‘That’s what I saw in MY story!’ Reading and rewriting Chinese folktales with bilingual children

While research has highlighted how bi/multilingual children share their experiences and identities through reading and responding to stories, the practice of rewriting stories, particularly folktales, as a form of agency and identity affirmation remains underexamined. Drawing on translanguaging literacies as a theoretical framework and a critical pedagogy, this multiple case study explores how Chinese American children's biliterate identities are enacted through reading and rewriting Chinese folktales in two bilingual classrooms. Findings reveal that children traversed linguistic, semiotic, and cultural boundaries as they engaged in shared reading and offered unique interpretations of folktales. In their rewriting, children creatively wove together multiple named languages and visual elements to reimagine characters and plots, blending various cultural references, personal fantasies, and moral perspectives with original narratives. This study challenges the often monoglossic construction of biliterate identities, offering instead more complex ways of understanding bilinguals’ identities, which do not align with either one named language or national affiliation. It also offers pedagogical and theoretical implications for practitioners and researchers committed to empowering children from linguistically and culturally diverse communities in bilingual ways of doing literacies.