Personal Narrative: My Experience As A Canadian Language

Tensions started setting in. That dreaded long walk from the parking lot to school felt different this time. From now on I would be leaving my hard hat and work boots at home, and walking past the construction site rather than to it. It was my first nerve-racking day as a student at the University of Regina.

I hail from a Hindu joint family in the South of India. My parents have inculcated the values of culture, religion, respect, love, humility and care for others ever since I was a child while my grandparents have coddled me with gifts and stories from their childhood in pre-independent India. I grew up in a multilingual

Many barriers can evolve from people who grow up with no formal education, who only speaking their local dialect, and who have little exposure to people who are different from them. Ethnic people who can acquire a formal education, practice biculturalism, and code switch are able to be much more successful in life. It is a well-known fact that having a formal education has a major impact on a person’s earning potential and life success. Needing to understand and navigate cultures other than one’s own culture is another critical life skill. This is common thread of Dr. King, Fredrick Douglas, Amy Tan’s and myself.

A typical childhood consists of a child having two parents; a mother and a father, or two fathers, or two mothers, whatever the situations maybe. My childhood wasn’t typical, my childhood consist of one single parent, my mother, with the occasional glimpse of my father, but that was rare. My mother played a significant role in my education and how I communicate with others. You see my mother immigrant from Cuba to America and was unable to speak a word of english but she came anyway with her Heart open and her mind ready to learn. Thanks to reruns of ‘ I Love Lucy’ and Oprah; my mother was able to learn english but it was “broken” as Amy Tan would put it. Amy Tan’s essay “ Mother Tongue” discusses the many difficulties that she and her mother have face with her mother's “broken” english; which seem all to similar to my mother and me. It was like we were one in the same. Tan points out the prejudices and culture racism that immigrants are forced to endure without showing aggression or even acknowledging the reader of it. Tan is able to criticize our culture standards and expresses how we have double standards for English speakers.

My ancestors first came to Canada around 1845-1852. The names of the first people in my family to come to canada was Robert Young and Anna Young. They came to Canada from Ireland.

I am 1/128th Cherokee I have my CDBI card and receive all my native benefits. I discovered that I also have French in my blood line. So I call myself a French Indian. I am not sure where my family came from I was unable to locate some of the family history, but I am not giving up on tracing my family tree. I know that I have Choctaw blood line as well, my mother and I are tracing that back as well. All of my Indian blood line comes from my mother’s side of the family. I am not sure what blood line my father has, I just haven’t had the desire to look that side of my family up and do the

It was a regular Sunday morning, precisely at 8:00, I was walking my dog Sham. He may look cute but he will snap and bark at any stranger (but that is completely irrelevant). Anyway, all of a sudden the authorities came and evicted everyone out of their homes! I caught up with my parents and they acknowledged that we had to move to Canada because of the virus.

Human rights are in place for a reason, because all persons regardless of their age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, ability, class, appearance and social location deserve to, and ought to, be treated with fairness and in an equitable manner. My responsibility as a Canadian citizen and professional is to uphold and promote all human rights regardless of my social location and assumptive world view. I feel as a humanitarian it is also my responsibility to educate and create awareness of issues surrounding basic human rights, especially those related to gender identity and expression. Through education of gender identity and gender expression, clients and members of the public are made aware of the oppression and discrimination that

Walking into my high school, I already had trouble understanding the language, and top of that, I constantly feared eyes judging me. I felt lonely and lost hope of living a joyful life similar to the one I experienced in India. At times, I grew frustrated with the criticism I received when I could not effectively express my thoughts, but today, I write papers and give presentations fluently. My tenacity disproved my judgment and I started believing anything is achievable with determination. When I acknowledged the criticisms and challenged myself to learn the language and make wonderful friends, a different me

The metro would be filled with a dozen different languages being spoken by members of a dozen different nationalities. My courses were with students of a dozen religions and hundreds of personal stories to tell.

It was the start of the 1900’s, and Canada was looking for people to immigrate there. There were posters posted in Europe; everywhere you went there were advertisements endorsing immigration to Canada. My parents one day came home and looked over it. It promoted that anyone who was willing to settle in the Prairies would be given 169 acres of land. They wanted people to immigrate to the western part of Canada because by populating the land, it would slim the opportunity for America to invade the Prairies. This sounded like a tremendous idea. My dad used to work at a factory, but unfortunately he just lost his job to a machine. This placed my family in an awful position. At that time I was about four years old. They had to provide for my two older brothers and I.

I would go to canada and other diffrent countries in discover new things like religion citys

Everyone has faced difficulties after immigrating to a country. Whether it`s finding a job, it`s language barriers or facing prejudice, usually everyone faces has faced one difficulty. My parents have faced the difficulty of languages. My parents come from a country where the second language is english. They weren't familiar with a country where everywhere you go it's always english. But luckily, my parents did study in a school where it’s “English Medium”. That means they went to a school where they learned Hindi, Gujarati and English.

Living in the United States, may detach some people from their culture but in my case, I have increased my knowledge in my culture much more than I knew before. Punjabi culture is evident from Punjabi philosophy, poetry, spirituality, education, artistry, music, cuisine, architecture in all the countries. There are some little things that I understood when I moved to the United States such as about Gatka. Gatka is a traditional South Asian form of combat-training, developed by Sikhs, in which wooden sticks are used to simulate swords in sparring matches, basically Indian martial Art. They teach it at the Sikh Temple and when I see kids doing it, I feel like doing it too but I can not because you have to Amrit Sanchar (also called Khande di

The pounding sound of the 8th wonder of the world is truly breathtaking, and even more unbelievable is walking behind it, or standing right beneath it. Over the last summer I went on a vacation with my younger brother Liam, my mom Erika, and dad Aaron. We went on a long car ride to Niagara Falls in Canada, then to Boston, and finally to Pennsylvania. It was the trip of a lifetime.