After Reading “Achieving Community”
While I was reading the story that the author Suresh Canagarajah encountered an attendant which was also a Sri Lankan Tamil compatriot, I related it to my own and my family experience instantly. Though the background of society of Tamil and China are not same, I find that I can partly understand the feeling and behaviors of those immigrant Tamil people. The reason that I feel familiar with this story is that I am also speak only standard putonghua and unable to speak my home town dialect, just like the next generation of a nouveau bilingual Tamil who migrant to Canada. My parents moved to Beijing, the capital of China, and decided to settle down here over 20 years ago. They grew up in Anhui, a Southern province of China, and they only speak dialect until they came to Beijing. But from the beginning of my memory, they rarely talked to me and my brother in dialect, especially when we were little.
The reason of my parents do not teach and let me speak dialect is same to these nouveau bilingual Tamil for acquiring for a social status. Beijing, as capital of China, is one of the most developed city with abundant resources and opportunities which attracting many people from all over the country to find their lives. This gives indigenous Beijing people kind of privilege over other province. At the age of my parents, they most simple way for them to distinguish outsider is listening to one’s accent. If you speak a dialect or speak putonghua in accent, you would definitely feel that you are not belong to the society. Even worse, some indigenous people will discriminate outsiders because they consider that outsiders are consume resources belong to them and are at lower status. My father said, “The reason that I never let you speak dialect of our own is that I do not want you experience what I met. If you can speak putonghua perfectly, you can have an equal status with others from the very beginning of the conversation.” Though I know that one’s ability and status can definitely nor determined by whether he speak with accent nor not, but it is just very difficult fro us to change people’s stereotypes. It takes time for society to change and developed. Fortunately, the situation now is much better than my parents age for people people already realize that outsiders help improved economic and cultural development of the city.
What is different between my family and nouveau bilingual Tamil is that the native language of Tamil is related to social status inequality so that the disadvantage Tamil want to caste off their old identity and to gain power and new status in a new community, however, for my parents and me, we have no idea to away from our home town but try to find the way to fit into the community where we live in. I totally agree with Canagarajah’s conception of “shuttling” model of community which encourage people to abandon the term “community” itself as it still gives the impression of something bounded and static but fluid and changing. Community is not established by language, or social status but formed during people’s interaction. Nouveau bilingual Tamils form community with inner city residents; My parents have both social circle in Beijing and home town.
