Culture Shock

You Don’t Have To Put
Down That Samosa

By Sarah Stanfield

According to Merriam-Webster, the word “assimilate” means “to absorb into the culture or mores of a population or group.” Perhaps this is an outdated definition in Queens, where immigrants can “become American” yet, at the same time, retain the language and traditions of their native cultures.

Queens is the most ethnically diverse county in the United States. It is estimated that more than 138 languages are spoken in the borough. People and ethnic groups from just about every country in the world make their home here, from Colombians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Georgians, to Pakistanis, Romanians, Guyanese and more, making up about 47 percent of the population of the borough, according to the 2000 Census.

Therefore, becoming part of American culture here is a little different than doing so in another part of the country. Immigrants here get the advantage of being able to live, as Dr. Pyong Gap Min, a professor of sociology at Queens College, puts it, “in two worlds every day.”

Learning English

Even in Queens, however, it is necessary to integrate somewhat into American society (a phrase that is becoming increasingly difficult to define). It is advantageous for numerous reasons: It makes it easier for you to get a job, get a good education (if necessary), and helps make you feel more comfortable in your new country.

The starting point of this process is learning English. There are numerous resources for learning English throughout the borough. A good place to begin is the Queens Borough Public Library, which offers English classes at 27 different branches for beginning, intermediate and advanced learners.

The classes are divided into two terms per year, one in the spring, and the other in fall. Each class runs four months, with two sessions a week. Since the classes are free and limited to 30 students each, many applicants are turned away. However, they are given a referral list to other free or low-cost English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) programs in Queens.

A unique aspect of the ESOL program at the Queens Borough Public Library is it also offers classes for non-English speakers who have less than four years of schooling in their own language. This helps them prepare for the beginning level ESOL class. For more information on these and other ESOL classes at a branch near you, call (718) 480-4231 or (718) 480-4235.

Queensborough Community College has the 21-year-old Port of Entry program, an intensive program for recently arrived immigrants who plan to go to college or enter the workforce. Classes are offered at the college’s campus in Bayside as well as at the CUNY Center of Higher Education in Flushing. Each program runs 180 hours, three times a year. Tuition is $1,100 to $1,300. For more information, contact Florence Tse, at (718) 281-5410.

For those who cannot shell out thousands for the Port of Entry program, QCC offers a non-intensive ESL program during weekday evenings and Saturday mornings at the Flushing center. The class consists of 40 hours of English conversation, writing and business English for $280. It also provides free English language and civic classes to adult students through its Queens Literacy Project. Instruction runs at least six hours a week for a total of 150 hours, and is offered at the college as well as at the CUNY center. For information, contact Dr. Kitty Bateman at (718) 631-6363.

Queens College offers several English programs. One is the ESL program, which is a part-time program with beginning, intermediate, and advanced classes. Courses can be taken during the day, evening or on Saturday. Tuition is $315. Another option is the English Language Institute, a full-time program aimed at teaching English to students enrolled at the college. For information on both programs, go to http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/CEP.

Sounding American

It’s one thing to conquer the English language. It’s another issue to pronounce it correctly. That’s where Accent Master comes in. Accent Master is a $129-computer program created by Bayside-based speech therapist Lynn Bo to teach users to pronounce English without their native inflection. “An accent is just a series of characteristics carried over from the native language into English,” Bo said. “We train your ear to hear the sounds in the American pronunciation.”

Bo said the problem with many English classes is that they mix people with several different language backgrounds, with many intonation and word stress differences. Her program, which comes in editions for Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Spanish, and Hindi speakers, cuts out that background noise and focuses on the types of intonations and word stresses specific to each language.

Bo is currently developing Russian, Farsi, Portuguese, Japanese, Urdu and Turkish versions of Accent Master. Each program costs $129 and can be shipped directly to you.

Social Skills

The other aspect of integrating into American society is less obvious than learning English. It’s learning the values of America and how they translate into certain social mores. In Queens, this can be difficult, because there are so many people coming from so many countries with different social rules and customs. Most immigrants the Queens Tribune spoke to for this article had their own definitions of just what American values were to them.

Dr. Paris Svoronos, chairman of the chemistry department at Queensborough Community College and originally from Greece, sees Americans as being into order and civility. “If you go to Flushing, you see everybody waiting at the bus stop, and nobody pushes anyone else [out of line]. “But when they go home [to their countries] again, they start pushing.”

For Svoronos, being an American means getting along with everyone else, no matter what ethnic background they come from. He has seen this in his work, where he has taught students from Armenia, Nepal, Guyana, the Ukraine, Ecuador, and other countries. “I have Muslims working with Jews, Indians working with Pakistanis,” he said. “They work together on joint projects, creating a bond that lasts beyond the project. They become almost like brothers and sisters.”

Indeed, taking a class or enrolling in college is one of the best ways to learn about American values and social customs. Irina Karshenbaum, who left the Ukraine for the United States in 1989, made a very conscious effort to become American. She received her associate’s degree in the U.S. and eventually a master’s as well. During classes, she would observe closely how her American-born classmates behaved. She would also tape class lectures to capture the diction and pronunciation of American English.

For Karshenbaum, this led to a moment where she felt truly American. “Once a former immigrant is capable of perceiving things and understanding things that any native-born American would, that is the point at which they achieve assimilation,” she said. “For example, if you see a burger, you don’t just see a bun and meat, you see a ‘burger.’”

Dr. Paul Jean-Pierre, the Associate Dean of Student Affairs at Queensborough College and a native of Haiti, said he learned much about Americans and their values through two vastly different institutions: the church and the military. He lived in a monastery for five years with native-born Americans and later joined the military. “You cannot find a more American institution than that,” he said.

One of the biggest differences he’s seen between America and Haiti has been the way the two countries view the discipline of children. In Haiti, he said, corporal punishment in school is allowed and the teacher is “viewed as a god.” While he emphasized that he does not believe in corporal punishment, he said he feels children in America have too much freedom.

“I firmly believe that children need guidance,” he said. “I believe in discipline. With punishment, you may send a child to his or her room or ground them for the weekend, but the burden is on the parent to speak with the child and help him redeem his or her ego.”

Dr. Madhulika Khanekwal, Director of the Asian/American Center at Queens College and a native of India, says there is no checklist of American values that immigrants can learn. But she does feel new immigrants should research the history of former immigrant populations to New York City.

“I feel it’s absolutely crucial for immigrants to see how [earlier] immigrant groups came to this country, shaped their communities and defined their identities here. Then they can reflect on where they as individuals and their communities are.”

She also thinks it’s important for immigrants to participate in the civic and political life of Queens. “People can start becoming ‘American’ before they are citizens,” she said.

“Know your community board, know your elected officials and understand the school system.”

One thing she noticed about both Americans and most new immigrant groups is that they define success only in financial terms and feel that they can only start contributing to society once they have become financially successful. “This bothers me,” she said. “Every other aspect of American life is very rich in many ways. It has very rich civic and political values.”

Pop Culture And Fashion

There’s a third level of integrating into American society, and probably the easiest: learning about fashion and pop culture. It’s easy because New York is the fashion capital of the country and the center of the publishing and the advertising industry, which helps spread American fashion and pop culture throughout the country and the world.

Want to know about this country’s pop culture? Flip on the radio or television. Watch channels like E! VH1 and MTV. Subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, which will tell you what the hottest television shows and movies are at the moment. Pick up a copy of US Weekly at your local newsstand and you’ll learn about America’s favorite celebrities.

As for fashion, read Lucky magazine or Vogue. Vogue is considered the “fashion bible” among some circles, while Lucky gives you step-by-step tips on how to buy and wear the latest fashions. The men’s version of Lucky is Cargo. The men’s version of Vogue is GQ.

Keep The Kofti

Just because you’ve come to America does not mean you have to trade in your sari for some Daisy Dukes. That’s the beauty of Queens. Assimilation in this borough is not the dictionary definition. In fact, most of the immigrants The Queens Tribune spoke to said assimilation to them meant picking and choosing the American cultural traits they liked and retaining the traditions they liked from back home.

“We don’t have to get rid of our cultural traditions,” said Queens College’s Dr. Pyong Gap Min. “We can retain our traditions, but in the meantime, we selectively adopt American cultural components that are helpful to our life here, such as learning English.”

Min switches between Korean and American culture several times a day. For example, he said, “When I say hello to a non-Korean, I don’t bend my head, but when I say hello to a Korean person, I bend my head.” He eats Korean food three times a day, watches Korean television programming daily and talks to relatives in South Korea weekly.

Min says it’s easier than ever for immigrants to maintain ties to their ethnic traditions, thanks to the popularization of air travel, communication and IT technology. “It’s easy to ship things from [South] Korea to the U.S.A.,” he said. “We have all kinds of Korean food in the stores here.”

Unlike the generation of immigrants that came to America at the turn of the last century, new immigrants and their children will not lose their traditions, he added. In an article he wrote in 2002, entitled, “Contemporary Immigrants’ Advantages for Intergenerational Cultural Transmission,” he argued that because of the changes in technology and transportation described above, contemporary immigrants’ proximity to their homelands, and the U.S. government’s adoption of more multicultural policies, it is easier than ever for immigrants to maintain the cultures of their homelands.

In the article, Min said that up until the early 1970s, immigrants were actively encouraged to lose all links to their heritage and adapt to mainstream Anglo-American culture. English was associated with being patriotic, and being bilingual meant you were disloyal to the U.S. After World War I, groups of women were even sent out to immigrant homes to instruct them on preparing “non-ethnic” food and instilling English as the main language in the home. The fact that there are millions of third-and fourth-generation Jews and Italians in New York City who can’t speak fluent Italian or Yiddish is likely a result of these policies, he said.

But since the 1970s, multiculturalism has been in vogue. Knowing more than one language is considered an asset, especially in the global economy. Min has found in his studies that second-generation immigrants who are bilingual and bicultural have more success over their monolingual/monocultural counterparts. Their ability to translate between two cultures and languages allows them to work at multinational companies, for example.

Queens’ Cultures

It’s very easy to retain your heritage in Queens. There are numerous houses of worship, community centers, schools, and stores that cater to specific immigrant populations. The best way to find them is to know the neighborhoods where some of Queens’ largest immigrant groups reside. For example, Astoria has long been known for its Greek presence, but it also has a large population of Brazilians, citizens of the former Yugoslavia, Egyptians and other types of Arabs.

Sunnyside is home to numerous Asians as well as a significant Dominican population. Woodside, known for its large Irish community, also has a Filipino neighborhood, situated roughly between 65th and 69th Streets along Roosevelt Avenue. Besides Flushing, there is another large Asian neighborhood—Elmhurst, home to Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese people.

Rego Park, Forest Hills and Kew Gardens have long been heavily Jewish neighborhoods. But since the early 1990s, they have seen an influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union. Most prominent among these groups are Bukharians (Jews from Uzbekistan) and Jews from the Republic of Georgia. In recent years, Israelis have joined them and many of the Georgians and Bukharians are moving to Jamaica Estates.

Jackson Heights is famous for its South Asian community, but it also has significant numbers of Colombians, Ecuadorians, Mexicans and Peruvians. Nearby Corona also boasts large populations of all these groups.

Moving toward Eastern Queens, Jamaica has a large presence of West Indians of African descent. To the south, in Richmond Hill and Ozone Park, there is a flowering population of Guyanese and Trinidadians, most of whom are of Indian heritage.

Whatever your heritage, you can find a place to keep it in Queens.