"Child of Two Worlds"

What would it be like to truly rename yourself?

The closest I've come was four years ago, when decided I wanted to craft a new identity -- and I needed a name for this new person I would become. 

I used to be Danni -- in some ways I still am. Danni is the girl my family knows, the girl my oldest friends know. Danielle is a collage of pieces of that girl and pieces of a new individual.

Andrew Lam, in his essay "Child of Two Worlds," writes about a similar transition in his life, although it was infinitely more dramatic and painful than my own. Lam writes that when he arrived in the United States, he was "at a peculiar age...old enough to remember Vietnam...young enough to embrace America, and to be shaped by it."

Lam also writes about his mother's struggle. According to Lam, his mother is unable to truly reconcile her Vietnamese past with her American present and future. "Do her ancestors hear her prayers amidst this world of computers, satellite dishes, and modems? She does not know. But she does not like contradiction. One cannot be both this and that." She was unwilling to accept America and its culture -- she resented the culture that had stolen her son from her. But Lam also writes that his mother regularly attends the gym. In her mid-sixties, she is a youthful woman, strong and healthy, and Lam recalls her saying, "'If we were living in Vietnam now, I suppose I would sit on the wooden divan, fan myself, and chew betel nuts like your grandma.'"

Still, in order to "deny her American conversion," she keeps a garden of traditional vegetables and herbs ("the smell of home," Lam writes); she observes her father's death every year in the traditional Vietnamese manner; she stays up all night on Tet, making rice cakes; she tells Vietnamese stories to her American-born grandchildren. It seems to me that she is indeed making a collage with pieces of Vietnam and pieces of America -- the key, though, is to accept that, to be at peace with that. As Lam puts it, "Home is portable if one is in communion with one's soul."

I agree with Lam's statement. I like to think that if you are immersed into a new environment, you don't have to absorb every element of that culture, nor do you have to discard your old identity. You can change, blend, mix your identities as you like. You can keep them all. You can discard them all. 

Think about when you were back "home," wherever that may be -- wherever you started from. If you'd stayed there, you'd still have changed as you continued to learn about the world around you. No matter where we go, or where we stay, our sense of self is always a shifting thing. We don't have to be either one thing or the other.

I think this would be important for America as a whole to realize right now, because America itself seems to be having a sort of identity crisis. (Then again, when is America NOT having an identity crisis?) As ashamed as I am to admit this, many people think that if America becomes anything other than a "white" country, it just won't be America anymore. Some people feel threatened by the growing, changing demographic of the workforce, of school classrooms, of neighborhoods. Sometimes, what I find in many Americans (in particular, white Americans) is a deep-seated fear of racial and cultural change.

But my question is: what does anyone really have to fear? Change, adaptation, is necessary for life, for progress. Isn't the American Spirit all about change? About casting off tradition, of forging ahead, of exploring the unknown?

"They Shut the Door on My Grandmother"

I wish I had spoken with my grandfather one last time before he died. I wish I had gotten to know him better through the years, but until now I was too immature to realize what I was missing out on.

He died peacefully in his room at the Veterans Home of California in Yountville. I wasn't there that day, but I had just visited him on the Fourth of July, along with many other members of my family. I think most of us knew it might be the last time we would see him. I will never forget the image of all my little cousins crowded around his bed at the end of the night, and placing their hands on his. Their hands were small, soft -- his were large with skin so thin you could see the tendons poking out, and I thought about how those hands had tugged on parachute cords, had squeezed the trigger of a machine gun...and had held a baby. His hands had stories. The hands of my little cousins were just beginning their own.

This is what I think about when I read Lam's essay "They Shut the Door on My Grandmother." Lam writes that the nurses in his grandmother's retirement home would rush to shut all the residents' doors when someone died. "The series of doors being slammed shut reminds her of the firecrackers during Tet," he writes. This is an important reflection on how Lam's grandmother thought of death, and it speaks to the cultural attitude Lam describes in the essay. Tet is a Vietnamese festival which welcomes in the spring season and new year, and most people in Vietnam spend the holiday together with their families.

I have never experienced this holiday first-hand -- so, in lieu of a first-hand account, I hope you enjoy these wonderful photostreams on Flickr! These photos will link to their respective photostreams.

This is a glimpse of the celebration to which Andrew Lam's grandmother is referring. I think we can draw a clear parallel between the mention of Tet and Lam's observations on how the Vietnamese and American cultures regard death and dying.

"Living in Vietnam, we used to stare death in the face," Lam writes in the essay. "Though the fear of death and dying is a universal one, the Vietnamese do not hide from it." He goes on to explain that the Vietnamese are very connected to the deceased, to their ancestors, and to the world of the past. I trust that Lam is providing us with a very accurate analysis.

His analysis of American culture in this regard is also very accurate. Lam writes that Americans shy away from death, we laugh at it, we try to pretend that it will never happen -- like it doesn't exist. Americans are all about the now, and all about the future. I think there is something to be said for this attitude of forging ahead, of forgetting the past in order to begin anew -- but I think there is also something to be said about looking back, about remembering.

For example, many Americans have a shamefully inadequate undersanding of history. We have this attitude that history doesn't matter. But I think that we are only harming ourselves by looking at it that way. Our lack of historical knowledge allows politicians to manipulate us, it shuts our eyes to the patterns formed over and over again by cultural and political events. I think that if we could only see through political propaganda, if we could only recognize these patterns, our nation would be a much better place. I think history is an important part of education, but what needs to change is the way in which history is taught. In my experience, today's youth are not being shown the relevance, the connection that history has to today's world. History class is being overlooked as an opportunity to provide young people with not only knowledge, but the habits of mind that are crucial in examining our living world.

I also think that we can find things of value in our own pasts. I like to think that I have the power to pick and choose what characteristics I retain from the culture of my family, and what characteristics I reject. To do this, however, I must know not only myself, but my family's past. For example, I know that my grandfather was a skilled painter. My family hung on to many of his paintings, and I'm happy to say that I have hung on to his old paintbrushes (they are waiting in my art supplies box at this moment -- waiting for me to return to them after finals are over!) and I have also retained his artistic talent. I am only a beginner at painting, but I hope I can hang a work of my own on the wall next to his one day.

"Accent" by Andrew Lam

Two weeks ago, I met a man from Egypt. I had never heard his accent before, and as I was adjusting to it, I kept having to ask him to repeat himself. He apologized for how terrible his English was, but it wasn't terrible by any means. He spoke it perfectly well. The only thing keeping me from understanding him was his accent -- and even that didn't last more than the few minutes it took me to get used to the way he spoke. He was still very self-conscious about it, despite that I told him I didn't mind at all.

Part of me thinks this self-conscious feeling is normal. When I speak Spanish, I am very embarrassed if my pronunciation falters. I'm afraid that the people to whom I am speaking may consider it disrespectful, a sign of ignorance, or both. It wouldn't surprise me if every second language learner experienced these feelings.

But there seems to be another part to all this -- at least, here in the United States. In his essay "Accent," found in the collection of essays called Perfume Dreams, Andrew Lam recounts wisdom imparted to him by his Uncle Tho: "Americans turn a deaf ear to foreign accents. You'll never get anywhere fast if you sound like a foreigner."

Indeed, when Lam's Uncle Tho arrived in the US at age forty-four, he took night classes to earn his BA and then -- "through Herculean effort," Lam writes -- made his way through law school. But these years of hard work did not prove fruitful, because Tho was unable to get work. "My uncle," Lam writes, "was not rejected for lacking qualifications or intelligence. It was his unruly tongue that gave his foreignness away, pronouncing him interminably alien and...unemployable." Nobody was willing to hire Tho, despite his obviously strong work ethic, diligence, and intellect.

Someone I know has a math professor with a very thick Chinese accent. My friend is always complaining about how this particular teacher should "work on" his accent, because it prevents the students from understanding much of the lectures. At first, I was able to see the sense in that argument, but when I sat in on my friend's class, I had no trouble at all understanding the professor.

Someone once told me I have "an ear for broken English." That may be, but at the same time, I think there's a difference between not being able to understand and not making an effort to understand. I know too many people who who are actually offended or "weirded out" by foreign accents, and who simply aren't willing to accommodate anything they aren't used to hearing.

I have seen this attitude not only toward foreign accents, but toward foreign languages as well. I know someone who bristles every time he hears people speaking Spanish at the supermarket. I bristle every time I hear something like this:

Tim James- This is Alabama "We speak English" Campaign Video

And I don't just hear this from GOP candidates in Alabama. I recently heard a similar sentiment expressed in a classroom here at Chico State.

What bothers me is the attitude I often find behind the idea that everyone should speak English in America. I'm fine with the notion that if you move to another country, you should probably learn that country's dominant language because it's practical to do so. Overwhelmingly, however, this isn't what I'm hearing. What I'm hearing is xenophobia and nationalism. Both are embedded deeply in our cultural consciousness, but I think it would be worth it to address these issues.

This is, in part, why I support the idea of bilingual education and/or the use of texts which are not only contemporary but multicultural. Not only would it provide our students with the useful skill of speaking two languages, it would also contribute greatly to their cultural experience and perspective. I think it is crucial to expose young people to the wider world, and encourage them to interact with it and learn about it. This, I think, is the key component to achieving a greater level of racial and cultural sensitivity as a nation in the future.

I hope that this would lessen the pressure for immigrants like Andrew Lam and the Egyptian man I recently met, who are facing any number of difficulties in having to leave their homes behind and begin anew. I hope that this would lessen the racial and cultural tensions between the US and other countries on the national stage. I hope that this would help lessen this habit we have of "othering" in general.

I realize I am speaking in an abstract sense here, and that nothing is as easy as I just made it sound. It would be exceedingly difficult to implement this kind of education in what I would consider to be a truly successful way. But I've found that in life, saying "I can't" will never get you anywhere -- but saying "I will try" can take you places you never thought possible.