Thanksgiving, Holidays, and Chinese New Year and such

Because it is shortly after Thanksgiving, one of the biggest and most group-oriented holidays in American society, it seems appropriate to write about how many foreign and English as a second language students view the holiday. The interesting truth is that it’s often surprisingly unimportant to them.

 Some who work with foreign students forget that Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday. (Okay, there actually is a Canadian Thanksiving held around Columbus day, but it lacks the same symbolism and significance.)

For instance, I once taught at a program at Tufts University that was intended to orient and prepare Chinese high school seniors for study at colleges and universities in the USA. Although I learned a lot in my time there, my feelings were that in many ways it was very much a program designed by and for American liberals without terribly much first hand understanding of Chinese culture and based in their preconceived notions of what the students should be taught rather than based on what the students actually needed. (Perhaps more on this another time.)

And one example of this was at a meeting early in the year,  someone announced that we must find places for them to spend time on Thanksgiving. The fear, as I understood it, was that they would become very lonely on the holiday if they did not have a place to go. However, few newly arrived Chinese students consider Thanksgiving to be terribly important. It is not a holiday celebrated in their country, and they did not grow up with it.  Instead they consider Chinese New Year (also known as Lunar New Year) to be the most important holiday of the year and both are celebrated with feasting and a gathering of families and communities. This is when Chinese, Taiwanese, and many other Asian students (including Vietnamese who celebrate Tet at this time of year) tend to get the most homesick and lonely.

By contrast, I remember my first Chinese New Year’s celebrated many years ago in Taipei, Taiwan, when I was in my early twenties and off to teach English as a Second or Foreign Language for the first time in Taiwan.

A group of us young foreign English teacher and student types gathered and enjoyed the way that the locals seemed to have abandoned their city and how it had become like a ghost town as people left to spend time with their families elsewhere.  The restaurants were closed so we ate canned fish and crackers and chatted and had a great time. We were not lonely at all, although my guess is that most of the Taiwanese we knew would have thought we were.

Some of us, including me, later had the opportunity to spend time with Taiwanese families and that was an enjoyable experience too, but it was something more along the lines of a cross-cultural educational experience than it was an experience based on joining a shared community for an important holiday.

We were much more on a “so what’s this crazy thing about anyway?” frame of mind than we were on a “how will we spend this important holiday?” vibe.

And that’s how many of your foreign students view Thanksgiving. If invited, they are happy. They meet new people. They see new things. They experience the host culture and learn more about its people and traditions.

However, if not they are usually fine.

By contrast, however, if one wish to care and provide well for your foreign students, you should learn what their holidays are and how they spend them and seek to ensure that they do not struggle with serious depression and homesickness during those times of year.