Tuesday 20 November 2007

Assumed to be?

It seems to me that to Australian eyes, when a man has a vaguely-asian-sounding surname, they just assume that we would be speak in one of the asian languages. Well, I am a Korean-born, immigrant to Australia, so I can speak Korean naturally. But this story of a brother was quite funny.

But sometimes, it gets a little bit beyond just being funny. My church is a Korean immigrants church (well, at least it has been so far), but we also have English speaking congregation who cannot quite understand Korean well, and many of them would not identify themselves as Koreans, but Australians. Granted, most of them are still Korean by blood, and have grown up in Korean culture because of their parents, even though they grew up in Australia. However, it is not always appreciated by everyone when a guest speaker addresses all of us as Koreans and display his broad(?) cultural experience. We'd rather be addressed as Australians and be given a fair treatment than to be treated special just because we look asian.

No comments: