Our purpose is to use a Deleuzian-informed conceptual and theoretical framework to disrupt predominant representations of "the" immigrant experience in Canadian official language education and to open up to the affective potential of "an" immigrant life to become otherwise. Employing a rhizoanalytic research approach that acknowledges "wonder" as an analytic practice (MacLure, 2013), we map interview data from two qualitative studies with immigrant language learners to show (a) how affective relations involving an adolescent French second language student disrupt received understandings of motivation; and (b) how reading a poem in an adult English second language classroom disrupts anticipated, affective responses to a lesson. Our rhizoanalysis underscores the complexity and unpredictability of the becomings of "an" immigrant life in the context of meeting the primary objective of teaching Canada's official languages. It also suggests how second language research itself might be conceived differently and become otherwise.