This chapter has explored the processes of acculturation evident in participants‘ everyday lives. Acculturation often ruptures people‘s existing ways of life and the connections of people to places and their shared identities. Despite hardship, my participants survive and flourish in a new land through processes of adaptive acculturation (cf., Hodgetts, Drew et al., 2010). The participants face challenges and stresses, but also discovery, possibility, hopes, joys and renewal. My analysis illustrates how such adaptive acculturation entails older Chinese migrants‘ abilities to both integrate with the host culture and maintain their ethnic identities. Such integration is associated with positive wellbeing and indicates access to resources provided by the immigrants‘ families and own cultural groups along with the resources emanating from the host society. In this regard, social support plays an important role in successful adaptation and wellbeing among older Chinese immigrants. My analysis shows that older migrants support one another by maintaining a shared interpretation of their collective experiences, and by providing social resources, such as singing Chinese songs, to alleviate acculturation stressors. Forging new social networks within the cultural milieu of the host country is integral to their adaptation (cf., Jorden, Matheson, & Anisman, 2009).
The older adults are, therefore, not simple passive recipients, in the process of acculturation, of what the world has to offer, but are instead active, intentional agents. This finding has implications for conceptualisation of culture and understanding the ideology underpinning understandings of acculturation. As Markus and Hamedani (2007) argue, an essential element of human behaviour is an engagement of a person making sense of a world that is replete with meanings, material subjects and practices. Central to understanding how the cultural and psychological construct each other is what Shweder (1995) calls ―meanings‖. Meanings are useful units of the mutual constitution; because they refer to constructed entities that cannot be located solely in the mind or solely in the world. Rather, meanings are always distributed across both (Markus & Hamedani, 2007;
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Shweder, 1995). Substantial differences in these meanings provide useful ways of distinguishing among cultural contexts (Markus & Hamedani, 2007). Circumstances keep changing; culture at the same time keeps evolving instead of being static (Triandis, 2007). In this sense, culture, as a process, is continuously produced and reproduced in the dynamic interaction between individuals and their social and natural environments. So is acculturation.
As argued in Chapter 2, the dominant acculturation studies are underpinned by the questions of host language proficiency, frequency of host language use, host language media consumption (TV, video, newspaper, magazine), ethnicity of friends, food consumption at and outside home, and social gathering and so on (Jang et al., 2007; Kao & Travis, 2005; Schnittker, 2002). Such an approach to acculturation focuses on surface behaviours that are open to code switching, such as language, cuisine, fashions and other preferences, while ignoring deep meaning-generating aspects of culture (Chirkov, 2009c). The approach sees acculturation as abstract or something that is detached from the person. Many acculturation researchers have argued that the role of the host language in the identity negotiations of immigrants is critical and the use of the host language can serve as a marker of immigrant status (Deaux, 2000). My analysis indicates that the host language does not serve as the sole key indicator of acculturation for my participants. I am not suggesting that the host language is unimportant in the process of acculturation; simply, my participants work around language barriers in ways that are not accounted for in dominant acculturation research. For this group of immigrants, their acculturation is mediated by practices beyond language. Consequently, material culture plays a more fundamentally constitutive role in their acculturation processes than does the host language. Participants‘ observations on everyday practices of their neighbours do far more than just speak as the non-verbal social interaction expresses meanings beyond languages. In this sense, a new reflective, critical and cultural approach to studying acculturation processes is required (Chirkov, 2009a, 2009b; Waldram, 2009).
Among Berry‘s (2006) four typologies of acculturation (assimilation, integration, marginalisation and separation), the categories of ―assimilation‖ and ―marginalisation‖, which require non-adherence to the original culture (Jang et al., 2007), may not applicable to the participants. These participants are more likely to be categorised as ―separation‖ for reasons such as their low scores of English proficiency, frequency of English use and English media consumption, and high
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scores of ethnic friends and so on. However, my analysis has shown that the participants are marginal, but these participants are not marginalised because they are respected members of both cultures (cf., Liu, 2009). Rather than separating themselves from the host culture, they actively integrate into larger society through observational, familial, participatory, media, and religious acculturation. Their acculturation is not a passive process. They engage positively in their acculturation and increasingly come to be acculturated into a number of communities with varying degrees of success (cf., Hodgetts, Drew et al., 2010). Berry‘s four typologies of acculturation offer an incomplete picture of acculturation. The model rests on contestable assumptions about measurements and meanings that fail to capture the complexity of acculturation and human agents‘ involvements and efforts in the processes of acculturation. In addition, Berry‘s model fails to examine group-specific settings and social, cultural and material resources available in negotiating intergroup relations (Sonn & Fisher, 2005). It is not my intention to suggest that Berry‘s model is irrelevant to older Chinese immigrants; rather, I would argue that existing theories need to be rethought in the light of the complexity that surrounds human engagements in everyday life.
According to Goffman (1959), human actors bring selves into view by taking account of, managing, and developing their performances in relation to fellow actors, audiences and the settings in which the performances unfold. The presentation of the self is practical in that it is not fully scripted as a stage production might be predetermined. Rather, the self performatively weaves its way through everyday interactions through which people develop. When older Chinese people move to New Zealand, the social and cultural settings in which they construct themselves change. These changes in their everyday lives produce new types of social relations through the processes of acculturation (cf., Simmel, 1971). As a result, the identities of Chinese migrants‘ transform (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000). My analysis draws on the interactionist notion that people have as many selves as relationships and social settings. It is through the locating of the self in the situations that people understand who and what they are (Hodgetts, Drew et al., 2010).
For Goffman, some of the most important performative interactions are the material features of a social setting, such as bodies, postures, furniture arrangements, lighting and so on. These material features, Goffman argues, play a central role in the work of self presentation as do talk and emotional expressions. In other words, subjectivity is embedded in the material world of a performance
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(Holstein & Gubrium, 2000). Following Goffman‘s arguments, I maintain that the older Chinese migrants‘ acculturation is also materially mediated. These material mediations are ubiquitous in older Chinese migrants‘ acculturating identity landscape. Here the material world does not stand on its own; it does not determine older Chinese migrants‘ identities in some independent fashion, as if it were separate and distinct from the everyday practices. Nevertheless, the material world is there in people‘s everyday life and mediates acculturation and the construction of self on its own terms. Using material objects metaphorically allows people to borrow or transfer meaning between interpretive realms (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000).
Within existing acculturation research, cultural values have received relatively less attention than identity and behavioural practices (Chia & Costigan, 2006). The next chapter explores the participants‘ understandings of the cultural value of filial piety and their practices of filial piety in everyday life. Filial piety research has also largely focused on quantitative surveys which detach people from the world in which they practice filial piety. The approach to acculturation taken in this research, which combines concepts such as everyday experience, offers an alternative.
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