Wow. This is very interesting.
I think it would be very different if you grew up in the time and place I did. But even then, most all of the other half asian people I know around here who have grown up in north america have been sheltered from the asian side. Even some of the completely asian kids I know have been somewhat kept from learning their parents' language in order to better assimilate them into the eurocentric culture here. But they end up getting fucked over. I wrote a blog entry on this for my English class last year:
[h=1]Employment Complications in Richmond: Part 1[/h]“If you can only speak one language, English, in Richmond, basically you are half-garbage. Even waiters and waitresses can use English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. This is a basic skill for survival for when you live here. If you’re an Oriental-looking person, it’s worse. At least if you’re a white person, you have an excuse.”
My mother is a critical person, but she keeps it real. I love her.
This conversation was sparked at the dinner table tonight, over a meal of various pescatarian dishes, boiled choy sum, and stewed pig’s feet.
At my mother’s workplace (she’s an insurance broker), seven people had quit in the span of two months, she’d explained. They had hired a bunch of new people as replacements, two of whom were Chinese-Filipino, yet could speak neither Chinese nor Tagalog.
My immediate response?
“Wow, that’s just useless.”
And, I added, almost misleading. If someone is Chinese and Filipino, especially in Richmond, it would make perfect sense that they would be able to speak Chinese and Filipino. And that preconception would be a major reason that employers would hire them. That was certainly my preconception, and I was fooled. Of course, if they did not specify that they were proficient in these languages on their résumés, then it wouldn’t actually be considered misleading and it would be court-worthy for an employer to have assumed so. But the fact that I, and most certainly many others living here, would hold this preconception, holds much significance in the lives of employment-aged Asian-Canadian Richmondites.
It can be difficult for people who were born here in Canada to look for jobs in Richmond for this reason. A large amount of goods and service establishments in Richmond are Asian-run and expect to mostly cater to, and to be staffed by, Richmond and Vancouver’s Asian community. A large part of this community is more comfortable conversing in their native non-English language, and so it would be most pragmatic for companies to look for people who are competent in these Asian languages to work for them. It’s not always a spoken or written requirement on job postings, but it exists here as an unspoken judgment of a person’s value.
Not having taught your children your native language(s) will have created a major disadvantage for them in Richmond. This is counterintuitive to what many parents may have expected for their children that were growing up in a North American locale. The parents may have personally experienced difficulty in integrating into a predominantly North American culture (and it was a predominantly North American area and culture here during when our parents’ generation was in their prime years—but no longer!)—and in deciding to not teach their children languages other than English, they may have thought that it would be easier for them to integrate into the culture and that they would be giving their offspring a fighting chance. Their very reasonable-sounding rationale would be that their kids would be able to learn English faster and better this way, and therefore do better in school and afterwards, better in life. A decade or two later into their children’s lives, parents and children alike would come to the realization, painfully, shamefully, through awkward encounters with family friends, peers, interviewers, and long-unseen relatives that were all overachievers that knew multiple languages and would look down on you for not having learned your native tongue, that this has simply not turned out to be the case.
Shame is in being awkwardly denied face-to-face interviews by countless managers after suffering through phone conversations with them in which you force out what broken Chinese you know after wracking your brain; it’s in indcredulous looks from lost strangers asking for directions in the only language that they know when you are unable to answer them while clearly looking like you should be; and it’s in people of your own ethnicity clear-as-day gossiping about you in front of your face while you are unable to understand what they are saying and are helpless to intervene. Before you know it, your life is a recreation of a scene in Mulan—you have dishonahh your famirry!
“Darn it, I can’t believe that God-awful CBC accent that Mulan is talking to Uncle Chen with.”*
After all is said and done though, it’s probably really not as big a deal as I’m making it out to be. We still live in Canada, and tons of Asian-Canadians and Canadians of other “minority” groups who aren’t proficient in their associated languages are very successful people who don’t give off the impression that they’ve “missed out” on any opportunities. In fact, it seems to be the case that many have worked extra hard on other aspects of their lives and have developed themselves in other spheres to make up for it. They are comfortable and confident in knowing that they know the extent that they know or are connected to the extent that they are to the Asian-related community and opportunities in Richmond and Vancouver. They know that they are still, quite obviously, fully capable individuals. And so at the same time it seems that it might in fact have been a better thing that they did not concern themselves so much with ties to the Asian community here.
And this concept is the predecessor to Part 2 of this post…
To be continued…
*CBC = Canadian-Born Chinese
Image Source: http://sweethingsonearth.blogspot.ca/2011/12/mulans-crowning-glory.html
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