Recognition Crisis of Immigrants
Sharing similar characteristics with others, including speaking the same language, having the same custom, or even having the same skin color, can create the sense of belongingness to a certain group or community. People usually categorize a stranger due to how they look from outside, from what language they speak, what they look. All these characters imply what culture background the person came from and usually these different tags will also linked with other stereotypes no matter positive or negative. Some people, especially the immigrants are trying hard to remove that originated culture aspect of them. Thus they pretend not to know the original culture or to avoid the lifestyle related to their originated culture to blur their cultural identity.
This phenomenon not only appears in Tamil immigrants in Canada which mentioned in the article “Achieving Community” by Suresh Canagarajah. This kind of phenomenon also could be found in American born Chinese, this problem of the confusion of identity. The first generation of Chinese immigrants speaks Chinese Mandarin or Cantonese as their first language, and many of them still live in a Chinese style of living. From the first generation of Chinese immigrants that I have known, many of them choose not to teach their children Mandarin or their dialect to help their children be more “Americanized.” Maybe their children can understand but still not able to speak the language fluently. It is an interesting situation since their life is still somehow under Chinese culture’s influence, but as long as they are unable to speak Mandarin, they are not “Chinese” to other people who lives in China or had been raised in China.
Many ABC (American born Chinese) identify them as a pure Americans rather than recognize have that Chinese heritage part. I also experienced the similar thing that Canagarajah mentioned in his article. A local student was living on the same floor with an Asian face, but he speaks English all the time and has an English name. Once I accidentally heard him speaking mandarin to his parents on the phone, so I’ve noticed that he can speak Mandarin fluently. However the other day I tried to greet him with Mandarin, but he insisted on using English to answer, and pretend that he doesn’t understand Mandarin. I was confused at first. However, I figure out later that he uses the language as the way to tag himself as a “true American” rather than the stereotypes his Asian face might bring.
