An excerpt: cultural musing

An excerpt: cultural musing

I tweet. I Facebook. I blog. I MySpace. I am also a chronic texter on the side. I am defined as your modern “screenager”, the keyboard-jamming generation getting our soul sucked out of our eyes by LCD screens. Though I’m consciously unaware of how much I rely on technology, it remains conspicuous of my everyday life. Today, I am a product of America’s dominant culture.

Back in the technological stone age of the 90s, I was primarily raised in a Cantonese-speaking household, but it wasn’t until elementary school that I learned the English language through social interaction and the ESL program. It was in the midst of my childhood, when we begin to establish identity and values, that I was getting adjusted in between the Asian and American culture. It wasn’t a matter of pick and choose, it was comfortably embracing the two. With my parents being the model figures in my life, they have shaped the independent person I have become growing up. Because of our communicative and cultural barriers, as they have been raised in a culture with values heavily from Asia’s ancestry, they were near-sighted when it came to the American way of living – even a bit ethnocentric. Growing up in my household, the expectations and standards of my education have been higher than those of a typical American family. A heavy Confucian belief was weighed upon me that stressed the importance of education for moral development of the individual. Many give credit to the Asian American family infrastructure to the success of the ‘model minority’. However, I believe the American culture plots my triumphs to fall along stereotypical subject and career paths, further relating false ideals to my family. It has been said that there are numerous Asian American adolescents that wish to branch out from the stereotypical career paths that society fits AAs in (i.e. Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer, etc) While these careers are extremely significant in their own right, it only subjects AA adolescents to see themselves in a stereotypical box. I acknowledged the desire to have a highly successful career and prove that there is educational drive dwelling inside my family blood, and that ultimately Asian Americans can be deemed as thriving figures in other career arenas. That being said, family and education has shaped the aspect of my nonmaterial culture. Never feeling the need to constrict within the stereotypes of the Asian culture has hammered my beliefs in the importance of individual freedom and my liberalistic outlooks.

Now that society has come a long way since the 90s, technologically, culturally, and as government, I find myself in the common body of dominant culture for a few reasons. While growing up as an ESL student, I was open to learning all about the American culture and social institutions perpetuated the dominant culture for being the most powerful group in society. I had become adaptive. In recent years, media studies and popular culture has piqued my interest. I choose to pay attention to social trends and “keep up with the times.” While I am just another mindless technologically advanced drone in the bunch, I am a knowledgeable one. In a time where the media has a large influence on the American society, the general public blindly consumes texts at an unconscious level. I believe my ability to evaluate what the media exuberates into the airwaves separates the myth from reality and I live in this dominant culture with a realistic, rose-colored filter.