Identities in Community
Before I came to America, I had always thought that community should be homogenous, consisting of people who are similar to each other. For small communities, like in the elementary school, community involves in genders. Girls are likely to gather together and form a community. Boys are also likely to gather together and form a community. For large communities, they often comprise of people who are similar to each other, having similar cultural backgrounds and similar ethnics. This is because China is not a country as mixed as America. We do not have a lot immigrants, so people around me are all Chinese. However, after I came to America, I found it is really difficult for me to find a community in the first place because people here are really various. I always see a group of people, consisting of different skin color people, walk and talk together. In my old opinion, community should contain people who are similar to each other. It was not that I realize community should be flexible instead of being rigid until I read Suresh Canagarajah’s article. This is because he has encounter many ethnic groups through different languages, and sometimes without any common language at all. But the author really enjoyed with other communities, and he quoted from migration scholar Papastergiadis, who says “Communities are not just dominated by rigid structure and fixed boundaries but are like a happening”. This means we don’t have to put people into different categories, which build the community. As long as we interact with people, the whole process can be called “community”. Instead of being static, community should be flexible and changing. People may have their preferred community, but we are not suppose to constrain them in one community. They should have chances to shuttle between communities.
Nevertheless, sometimes people prefer restricting them to one community, hiding their identities from other communities, as the article mentioned. The author met a carwash attendant who seemed can speak Tamil, which is spoken in the author’s home country. The author felt a bond with him and talked to him in Tamil. However, surprisingly, the attendant replied to him with English. The author did research later and he found Tamil dealt with caste association. There are specific words for people of different castes and people who speak Tamil have to obey this rule strictly. And this could lead to the following result, as the author states, “A conversation in Tamil between two non-acquaintances leads to prying personal questions about one’s background.” Therefore, the reason the attendant replied with English was that he did not want to reveal his social status through speaking Tamil. He was afraid of being looked down by the author, which would hurt his dignity. A similar experience happened to me once in China. Although China does not have a lot of immigrants, our language does vary with different regions. Different areas have different dialects. Once , I went to Shanghai, which is a very modern city like New York in America, and talked to my parent with a dialect of my city, which is a small city like Santa Barbara in America, in a crowded shopping mall. Then my parent told me to speak mandarin because Shanghainese can tell that I am not Shanghainese through my dialect. They would think my accent sounds like that my family was from countryside, probably as farmers, and then they would look down upon my family.
As you can see, people intend to hide their identities of communities if they think that identities are inferior. However, we should propose that communities should not contain inequality. Nowadays we use a lot of factors to define a community, like culture, language and race. It is time to redefine it and reconsider it as flexible and changing. Communities should not be restricted to rigid structure.
