Due to yesterday’s post, I received a comment from a friend about what is happening in the UK. I would like to respond with the perspective of one Canadian. This friend informed me of a hospital in Manchester that has signage in Indian (I am guessing Hindi) first and English much smaller underneath. Funny, it did not really faze me.
This past weekend, I was in Vancouver at a concert and I went into Richmond, which is quite close. The area is a great place to shop and eat and has a large Chinese population. It also has most of it’s signage in Chinese as well. In fact, I went to a restaurant that had menus that had very little English on them. Sure, it is difficult to understand but I also found it very enlightening.
Vancouver has a huge multicultural population. There are people from China, Hong Kong, Japan and India and other countries as well as the stereotypical white Canadian. Relations are far from perfect but that is the same in even white neighbourhoods when people have different values.
One of Canada's national policies is one of Multiculturalism. One day, we all woke up and it was decided that this would be a step ahead in installing the rights of all minorities. It pissed a lot of people off. They had no idea what this policy meant and people were afraid that this would result in less rights for Canadians who were born here.
Personally, I have no problem with this and choose to embrace the diversity of it all. This is a touchy subject with people even in Canada still and I think that is mostly because people fear and feel threatened by that which they do not understand. Fear is a strange motivator.
I have had the experience of living in a country that doesn't have English as a first language. Japan has a lot of English signs (although some of them are poorly written) and I was thankful of that even though I was trying very hard to learn Japanese. There, it was expected that I would have no idea how to communicate with people because I was white. There are loads of "foreign" people who live and work in Japan who do not have any desire to learn the language. They are just there to make the bucks. This is a disadvantage for those who are serious about learning the language because the Japanese just assume that the minorities don’t want to.
The truth is that we cannot blame the minority populations for this entirely. We are really all to blame. I saw so many white people who were guilty of the same thing so it's not just Indian or Chinese or Japanese that do this when they immigrate to a new country.
Many people assume that immigrants should adapt to the dominant language of a country when they move there. However, I don't think that people are realistic enough with themselves about how difficult it is to change someone’s language and cultural identity. I can speak for this first hand. It is not easy to give up the identity that you have been brought up with and this is true of anyone. Have any of you out there tried to do this? If you have, you know that it is not an easy task. You bring all of what you were brought up with into adulthood. Even fear and hate.
I suppose that I just don’t want to succumb to that fear and hate. If the white population in Canada were to become the minority tomorrow and, say for examples sake, the Chinese or Indo or First Nations population were the majority, I suppose that I would be learning a new language and culture. No doubt, there would be a backlash by those cultures trying to get payback for all of the shitty treatment the whites dealt out to them but not by all of them. It’s human nature, don’t you think?
What I would like to suggest is that we go out and embrace these cultures and talk with people and accept that they are having just as difficult a time adjusting to the things that life throws at us. It can’t be all bad to make friends, can it?
This past weekend, I was in Vancouver at a concert and I went into Richmond, which is quite close. The area is a great place to shop and eat and has a large Chinese population. It also has most of it’s signage in Chinese as well. In fact, I went to a restaurant that had menus that had very little English on them. Sure, it is difficult to understand but I also found it very enlightening.
Vancouver has a huge multicultural population. There are people from China, Hong Kong, Japan and India and other countries as well as the stereotypical white Canadian. Relations are far from perfect but that is the same in even white neighbourhoods when people have different values.
One of Canada's national policies is one of Multiculturalism. One day, we all woke up and it was decided that this would be a step ahead in installing the rights of all minorities. It pissed a lot of people off. They had no idea what this policy meant and people were afraid that this would result in less rights for Canadians who were born here.
Personally, I have no problem with this and choose to embrace the diversity of it all. This is a touchy subject with people even in Canada still and I think that is mostly because people fear and feel threatened by that which they do not understand. Fear is a strange motivator.
I have had the experience of living in a country that doesn't have English as a first language. Japan has a lot of English signs (although some of them are poorly written) and I was thankful of that even though I was trying very hard to learn Japanese. There, it was expected that I would have no idea how to communicate with people because I was white. There are loads of "foreign" people who live and work in Japan who do not have any desire to learn the language. They are just there to make the bucks. This is a disadvantage for those who are serious about learning the language because the Japanese just assume that the minorities don’t want to.
The truth is that we cannot blame the minority populations for this entirely. We are really all to blame. I saw so many white people who were guilty of the same thing so it's not just Indian or Chinese or Japanese that do this when they immigrate to a new country.
Many people assume that immigrants should adapt to the dominant language of a country when they move there. However, I don't think that people are realistic enough with themselves about how difficult it is to change someone’s language and cultural identity. I can speak for this first hand. It is not easy to give up the identity that you have been brought up with and this is true of anyone. Have any of you out there tried to do this? If you have, you know that it is not an easy task. You bring all of what you were brought up with into adulthood. Even fear and hate.
I suppose that I just don’t want to succumb to that fear and hate. If the white population in Canada were to become the minority tomorrow and, say for examples sake, the Chinese or Indo or First Nations population were the majority, I suppose that I would be learning a new language and culture. No doubt, there would be a backlash by those cultures trying to get payback for all of the shitty treatment the whites dealt out to them but not by all of them. It’s human nature, don’t you think?
What I would like to suggest is that we go out and embrace these cultures and talk with people and accept that they are having just as difficult a time adjusting to the things that life throws at us. It can’t be all bad to make friends, can it?
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home