Americanization

My coworker linked me the following article,
LA Times-Saying the Magic Words, which basically states that the Americanization of Vietnamese youngsters has caused a lifestyle rift and an untraversable communication divide between children and their immigrant parents.


My response to my coworker was:

I think "you reap what you sow." The parents are hypocrites and have failed if they wanted their children to retain their heritage but didn’t take the time to instill it in their children. It's also very ethnocentric to look down on your child for her inability to pick up a "new" language when the parents themselves didn’t assimilate and learn English.

My mom taught me Vietnamese before I entered kindergarten, so I speak/write Viet fluently, but I choose not to with most people just because I genuinely dislike the language, how it sounds, and what it conveys. I speak it at home but usually nowhere else unless I want the fellow-Vietnamese-person discount at local stores.

The language is passive/submissive language full of superficiality and fake respect that requires females to be extra meek and debased. I also think it's crazy how a Viet person refers to himself as "we/us," like he's freaking Gollum from Lord of the Rings--another sign of de-emphasis of the individual, which I hate. If you say "I/me," it is considered rude and demeaning to others, only to be used authoritatively.

Those English speaking-only Viet kids aren't missing much, other than knowing how to read a Viet cuisine menu. And I feel offended that I would be considered as having lost my roots if I chose to hate Vietnamese food in favor of mashed potatoes and gravy. I have my roots and my language, and I made a choice not to live by those traditions.

All in all, I think this has nothing to do with society. If you can’t communicate amongst your own family, then obviously the parents failed in more ways than one. To blame it on Westernization is very typical of Vietnamese people--it's always someone else's fault, isn't it? But this language situation is not unique to just the Vietnamese, so I don't know why this article is so focused on Viets.


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And on a side note, in Spanish, often with "negative tone" verbs like loss, forgetting, etc, the verb is reflexive upon the speaker and not an actual mistake by the speaker. For example, you don't say "I forgot my keys" but rather, "My keys forgot themselves with me." Just another example of how language mirrors a cultural mentality. There are many differences amongst cultures and sometimes, upon reading various posts on this site, I wish that "all-American" people would quit trying to analyze the minority mind with the values of America, having little to no experience of a completely different cultural mindset. Most foreign countries de-emphasize the value of the individual and suppress independent thought, so whatever spectacular insight you have probably seems ludicrous to someone with a different background.