Comparing Amy Tan, Eric Liu, Dean Barnlund PDF

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Journal essay assignment for Professor Tina Crafton's class....

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How do Amy Tan and Eric Liu provide another dimension to the communication problems Dean Barnlund discusses in his essay? Both Tan and Liu give insight to the same kind of communication problems Barnlund discussed in his essay, but they each wrote through different lenses than he did. Barnlund referred to this “rulebook” of meanings that is different between cultures even if the language itself is similar. He explained that this is what keeps such a great psychic distance between people of different backgrounds and races. Liu described a similar experience in his essay when he said, “I came to suspect that there was an order to things, an order that I, as someone Chinese, could perceive but not quite crack.” I thought this was a perfect example of Barnlund’s idea of a rulebook because Liu felt that as much as he attempted to assimilate into white American culture, he couldn’t quite break through that barrier of the manners and meanings behind the language. He described multiple instances in which he went over his white friends’ houses; their families found him to be impolite, and he found their customs and dinner table mannerisms to be odd. Tan explained a very similar experience when she stated, “I thought about this misunderstanding again - of social contexts failing in translation,” and again later when she said, “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.” She had the upbringing of a mix between the two cultures; her understanding of both English and Chinese allowed her to have one foot in each culture, but she went on to explain that this just muddled her view of herself and her identity in the end. Essentially, Tan and Liu have experienced the conflicts and discrimination that come from being an outsider in a country they were born in. This was what Barnlund referred to in his essay, but he wrote from a privileged white American perspective and thus, neglected to focus on the effects of these communication problems on an outsider’s identity....