My Experience

In the assigned reading, there is a phenomenon that young people from Sri Lanka refuse to speak Tamil — which is their mother language when they come to U.S. The most important reason that could explain this is that those young people tried to stay away from their bad memories given by Tamil due to the Caste system in Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, only people with high social status are able to learn and speak English well. Those people who are from lower class don’t have the same education opportunity as people from higher class.

However, I had similar experience when I visited Hong Kong last year. I tried to speak Mandarin to an old lady who sells snacks, but she insisted that she couldn't understand me and asked me to speak English or Cantonese to her although I know that she must know what I mean by Mandarin. I think that is probably something related to politics. Hong Kong was not legally a part of China until 1997, some old people may still have the idea that it’s not a part of China but an individual country.

Another experience that I had about speaking English is that many people ask me : “Hey, you speak very good English, are you an ABC (American Born Chinese)?” I always respond no and explain that I am not even from Hong Kong or Taiwan, I am from mainland of China. In fact, the reason why they have such misunderstanding is probably that most Chinese student speak with Chinese accent, which is easy to distinguish. And it’s also hard for most Chinese students from mainland to speak fluent English. In that case, I will try to speak more Chinese to them to prove that I am really from mainland.