In Monday’s class, we discussed how immigrants should assimilate into the American society and how immigrant children should learn English in school. I was able to relate to the topic with my own experiences. When I first began school as a sixth grader in America, I was somewhat directly thrown into the English learning environment. Although there was an ESL program in my middle school, I was able to pass the placement test and was not placed into the program. However, my English level was nowhere near that of the others in my classes. Before going to school, I had trouble understanding third grade English materials as I did not know most of the words in the passages. Therefore, although I passed the placement test, I still could not understand most of the things that the teacher was saying in class, and often need the help of a Chinese-English dictionary to know what to do for the assignments. And where there are other Chinese speakers in my class, I would choose to talk to them in Chinese instead of English because I couldn’t find the necessary words to express myself in the English language. Sometimes I was actually envious of the kids who were placed into the ESL program, as they seemed to form their own group, whereas I was neither in the group of ESL students nor had the English capabilities to speak with other students normally. But this experience of being thrown into the English environment actually helped me learn English faster than my peers in the ESL program, since I had to force myself to speak English and expand my vocabulary on a daily basis. In the meantime, my Chinese hadn’t deteriorated much because I also spoke Chinese daily with my friends in ESL program as well as in my family.
But in my cousins’ case, what I saw was completely different. Both of my cousins were born in America. When they were little, they learned how to speak Chinese first because that was the only language that was spoken at home. But as they grow up, they first began to learn English from watching television, and then they would communicate to each other with a mix of Chinese and English. When they started school, they began to communicate to each other exclusively in English, and they also began to communicate to their parents in English only. The only times that they would speak Chinese at home is when they are talking to the grandparents, who understand almost no English at all.
I think that although it is important to maintain someone’s native culture during the assimilation process, it is only a matter of time before the mark of a family’s native culture eventually disappears if they truly want to assimilate into the American society. If it does not happen in this generation, then it will happen in the next generation, or the one after that. In order to assimilate into a new culture, one is planting new roots in another land in the world, so it is inevitable that the person also have to eventually be disconnected from his/her original roots. It is not America that Americanize its immigrants who come to this land, it is the immigrants who want to Americanize themselves.
Is it actually important to assimilate? Let’s look at naming practices of African Americans in NYC during the 1980’s. Many of the blacks living in New York at this time were children of the Great Migration. Before the eighties, black parents gave their children “American” names like “Joe, James, Jack” but after the 1980’s and the Black Power movement, mothers, trying to reconnect with their roots, chose to name their children distinctively Black-sounding names. It was largely single, poor, Black mothers who did this. But the reason why someone named Tyrique Smith has a lower stander of living than Tyler Smith isn’t because of their name, it’s because a mother that would name her son Tyrique, more than likely, lived in an inner city neighborhood, full of crime, lacking opportunity and was a single mother. The point I’m trying to make here is that we shouldn’t give up on our roots. We shouldn’t be afraid to defy the status quo. Our cultures–even if they’re distinct from the “American” culture– should be celebrated and shouted from the rooftops not hidden and renounced. We should be free to name our children Tyrique or Roshanda or do anything else we feel is important to our culture.
For further reading and sources see the linked article:
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/2005/04/a_roshanda_by_any_other_name.html
This subject is the kind of area in which people might confuse correlation with causation. As you say in your comment and as the authors of the linked article show, giving a baby a certain kind of name does not necessarily lead to any specific outcome even though it correlates with certain outcomes. I am glad you linked to the article — it helped to clarify what you were getting at in your comment.
I totally agree with you because I have similar experiences growing up as a Chinese immigrant and going through with all the ESL programs that aim to ease the transition in terms of language. I came to the United States at the age of three, which is younger than you, and also at a crucial period of language development. Chinese was my first language but it soon became my second choice of communication to English simply because I only spoke the language at home. After fifteen years of speaking solely English outside of the house and solely Chinese in the house, I feel am relatively able to communicate basic ideas in both languages. However, I have also noticed that it becomes hard to articulate more complex ideas in both languages. I find myself filling Chinese words I don’t know with english when I communicate with my parents, “Chinglish,” and sometimes being at a lost for words when a thought is too complex to say in english.