Community: Defined identity
In Suresh Canagarajah’s article titled “Achieving Community”, he describes two similar situations with exactly opposite results. When he talks to someone he thinks is from Sri Lanka, his home country, in Tamil, and supposes the person will reply him in the same language, one worker just show his unwillingness but the other actually starts a conversation with the author. The whole article was roughly about whether people want to cut off the bounds to the original country after their migration. And as a person who like traveling around and observing people, I indeed face some similar situations.
When I was in high school, I paid a visit to several cities in Sweden with my friends. Like every other tourist, we booked hotels and enjoyed the comfortable rooms during the days. At one night when we were back from the supermarket, we waited for the elevator in the hotel’s lobby. The door opened, and several strangers, I didn’t know where they from, saw us. Then a man greeted us in Mandarin, saying “Nihao” in some accent. We were shocked but thought it was somewhat a friendly greeting till he kept saying so, and walked out of the elevator, laughing out loud with his companions. That was kind of offensive, since he added his judgement to us, thinking that all tourists have asian faces are Chinese. Though we are Chinese, and his guess was right, what he behaved was not that polite to us. If people really want to show their friendliness to others, for example in Sweden, he can greet others in English like “Hi!” or in the local language, Swedish, “Haj!”. Our skin colors and ethics may be clues of where we possibly from, but it’s really rude to put subjective views on others, especially strangers.
I regard me myself as someone who doesn’t want to be labeled as a specific group of people. Actually every day as an international student I am experiencing a same thing that most of American students seem unwilling to talk to me even if the instructors ask us to discuss with others. I look like Asian, Chinese, and I may not express myself that clear in English, but that doesn’t mean I won’t have interesting views. When someone is defined as a specific type of people, stereotypes are applied immediately. I myself don’t like to have too much connection with Chinese students now, one reason is that I don’t fit in the mainstream. Others may do things I never thought about, and it’s unfair to judge me and blame me because of something I never did. Besides that, I truly believe that everyone has the right to choose what kind of person he or she wants to be. We ourselves make the choices rather than our skin colors and ethics, or even genders and sexualities doing that for us.
When I decided to travel or study abroad, I somehow wanted to escape from the older version of me. But all my efforts would be wasted if other people labeled me with stereotypes and put me into an incorrect group. Why people focus only how I look rather than how I shape my inner world? Communities or groups make my identity stable and hard to change. Of course there are some people like that, but obviously, I’m not one of them.
