Here is an excerpt from my Project One Literary Narrative titled Culture Shock! Culture Shock! narrating a couple of my multilingual interactions while at boarding school in Singapore. Through the medium of this narrative I have tried to share my experience in a multicultural and multilingual environment while raising questions on the relationship between the language and culture.
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CULTURE SHOCK! CULTURE SHOCK!
"One place I'm not prepared to travel to is China! I have heard that not many people can converse in English over there, how will I be able to survive over there and discover more about the country and its people?" That is what one of my friends claimed to be her reason to not tour around China. It is a preconceived notion by many, that unless one can speak the language that another speaks, it is impossible to communicate with a person from another nationality or learn about and understand their culture and customs.
Be it interacting with people from different cultures while on a cruise on the Nile, bargaining with an old lady in a crowded byway in Shanghai, staying in a tent in Masai-Mara, or even while volunteering for a week at an animal protection organization in Cambodia; I have truly had multiple opportunities to interact with people from different cultures with whom I could not converse with in a mutual language. However, the biggest challenge I faced was when I went to boarding school in Singapore and resided with people representing about sixty-five different nationalities, of which many did not share Hindi or English as their first languages. I experienced a number of multilingualism related experiences whilst studying in Singapore which influenced my thoughts on the connection between the language and culture of a place and led me to question whether language can act as a hurdle whilst forging relationships with people from other cultures.
WATCHING THE BARRIER DISAPPEAR