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Description
This ethnographic study examines why and how older Chinese immigrants pursue English as a Second Language (ESL) in later life, foregrounding the role of generational biography, language ideologies, and diaspora context in shaping late-life multilingual trajectories. Drawing on mixed-methods data collected across three institutional sites in Central Massachusetts from October 2022 to December 2023, the study centers a generation whose schooling was disrupted by war, revolution, and the Cultural Revolution—producing interrupted and ideologically charged relationships with formal education and foreign language learning. For these learners, motivation was not economic but relational: participants enrolled to avoid being a "burden on my children," to navigate healthcare independently, and to sustain belonging within their communities. Two distinct learning cultures emerged, shaped by educational biography rather than chronological age. Intermediate learners treated English as an intellectual pursuit, drawing on disciplined self-study habits formed across their life course—in one case, secretly learning English during a period of political restriction. Novice learners, whose schooling had been more severely interrupted, oriented toward English as a communal practice, sustaining one another's participation through WeChat coordination and shared social rituals. These divergent orientations reflect broader ideological trajectories shaped by China's shifting language policies across generations. The study contributes to understandings of heritage language maintenance, diaspora language ideologies, and the institutional conditions—here, "program-linked enclaves" of senior care and community services—that make late-life language learning possible.