My Father Tells My Story

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“My Father Writes His Story” In this essay I will discuss personal stories from my childhood that will outline similarities and differences of “Western” and “Eastern” cultures. “Western” and “Eastern” countries differ in many ways. They both have their own history, culture and traditions. They also differ by how “Western” and “Eastern” people present themselves and tell stories about themselves. In both “Western” and “Eastern” culture heritage, family, respect and honesty play major factors. Me, being from a Western culture, heritage is one of the most important values to me. I enjoy letting others know, where I was born and raised, because it makes me proud and it makes me “different” from the rest. Telling people where I am originally from…show more content…
My family plays a big role in my life, since they have taught me all my cultural values, such as respect for elderly. When I tell funny and embarrassing childhood stories about myself, I usually share these with family members or with really close friends only. I do not like telling embarrassing stories to strangers, because they may get a wrong impression from me or may even judge me based on that story. One of my embarrassing childhood stories happened to me at around the age of 5. I was on vacation with my family and my cousin shared her bed with me. That was my first time ever sleeping on a water bed before. After sleeping in the water bed for a little bit, I started to feel sick. That’s when I threw up. I got motion sick from sleeping in my cousin’s water bed. Family is also a very important aspect of life in the Eastern culture. Jen points out in her story that a person’s place in the family was often worked into their name, which could be worked into the house. Jen’s grandfather’s house had eight words posted on the door. These eight words provided the middle names for the following eight generations. Her grandfather has the first word, her father has the second word and she has the third word as her middle name (Jen, 2013). As you can read in my statement, family is a major aspect in our lives. They help us, guide us, support us and they give us advice. Family makes us to the person we are today. Without our…show more content…
I personally do not want to disrespect anyone, when I tell them my stories. That’s why I leave out details that might offend my listeners. However respect has also something to do with how the listeners react to your stories. Having other people laugh at my stories can be disrespectful, but also embarrassing to me. One of my funny stories that I tend to share is when I was a flower girl at a really fancy wedding. From the beginning of the aisle to the end of the aisle I knew exactly what I had to do. My mother taught me to take a flower and to put it neatly on the ground. Once I was at the end of the aisle, I realized how many flowers I still had in my basket. I decided to take the basket to turn it around and to dump all those beautiful flowers on the ground. In some cultures this could be seen as a disrespectful gesture. Jen states in her story that describing a person’s appearance, personality or taste is something we would only include in Western cultures. As I quote Jen in her story: “before he describes any person, my father describes the power structure of his world as it was inscribed in its architecture (Jen, 2013). It may be more important to describe a person by their “power structure” because people in the “Eastern” culture recognize people by what they possess and what they have achieved. This is one of the ways on how to get respect in the
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