflecting critically on the Janus-faced reality of being torn between the romanticized ideals of multilingualism and the monolingual ideology of standard English. By sharing how I shuttled between idealism and reality in my research and teaching, I elucidate the myriad facets of multilingualism, both the opportunities it brings as well as its concomitant challenges. I argue that the idea of embracing languages and language varieties other than standard English is empowering and liberating for many multilingual scholars, yet such idealized conceptualization often falls short in high-stakes situations where linguistic hierarchy and English monolingual ideology continue to prevail.