This article unpacks the ideologies of "professionalism" by examining how international and multilingual identities are negotiated through the enactment of workplace genres. Relying on autoethnographic narrative vignettes that highlight the affective labor inherent in such identity negotiation, this article moves beyond traditional workplace contexts to explore familial sites of intergenerational knowledge construction. The author argues that "professionalism" for multilingual communicators is bound by native-speaker paradigms and colonial language ideologies that complicate how expertise is voiced.