Nothing to Wink at, Newcomers Say of Body English

Learning English was relatively easy for Edward (Te-Lung) Chang. But the Taiwan-born student needed six months to master the American wink.

Chang wrote about his difficulties in an English-as-a-second-language class at Pasadena City College. His essay and those of dozens of his fellow students were recently published in a book called “The American Experience: A Foreign Student Guide” from Star Publishing of Belmont, Calif.

Mastering an unfamiliar language has its pitfalls, Chang notes, citing a fellow foreign student who evoked snickers from his American audience when he pronounced election as erection. But for people who are new to the United States, nonverbal English and other cultural subtleties can be even tougher to learn.

For months, Chang couldn’t figure out what a wink meant or even when it would occur. “The first person to wink at me was a female cashier at my college; the next one was a female classmate; but when the next one came from a male instructor, I was thoroughly confused.”

Chang finally asked one of his American professors what all this winking was about. “She told me she had not noticed that anyone ever winked that much, and then she too winked at me,” he recalls. “I knew that I was beginning to adapt to American culture the other day when a friend of mine who had just arrived from Taiwan asked me why I had just winked at him.”

As teacher and editor Karen M. Holgerson, 45, explained, the 49 essays in the book show American life through the eyes of people confronting its intricacies for the first time.

The published essays were edited to correct grammar, spelling and the like, but the content is entirely the students’, Holgerson said.

In Holgerson’s view, cross-cultural communication is often hampered by the assumption that we are all alike.

“The fact is that people of different cultures have different ideas,” Holgerson said. “They perceive and react to the world in different ways. They can observe the same thing and not necessarily see the same thing. Most people, in fact, are blind to what makes their own culture and point of view unique and, consequently, find it difficult to pinpoint what foreigners would find difficult to understand or adapt to.”

Voices of Experience

A major purpose of the book, Holgerson said, is to help newcomers to the United States by telling them, in the accented voices of experience, what they can expect.

The first essay, by Jennifer Chang of Taiwan, reports her fresh-off-the-plane wonder at the ethnic diversity of an American airport. Instead of a waiting room full of the stereotyped blue-eyed, blond Americans she had anticipated, she saw people of every description. “Some people were amazingly tall; others were short even by Asian standards,” she notes. “In my country, people have a much more homogeneous look.”

Some of the essays deal with such practical issues as what to expect on a date, what to do if you are in an automobile accident and how to find a comfortable place to live.

In the matter of housing, Chi Leung of the People’s Republic of China and Tji Jong Ong of Indonesia warn that foreign students may feel isolated among American roommates and advise against settling in neighborhoods full of burglar-barred windows.

Shocked by Culture

In the course of their essays, many of the students reveal how shocked they are by aspects of American culture.

Freedom of choice is one pervasive characteristic of the American experience that unsettles many of the students.

“Americans are free to select their own jobs, their own religions, their own life styles, no matter how strange, wrong, or illogical they might seem to others,” Cherry Lim Co of the Philippines explains. “Many of us will observe that Americans have too much freedom, yet many Americans complain they don’t have enough!”