Preston Chamberlin Mrs.

Davis ENGL 1101 December 8, 2013 Ethnography Final Analysis

Intro (context, who what when where, name community, set the scene): Monday, the day the routine starts all over again, but also the day I got to spend some time observing the people who make up UNC Charlottes Chinese club. Every week this club meets on the second floor of the student union in room 265 from 5:00 6:00 PM. The clubs focus is on Chinese culture and the language itself, with the aims of broadening peoples cultural knowledge. The community is mostly made up of Asians with some Chinese relation in their family, but there are also people of other ethnicities and are just interested in the culture, community or want to refine their knowledge of the language. Main claim ( what does an outsider need to understand?, purpose/function; goals; defining characteristics, or philosophy/beliefs) Chinese club is a stress-free environment where anybody can learn about the Chinese culture and language, no matter what your race, ethnicity, religion, culture or background. The Student Union is a big place, but I didnt have any trouble finding the room which resided upstairs on the third floor. A few days prior I sent an email to the president of the club asking permission to observe and interview somebody, but he never replied back to me, so before I did anything I wanted to find the President and make sure he was okay with what I was doing. I kind of remembered what he looked like from when I found out about the club at their booth from SOAR earlier on in the year. I finally caught up to him and asked if he received my email, and he said he did but just didnt have time to re spond. I then introduced myself and he was totally fine with me being there to observe. Now all I had to was wait for everybody else to show up and begin my notes. I didnt really know what to expect, and as it got closer to 5:00 PM there were only around six people there so I was beginning to feel like this wasnt that big of a group. The club didnt really start until the other regulars showed up, and you could tell it was a pretty relaxed environment because nobody cared if you were late or anything. At the start of each meeting the President hands out tea to everybody which he brewed up himself in his ceramic tea pot. The room itself was about the size of a normal classroom and had a formal feel to it. The desks were arranged in a rectangular outline with an open space in the middle. The President and leaders of the club sat at the front of the room below the projector screen, looking out

towards the rest of us. Although this felt like a formal layout it was pretty effective in being able to get everybody in the conversation and relay information effectively. With the club being focused around Chinese culture, I presumed that most of the people who would attend would be of Asian ethnicity. The President and all the officers except for the secretary were all of somewhat Asian descent. The secretary was a female African American. As for the rest of the people, it was still mostly Asians and two white females, and one African American. One thing that is unique is that you cant identify who is in the club just b y looking at them. There are quite a few people at this University who have some Asian background, and a lot of them arent in the club. The club is also open to anybody, no matter what you look like, and there isnt any uniform that the members wear, so identifying people in the club is almost impossible unless you ask them. As I said earlier, the club is a relaxed environment, but each week there is a set topic or theme of the meeting. The day of my first observation the theme was about the Winter Festival in China. First one of the clubs leaders who was more fluent in Chinese than English showed a presentation introducing the topic whilst explaining some things to us. I noticed earlier that she was talking about going back to China over winter break, and then later on she needed help identifying certain words like fog in English. It was pretty interesting to me how she didnt know that much English and yet everybody could communicate with her pretty well if they knew Chinese. As you may know China isnt exactly the land of the free, so to access some sites the club leaders pulled up a Chinese search engine. Of course I couldnt read any of it, but it was interesting none the less. If you are interested you can even google yourself Chinese YouTube and click on youku.com and from there click on any of the videos on the home page. What you will soon realize is that most of the videos on there are region locked to Chinese IP addresses, so you cant watch them in the US unless you use a proxy (A proxy is basically a filter that flows all the data through a Chinese IP address so you can see the information). The following Monday was the next club meeting. It was held in the same room with the same general layout. There were only a few people there as I arrived early. This weeks theme was Karaoke so I had absolutely no idea how this was going to play out. While we were waiting for everybody to show up this guy who seemed to be a regular was messing around with one of those E-Cigarettes. He was entertaining his buddies by making shapes with the vapor that he exhaled, he was pretty good too. Everybody else seemed to be socializing as well until the club started at 5:17 PM. The Karaoke was more of a learning tool than something just to do for fun. The same lady who taught last weeks topic was putting up YouTube videos of sing -along songs in Chinese up on the projector screen. The goal of this was to help with everybodys Chinese pronunciation. The first song was called Two Tigers/ Liang Zhi Lao Hu and was a childrens song used for learning the language. For these songs the whole club read out the words and sang as a group with the guidance of the lady leading it who was much more fluent in the language.

(Put together argument supporting claim using data from observations/interview etc. )