Unselected "Presence Nonfiction Writing Scholarship" - Conversations between a New Generation of Taiwanese Immigrants and Second Generation Asian Americans

Aug 26, 2022

When I knew that the non-fiction writing scholarship was present, it was only a week before the deadline. For most of me, who only published overseas life experiences on the date change line, I wrote down a topic that I really wanted to write. In the end, the judge felt that the topic was too much. Big, the trial writing is messy. For me, who has not written in-depth reports, I actually don’t know how to improve it. I hope that in the future, I will have the opportunity to continue to hone my writing skills with senior writers and editors.

(The following article is not the original trial draft. Later, it was edited and revised by myself, but the overall article remains unchanged)

Learning Chinese is only part of the pull between the first-generation Taiwanese overseas immigrants and the second-generation Chinese-Americans. The other pull is the persistence of the first-generation immigrants, such as seeing someone who wants to call someone, but the second-generation looks like this The actions are cultural barriers that cannot be understood. On the other hand, when the second generation is talking about Star Wars or the phenomenon of mainstream American media, the first generation is not interested in participating. don't know each other.

The new generation of Taiwanese immigrants who immigrated overseas after the millennium. When they grew up in their own country, because of the rise of the Internet, the opportunity to contact popular products in the United States was much earlier, and the English ability of the new generation of immigrants was also due to their own country. The resources for learning English are also more fluent than those of the first generation in the early days, but the new generation of immigrants is still similar to the first generation of immigrants in the United States, and they have no knowledge in this area. Those who know nothing can actually learn from the second generation of Chinese Americans of the same generation. By exchanging the knowledge they lack with each other, the next generation can grow up in the United States more comfortably and at the same time get close to themselves. Asian cultural history.

The culture and inner dialogue of the first-generation immigrants themselves cannot be passed on to the second-generation children:

For an ordinary lunch, in a home where both parents are first-generation Taiwanese immigrants and second-generation Taiwanese Americans who have grown up, there is Taiwanese braised pork rice prepared by the first-generation immigrant grandmother on the table. The family is happy. After chatting and eating, the second-generation father and the first-generation grandfather mentioned a dish that is usually ordered in restaurants called "Dried Beef River". The second-generation sister-in-law on the side, because she hated Chinese school when she was a child, although she was a child She both speaks Chinese at home. After she went to a public school, English has become her main and only language, so when her brother and father were describing the dish, my aunt frowned and tried to imagine what the dish was. It looks like, "That noodle is wide and has beef in it." She didn't think she had eaten this dish because the adjectives sounded unfamiliar. Later, her brother picked up the phone and checked it, because he knew, His sister must know this dish. This is a dish that my family will order since I was a child, so when the English name "Beef Chow Fun" appeared, my sister-in-law immediately said, "I know this dish! I only ate it the day before yesterday, and I often eat it ”, the Indian-American gentleman next to the sister-in-law also echoed that they often eat this dish, but they are just unfamiliar with the Chinese name of the dish.

After the meal, grandpa felt that he was getting older and he was thinking about a piece of farmland in Taiwan. He asked his two children who grew up in the United States if they were interested in inheriting the piece of land. The children were not interested. I chatted with the daughter-in-law who grew up in Taiwan. At first, the daughter-in-law asked what to do with the farmland. This is a question only asked by a daughter-in-law who has some knowledge of Taiwan. After chatting, my grandfather said that he wanted to be buried in Taiwan and hoped that his son would be buried in Taiwan. I can go back to Taiwan with him to learn about the place where the ashes are placed. At the same time, my daughter and her husband are chatting in English on some unrelated topics. I have never heard such a serious Chinese conversation. Understand your father's wish to be buried in Taiwan.

Second-generation immigrant parents actively look for ways for their children to learn the language of first-generation immigrants:

In a Facebook group "Raising the Next Generation Bilingual in Chinese and English" with English as the main language of interaction, there was a poll, and the question was "How many second-generation Asian parents will send their third-generation children to Chinese school on weekends" ?", 94% of the parents voted for 10-50%, and 4% of the parents voted for 50-70%. Among the 100 comments below the vote, some parents joked that they were looking for "<10 % option.” Some parents also called the weekend Chinese school a kind of “torture”. A father responded to the vote with a relatively long article. He said that he was born and raised in the UK, and he knew many second-generation immigrants in the process of growing up. Participated in weekend Chinese school, but the results were not very good in the end, so now that we have our own children, the first priority is to help them learn Chinese, because many third-generation children are mixed race, they look at the appearance It doesn't look like Asians, so how to make them understand their own Asian culture is a very important issue.

The new generation of immigrants has no idea how difficult it is to learn Chinese in a non-English environment:

In another scene, a Taiwanese mother who is a first-generation immigrant in the United States is very fluent in English and is very good at work. She hopes that her child's language learning will develop naturally, so when her children begin to learn English In the kindergarten class, I let my daughter learn English naturally, and she also speaks English with her children, because she believes that it is better to learn Chinese at the weekend Chinese school, especially since she and her husband both grew up in Taiwan, it should not be too difficult to teach children Chinese. Until one day, she told a friend, "She is too slow to deal with Chinese matters." The child was completely accustomed to speaking English, and he couldn't even have a conversation in Chinese, but it was still early. Weekend Chinese school, I hope children can learn Chinese subtly.