Young Children as Intercultural Mediators

Mandarin-speaking Chinese Families in Britain

Zhiyan Guo

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783092154
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This multidisciplinary approach to cultural mediation brings together insights from anthropology, sociology, linguistics and intercultural communication to offer a detailed depiction of family life in immigrant Chinese communities. Utilising a strongly contextualised and evidence-based narrative approach to exploring the nature of child cultural mediation, the author provides an insightful analysis of intercultural relationships between children and parents in immigrant families and of the informative aspects of their everyday lives. Furthermore, the family home setting offers the reader a glimpse of a personal territory that researchers often have great difficulty accessing. This ethnographic study will be of interest to students, researchers and professionals working in the areas of intercultural communication, childhood studies, family relations and migration studies.

1Migration and Acculturation

As long as there have been human beings, there has been migration. Human beings colonised the land masses of the Earth by migrating from one geographical area to another. Migration has been continuous, for it seems that as long as people see opportunities in other places, or experience oppression, poverty or restraint in their own land, they will seek, or be forced, to migrate. Some of these migrations have been extensive, such as the Jewish and Irish diasporas, or the mass European emigration to the USA, while others have been more limited as individuals have sought opportunities to change their lives. Migration has been ranked as one of the most important factors in the global change and it appears to be one of the most salient phenomena in modern life (Castle & Miller, 2003). It has been studied from many perspectives – including psychological, literary and historical – but here we shall primarily draw on sociological analyses, linking the study of migration and acculturation with an analysis of concepts of culture.

Migration

Broadly speaking, population mobility changes demographic, social and economic structures, and facilitates cultural exchange and global integration (Castle & Miller, 2003). For the receiving countries, migration may give rise to cultural diversity and an evolving national identity, although problems may emerge when people who are culturally and socially diverse live together in one society. For migrants themselves, the experience of relocating may bring substantial changes and challenges as well as benefits to their lives, and lead to varying kinds of outcomes for them and their families.

As a consequence of their arriving in a new culture, migrants may have unsettling, challenging and traumatic experiences. Firstly, in daily life, they may experience differences in climate, food, language, living and work habits, ethics, religion and even dress (Berry, 1995); some of these differences will appear in later chapters as children deal with, for example, food and everyday habits and customs. Migrants may also experience difficulties in areas such as housing, transportation, shopping and schooling (Storti, 2001). Secondly, depending on how quickly they can find and hold down a job and enjoy economic stability, migrants may face difficulties in simply surviving in the new environment. Thirdly, lack of language skills may present difficulties in adapting to the new culture; some may encounter a totally new language and find communicating with others difficult, and thus may experience linguistic and cultural isolation. Every step of their daily life may become tough and complicated which may be compounded by difficulties in accessing appropriate social agency support and seeking advice for themselves or their families (Arthur, 2000). Fourthly, a migrant’s previous educational backgrounds may be significant in his/her ability to take in new cultural knowledge and develop his/her attitudes towards the new culture. Those who are illiterate in their own mother tongue may encounter immense difficulty in learning and achieving understanding of the majority language. Bloch (2002) found that most Somali women arrived in the UK without formal education in their country of origin, and were the group least likely to acquire English language skills. Migrants’ educational backgrounds may affect their job security and influence their social interaction (Kannan, 1978).

Due to cultural differences and racism, migrants may also experience misunderstanding or discrimination from the majority population. As a result, they may feel troubled by loneliness, or find it hard to establish friendships and achieve an effective social network. In a new society, lack of a sense of competence, control and belonging may lead to a sense of loss and disorientation (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001). Thus, migrants must cope with sociocultural changes as well as economic difficulties.

However, despite its challenges and difficulties, migration may bring about benefits for new settlers. It may create advantageous life situations, such as better jobs and education. Migrants may have more opportunities to appreciate different cultures and enrich their life experiences. Depending on the circumstances, migration is seen as crucial to improving people’s quality of life.

Castle and Miller (2003) classified migration into three types: economically motivated, forced and sojourners. Seeking more economic benefits, economically motivated migrants may be keen to improve their standards of living, set up a business, build a house and/or pay for education (see Garvey & Jackson, 1975; Kannan, 1978). Forced migrants move to avoid threats to life such as wars and political prosecution; they are often poor and their situations may be politically unstable in the country of asylum, particularly if they are being investigated by the government.

The focus of this book will be on sojourners. The experience of migration may be very different for sojourners from that of the economically motivated or forced migrants since they stay only temporarily in an unfamiliar environment (Furnham & Bochner, 1986; Ward et al., 2001). Ward et al. (2001) identify many types of sojourners including business people, diplomats, technical experts, overseas students, missionaries, voluntary workers and so on. Sojourners relocate for various purposes and lead their lives in different ways. While they may experience some of the challenges mentioned earlier, such as inadequate finance and lack of support (see more in Arthur, 2000), sojourners may be more advantaged in other ways. They tend to be ‘young, well-educated, highly motivated and adaptable’ (Furnham & Bochner, 1986: 12). As Nauck (2001) finds, this educated group tend to assume an open attitude towards their migration, and this may lead to greater integration into both minority ethnic and mainstream cultures. Furthermore, some may already have knowledge of the majority language before their arrival and basic communication with the new population may help to reduce their sense of alienation and alleviate the pressure caused by their unfamiliar surroundings (Storti, 2001). However, due to variations in dialect, accent and slang usage, as well as local customs and codes of behaviour (Brislin et al., 1986; Taft, 1966), speaking the same majority language does not guarantee a close relationship or identification with a new culture (Findlay et al., 2004). In Bickley’s (1982: 100) words, ‘both cultural and linguistic barriers exist which may sour relations’. This may apply not just to migrating across countries and different speech communities, but also to moving within one country or one speech community. As Bickley (1982: 100) further argues, ‘the fact that everyday things are done differently in different cultures often leads to misunderstanding, and even within an apparently homogeneous language community, varieties of the same language may be culturally divisive’. In other words, speaking the language may not be equivalent to knowing the values, world views and social practices of a culture (Katan, 2004; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001).

While sojourners may intend to return to their home country on completion of their assigned tasks, they may have the possibility of staying longer in the host country. Whatever their ultimate destination, they may adjust rapidly to the new culture during their stay in the host society in order to operate effectively (Furnham & Bochner, 1986), e.g. in doing business or engaging in further studies, or they may have to start their journey of culture learning. Although their stay may be temporary, sojourners may still have to learn the key characteristics of the new society (Bochner, 1981, 1982) and the ‘culture-specific skills that are required to negotiate the new cultural milieu’ (Ward, 2001: 413).

The sojourners in question here are Chinese. Across its history, Britain has received immigrants from many parts of the world, but the history of Chinese migration to the UK can be dated back to the early 19th century when the first groups of seamen, recruited from Hong Kong and south-eastern China, settled in port towns such as London, Liverpool, Cardiff and Bristol (Chen, 2007; HAC, 1985).

In the 20th century, a large number of Chinese from the New Territories and Hong Kong emigrated to the UK, with most finding work in the food-related trades. This type of immigration continued until the 1980s due to the increasing popularity of Chinese cuisine in the UK (Li, 1994).

Up to this point, only a minority of the Chinese migrants were from mainland China, Taiwan and other Southeast Asian countries. During the 1990s, as the West established better relationships with mainland China, sojourners such as students pursuing their higher education and people working in commerce and industry started to form part of a new wave of Chinese migrants to Britain.

The families we will meet in the later chapters of this book can be most easily described as sojourners. They are an economically motivated and successful group who joined the post-1990s wave of Chinese migrants. Half the parents of the families were educated to university level before they moved to the UK, and each family has at least one member who has a full-time job in the UK, and a certain level of proficiency in English. They seem to take an open attitude towards the new society, but in spite of some advantages, they have, nevertheless, faced challenges and problems since arriving in the new country. Undertaking everyday living in a new culture and, in particular, having children who are being schooled and are growing up in this new culture create many issues for them, which, in some respects, forces them to engage with the new culture in ways that might be quite different from people without children. Once they stepped onto the new land, their journey of adaptation and acculturation began.

Acculturation

Acculturation is understood as the process that occurs when the characteristics of one cultural or ethnic group are changed as a result of interacting with another group. In this process, the interacting groups exchange cultural characteristics and are changed at the same time (Banks, 2002). Although the process can be reciprocal between the dominant and the minority groups, acculturation is mostly viewed as the minority group adapting to the habits and language patterns of the dominant group (Berry, 1995, 2003; Marín & Gamba, 2003). In most societies, the dominant ethnic or cultural groups are ‘at least partially successful in getting other groups to adapt its culture and values because of the power that it exercises’ (Banks, 2002: 59). As a result, acculturation may become the process of adapting to a new society, a process in which individuals of a minority cultural group come to change their behaviours, beliefs and values, cultural practices and identities as a result of continuous first-hand contact with the mainstream culture (Barry, 2001; Ward et al., 2001). Thus, new immigrants may either seek absorption by becoming accustomed to the new culture, or find themselves under pressure to conform to the norms of the new society. Sometimes, these adaptations may be modest, as in moving from one part of a country to another; at other times, they may be huge as individuals and families face a new language, new ways of thinking and so on.

As a complex, diverse and long-term process of adaptation, acculturation may start as soon as the migrating population arrives in the new country and continue throughout their lifetime. It may even be a much longer process than this as several generations of families develop relationships with the dominant culture. All the possible changes in acculturation appear to be gradual, long term and ongoing (Bloch, 2002; Okagaki & Bojczyk, 2003). At the individual level, acculturation presents itself differently to different people, as individuals may vary in their ways of dealing with cultural influences. Berry (2003: 19) points out, ‘not every individual enters into, participates in, or changes in the same way; vast individual differences exist… even among individuals who live in the same acculturative arena’. Even different members of a family may acculturate at different rates due to their amount of exposure to and interaction with the mainstream society (Gopaul-McNicol & Thomas-Presswood, 1998). As Berry (1995, 2003) argues, the process of acculturation may also appear different across several generations.

The variations in the acculturation process may derive from a multiplicity of factors. They may depend on the immigrants’ status on arrival, their length of residence in the receiving country, whether they come as individuals or as families, the similarities to or differences from their original cultural values, the support they receive from agencies in the new country, the existence of people or communities from the original country, the degree of acceptance or discrimination by the majority population, the quality of their living environment, their age, educational background, proficiency in the majority language, urban or rural orientation, their goals, their personality and so on (Arthur, 2000; Costigan & Su, 2004). Given this variety of factors, how does acculturation take place?

The directionality of acculturation can be explored in two ways. An older view suggests that acculturation takes place in a linear and unidirectional manner; that is, the acquisition of the new culture is accompanied by the loss of the ethnic culture in a kind of zero-sum equation (see e.g. Birman & Trickett, 2001; Costigan & Su, 2004; Phinney, 1990; Trimble, 2003). This model seems to take assimilation to the new society as the ultimate outcome of acculturation, paying little attention to diversity in the acculturation process. However, while unidirectional assimilation was seen as a normative practice of some migrants in the past, recent research has suggested multiple models of acculturation.

A more recent approach suggests a bidirectional or orthogonal model of acculturation. Individuals may be attuned to both their native culture and the host culture, and retain their original ethnic identities and cultural values while adapting to the new ones of the majority culture (Berry, 2003; Costigan & Su, 2004; Phinney, 2003; Trimble, 2003; Tsai et al., 2000). Buriel and De Ment (1997) found a bicultural pattern in Mexican, Chinese and Vietnamese families in their review of sociocultural change in immigrant communities in the USA. This view of acculturation seems to recognise the complexity and diversity of the process. In other words, the eventual outcome of acculturation may not necessarily be assimilation; there can be other pathways in the overall process.

Indeed, according to the degree with which immigrants adapt to the dominant society and maintain their home culture, as well as their psychological and cultural conditions, Berry (1988) suggests that there are four possible outcomes of acculturation: integration, assimilation, separation and marginalisation. While assimilation depicts those migrants who totally embrace the new cultural elements, its opposite category is that of separation, where individuals turn their back on the new society and just maintain their own original culture. This group remains monocultural, ‘clinging to the culture of [its] origin and rejecting all the foreign influences’ (Bochner, 1981: 12). There are others who may ‘selectively engage with the new while merging it with the old’ (Berry, 1995: 461), and this is termed integration, i.e. attaining a certain degree of adaptation to another culture while maintaining one’s previous culture. The other outcome is marginalisation, which refers to those who disregard their own ethnic identity, cultural contacts and practices of their country of origin while resisting the adoption of the ‘host’ culture.

In addition, Bochner (1981) argues that there is another group that can be described as multicultural. They retain their culture of origin and learn several other cultures, particularly in a multicultural society. Among the aforementioned five groups, the integrated and multicultural groups are those likely to become mediators. They are more likely to be ‘intercultural speakers’ who are curious and open to the daily life experiences of other cultures and to the expectations of appropriate behaviours of people of different cultures. They have knowledge of both their own country and others. More importantly, they develop their skills of interpreting documents and relating events from their own culture to others, and the skill of acquiring new knowledge of different cultural practices and using them in everyday interactions with the majority group (Byram, 1997).

In addition to the directionality and degree of acculturation, how migrants acculturate to the majority culture can be seen from their changes in three dimensions: cultural orientation, identity and cultural values. Cultural orientation can be seen in behaviour, in how individuals participate in the cultural activities and actual practices of daily life, including language use, preference and proficiency; daily living habits in terms of food and music choices; and social interaction patterns (Zane & Mak, 2003). Relatively speaking, changes in this dimension may be more easily detected in the acculturation process because it is observable, although it may equally take time to measure and assess how the actual changes occur. Behavioural changes may result from deeper internal changes in other dimensions such as identity and cultural values, but this dimension may be misleading, since one’s behavioural changes may be regarded as temporary outcomes of cultural learning, and tend to be subject to a...