Community self-introduction

We are group of international students. We all enrolled in Translating & Interpreting(English<–> Chinese) course in RMIT at 2008. Yes, like your guess, we are all from China. Some of  us just came to Australia more than half year ago, and just two of us have been staying here for more than 4 or 5 years.

 

When we translate ‘community’ into Chinese, there are several versions explanations: 1, ‘ she hui’, in Chinese this phrase means ’society’; 2,’tuan ti, which means ‘group’ or ‘organization’; 3, ‘qun luo’ means a group of people having a religion,race, or other particular characteristic in common; 4, ‘gong tong xing’, means the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common.

Back into the theory of community(Willmott 1986; Lee and Newby 1983; and Crow and Allen 1995), it is explored in three different way:

Place. Territorial or place community can be seen as where people have something in common, and this shared element is understood geographically.

Interest. In interest or ‘elective’ communities people share a common characteristic other than place.

Communion. In its weakest form we can approach this as a sense of attachment to a place, group or idea (in other words, whether there is a ‘spirit of community’).

Interestingly, our community share all of these three characteristics: We are from the same country and studying in the same Uni.; We all chose to study the same major, and probably we’ll engage in the similar career in the near future; and We also believe there is a ’spirit of our community’, which is we are doing our best to fit in this new oversea

The reason of my documenting

As Cohen (1985) says, ‘community’ involves two related suggestions that the members of a group have something in common with each other; and the thing held in common distinguishes them in a significant way from the members of other possible groups.  In this case, there are a lot of communities in our lives, the tram drivers in Melbourne, the sales of coles or safeway, even the footy club or the mahjong club.

However, I prefer to choose this group of oversea students as the protagonist in my documentary, not just because I’m one of them, also because I very value the relationship set up in our oversea lives. There’s William Morris’s (1886) approach of ‘fellowship’ which is similar to ‘community’:

Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship’s sake ye do them.

If a person keeps his/her life outside any community, he/she wouldn’t be sb.’s son/daughter, sb.’s husband/wife, sb.’s father/mother, etc. In other words, he/she wouldn’t exist in this world. As a normal human being, you can’t escape from the identity which makes your to be one of community members.

I have a good experience with the group of Chinese students, and I also enjoy that I’m one of them. We come from the same country; we met each other at Melbourne on same day; we went through the first year of our new course together; we help each other to overcome loneliness, homesickness and upset which almost are shared by every oversea student. Actually, we are not just a community that has something in common. The truth is we have a lot of things in common. 

I think this might be the reason that I choose this as the theme of my documentary.