The annual church picnic has a band, free food, games, competitions, prizes, and even offers a chance to dunk the principal and the two pastors in water. It’s for the kids. And it’s not really free. The church provides all this, including the dunkable pastors.
A group of Bangladeshis without kids crashed the party. They are heaping platesful of food and pushing their way to the front of the line for every prize. It was not until they started taking pictures of parishioners’ kids that they were asked to leave. The Bangladeshis are probably lovely people but they don’t know how to decipher what is happening and realize why their behavior is inappropriate. Any of the Americans at the picnic would look as rude and out of place at a gathering in Bangladesh.
As an immigrant myself, I know how long it takes to start figuring things out, reading the cultural clues, and remaking yourself according to a different mold. Uprooting and transplanting is always complicated, always carries consequences.
Clarissa's Blog 
I grew up hearing stories about my parents adjusting to American culture after arriving from Cuba, my Dad came in 1965 and my mother in 1970. Dad said that a lot of adjusting as a 10 year old was by osmosis, watching the other kids his age how to act. It also helped that the family settled in an area with a lot of normie Americans and quickly learned American norms, Mom’s family settled in Miami and that took more but they learned to be Americans.
Back then, kids were surrounded American culture and had to learn to fit in and be Americans instead of living in a Spanish bubble. My parents speak English with very American accents and act like middle aged boomers, too many Hispanic kids now live in a Spanish bubble away from American normie culture and never really act like Americans. These Bangladeshi people might never assimilate if they’re Muslims, they seem to think our culture is evil. Hopefully their kids will think being American is cool and act like normal American kids instead of their backwards parents
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Bangladeshis are some of the most wretched people on this planet. India intervened in east pakistan to stop a genocide, which led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. It is now 2025, and the hindu population of the country has plummeted from 28% to less than 8%, due to persecution. There are pogroms going on against hindus right now there, under the leadership of the new government (headed by a nobel peace prize winner lol) which was installed after the coup last year.
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One of the women – and these are women in their thirties – was so desperate to get a little rubber duck as a prize that she pushed a kindergartner with pigtails out of her way. The kid almost fell. I’m still wondering why that rubber duck was so important to her.
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The haitians of the subcontinent.
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This is why Asians who’ve been here more than ten years have a whole suite of “pollack” type jokes about FOBs.
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This is not unusual in Indian culture though. In our last family trip to India, my 6 year old daughter got violently shoved by a fellow passenger on his way out of the plane in New Delhi. She almost fell and hit her head. Can you imagine someone would do this to a 6 year old?
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“It was not until they started taking pictures of parishioners’ kids”
Why? Why wait until then? I’m surprised. Would they have been allowed to stay till the end if they hadn’t? Who knows, maybe invited to come to the next church fête?
“The Bangladeshis are probably lovely people but they don’t know how to decipher what is happening and realize why their behavior is inappropriate.”
Probably not, at least not this lot. And, no, it’s not a case of cultural misunderstanding since it’s impossible that they didn’t know that they were gate-crashing.
They did what all people of their kind do – from Asia Africa and everywhere except Japan – they know a good free-for-all when they see one – to which they’ve contributed nothing and to which they intend to contribute nothing – and they grab it.
To them, you and I and all Western, European, non-moslems, are just vermin: to be used, exploited and taken advantage of until they can get rid of us, whether physically or not being quite irrelevant, all things considered.
“As an immigrant myself” – No, nothing could be further from reality than comparing yourself to them, unless you also went on gate-crashing galore, moving around with self-entitlement. You and they came from outside the US to settle permanently – and that’s where the comparison stops.
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Christiana wanted to be welcoming, hoping that kindness would make an impression. Americans in general are the most open to difference and the most kindly predisposed to the Other of anybody on Earth.
I saw the other day the Mayor of Dearborn, MI named Abdullah something tell a resident named Tim that he’s not welcome in his own town. Americans are so tolerant that they let any stray Abdullah tell them they aren’t welcome in their own country.
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“The Bangladeshis are probably lovely people but they don’t know how to decipher what is happening and realize why their behavior is inappropriate.”
Have you read the Koran(Queran) or the Hadiths, Muhammad rather obviously apparently changed his mind on how to treat non-believers depending upon his situation. At best you are “dhimmi,” allowing a second class position in exchange for the payment of jizya, a tax levied on non-Muslims. But you know what happens when Muslims reads his ententions otherwise, the murders Nigeria and Egypt or the many thousands of raped young English or Sikh girls in Britain.
In their belief and minds, you were “dhimmi”; the Bangladeshis only did what was their right, as did Abdullah, and the Pakistani gang rapists in Britain. Kid, understand what your instinctive intuition tells you in Montreal, this is not the time to sing kumbaya ;-D
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It happens to some extent in any clan-loyalty, poverty culture. Primary loyalty is to one’s relatives, and life is all about grubbing up as much resources as you can gain access to, and distributing them to family members. Anybody not your family, or some ally of your family, is fair game for cheating, stealing, ripping off, etc. You would never do this to a relative, of course. In a famine situation, maybe this is the difference between life and death, the survival of your children. In a generalized prosperity situation… it’s a horrific breach of etiquette.
Difficult to un-learn, I expect.
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Actually religious fervor seems to go even beyond clan-loyality. The highland Scots fought endlessly but had an ettiquette regarding hospitality, that breach in the Glencoe massacre in 1692 is still not forgotten, and very slow to forgive. My grandmother warned me that I was not to go with Margery Campbell, even though she was the first girl not to have cooties, but for some strange reason actually seemed to like me ;-D
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