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Being the minority
Jean
Heartbroken papa bearGatineau, QuébecRegistered User regular
Heartbroken papa bearGatineau, QuébecRegistered User regular
It's something I've spent a lot of time thinking about lately. How hard and discouraging it can be being in the minority culture.
I'm a pure blood french speaking Québécois and I had spent all my life in that province prior to last year so I always was part of the majority culture.
I moved to Alberta last year to make more money (like nearly everyone else who does move here, I'm definitively not special in any way they're!)
The more time flies, the more I find myself craving my native culture. It might sounds silly but for an example but I used to mostly watch american and japanese videos on YouTube.. Now, Québécois videos is almost all I watch, to keep in touch with my home.
IMO, Albertans don't deserve the reputation of rednecks they got. I never felt like I was victim of discrimination, 99% of the people I have met has treated me with respect.
Even then, I get very lonely at times and I think '' I would be willing to trade-off a downgrade in pay to live in my own culture''. I never realised how much I loved Québec until I left it.
To be perfectly honest, I am not really sure in what direction I want this topic to go! Perhaps as a topic for minorities in this forum to discuss their experiences and feelings
Especially feelings because rationally speaking, nothing is wrong with my situation in Alberta.. it's just than I miss the comforting enveloppe of my home culture so much.
I'm a pure blood french speaking Québécois and I had spent all my life in that province prior to last year so I always was part of the majority culture.
I moved to Alberta last year to make more money (like nearly everyone else who does move here, I'm definitively not special in any way they're!)
The more time flies, the more I find myself craving my native culture. It might sounds silly but for an example but I used to mostly watch american and japanese videos on YouTube.. Now, Québécois videos is almost all I watch, to keep in touch with my home.
IMO, Albertans don't deserve the reputation of rednecks they got. I never felt like I was victim of discrimination, 99% of the people I have met has treated me with respect.
Even then, I get very lonely at times and I think '' I would be willing to trade-off a downgrade in pay to live in my own culture''. I never realised how much I loved Québec until I left it.
To be perfectly honest, I am not really sure in what direction I want this topic to go! Perhaps as a topic for minorities in this forum to discuss their experiences and feelings
Especially feelings because rationally speaking, nothing is wrong with my situation in Alberta.. it's just than I miss the comforting enveloppe of my home culture so much.
"You won't destroy us, You won't destroy our democracy. We are a small but proud nation. No one can bomb us to silence. No one can scare us from being Norway. This evening and tonight, we'll take care of each other. That's what we do best when attacked'' - Jens Stoltenberg
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it took me many years to not feel like a stupid, clumsy, unwanted mutant. then once i felt 'american' i went to high school where i got bullied for being white.
now i am 24 and i've lost my accent, i love cheeseburgers, and i'm going to school for programming- where being white is, like, customary!
it's been a real trip but i am glad i didn't only live one 'sort' of life or experience just sameness or just differentness growing up. variety is the spice of life, and all.
Was that voluntary?
I would never want to loose my accent. I feel like it's part of who I am. It's somewhat funny when people mistakes me for german but I would rather be mistaken for german than being told '' wait, what.. you're not albertan?''
it's not like i make any attempt at attracting attention on the fact I am french but i'm also making *zero* effort at hiding it as well!
linked, I had read the comic and forums for years and needed a new forum), so in some ways I've been a minority member coming from a place where I was part of the majority (6th gen NZ European).
It is a little different though than it may be for say Jean, as London is pretty much the root of my culture & ethnic group so while I'm not from here, I sort of am in other ways. It is so familiar & comfortable to me that it is like I've moved to merely a larger city in my country not the capital of another. Which is not quite what I expected before I moved to London.
But despite that I am still linked to my own separate culture. I spend an hour a day listening to NZ radio or reading NZ media and I socialise more with Kiwis than I do others. So despite my attachment to the UK I display classic migrant behaviour.
I am wondering if that will ever change. Should I go back? If I go back will I sound more British than New Zealander? Will I fit back in easily? Ugh
it was involuntary. i wasn't clinging to it but i wasn't trying to hide it or extinguish it either, really. i was perfectly fine with the idea of existing as an israeli-american (as opposed to an american who just happened to spend the first fraction of his life in israel). but after a while my voice naturalized so that i sound native to the area where i've lived for most of my life (philadelphia).
Do you ever find yourself getting a little touchy if you think that some one is challenging your authenticity as an Quebecois or Israeli?
I have found this to happen to me, even though I think, on reflection, that I've imagined the slight . More so the longer I stay away
Nah, it is more my perception than actual reality, which worries me
I felt like an outsider most of my childhood, being part English growing up in Northern Scotland was tough, I got bullied a lot, for a long time it made me reject the Scottish part of my heritage because I didn't want to associate with that. I don't do that anymore though, I'm proud of who I am and where I've come from and this place will always be home to me.
These days I even get a little offended when people tell me I'm not "properly" Scottish because I don't have a strong accent, it can feel like people are denying what you consider to be a large part of yourself.
Apparently over or about 1/10 of NZ either are UK citizens or could get it, so yeah your experience or mine are about normal.
Do you think being a proper migrant for a year or two helped you with reconciling your issues with being the outsider back home?
My native culture has never been particularly important to me, nor is it something that forms part of my identity - not consciously at least. That doesn't mean that I don't acknowledge it, or that I disapprove of it. I've just never found it to be very important. It certainly makes it easier to move and adapt to different parts of the world very quickly I guess.
I'm mixed (with a Asian mother and a Latin father). As it happens, I've become more and more separate from my culture of birth (an inevitability). It's not as bad, as my birth culture is fairly open and fluid thanks to history and geographic location, and used to foreign elements. My spoken Mandarin is pretty bad now, and let's not even get started on reading...
Coincidentally, I don't really fit into my particular part of North American culture either. Despite living here for so many years, I've done a less than stellar job of acculturating. It's not so much things like my accent (which is forgivable and probably not as pronounced as, say, the Southern accent that many of my neighbors have. It's simply "acting" like an American--my diet is notoriously un-American (I don't eat cheese, for example, which as any good American will tell you is a great heresy), and even now, a lot of aspects of American popular culture (books, media, popular traditions, sports) still go over my head and need to be explained to me since they're things typically learned as a child. Additionally, I'm an atheist--which is not uncommon where I was born, but still something of a rarity where I live now (okay, very rare), and thus separates me from a major part of the American experience (spiritual and church life). Hence the bad job of acculturation. In actuality, I could probably easily pass as an American thanks to the very lose definition of what it means to be one (a culture that is fairly fluid and open, just like the one I came from), provided I went out of my way to directly address certain "flags" that I inevitably set off--my diet, my disinterest in local sports (tantamount to religion), my lack of a religion. I'm just too set in my own ways.
So, I've gotten used to the fact that I'll never really fit quite right into any culture. Which is not the worse problem to have, but something I'll have to live in. Pretty much everywhere I go, I will remain, in some respects, a foreigner. It's true in Athens, it was true in Yokohama, and if I packed up and left tomorrow, it'd be true in Taichung for at least another decade, if not longer.
the accent gets noticed, but it always results in compliments and flirting so its hardly particularly alienating
I wouldn't claim not to feel at home. Pretty much everywhere I've lived for more than a few months, I've inevitably felt at home, one way or the other. It's practically a necessity. In 2001, I lived in four countries: Indonesia, South Korea, the United States and Taiwan. It wasn't fun, but you learn to make home wherever you can. Otherwise, you go insane.
As it happens, wherever my home is I'm clearly a foreigner. It's not necessarily a bad thing, just a reality of life. My accent doesn't get me complements. But I've learned to live with that. My weird Mandarin isn't going to win the ladies over either if I want back to the old country.
Some accents are clearly superior to others. On the bright side, I've been in Georgia for 7 years now, and I don't have a Southern accent. Whew.
From my own standpoint, I really don't want one.
Of course, if I did have one, I would sound a lot less "foreign" than I do now. However, since I have managed to become fluent in English, having a Southern accent would prove to be a problem in teaching/working in Taiwan. Ideally, you want the so-called "neutral" American accents, or the ESOL accent from India. There are also certain British Isles accents that're preferred (lots of Australian teachers try and pick them up). It probably has to do with "drawls" being considered very negative in both Taiwanese and in Mandarin in Taiwan.
Plus I don't like how it sounds. But that's a matter of personal preference.
To a certain extent I'm sure we all want to be able to fit in as far as possible because it usually makes life easier. On the other hand retaining characteristics that you either value or appreciate, or indeed cannot change is important too.
I'm still not sure where I stand on that point, although I do err to not making an effort to pass, as there isn't any need to in London. On the other hand, I apparently sound far more English than I once did (I can't tell) so it might happen without realising
It carries a stigma of being uneducated with a lot of people. Stephen Colbert used to have one but purposely practiced and adopted his current one to avoid that stigma. Whenever I'm around people with a southern accent I'll slip back in to my Texan one and depending on who's around I'll make a mental note to stop.
It's not that simple either. In a lot of languages--including Mandarin, as far as I can tell--the "drawl" in the Southern accent is a charateristic associated with poor use of those languages. I think it has to do with extended vowel sounds longer than they should be: for example, my mother was a Chinese literature major, and (now) a neoconservative. She loves folksiness to a ridiculous extent. But she struggles with understanding people with strong Southern accent and is really annoyed by anyone with a drawl in Chinese. Basically, someone who speaks with a drawl has an additional problem if trying to enunciate in Chinese.
It's also a generational thing. My grandmother can't speak Mandarin (or rather, she chooses not too) because she was educated during the Imperial Japanese period, so she speaks Taiwanese (and maybe some Japanese, but that's not very useful nowadays). Unfortunately, she speaks Taiwanese with strung-out drawls, like a lot of her generation, which makes her rather irritating to try and comprehend (among other things, it makes her sound more irritated than she probably is).
That translates to the Southern drawl, at least for me. It's why I've been ridiculously dilligent about not acquiring my own. The end result is that my speech patterns, by local standards, are weird:
- I use the word "automobile" interchangeably with "car" (probably about 40-60, and more often when the subject of the sentence is the vehicle in question). I also say it "au-TO-mo-bile," since I don't say "Au-to" as a contraction.
- I don't use the word "y'all", instead saying, "All of you" or "the lot of you" (blame my Australian teachers in Japan for that)
- Similarly, I use the statement, "...a bit of a..." more often than "...a little..."
- If I ever say the word "ain't", it's almost always satirical, as though I'm trying to be comedic. For example, "That ain't go-ING to fly, my friend." Otherwise, I use the word "isn't," since I can't use "ain't" naturally.
- I rarely substitute the "a" sound for "-ing" suffixes. I will occasionally overemphasize, like the above example, "I'm go-ING to forget to do that."
That's on top of certain weird pronunciations (I often pronounce words phonetically). Additionally, if I'm speaking to exchange student, I tend to switch over to their speech patterns in order to make the conversation flow more naturally (in other words, the exact opposite of what I do with native speakers). A common thing is to skip articles.
EDIT: I've been told (okay, rather, I read it in John Grisham's A Painted House) that to less accustomed Southern speakers, many Northern accents (particularly the stronger north eastern accent) sound extremely harsh and unnatural. Of course, the whole country seems to mock the infamous Bostonian accent, including other people in New England, but apparently this also extends to the so-called "neutral" accents.
Ha, I dodged inheriting the Bostonian accent by an inch. My grandparents have it BAD, and my dad tries to surpress it but it still comes up now and again. Actually, I was more likely to get the anti-Boston accent, which includes adding "r" sounds where they don't belong.
(Idea = "idear," sofa = "sofer," etc.). Yes, we New Englanders have a colorful array of our own strange accents, but I still don't believe they're as stigmatized as the classic "southern" accent of the Alabama/Mississippi region.
ehhh. considering where i'm from, people always test me about the exact same stuff- and upon discovering where i'm from, i always get smacked with a lot of HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THEM ARABS, YOU GENOCIDE ENABLING KIKE (in kinder words, of course).
i often feel like there's a double standard- where i might possess a fairly liberal, forward thinking ideation of my homeland... but because i'm 'of' there, there's a much firmer and more adversarial standard of how i ought to feel about the entire thing.
I actually have a very mild issue with inappropriate "r" sounds--I tend to speak very fast (not uncommon among Taiwanese either) even in English, and add a light "r" at the end of words like 'sofa' (as mentioned). It's pretty discreet (I think) and I think it's done in order to allow a faster pass through that word.
I think this is probably a result of your living in the deep South. Try moving out West for a while if you get a chance.
It's not that puzzling. I have friends in the mid-west, also foreign nationals (mostly East Asia) who feel the same way. We nonreligious tend to severely underestimate the value of faith to a great many communities throughout the country.
And religion is only part of the dilemma, as I've already stated. As it happens, I'm in a terrifically liberal area (comparatively, Athens) which is still deeply effected by the twin pillars of sports and God. But even without those, there are plenty of other areas where I'm not familiar with.
You're an American national, as far as I can tell--not to denigrate you, but you're entire cultural experience is very likely exclusively American (with the various subtleties and complications that entails). Of course you "get along just fine", it's a non-issue. I am not even remotely outspoken about religion (I actively dodge the topic), but the simple fact is that a lot of life is centered around church groups and that particular social network. Outside of that, chances are you have access to certain social networks I don't have, since when I came here I was already an adult. For example: before I came here, it was normal to get to now your neighbors (a natural part of urban living). Suburban life eliminates that (even in apartments), and you're expected to know your neighbors via church groups, among other things. In fact, churches are often a bigger part for recent immigrants because they supply a new network among the shared faiths (I know plenty of Korean exchange students who rely on local baptist churches, for example). It's probably why a disproportionate number of expats in the US are religious compared to the rates back home. That's not an option for me (of course, nothing's barring me from going to a church....).
"Moving out west" isn't really a solution, so much as a new approach. Especially since I'm even less accustomed to midwestern/west coast culture.
I went to school in Georgia for four years, and I remember having a substitute professor for a while who had a thick Southern accent. I caught myself assuming some negative things as soon as he started speaking. It was also interesting to notice that, even at Georgia Tech, I can only remember having one professor with a Southern accent. Hell, I had more profs with impenetrable French accents than actual Southern ones. I wonder if many academics deliberately drop their Southern accents over time.
It just seems like the problem is less "I'm a foreigner" and more "I'm a liberal living in the South". I don't think it's specifically the "foreign" part that's got you down, although I can imagine it might make the existing situation a little worse.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
As an adult I returned to the US and now I don't get the "where are you really from" because of African-American history, but I don't *feel* African-American at all; this isn't my culture or my background or my history. I don't automatically share the love of the same kind of music, I don't share the religious culture, etc. My childhood friends are white and Asian and geeky and the reason I hit it off so well with my husband is because he's a first-generation American as well, not because he's white (and he's another story altogether; English wasn't his first language and yet when he tried to join a local campus project asking to get input from people who had ESL backgrounds he was quietly turned away because they were basically looking for those of Hispanic descent, not blue-eyed Swiss).
Then I'm one of those bisexuals who have "disappeared" because I married a man and who had to wade through women who refused to consider me as a partner because I might just be experimenting or might leave them for a man. In fact, my hetero marriage is possibly the only way in which I feel I am part of a "majority" in any sense, and we even manage to muck that up by being inter-racial and childfree and atheist so
Basically my free time is spent seeking out other like-minded individuals as much as possible. I have many online circles I have to navigate to get my fill of kindred spirits, and I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have them. I was so fucking lonely before the internet.
As someone who grew up in the South, Southern accents carry a stigma even with Southerners. Most middle class Southerners have a fairly neutral accent - i.e. Northern Virginia/"Charlanta" accents in my region - and the deep accents are seen as a sign of being "country" - i.e. ignorant.
In Japan I'm a minority, and that sucks, but at least it's educational. I have a much better appreciation of racism, and I notice it in a way I never used to before I came here, 14 years ago. In a sad way, I think it's an experience everyone should have. And it's interesting, seeing how hard white people find living in Japan, because we've never been the target of racism before. In fact, the discrimination whites can receive here is the mildest, but it's such a shock that we complain louder than anyone. And, as a minority, I can see how some minorities react badly - there are other foreigners here that I hate talking to, because they literally can't have a conversation without complaining about Japan. There's a Canadian woman I see at one of my clients, and conversations with her go something like:
'what music are you listening to?'
'not japanese music of course. Some reggae, real reggae not Japanese reggae. And some R&B, American of course....'
Or
'which train are you getting home?
'well the trains are so crowded, o my god the trains here! I get the X train, but of course, I can't stand on the train in Japan, so it's a hard journey....'
These kind of people give me a lesson in what not to do. It's so easy for an immigrant to hate the majority, and I try to avoid that. I can definitely see the way that some British Asians end up hating white Brits.
Being a minority is educational, but it's not easy at all.
I guess we're just not seeing eye to eye here. While the role of religion isn't uniform throughout the country, I'm pretty confident in that religious social networks are pretty instrumental for a lot of Americans. Not all of them, but not limited to those who are actually religious too.
It's entirely possible to not have access to this sort of network while being an American national (it just is, statistically, not that likely). But the notion that somehow, if I'm surrounded by other atheists or like-minded people, I'm going to acculturate better probably isn't actually grounded in reality. I mean, you say, "Hey, try moving out West." That doesn't really address the fact that a lot of people count on social networks they've developed their whole life because a substantial portion of the population doesn't leave the continent they were born in (or the nation or the province). Religion just happens to be the most obvious one because of how it's organized.
Sports is different--largely since sports fandom isn't organized the same way. I don't follow the sports in the old country either, so that's nothing new. But all the same, I don't have any access to the social networks that existed when I was born outside of my extended family. That isn't true for everyone (though it's hardly false for everyone either).
That's a serious consequence of being a foreign national. This is not "Well, I moved from the center of the country to the edge," this is, "I went across national borders." If you don't understand that, I'm not really sure how to explain that to someone who, from what I understand, never left the United States (I'm not being snarky, it's just a reality of being in a single country, which is for most people the largest extent their social networks can easily stretch). It's also possible a person would deliberately severe those ties without travelling, it's just not terribly common.
Put more simply: Person A is nonreligious, but went to a church for four years of their childhood. Even if they never went to a church again, it's entirely possible for them to retain those connections. Person B went to the other side of the planet, and cut those connections. Both persons can form new connections. Person B can't go back in time. I probably have more friends than at any point of my life since I'm in university, but I know I don't have what dozens of people I know have: namely, friendships going back twenty years (or even more). That's a unique thing that a foreign national is likely not to be able to count on.
I don't really know how to explain it simpler than that. It has nothing to do with politics or religion, and everything to do with the circles you get to keep. Sure, there is a sort of "other" factor that my failure to pick up the accent or have a personal relationship with the Christian God impresses upon me, but that's independent of the fact that I can't call up a non-related family I've known for more than fifteen years, something plenty of people who I know today can do at the drop of a hat. Church just happens to be the mechanism--if I was born in 1966, and immigrated to the Soviet Union after 20 years of moving around, I'd have the same problem because I didn't know any Young Pioneers, Komsomol Members, Film Club friends or, once again, people who went the same church. Today, if I could find a city full of biracial ESOL non-smoking leftist squares, that problem wouldn't really change.
I remember in my own time, in big chunks of Yamate-cho in Yokohama, it was pretty obvious that if you were an expat, you were, on average, doing better off than the actual native population. Of course, this was a case unique to that community, with a disproportionate concentration of wealthy foreigners in roughly the middle of what we've come to call the "Lost Decade" of Japan. It was entirely possible (not guaranteed, of course) that I had an easier life overall than someone who's family packed up from Hokkaido in the same year and settled down in the same community.
Of course, I was part of the affluent expat community. Nowadays, even the expats complain about "shady" migrant laborers from Nigeria and other countries that you'll get in the major cities in Kanto and elsewhere, much less the locals. That has got to be a difficult experience from the get-go.
Also, not sure I even count as a minority even as an immigrant. I've probably spoken more afrikaans here than back in SA.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
I am jealous to the point of turning green when I go home and see my cousins (whom I lived with for the first years of my life) making plans with people they met ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. Hell, even if they can only stay in touch with 50% of them, it beats the hell out of the 0% I have.
It is something I've been thinking about lately. Previously I had quite a few friends, even recently new friends. But in tracing back on how I made them, it's almost all through other friends that I met back at church/school/tech. It's weird how your social group grows and spreads out like that. Much harder to do a cold-start. Work's pretty much a dead-end, so I might actually have to do something outgoing.
And the chance of running into someone you went to school with ages ago (and who you probably never liked then) and suddenly becoming insta-friends decrease.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
I think the nature of NZ migration to the UK helped me, as the sheer scale means that I do have the kinds of connections that most migrants don't. There are literally hundreds of people I went to school or uni with, or worked with in NZ living here if just for 6-12 months. So there was and is no need for a cold start, although there is a risk when they all start going back
It could be yeah, living in NZ for a year was a life experience I wouldn't trade for anything, I think I grew as a person because of it. My real change in attitude was when I just said one day "you know what? Fuck you bigots, I've lived here my whole life, this is my home and I'm as entitled to be proud of it as you are". I realised being proud of being Scottish doesn't mean adopting the negative aspects of Scottish nationalism, you can set a different example.
I also got tired of feeling like I had no place to call my own, some people were determined to force me into the the English camp but I've never lived there and the place feels unusual to me when I visit, it isn't my home. With the relaisation that Scotland is the only place I feel at home came the shift in my attitude.
Growing up, my parents refused to teach my Tagalog because they said it'd get me nowhere in life, it would only give me more hurdles, it'd have people look at me differently, and I'd never be treated as an American. We did very un-Asian things so we could fit in with everyone else. So I grew up with very little to non-existent Asian pride.
I grew up in CA and live in VA now. When I first moved here, I was one of 3 Asian-americans in my school in NoVA, and I knew the other two dudes: we'd hang out all the time. When I first moved to VA, everyone used to say they could tell I wasn't from around "here" because of my accent and the way I spoke, so I worked on dropping whatever accent that was from Cali without having to adopt the southern accent. Now, when I talk to friends back in Cali, they remark that I have a southern drawl, or when I talk to relatives in Wi, people here in VA remark on my northern accent coming out.
When I joined the Army, I was 1 of 2 Asians in my battery (90+ people), the other guy I knew because I'm the one who got him to enlist since we went to HS and college together and he was my roommate. In my Battalion (3-4 batteries), there were 4 asians: my friend, another guy I knew from AIT school, 1 person I didn't know, and myself.
It wasn't until later in life that I realized what I was doing by keeping track of how many Asian people I was around: while I want to be around like minded people and people who share the same interests and experiences as I have, I also try to avoid Asian gatherings because I don't want to appear as an outsider to everyone else. The less "different" I appear to other people, the easier it is to be accepted in the community.