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CROSSING BORDERS 04-02, 16 AUGUST, 2002
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EDITOR'S NOTE
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Hello readers and welcome new readers. Wow! It's been months without a peep from Crossing Borders! Where have I been?
No where really, just happily reigning over our little kingdom and tiny subject who has begun to crawl real fast when I call her.
Fact is, I've been busy wrestling with several personal (non-marital I must add) issues and
a very disillusioned psyche.
Back to Crossing Borders. As I promised many moons ago, here's our report "How
To Lift Your Conditional Status" for our readers in U.S. I also realize many of you are couples with no American ties which I think is cool. I like diversity in the list.
However, this also means I'm often short of ideas coming up with topics generic enough to satisfy most if not everyone.
Grappling with fresh topics each month is very exhausting and may force us to give up Crossing Borders completely. COME ON
PEOPLE! Anything at all you wish to share with us is welcome! Experiences, assimilation issues, passage of rites, parenting,
starting your own business, finding your way in a strange country's corporate
world, getting your citizenship, learning a new language, whatever. Even 'sensitive' issues like
what happens to your status if divorce is eminent, what to do if you're a battered spouse.... I know it's not necessarily the
happiest issues to discuss. After all, we want to be model inter-racial marriages BUT in life sometimes even the best things done
under the best intentions go wrong. Because we don't normally talk about this, information like this is hard to come by but we still
need to now and hopefully help others who are in those situations. Do send in your thoughts, experiences and stories. You can
e-mail them to us or go to http://www.angelfire.com/ok2/kenandlynette/cb/feedback.html
Meanwhile, enjoy this issue!
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HOW TO LIFT YOUR CONDITIONAL STATUS REPORT
(requires Adobe PDF Reader®)
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SOWING THE SEEDS FOR A BILINGUAL CHILD
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The child of an inter-national couple is nothing new to me since I have many cousins, nieces and nephews of inter-national breed.
But I can never forget mom telling me what a 'shame' it is they are unable to communicate in either parent's mother tongue. She
felt they should at least be able to understand the language if not converse. A fair opinion.
Naturally, when we decided to have children, we had mutually agreed to teach our child my mother tongue (which is Chinese,
more precisely Cantonese and Fujien dialects) knowing it would be difficult because my husband himself knows next to nothing
of the language. But I could never put my mother's haunting words nor her disapproving 'what-a-shame' look off my mind. So, I
tried to prepare myself at the birth of our daughter. By the time she was born, it had been 19 months since I spoke
continuously in Chinese or Malay. Not that I'd forgotten, you don't 'forget' a language you've learnt from childhood, but I often felt somewhat strange.
While people here are often impressed by your ability to speak various languages, I on the other hand felt weird trying to talk to
my baby in Chinese. At times, it felt dumb talking to her because she can't respond yet; at other times, it felt like I was being
viewed as an immigrant who never bothered to learn English (Afterthought: I was happily surfing the other day when I tumbled
headlong into a page with bold words "Learn English or Get Out!".... you get my point).
For weeks, I couldn't bring myself to speak anything but English to my baby. But then, she was not unexposed either because
my mother who was here helping me at the time never spoke to her in anything but Chinese! I guess she's trying to do her part.
So here I was, trying to fight my inner probably unfounded fears, at the same time felt I was letting mom down since she was here
to witness my behavior! Am I not proud of my heritage? I often asked myself.
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"Why do you care what other people think?" my husband always asks me.
"Besides, foreign languages are no longer a rarity in the U.S.", I would add my own reasoning.
"But this is NOT New York or California! It's North Carolina in a small town, almost in the boonies!", the devil in me would
retort.
While I've since come to realize, cultural sentiments here whether spoken or unspoken have shaped these feelings in me, I've also
learnt my fears are not so much fears but pride. I had to let my pride down so I could speak to her in Chinese and expose her to
it so she won't have problems picking it up later in life. I had to let my pride down so she wouldn't be deprived the chance to
learn what is part of her heritage. Pride was getting in the way of my child's benefit.
Today, I'm more confident and speak to her in Chinese and some Malay even in public. Now that was another giant step, taking
it from the home to the outside. I still get the feeling people quickly jump into branding me a '**** immigrant', outsider....
whatever. But I try to remind myself they'll not think less of my daughter when she grows up and is able to speak 2 (hopefully
more) languages. I try to look forward instead to the times ahead when I'd be able to have a private conversation with her in
public and not have anyone understand us. Sometimes I repeat in English what I just told her for the benefit of her father but that
is another thing. Hopefully he'll be able to pick it up too.
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Copyright 2002. All rights reserved, Ken & Lynette Chandler.
Website: http://www.kenandlyn.home-page.cc
E-mail: mail@kenandlyn.home-page.cc
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