|
Post by Ganbare! on Aug 24, 2009 18:27:55 GMT -5
Despite the fact I have quite a respectable number of stamps on my passport, I feel like I assimilated to Western culture too much...
I guess the opposite happens too, any experiences ?
|
|
|
Post by betahat on Aug 24, 2009 18:59:01 GMT -5
May I put forth the proposition that no one is really 50-50 Eurasian culturally and that one side will always dominate more, depending on where you were raised, what languages you were taught, etc. ? Some of the folk here seem pretty close, as they've lived in "Westernized Asia" for long periods, but if the idea behind "white-washing" or "yellow-washing" is that you don't really represent an even mix, I submit that we're all at least a little "washed" one way or another.
[FWIW I'm probably one of the most white-washed people here, in spite of living with Chinese grandparents for years, spending ~4 out of 27 years in Asia, etc. I don't really see it as a problem or issue, though it would have been nice to be raised with another language - learning Mandarin is pretty intimidating at this stage.]
|
|
|
Post by Ganbare! on Aug 25, 2009 8:22:35 GMT -5
May I put forth the proposition that no one is really 50-50 Eurasian culturally and that one side will always dominate more, depending on where you were raised, what languages you were taught, etc. ?] I second that, I suspect it's scientifically impossible to be 50-50 unless you're some sort of social experiment. I'm a bit surprised that you lived in Asia and that you're a PHD student and you're still intimidated at the idea of learning mandarin, imagine us poor mortals with undergraduate or worse high school education who've been living all our life in the West lol...
|
|
|
Post by Subuatai on Aug 25, 2009 11:22:14 GMT -5
I think I'm wifey-washed. She has successfully eliminated any racial or cultural identity within me and now is making me her very own plaything to walk all over on with her high heels. Not to mention she has already made me agree to raise our daughter just like her. And so in the future I'm going to be the only bloke in the house surrounded by two individualistic bossy women who would slap me up if I ever regain a racial or cultural identity.
European? NO WAY! Asian? NO WAY! Mongol? NO WAY! Individualist? HELL YEAH!
Meh, seriously though I reckon she's right. Just be yourselves.
|
|
|
Post by betahat on Aug 25, 2009 21:44:58 GMT -5
Any language where I can't read the alphabet seems an order of magnitude more difficult. If I was going to learn an Asian language, it would probably be Malay/Indonesian because they are phonetic, use the roman alphabet, and seem to have relatively simple grammatical structures. But maybe my view of the difficulty of Chinese is colored by my father, who despite living for the first 14 or so years of his life in Singapore/Burma in a Chinese (albeit Hokkien, not Mandarin) speaking community can barely speak any now.
I would be curious to know of anyone's experience (including yours Ganbare) learning Mandarin, vs. learning another language (especially from the Latin group - Spanish and French are my other two and weren't too hard to pick up).
|
|
|
Post by Ganbare! on Aug 26, 2009 14:48:06 GMT -5
Well my native language is French then my parents figured out I should learn more and since my mother spoke Spanish, they settled on that thinking it would be easy for me to pick it up and they were right it was (but useless!). At the time, I was living in Canada so I started learning English at elementary school. The said languages share ALOT of vocabulary so just like you, I had no trouble reaching a decent level in each. The tricky part of learning too much too early is that now I code-switch very frequently and impose improper grammatical structures of one language to another making quick communication hard at times. It didn't help either having no special ability in the language department unlike my mother, I'm more of a social science guy, that and the fact that my parents often spoke Arabic or Mandarin at home with their friends and family.
I've been dedicating up to 2 hours a day for the past 2.5 years and I think that my Mandarin is somewhat conversational. But communicating orally is the easiest part of any language. Learning to read properly requires much more work because of the complexity of memorizing elaborate characters and the same applies to writing them, it is like calligraphy class all over again, just much harder. However I'm not sure if I'll ever need to learn all this to live/work in Asia for a couple of years as an expat.
|
|
|
Post by jefe on Aug 31, 2009 13:11:29 GMT -5
First of all, much of Asia is already semi-westernized. It is difficult to avoid western culture altogether, esp. in the large cities that used to be under colonial domination by a Western power.
In order for someone to be "yellow-washed", they would have to be born to non-Asian parents, but raised in an Asian culture.
If you are including Eurasians, then I think there are quite a few, especially those who were forced to grow up with no contact with their Caucasian parent or relatives (which may happen if the Caucasian parent abandons the child and the other parent, dies, or is otherwise absent). People like the local HK actor Anthony Wong Chau Sang come to mind, whose British father left them when he was about 3 years old and he adopted his mother's surname.
Some Eurasians in Asia are sent to local schools which are taught in the local language, and have no Caucasians and very few Eurasians at the school. They might get very yellow-washed if their upbringing is not balanced at home.
I have seen a number of cases where the Eurasian kid stays with the Asian parent in Asia, who remarries another Asian and has additional kids. Then the Eurasian kid grows up in what otherwise is a 100% Asian family.
I have only heard of one case where a Caucasian kid was adopted / raised by a full Asian family.
I have also personlly known a case where an American couple in HK both learned Cantonese, and had a son born in HK (the wife interestingly went to the same university as I did (Massachusetts) and her time there overlapped with mine). Their blond hair, blue-eyed son ended speaking Cantonese most of the time, started to learn to read and write Chinese as well from age 6, and learned to speak English with a distinctive HK Chinese accent. By the time the kid was about age 8, the parents decided that they should move back to the USA (they chose Seattle), and I heard one of the reasons was the psychological-social development of the child.
|
|
|
Post by Ganbare! on Aug 31, 2009 13:44:53 GMT -5
I have also personlly known a case where an American couple in HK both learned Cantonese, and had a son born in HK (the wife interestingly went to the same university as I did (Massachusetts) and her time there overlapped with mine). Their blond hair, blue-eyed son ended speaking Cantonese most of the time, started to learn to read and write Chinese as well from age 6, and learned to speak English with a distinctive HK Chinese accent. By the time the kid was about age 8, the parents decided that they should move back to the USA (they chose Seattle), and I heard one of the reasons was the psychological-social development of the child. Wow some parents do take their role very seriously, acculturation can be something very disturbing for the mental growth of a child. I know several non-white adoptees that had some harsh time building their family, ethnic and national identity, somehow similar to the EA X-PERIENCE tm.
|
|
|
Post by jefe on Aug 31, 2009 13:52:12 GMT -5
Any language where I can't read the alphabet seems an order of magnitude more difficult. If I was going to learn an Asian language, it would probably be Malay/Indonesian because they are phonetic, use the roman alphabet, and seem to have relatively simple grammatical structures. I would be curious to know of anyone's experience (including yours Ganbare) learning Mandarin, vs. learning another language (especially from the Latin group - Spanish and French are my other two and weren't too hard to pick up). I listened to rural Southern Chinese dialect (Toishan / Sze Yap) in my early childhood in the USA (from non-English speaking grandparents), and was sent to Chinese school (Cantonese) in Chinatown at age 6. Then I started learning French in Primary school from age 7. I stopped Chinese at that time (but continued French all the way until university) until I started Mandarin at age 15. In my second year of university (in Massachusetts) when I was still 17, the Chinese dept. head asked me to be a teaching assistant for the beginning Mandarin students. That really helped my Chinese, as I had to learn EXACTLY how to write each character and how to pronounce them in order to correct the students' homework. I also conducted the students' exams and quizzes, including the oral dictation. Imagine that many of the students were ethnic Chinese, and a few of them were born in HK or Taiwan or China -- do you believe that I actually had to correct their mistakes in Chinese? After university, I then took classes in Spanish off and on over 7-8 years (part of the time living in a Spanish speaking neighborhood) and later took classes in Japanese, and later went on a study tour to Japan. Then I joined a Filipino cultural ensemble and had Filipino roommates, which helped me to pick up some Tagalog. Later still, I moved to Penang, Malaysia for 5 months, where I also attended Malay classes. After moving to HK, I also took Thai classes (while volunteering at a Thai workers' social service centre) and some Taiwanese classes as well. My latest language interest was Portuguese, after 2 trips to Brazil. NOT THAT I REMEMBER ALL of this, but I hope that it gives some credibility about exposure to both European and Asian languages and cultures. By far, the hardest for me to learn to read and write was Thai -- despite having an alphabet (which I finally learned at one point), its orthography seemed very complicated to me. Japanese, on the other hand, was MUCH easier to learn to read and write, esp. the alphabets, which has very regular rules. The challenge with Kanji was that I had already had to deal with learning first Traditional Chinese characters, then Simplified, then Kanji, many hundreds of which are different from both forms of Chinese. Chinese may seem like a mess of complicated pictures at first, but after a while, you see how RELATED the characters are to each other and there is a systematic relationship to help you learn to read and recognize more. It is not necessarily more difficult than learning to SPELL in English (but now they have spell-checkers, right? -- but with Chinese character input, you don't have to know how to write the word either). Grammatically, I find Tagalog to be a bit of a challenge, as it does not have the typical subject-object relationship found in other languages. The grammar is not as complicated as, say, French or Spanish, but simply very different from everything else I ever encountered. But it was a boon to help to pick up Malay, as up to 25-30% of the vocabulary is very similar -- maybe like how English is to French or German / Dutch. And Malay / Indonesian grammar is not nearly as complicated as Tagalog. I would not pick a language to learn simply because it is *easier* (all languages are easy for 3-4 year olds to pick up the basics, but difficult even for adults to master), but because it is relevant to your daily life, your work, your social life, or your interests. The reason is because focussing your mental attention and engaging in frequent practice is the key to mastering it, not because you believe it is *easier*. If you believe that most humans are similar in intelligence and aptitude, then you have as much chance to learn any language as long as it satisfies the requirements above.
|
|
|
Post by Ganbare! on Aug 31, 2009 13:55:33 GMT -5
Anyone noticed how post 1990's Eurasians seem to have much fewer issues about their identity than older ones. People in general are more and more accepting. At times, I'm so freaked out by those mixed couple, purchasing pedagogical books about mixedness long before the kid is even born, really sounds like some sort of experiment.
However it seems like the 'Oh Ma Gawd our kid needs to learn linear algebra before he hits elementary school or else he'll become a hustler' mentality is a general trend.
|
|
|
Post by jefe on Aug 31, 2009 14:00:33 GMT -5
Wow some parents do take their role very seriously, acculturation can be something very disturbing for the mental growth of a child. I know several non-white adoptees that had some harsh time building their family, ethnic and national identity, somehow similar to the EA X-PERIENCE tm. Whereas many non-white adoptees into white families have a struggle with their family, ethnic and national identities, as do Eurasians, I still think it is quite different from the Eurasian one. The Eurasian is still related by *blood* to those very relatives who may have an issue with them. It could be VERY serious if the Eurasian was a *mistake*, ie, the result of an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy. A non-white adoptee could not be the result of an unwanted or unplanned adoption.
|
|
|
Post by Ganbare! on Aug 31, 2009 14:10:50 GMT -5
Well we're not all born equal langage-wise. My father (French/Mandarin speaker) used to fail miserably his Japanese classes at because it seems like his brain wouldn't remember more kanjis, having already learned so many traditional and simplified characters in his youth. At the end of their high school curriculum Japanese students are supposed to master the most frequently used 1945 kanjis...
I understand your point but not knowing your family is in general far worse than knowing a conflicting one. I live in the same city as my 2 aunts' family and we barely talk to one another because they are part of the Scientology cult and they are trying to brainwash our family into it but if I really was in trouble to no end they'd be the one I would go to, I guess they'd still help me, just because we're blood related.
|
|
|
Post by jefe on Aug 31, 2009 14:11:53 GMT -5
Anyone noticed how post 1990's Eurasians seem to have much fewer issues about their identity than older ones. People in general are more and more accepting. Does this help explain the coma that EAN is in now? There are simply fewer new entrants into the whole premise of the idea. Actually, I think the issues simply have changed and evolved. For example, a mixed-race couple in the 1960s in the USA would have had a rough time just finding a place to live given the legally enforced segregation at the time -- how to raise the kid culturally was less of a pressing issue. This is hardly a problem nowadays. It does seem much easier for Eurasians to identify more with the mainstream culture now - a generation earlier, they were more of a curiosity -- and a large portion of them were children of war brides.
|
|
|
Post by jefe on Aug 31, 2009 14:14:43 GMT -5
Well we're not all born equal langage-wise. My father (French/Mandarin speaker) used to fail miserably his Japanese classes at because it seems like his brain wouldn't remember more kanjis, having already learned so many traditional and simplified characters in his youth. At the end of their high school curriculum Japanese students are supposed to master the most frequently used 1945 kanjis.... I didn't say it was easy -- I actually mentioned the same thing -- I also got traditional, simplified, and Kanji mixed up because there was no easy system to distinguish them easily -- sometimes a Kanji character differs minutely from the corresponding Traditional or simplified character.
|
|
|
Post by Ganbare! on Aug 31, 2009 14:24:58 GMT -5
I'm really keen to learn Japanese and Italian, I know that learning the latter will be a breeze because I already speak 2 latin languages but I'm almost certain Japanese is a desperate case because of the amount of characters to store and mixing up with my fledging Mandarin.
I really feel like that you're bitter towards the US, you'll never forgive the good ol' racist Uncle Sam for the hardship you and you're family been through.
|
|