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Fanglue Ni

Lorene Delany-Ullman

Writing 39B– RA Essay Final

18 March, 2018

Word Count: 1362

The “Fight” of Literacy: Asian and Chicano Suppressed by Whiteman Culture

As an immigration country, the US is a melting pot of races and cultures. But

from the foundation of the country, white’s culture had become the main stream in the

society, and English become the official language of the country. Whites force other

races and immigrants learn and use English and obey the White culture. However, many

new immigrants don’t want to lose their own culture and there were many conflicts

happened. Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese immigrants who has been treated unequally

during his student life. The story is called “Surrendering” which is a public literacy

narrative. Gloria Anzaldua is a female Chicano writer. The article, “How to Tame a

Wild Tongue”, is about how she fought for her right to speak and learn Spanish which

is her native language. Literacy Narrative is a story related to the writer’s memory about

reading and writing. (“Writing a Literacy Narrative”) It is about how people learned

writing and reading and how reading and writing affect their life. In a proper literacy

narrative, there are three important elements. (“Writing a Literacy Narrative”) The first

element is story. The writer need to tell a story to present the idea that he or she want

to express. As a story, plot is about what’s going on; character is the main part of the

story; settings is the historical and the situation that happened at that time; theme is the

main idea that writer want to express. Detail is also one of the elements. In a narrative,

details support the main idea that writer want to express by making it more
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understandable. The third element is about how this event affect the writer himself or

herself. Literacy narrative is not only a story, it also about how this reading and writing

story influence the writer and how does it change him or her. Two immigrant authors,

Ocean Vuong and Gloria Anzaldua, use literacy narrative to tell a story about their

literacy education about English by using the conventions such as plot, characters and

vivid details. But they don’t mean to show what they learned in English; instead, they

express the conflict between their own race and the whiteman culture of this country,

and the unequal treatment they had.

In Vuong’s narrative, the author talked about a story that he had unequal treated

on the poem he had written by his teacher. The purpose of his narrative is to get the

equal treatment on the literacy for every immigrant children. The teachers and people

who interested in literacy and reading The New Yorker will be his audience. He wanted

these people to improve the unequal situation that Asian immigrants have. Because

immigrants like him can’t speak English so well, but they do have chance to improve

and learn. The plot of this story is about a boy who had written a poem but treated as

plagiarism by his teacher. The main characters in his story is his teacher and himself.

In the article, he quoted the sentence of his teacher “‘No, where is the poem you

plagiarized? How did you even write something like this?’” (Vuong, Ocean) This

quotation described how does the teacher treat him, a non-white immigrant, differently.

In Anzaldua’s article, she aim to let Chicanos be proud of their accent and speak

their own language, which is very different from Vuong’s purpose. As a academic

discourse, this article is not published for public; it is for other academic researcher who

are mostly white’s at that time. She wanted to express to these “oppressers” how she

will use her own language to express her ideas. So she used many Spanish on this

article. The plot of the article is not so clear due to its audience. Anzaldua was trying to
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combine some stories to describe the whole process about how she fought for her rights

to learn Spanish instead of only English with some introduction about the situation of

current Spanish. One impressive story in this article is about the how she was caught

speaking Spanish. Her teacher said “‘If you want to be American, speak ‘American’. If

you don’t like it, go back to Mexico where you belong.’” (Anzaldua, Gloria) This is

also the quotation of the teacher, similar as Vuong’s quotation. In this quotation, her

teacher also expressed that how she did not welcome the immigrants not speak English,

which is whiteman culture privilege: People in America have to speak “American”.

Immigrants are not allowed to learn and speak their own language because they are not

whiteman.

Another element Vuong used is the detailed description. In the narrative, he

specifically described the scene that he had listened the famous speech by Dr. Martin

Luther King Jr. “Through the headset, a robust male voice surged forth, emptying into

my body. The man’s inflections made me think of waves on a sea.” (Vuong, Ocean)

This is metaphoric description about how he felt the sound of Dr. King, which suggest

that the speech was attractive for him. Vuong is trying to use his experience to let people

know the problem about the literacy on immigrants like him. Immigrants don’t know

English much, but they deserve the equal treatment on the education and literacy. They

should not be seen as low literacy level and doubt their performance, just like his teacher

doubt his poem. At the surface, Vuong told a story about how he learned to write a

poem and got the reward like normal literacy narrative; but the true idea he want to

express is that the unequal treatment he had been through from his English teacher. His

poem, “ If a Boy Dream”, was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The poem is also

the suggestion of his life, the life that has been treated unequally, just like what he said

at the end of the article: “I have plagiarized my life to give you the best of me.” In this
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literacy narrative, he did not focused on how he learned literacy; he focused on the

treatment he had and he wanted other readers who like literacy treat the immigrants’

kid more equally.

Anzaldua also wrote many details about her feeling on the Spanish. “When

watching Mexican movies, I felt sense of home-coming as well as alienation.”

(Anzaldua, Gloria) After she came to the U.S., English is the environment of her life.

But she was still Chicano and she felt splitting inside her. This is one of her motivation

to learn Spanish. Also, she described how learning Spanish affect her life. “I had to

‘argue’ with one advisor after the other, semester after semester, before I was allowed

to make Chicano literature an area of focus.” (Anzaldua, Gloria) At that time, white

man culture and English literacy are still mainstream. Learning in Spanish and Spanish

literacy was not supported in university, especially by whiteman. She started to do the

research on Chicano literacy after she learned Spanish. She use this narrative with a lot

of Spanish to show how native language is important to immigrants like them.

Vuong and Anzaldua use literacy narrative by using the conventions such as

plot, characters and vivid details to tell a story about unequal treatment they have been

through when they were learn literacy. Anzaldua’s article was written in 1987 and

Vuong’s article was written in 2017. After 30 years, the white privilege on culture and

literacy were still exist and became more and more serious. In 2016, there are 1,183,505

legal immigrants become legal permanent resident. ("Legal Immigration To The United

States, 1820-Present"), and the trend is increasing.

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Fig.1 Annual Number of U.S. Legal Permanent Residents("Legal Immigration

To The United States, 1820-Present")

And by 2016, there are 33.1% of Americans are not white.("U.S. Census Bureau

Quickfacts: UNITED STATES") Even the population of other race in the U.S. is

increasing, the white privilege is still rising. Anzaldua wrote about the privilege in

academic discourse and Vuong wrote about it in public discourse. The problem is not

only in literacy research field but also public education field. Children were taught by

English and whiteman culture and they will be educated that whiteman culture is the

only culture in the world and the whiteman privilege will become and more and more

serious, not only in literacy, but the whole society.

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Work Cited

"Writing A Literacy Narrative." The Norton Field Guide To Writing, 2018,

https://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/write/fieldguide/writing_guides.as

p#BOLD01.

Vuong, Ocean. "Surrendering." The New Yorker, 2018,

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/06/ocean-vuong-immigrating-

into-english.

Anzaldua, Gloria. "How To Tame A Wild Tongue." Borderlands/La Frontera: The

New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1987, pp. 33-45,.

"Legal Immigration To The United States, 1820-Present". Migrationpolicy.Org, 2018,

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/Annual-Number-

of-US-Legal-Permanent-Residents?width=850&height=850&iframe=true. Accessed 4

Mar 2018.

"U.S. Census Bureau Quickfacts: UNITED STATES". Census.Gov, 2018,

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US#viewtop. Accessed 4 Mar

2018.