The teaching and learning of Chinese remains a fragile undertaking across all stages of Australian schooling. This paper reports on a practitioner inquiry into pedagogic practices and student engagement with disadvantaged primary school students in a Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) classroom in Sydney, Australia. Drawing upon studies of affect as well as the Fair Go Project's theoretical framework concerning student engagement, the research explores how 'difficult' Chinese knowledge and pedagogies of discomfort disrupt social norms and practices. The engagement of students is conceptualised as an interplay of highly affective, highly cognitive and highly operative learning experiences. In this paper, we argue that 'discomforting' emotions evoked by curricular and pedagogic approaches can influence significant change and foster curiosity for CFL education. The paper concludes with a consideration of pedagogic implications for foreign language education and possibilities for future research.