What Does Achieving Community Mean
As an international student coming to America for higher education, it is easy to bond with students who come from China as well. I thought Chinese international students would be a community as a whole before. However, that is never the reality. Students from provinces with relatively small amount of students coming here tend to tie with each other more tightly than those from cities like Shanghai or Beijing. I noticed it when I first tried to join in the game several Chinese students were playing. I got totally confused when they started to speak mandarin but with strong accent during the game. I think because of the linguistic features they shared, their community is naturally formed. At the beginning of the quarter, it would be a good thing to find your own community by this way in order to have company and not being alone. Nevertheless, it would limit the chances to find a true community one belongs to rather than what category one was born in.
The way I deal with this kind of situation is to let nature take its course. People with similar self-identity would naturally come together eventually, and the peers even from the same city can come out with totally different identities and values. I always thought community formation is related to geographical location and cultural difference is tight to geography. However, what I observed is that cultural difference is not the same as regional difference. It enlightens me that culture is not only divided by geography but also have other factors, such as parenting, education and personal social circles.
The question of what community truly means is raised at this point. The answer varies from individual to individual. As Suresh Canagarajah — the author of Achieving Community — asserts, if the community formation is only based on the sharing language and some cultural affinities and affiliations, the community would lose its value and deeper meaning of the sense of belongings. Community is more than a mere unity of folks with similar backgrounds, and I start to think about whether the notion of community should be emphasized or we can just keep open to infinite possibilities of joining diverse identities and drop the notion of community directly. I agree that we should regard the identity of community as a floating signifier which could change over time as we encounter different affairs and experience more. It is significant to leave the freedom of choosing community that fits one’s self-identity and can bring one the sense of belongings.
