We’ve all gone through our lives unconsciously acting according to the social standards and behaviors of our culture. In the world today, culture fully informs the way of thinking and acting of an individual because of the deeply and subconsciously engrained responses put there by the culture in which he or she was born. Cultural identity changes the way people behave. Our cultural identity shapes our “values, beliefs, ideas about appropriate behavior…” (Trumbull, Pacheco 8). If we have lived our lives in a bubble of a certain culture we will only know that culture and act accordingly as stated in the above quote. Those cultural aspects will stay with us for the rest of our lives no matter what we do. There are some people that decide to live up to different expectations than their culture provides them. In the story excerpt “By Any Other Name” the protagonist’s sister Premila refuses to be docile like she was expected to act. Instead, she stood up…show more content… They believe that somebody can make an opinion on the world solely based on the experience. For example Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘Two Ways to Belong in America’, two sisters from the same cultural background chose two different life paths. One sister marries someone with the same cultural background while the other “[opted] for fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans and T-shirts, and [renounced] 3,000 years… of caste-observant, ‘pure culture’ marriage in the Mukherjee family.” However, everybody is still influenced by their culture even though they don’t realize it. The sister in the past quote, Baharati , chose to marry outside her culture because she disagreed with her culture. Thus, her culture influenced her choice to marry outside of her culture’s social norms. In the end, opposers will say that culture has nothing to do with personal choices, but it is obvious that culture does fully influence personal