The Tale of Two Countries
America: The Wild West
Screeeeecch! THUD! Whooooosh. The plane from London has finally touched down in Dallas. After a long wait as everyone slowly gathered their bags and shuffled off the plane, she gathers her three children, and her new husband and herds them out of the plane door. When they arrive at customs and immigration, she is separated from her husband and must make the trip through the non-US passport line. She’s gripping her immigration packet from the US Embassy, along with four burgundy passports. When she hands the officers her form they lead her to a room and take the passports, without explanation. She waits, the clock ticking, for what feels like ages. When the officers come back they take her and her eldest child, Natasha’s, finger prints. Her younger children, Samantha and Alastair, are still too little. She feels like a common criminal. They’re taking her biometrics and checking them with a computer system. Finally she and the children are allowed to leave. When she arrives at the terminal to meet her husband and prepare for their next flight to Wichita, Kansas, she stares out of the huge windows. There are planes everywhere, a bright blue sky, and tarmac that is never ending. They board the second plane and discover it is tiny. It only has two seats on each side and her husband has to bend over so that he doesn’t hit his head. After a two hour flight the plane prepares for landing. She leans over and looks out of the tiny plexiglass window. Kansas is an expanse of brown foliage as far as the eye can see, interlaced with a twisting system of roads and tiny cars. When they finally exit the airport a wall of hot, sticky, humid air hit her body. She noticed that the cars were HUGE, there were trucks and SUV’s everywhere, and they were driving on the wrong side of the road! As they passed through interlocked neighborhoods she noticed that the huge grand houses she had seen on television weren’t dramatized — they were real.
This woman is my mother, and this is her story of adaptation to an American Discourse.
Before arriving in America, my mum’s only ideas of what the country was like came from television shows, and gave her the image of a “wild west”, where she thought everyone was toting guns and saying “y’all”. Upon her arrival, she was surprised to see that the information she had learned from her informal teachings of American culture were inaccurate. Her learned information no longer had any value to her, so she had to acquire knowledge of the culture and language in her new discourse instead.
James Paul Gee in Social Linguistics and Literacies describes a new way of thinking about literacy. He believes that being literate isn’t just about being able to read and write well but also includes who you are and what values you believe in. Gee says that Discourses are “…distinctive ways of speaking/listening and often, too, writing/reading coupled with distinctive ways of acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, dressing, thinking, believing with other people and with various objects, tools, and technologies, so as to enact specific socially recognizable identities engaged in specific socially recognizable activities.” (Gee 171). According to Gee, these “Discourses are mastered by acquisition, not learning…by enculturation…” (Gee 190). Acquisition, in Gee’s definition is, “…a process of acquiring something (usually subconsciously) by exposure to models, a process of trial and error, and practice within social groups, without formal teaching.” (Gee 189). Most people learn new skills through acquisition because knowledge about something often doesn’t lead to being able to do that thing. My mother, enculturated in the American Discourse, would eventually master this new discourse by acquisition.
Integrating into American culture included changing her language. The general public may think this is easy because both America and England speak English, but there are many differences in the meanings and spelling of words. One day, shortly after arriving in America, my family pulled into the parking lot of Walmart. My mother was amazed by how big the building was, and how it looked like all of the other buildings she had seen on the drive over. Her husband led her into the gaping mouth of a doorway, her three kids trailing behind. She clutched the fluorescent orange school supply list in her hand as her husband led her through the huge aisles searching for the Back to School section. As they’re searching through the pencils and erasers, trying to find everything on the list, Natasha suddenly exclaimed “I need rubbers!” As half of Walmart turned towards the eight year old shouting about condoms, my mother’s cheeks turned bright red. “They’re called erasers now darling,” my mother murmured, ushering her family through the store and towards the exit.
My mother not only had to experience this shift in discourses for herself, but also guide her three English children through the shift in discourses. However, my siblings being fairly young when they arrived, adapted to the new Discourse quickly, while my mother, who was in her 30’s, struggled with the switch.
Two Identities at War
In Fan Shen’s article The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition, he describes his transition from China to an American university. Fan Shen quickly realized that entering a Discourse is so much more than just knowing the language, it is a “social and cultural experience” (Shen 460). Fan Shen explained that it was extremely difficult for him to adjust to the sudden change in Discourses. I believe this difficulty was due to the fact that to be literate in a Discourse you “…must simultaneously say the ‘right’ thing, do the ‘right’ thing and in such saying and doing also express the ‘right’ beliefs, values, and attitudes.”(Gee 168). Because Fan Shen had an ideological identity that was extremely different from American ideology, which focuses on the self in writing, he had difficulty “saying and doing the ‘right’ things” because he held different cultural beliefs, values, and attitudes than those of Americans. Fan Shen dealt with these difficulties by creating an “American Identity”, which he could switch to when writing for school, that differed culturally from his “Chinese Identity”.
My mother could generally say the right thing, because she spoke English, but she struggled with doing the ‘right’ thing and expressing the ‘right’ beliefs and values, because her primary discourse had instilled in her different values and beliefs. Just like Shen she had to “re-program [her] mind, to redefine some of the basic concepts and values that [she] had about [herself], about society, and about the universe, values that had been imprinted and reinforced in [her] mind by [her] cultural background, and that had been a part of [her] all [her] life” (Shen 460). She had to redefine her primary discourse. Her primary discourse and this new American Discourse were competing in her brain, neither one losing or winning.
In England, my mother was an executive assistant. Needing a job in her new country, my mother applied for an assistant position for which she was overqualified. She submitted her application and resume, and went in to take a typing test. She was required to type at above 60 words per minute while also spelling and formatting sentences correctly. My mother walked into the testing center with her head held high and her shoulders squared. She knew she would get the job. She sat down at the desk, other women furiously typing on her left and right sides, and she set her fingers to work — flying across the keys. When she finished she went back up to the front desk to get her results. She gasped. She had made too many mistakes because she was spelling in British English. She had failed the typing test. She didn’t get the job. Because my mother was not well versed in her new discourse, she was unable to participate in the narrative, despite being well versed in a similar discourse, and she didn’t get the job. In this case, the Dominant Discourse was American, and because she couldn’t access that discourse, she was denied “…the acquisition of social goods (money, power, status) in [the] society”(Gee 179–180).
The Struggle to Find Belonging
After three years living in America my mother returned to England to visit her family. She stepped out of the airport feeling the cold breeze and entered the gloomy weather that told her she was home. Her father picked her up in his Mercedes, driving on the left side of the road, and as they zipped past the green trees and small brick houses and shops, she let out a small sigh. She was home. That night, when she got together at the pub with her family for Sunday roast, her family all joked with her that she “sounded so American”. She noticed that her nieces had all grown in the last three years, and that her family had lived their lives and changed. Suddenly she felt like she didn’t belong anywhere. She definitely didn’t fit in in America, with her accent and funny adages, and now she had Americanized just enough that she no longer belonged in England.
Megan Foss in Love Letters experiences a similar situation. When Foss tries to integrate into the mainstream Dominant Discourse in and after going to prison for sex work and drug abuse, she often experiences impostor syndrome (Foss 13–33). Megan Foss wrote letters that she felt were good stories, until she tried to tell her English professor about them and suddenly felt that she didn’t belong in the writing discourse (Foss 22). My mother experienced impostor syndrome in America and when she traveled back to England. She didn’t yet know enough to be considered American but she had also lost some of her English culture already. She was suddenly a fraud.
Upon arriving back in America she decided that she had to find ways to introduce her English culture into her American culture, without offending anyone. At that moment, my mother became aware that she had two warring identities, just like Fan Shen. My mother now had an “English Self” and an “American Self” (Shen 462). She didn’t want to lose her “English Self”, so she figured out what parts of England she could still keep in America.
A high pitched whistle, that started as a timid whisper and built like the crescendo of a full orchestra from the kitchen - startles her. With all of the commotion of her children and grandchildren at the table, she had forgotten that she had put the kettle on to boil. She dashed into the kitchen to turn off the stove, and the whistle was cut short. She pulled out three large tea cups, and two small mugs. The three larger teacups were for her and her daughters, Samantha and Amanda. The two small mugs were for her two sweet grandchildren, Emma and Callum, whom always begged for tea when they waltzed into her house. She plopped the tea bags in, as she had thousands of times before, and poured the boiling water over them to steep. Once they were done she took the tea bags out, poured in a splash of milk, and plopped two lumps of sugar into her daughter’s cups. “Tea’s done!” She called out, over the raucous children. Everyone sat down at the kitchen table, mugs and cups in hand, and sipped their tea. The kids begged her for Digestive biscuits, and she obliged, bringing two for everyone. Finally they could sit and chat while they drank their tea. She asked Emma, Amanda, and Samantha about their school days, while Callum told his mum about his day with Nanny. This feels right. She feels whole.
This is the joining of her two selves in one place.
Works Cited:
Foss, Megan. “Love Letters.” Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lee Gutkind, Creative Nonfiction Foundation, 1998, pp. 13–33.
Gee, James Paul. Social Linguistics and Literacies, Routledge, 2012, pp. 167–202.
Shen, Fan. The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition. Vol. 40, №4 (Dec. 1989), pp.459–466.