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Identity: My Culture, Identity, And Cultural Identity

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My Cultural identity
The pendulum in a grandfather's clock speaks to me the most. It swings back and forth between two sides, never truly belong in neither. Growing up, this is what I have always felt, whether it was my ethnicity, cultural identity, or my social identity encompassing my ideology and political opinions. It was a challenge, to say the least. My two drastically different worldviews were in constant conflict. Today, as an adult, I have come to the realisation that there was no need to limit myself within a label. I have the choice to be who I am, not whom I should be.

To me, cultural identity is a person’s sense of belonging to a group due to a shared similar set of beliefs, customs, values, tradition and views, opinion on certain topics. As I …show more content…

I’ve just accepted whatever I get and have learned to be grateful for it. My mom recalled that a plastic hair band and a clip would entertain me for hours.

However, there were times where I threw tantrums at my mother for refusing to get me a certain toy in which I would meet with a belt to the bottom or a slap in the face. These forms of punishments were widely accepted and encouraged at the time, both in households and schools.

Religion was not a major part of my family, though my mother is a Buddhist and also extremely superstitious. This can even be seen in my Chinese name. The name “鑫” (Xin), a symbol composed of 3 characters for gold “金” was chosen after a fortune teller told her that I lack the “metal elements”. Whatever that meant.

Perhaps it was my mother’s influence that I developed a rather open-minded attitude towards all superstitions. I had spent an unreasonable amount of effort to walk around ladders, avoiding black cats and tiptoeing around any mirrors present in the room. Some of these still remain with me today, though it had since become more of a habit like for example saying “Bless you” after someone

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