'Friends,' a model for how Americans behave. Photo via IMDB
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Even before my parents told me that we would be moving from Taiwan to the United States in 2000, I was already learning how to be an American. After all, American media was everywhere: My sixth-grade group dance performance was to Janet Jackson's "Together Again," and my earliest movie theater experiences were films like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Jurassic Park, and Titanic.
Looking back, I see how those products of American entertainment shaped my perspective of the United States—and of what it meant to be an American—more than almost anything else.
At its most basic level, television helps immigrants overcome the language barrier. While English is taught as a second language in much of the world, the ubiquity of American media has made it possible for immigrants to immerse themselves in the language before even setting foot on American soil. A 2012 study of more than 8,000 immigrants in the United States found that "pre-immigration uses of English language TV, radio, and print media, and post-immigration use of English language print media, were associated with higher English proficiency."
Madisyn Li, who moved to the US from China in 2013, said watching television shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother taught her the language in a way she couldn't have learned in school. "When you learn English in class, you don't learn slang," she told me. "When I came here, I was already familiar with American conversations because of those shows and movies."
As a preteen, I used to rewind my VHS tapes of Mary-Kate and Ashley films to play back certain phrases until I could pronounce the words in the same way. Now, instead of a "foreign accent," most people think I'm from Los Angeles: I adopted the accent of the Olson twins.
Beyond language, television provides a model for immigrants to understand who Americans are—how they dress, what they eat, and how they behave in various situations. Jack Song, whose family immigrated to the United States in 1991, told me his mom obsessively watched The Golden Girls and used its characters as a template for their new life in the US. "She decorated the house a bit like the show," Song told me. "She would say things like 'Oh, this is how Dorothy would do it!'"
"When you watch an American show like Full House, you're able to see how they have conversations at the dinner table, how they greet their kids or spouses when they come home," said Jason Wong, who immigrated to the US from Hong Kong in 2005.
Of course, representations of the United States in popular culture don't always set realistic expectations about what life in America is like. Mindy Lo, who moved to the US in 1998, recalls watching Baywatch and Beverly Hills, 90210 and thinking everyone in America was "blonde and super fit." But they do provide valuable reference points for immigrants to begin to immerse themselves into American life.
Wong, for example, told me that watching popular television shows and movies gave him something to talk about with other Americans, which made him feel like less of an outsider. "I pulled jokes from TV and movies that I watched," he told me. "And people were like wow, you're making these references, you're making these jokes I understand. Understanding American culture body language. That's where I learned everything," Wong told me. But knowing how to fit in as an immigrant in America isn't totally about assimilation. "I am an Asian guy living in America in a predominately Hispanic neighborhood, and I like African American music. What do I choose? I've decided that I don't have to give up one culture to enjoy another."
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