Cover Letter
Samgar Nurlan ENGL11000
When writing this profile I wanted to focus more on the Roman and how his past shaped him and his way of writing. I wanted to show what he felt in specific moments and explain why it happens. For example, I pointed to the fact that Roman is the oldest child in his family and how this fact affected his life. I exemplified many cases showing why Roman wrote specifically what he wrote about in WLLN. Mostly I think I answered some questions that may have arisen during the reading of his WLLN. Because I had an opportunity to interview Roman, I was able to correctly interpret what Roman was trying to say in his WLLN. So I focused more on what directly influenced his writing choices, both in subject and style.
I was mainly describing the context, the location and cultural significance of his past. I contextualized his experience and explained how his origin affected him during his life. I also tried to explain the rhetorical situation of WLLN. For example I summarized his situation and supported it with some outside, but related information in order for the reader to understand Roman’s situation.
I think that this profile is connected to the larger aims of the courses. For example the cases when he had to help his parents shows that people not knowing formal English have a particularly complicated lives when it comes to doing their work. For example Roman’s father had a rough time working with banks because service wouldn’t understand him or it would take longer than usual.
I was addressing mainly everybody, but the first generation immigrant children. Whereas Roman considered them his main audience I was considering everybody else. I wanted to show the people who didn’t experience similar situations that Roman did, through what first generation immigrant children go through and what challenges they face in their everyday life. I wanted them to understand the situation and maybe feel sympathetic towards them.
Peer Profile Review
Samgar Nurlan ENGL11000
Roman Lu was born on April 22, 2005 in Brooklyn. He was born in an immigrated Chinese family, being a first generation Chinese-American and also an eldest in the family. Currently, he is a freshman student in CCNY- City College of New York, majoring in Computer Science. Both his parents were born in China and moved to America in the “early 2000s” as he said. He has only one sibling, a younger brother who was also born in America. His grandparents still live in China, and moreover he is planning to visit them this year. Last time Roman and his grandparents met each other was when he was still a child and he doesn’t remember anything. Thus, he wants to meet them again and talk to them, especially in Chinese. However Roman wasn’t always proficient in Chinese as it is now and he had his own challenges throughout his life, in learning language.
Because he is the representative of the first generation children, his main language since childhood was English. Moreover his parents started adding some English words in their everyday life, because Roman could not understand some words in chinese. Being born in America and raised surrounded by American culture, his connection with his own culture slowly weakened. All his childhood he was using English as his main language. This type of lifestyle led to Roman actually forgetting his mother tongue. As it happens with all high schoolers, they have less and less time to spend with their family(the only way of speaking Chinese, in his everyday life), thus he spoke Chinese only with parents and some friends, which caused such changes. Moreover, his everyday environment was all English, such as school, friends, movies, tv series, news, tests and so on, which worsened the situation. However it meant that his knowledge of the English language was expanding. As he mentions in his WLLN: “my proficiency in English greatly increases, to the point where I could write essays and have formal conversations”. However Roman’s dramatic improvement in English had a negative correlation with his knowledge of Chinese language. As he went from not knowing English at all, when he was young, to being able to have formal conversations with strangers, he went from speaking Chinese fluently at the age of 8, to being able to say only short phrases at the age of 15. Thus, during the time in highschool, he actually started thinking about learning his mother tongue seriously. During his highschool years he took Chinese classes, specifically (mandarin), the language that his parents spoke. It helped him to spend more time with his family and be closer to them, speaking chinese. As he says now: “I stopped taking classes after highschool, but now I can at least maintain a conversation with Chinese people.”
However because he is the representative of first generation immigrant children, he had a completely different childhood and teenhood than a typical American child. Due to his parents’ spending their whole time working to be able to provide and maintain the lifestyle for children, forced them to neglect learning the English language. This, in turn, had an effect on Roman, as he is the oldest child. In middle school he started helping with translating some phone calls. Since he wasn’t old enough, his parents didn’t pressure him to help them a lot, but it changed 2 years later. During his highschool years, since he was old enough, his parents asked for more help with their bills, school meetings and various emails. Some examples would be that Roman’s mother needed him to format a professional looking email for her, since she doesn’t know how to make one herself, or his father asking to help with calls from the bank. All this shows that first generation immigrant children actually have more responsibilities than usual American children.
Roman being the oldest child in his family also affected him. All the responsibilities that were placed on him made him more frustrated about the time he had for himself. As Roman says: I had to take out my time in my day to help them out constantly”. As it usually happens, especially in Asian families, the oldest child has to be more accountable and sometimes take responsibility for the parents, by helping them with their problems. Typically, parents expect more from eldest children than others, because in this case, the eldest child can be a role model for younger siblings. This is what Roman partly experienced throughout his childhood. Even though Roman’s parents “were lenient in that they never forced me to take anything that I didn’t want like music or art classes” they were very strict in education. His parents sort of set a level of education that he had to maintain and never got below that.
The whole experience of forgetting a mother tongue, then learning it again, taking partial responsibilities for parents’ work, and also being a hard-working student shaped Roman as he is now. His writing skills, purpose and directed audience comes from his experiences in the past. In his last major writing assignment he chose to write about his past experiences with languages and set an example for the people in the same situation as he was once. He wanted his writing to resonate with people with familiar situations. His knowledge in formal English helped him to express his feelings and emotions regarding his past as he chose the formal format in narrating his past, addressing his writing piece to first generation immigrant people.
