Summary: What Does Citizenship Means To America
Silkey Xie
Professor Cristiana Giordani
Anthropology 2
June 6, 2013
What does citizenship mean to America? Picture that it is one sunny afternoon, as you walk around the University of California, Davis campus filled with thousands of students walking by. As you observe your surroundings, you notice that there are students of different colored skin, speaking a variety of languages. UC Davis is home to a diversity of students from different ethnic backgrounds, Asian, American Indian, and Hispanic, to list a few. International students in particular have sparked my interests. I wanted to learn more about them and hear about their life experiences here in America. In this paper, I will relate an observation made on my fieldwork to what it means to be a citizen and discuss the complexities of translations between two cultures.
Background Information on Evan Evan Lee (name changed to protect identity) is twenty-two years old and an international student at the University of California, Davis. Evan came to the United States when he was seventeen. He was born in Taiwan and grew up there. He is a student whom I just met and is also a student who is currently taking Cultural Anthropology. Evan’s experience in America, as he described it to me has been complex and challenging. He often felt discriminated because of his physical …show more content…
According to Huffington Post, stated by student Kedao Wang (Shanghai native), “growing numbers of international students do not solve the isolation problem.” Many Chinese and other nonnatives struggle at some point in their life of fitting in due to language and/or cultural barriers. In addition, many international students are recruited to American universities because of their capability to pay the costly tuition fees. Evan Lee was among these students that struggled to fit
Professor Cristiana Giordani
Anthropology 2
June 6, 2013
What does citizenship mean to America? Picture that it is one sunny afternoon, as you walk around the University of California, Davis campus filled with thousands of students walking by. As you observe your surroundings, you notice that there are students of different colored skin, speaking a variety of languages. UC Davis is home to a diversity of students from different ethnic backgrounds, Asian, American Indian, and Hispanic, to list a few. International students in particular have sparked my interests. I wanted to learn more about them and hear about their life experiences here in America. In this paper, I will relate an observation made on my fieldwork to what it means to be a citizen and discuss the complexities of translations between two cultures.
Background Information on Evan Evan Lee (name changed to protect identity) is twenty-two years old and an international student at the University of California, Davis. Evan came to the United States when he was seventeen. He was born in Taiwan and grew up there. He is a student whom I just met and is also a student who is currently taking Cultural Anthropology. Evan’s experience in America, as he described it to me has been complex and challenging. He often felt discriminated because of his physical …show more content…
According to Huffington Post, stated by student Kedao Wang (Shanghai native), “growing numbers of international students do not solve the isolation problem.” Many Chinese and other nonnatives struggle at some point in their life of fitting in due to language and/or cultural barriers. In addition, many international students are recruited to American universities because of their capability to pay the costly tuition fees. Evan Lee was among these students that struggled to fit