This paper contends that if the teaching of theory is to be liberatory rather than alienating, the process of theorizing and theory writing needs to be demystifed. To do this, the paper first describes a personal experience that set the course of an educator's life--her learning of English (taught to her by her father) in China. The paper then discusses the impression that Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" made on her (and the reaction that it elicited) during her first semester of Ph.D. studies at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages, as well as the impression made by articles by Mike Rose and J. Elspeth Stuckey. Next, the paper reflects on the experience of teaching "repeating" students and the parallels with the home schooling the educator received from her father. Finally, the paper considers theory writing as transforming the past into the future, commenting on Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish," his investigation of the coercive and permeating power of institutions and the academic disciplines, and considering Foucault against her own experiences as a student. The paper concludes that theory writing depends more than anything else on lived experiences; it consumes a complex process of experiencing and re-experiencing, reflecting and re-reflecting, questioning, resisting, investigating, encountering others, shaping and reshaping, and transforming the past experiences into a process of becoming. (Contains 9 references.) (NKA)