MY EXPERIENCE WITH IDENTITIES AND CULTURES 1

EDUC 251 Week 1 Reflection Paper: My Experience with Identities and Cultures

Jordan Lee

University of Washington

EDUC 251: Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity

Professor Jondou Chen

October 4, 2023
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I was born in America and my parents both immigrated to the United States in their

teenage years. Wanting me to grow up easily accustomed to the American standards, they often

gave me independence growing up—I wasn’t ever “forced” to participate in any of the Chinese

or Tawainese cultural activities that they did. In fact, I was more often kept away from church

and celebration; I never even learned my parents’ native tongue, even though their English was

far worse than their Taiwanese. Unsurprisingly, the cultural, linguistic, and generational gap

between my parents and I created a rift in our relationship. At some point, we barely even talked.

But I imagine that it was these circumstances in which I developed an essential facet to my

character—my ability to perceive.

When I was in middle school, with no real sense of cultural identity, I would spend hours

in the Mukilteo public library just reading everything and anything. From dystopian fiction to

Japanese manga—books taught me how to see stories with a diverse perspective. And whenever

I needed a recommendation, I would ask a new stranger the same question:

“What’s your favorite book?”

It was always so fun, reading their choices and guessing their personality. Because every

time, their tastes in books—what they found meaningful, compelling, and interesting in a

story—reflected something unique of their character. The books themselves, too, from authors all

over the planet, gave a voice to the most fascinating and telling of narratives, a lens into worlds

that I could barely begin to comprehend. These efforts gave me momentum to spend all my

efforts not trying to connect with my parents even in the smallest ways, from self-studying

conversational Taiwanese to doing housework alongside them, but to embrace other cultures,

other
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It’s this sharp perception of other perspectives, and subsequent curiosity in different

cultures, that fuels my drive to advance racial equity in my community. Because the disconnect I

felt with my parents stems from larger, inherent disparities between cultures and races, especially

between the majority and those marginalized. Even if my parents and I are intrinsically separated

by our differences, we were still able to form unbreakable bonds; it became my luminous dream

to create a platform to form those bonds across all cultures, all races.

I wish to preserve representation; to promote utmost unity.

Having made that effort to listen to other people’s stories about culture and their

perspectives with their identity, I feel much more whole — I love seeking out a new perspective

every single day and learning about cultures other than mine. I have always taken it for granted,

but I realize now that even my closest friend group — the friend group that has been with me

since elementary school — are culturally diverse themselves. I find that it is often not the

cultural differences that I find intriguing, but rather the differences in perspectives — and that is

often associated with culture, but also with other experiences that make a person unique.

For those reasons, I find the work that the National SEED project aims to accomplish

admirable. The “debilitating schooling in matters of gender, race, culture, manners, money,

power, and belonging” that they mention is what is preventative of differing perspectives in

schools — and the key idea of teachers reliving their school days to understand diversity in the

modern day is a step towards empathy that I respect (McIntosh & Style, 1997). And, like

emphasized in Brown’s Embracing Vulnerability, having the empathy to truly understand

another’s perspective and culture, requires a certain degree of vulnerability — I was not able to

truly appreciate the diversity of my friend group until I was able to first appreciate my own

identity, even if it was disconnected from my parents’ (Brown, 2013). And I very much relate
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and respect Clint Smith’s talk, The Danger of Silence — I found my own voice sacrificed every

day in my own household, not speaking the same language as my parents, and it was not until I

realized that I was ignoring my own silence that I forced myself to step outside my bubble and

try to converse with my parents (Smith, 2014)/ But, I believe it the best decision I have made —

I believe it important that people to aim not for silence, but to share their own story — to make

their perspective known, and to learn from other’s perspectives. Through that way, I believe the

world will become a more whole place.

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References

Chew-Bose, D. (2014). How I learned to stop erasing myself. Buzzfeed.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/durgachewbose/finding-myself-in-the-first-person

Style, E.J. (1996). Curriculum as window and mirror. Social Science Record, 33(2), 35-42.

https://www.nationalseedproject.org/images/documents/Curriculum_As_Window_and_M

irror.pdf

Wiley, K. (2010). Unity.

https://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/kehinde-wiley-legends-unity//