Dougherty 1 Jack Dougherty English 101-000 Dr.

Mandy Suhr-Sytsma 7 October 2013 The Multicultural, yet Uniquely American Experience In the eyes of many patriotic Americans, and surely to uninformed outsiders, there is a perception that the American Experience can be centered on the 1975 Chevrolet TV advertisement that coined the slogan, Baseball, Hotdogs, Apple Pie and Chevrolet. However, as all great things do, America has evolved greatly over the last few decades and therefore so has the American Experience to encompass many different races, cultures, languages and ideals. The experience of being an American is therefore really unique in the sense that it is one of very few nations where the prevalent norms of society include many mixed cultures, orientations and ideals. In my personal narrative titled, Lost on a Hong Kong Subway, I describe my experience of becoming hopelessly lost and separated from my family in a foreign subway system in which I didnt know the language or culture, all while only being eight years old. The author Bronwyn T. Williams writes about how writers may adopt different characters and traits depending on their development in the field of writing or their view of their own success in writing through the characters they present in literacy narratives. In writing about a little boy overcoming the language barrier, the character I portrayed as my younger self seems to be what Williams refers to as having, adopted the identity that through application and diligence they will better themselves. (Williams, 344) What is more American than that notion? This is because from this traumatic and frightening experience, I decided to learn Chinese. This wasnt just to avoid getting lost, but to better myself as a person, scholar and global citizen. However, my narrative

Dougherty 2 somewhat muddles Williams claim about this topic because the rewards I sowed were not physical prizes like he argues some of his writing students presented them as, but more of a metaphorical desire to learn a language and culture. Through writing my piece I concluded that this was that I presented myself as this type of character because of my experience with what is known as translingualism, which is a vital part of the American experience, which encompasses all aspects of American culture including the ideal of the American Dream and translingual experience. The American dream is universally known as through hard work and determination, one can achieve any goal. Bronwyn Williams notes in her introduction on Literacy and Identity titled Heroes, rebels, and victims: Student identities in literacy narratives that students writing personal literacy narratives that are confident in their writing abilities, write what she calls rise-to-success narratives. (Williams, 343) This defines the American Dream because those students would have had to work hard to achieve confidence in their work and should therefore be proud of their efforts. In my work, Lost on a Hong Kong Subway, I described my character as a frightened 8 year old who overcame the language barrier to reach safety in the arms of my loving grandmother after spending hours in an almost futile attempt to reach the one familiar place I knew in one of the most densely populated places on the face of the earth. After this experience, I was prompted to learn Chinese (still a work in progress), which I believe is the rise to success that I was so confident about in writing my personal literacy narrative. I then obviously depicted myself as this type of rags to riches character that Williams says writes this kind of work. As the son of an immigrant mother from China, growing up I was obviously always told to cherish the opportunities I had at my fingertips. I never appreciated them as much until I returned from my summer in China, seeing that America is a casteless society where such

Dougherty 3 a social transformation is actually possible. I now as Williams calls it, described the rewards and prizes they have accumulated through reading and writing, portraying themselves as successful consumers of literacy and identifying themselves as literacy winner, because they have the most awards and prizes to show for their work. (Williams, 343) This prizes I reaped were the motivation to work hard at my particular goal. As I grew older I began to understand that this type of transformation was not a myth but reality even in my family as recently as my own mother. In my own piece, I wrote that, I took many things from that experience. For one, I came to realize that if a third of the worlds population spoke this language, it would be irresponsible for me in many ways to not learn it while I had so many opportunities. I decided then that I would become proficient in Mandarin through family, as well as high school and college. (Dougherty, 3) The American dream applied to me because it made me realize that being multi-cultural was a very important part of being an American. In America, there are 40.4 million people living here that were born outside of the United States, which is an amazing statistic considering that there are roughly only 300 million people living here. (The Facts on Immigration Today) It is the dream of so many people to come to the US because it is known as a melting pot of cultures, languages and ideas. In this diverse of a nation, it is inevitable that a concept of translingualism would have a firm foothold on American culture. Suresh Canagarajah writes in his introduction to the book Translingual Practice by first off saying that, We also believe that other languages have their own unique systems and should kept free of mixing with other languages for meaningful communication. I consider these assumptions as constituting a monolingual orientation to communication. (Canagarajah, 6) However, he counters this by offering a definition to his idea of translingualism that he calls a different paradigm that communication transcends individual languages, (Canagarajah, 6)

Dougherty 4 because they are codemeshed together and communication transcends words and involves diverse semiotic resources and ecological affordances. (Canagarajah, 7) In such a diverse country, one would not expect such a notion to be true, but upon further examination of the facts, they clearly are. He continued to elaborate on languages by saying that they are always in contact with and mutually influence each other. From this perspective, the separation of languages with different labels needs to be problematized. Labeling is an ideological act of demarcating certain codes in relation to certain identities and interests. (Canagarajah, 6) The idea of separating languages is an archaic notion that no longer exists in America. Society is officially desegregated on every basis such as race, gender, sexuality, or political preference. Therefore it is logical to draw that barriers between languages are also a thing of the past, and therefore is central to the reason why the American Experience is so exhilarating to immigrants whose focal desire and dream is to create a better life for themselves as well as their families in the United States. American society has embraced the notion of translingualism by acknowledging this as well in both pop culture as well as physical culture. Again, it is amazing that one of the most prominent features of the uniquely American experience that makes America great is that translingualism in many cases lies at its core. Canagarajah states that, Users treat all available codes as a repertoire in their everyday communication, and not separated according to their labels. This is evidenced by terms such as Spanglish and Chinglish which are both commonly spoken by immigrants by fusing Spanish and English, and Chinese and English, respectively. Personally, my home life growing up was mostly codemeshed into this sort of linguistic fusion, and so was communicating with an aunt of Cuban descent. Where I dont know Spanish in the slightest, it is interesting to look at what Braunmiller calls receptive multilingualism where, We can

Dougherty 5 understand more languages than we can speak, (Canagarajah, 5) so I could communicate with a primarily Spanish speaker with no training. Naturally, humans are gifted with an innate sense of translingualism. That has naturally become a staple of the American experience as well. Translingualism has made many appearances by multilingual music recording artists in music such as the Somalia born artist Knaan, and Sri Lankan artist M.I.A., who Canagarajah notably referenced with the song Galang, which fused English and Tamil script. Personally, I feel in between cultures as a self proclaimed translingualist, and can relate to Canagarajahs quote, The linguistic hybridity of the performance draws from the artistes own sociocultural inbetweenness. (Canagarajah, 3) I know for a fact that I am not alone in having this feeling, because I have many racially mixed friends and acquaintances who feel the same way as I do about mixing language and culture, and this is indeed also part of the American Experience, where people are not obligated to identify with part of any specific group and are free to be whoever they aspire to or who they truly are. Pop culture shapes American culture, and recent pop culture proves that translingualism is essential to the American experience. Overall, translingual practice is one of the things that make the American experience so appealing to people from all over the world. It influenced my personal narrative, Lost on a Hong Kong Subway, because my experience of overcoming the language barrier and embracing my translingual culture led me to write an essay focusing on portraying myself as a hero, in the same way that Bronwyn Williams explains that a lot of her writing students did. Overcoming obstacles to better ones self is defining the American dream. It sounds very odd, but an essential part of the American Dream is translingualism in which people can be a mixture of two different things without having to segregate the two. Translingualism is also part of the American dream because of pop artists songs like Knaans Hoobale and M.I.A.s Ganang. In addition, it is worth

Dougherty 6 noting that humans are innately translingual because they are as Braunmiller puts it, have receptive multilingualism. The American experience is alive and well and encompasses both the American Dream of hard work earning success and the codemeshing of many cultures together into translingual cultures. It is becoming even more prominent in the public eye with the help of pop artists and rappers that influence American culture a lot as well.

Dougherty 7 Works Cited Canagarajah, Suresh. Translingual Practice. London: Routledge, 2013. Print. "The Facts on Immigration Today." American Progress. Center for American Progress, 3 Apr. 2013. Web. 6 Oct. 2013. <http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/report/2013/04/03/59040/thefacts-on-immigration-today-3/>. Williams, Bronwyn. Literacy and Identity. Louisville: International Reading Association, 2004. Print.

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