Redefine Our Community
I am an international student from China. In my memory, we really liked to stay together with our friends who had similar hobbies and interests with us in China, and I think it was called a “community.” Because there are not many of immigrants in China, me and my friends speak in the same languages and have the same culture’s background. Everyday, we had meal together, played games together and went shopping together. However, things are not the same in America. I always saw a group of people from different countries stayed together when I came to UCSB, and I cannot understand how can we get along well with someone who has totally different culture and language with us. Thus, most of Chinese students like to gather together with other Chinese students as we usually did in China and feel shy to make friends with others from other countries. However, I realize that making friends with other cultures is not as hard as we think after reading the article of Suresh Canagarajah: “Achieving Community.”
In the article “Achieving Community”, Canagarajah shared his person experience about doing a survey of Sri Lankan Tamil (his nation) in Toronto and wanted to find if they were still spoke Tamil in Toronto. When Canagarajah met a carwash attendant whose name was a Tamil name and wanted to spoke Tamil to him, Canagarajah felt strange that the carwash attendant responded him in English. The reason behind this was “Tamil language is loaded with caste association” (Canagarajah, para 6) which means this carwash attendant was not in the same caste as the writer and wanted to hide his identities of communities. Like Canagarajah said in his article, “it was even more surprising in the context of resistance to ethnic discrimination, activism for language rights, and militant struggle for self-determination that had led to the dispersal of my community in the first place,” sometimes people want to hide their identities because they think their inferior than others.
I experienced the similar situation before. When I took SAT exam in Hong Kong, I found that people in Hong Kong were hardly used Mandarin and even English was used more in Hong Kong than Mandarin. I spoke more English than Mandarin when I went shopping in Hong Kong because a lot of people could not understand Mandarin. Children in Hong Kong will be taught both English and Cantonese in school rather than Mandarin even if Hong Kong is a part of the China, and I think this was caused by politics.
As far as I am concerned, every community and race are equal, and we should feel confident about our cultures and also respect other cultures. Like Canagarajah told us in his article: we should “gain the nimbleness and openness to join any community or construct and identity.” Nowadays, we should refigure and redefine our communities and identities in this equal world.
