Essay about Personal Narrative: Being Asian American

I was late for school, and my father had to walk me in to class so that my teacher would know the reason for my tardiness. My dad opened the door to my classroom, and there was a hush of silence. Everyone's eyes were fixed on my father and me. He told the teacher why I was late, gave me a kiss goodbye and left for work. As I sat down at my seat, all of my so-called friends called me names and teased me. The students teased me not because I was late, but because my father was black. They were too young to understand. All of this time, they thought that I was white, because I had fare skin like them, therefore I had to be white. Growing up having a white mother and a black father was tough. To

In his 1971 paper “Personal Identity”, Derek Parfit posits that it is possible and indeed desirable to free important questions from presuppositions about personal identity without losing all that matters. In working out how to do so, Parfit comes to the conclusion that “the question about identity has no importance” (Parfit, 1971, p. 4.2:3). In this essay, I will attempt to show that Parfit’s thesis is a valid one, with positive implications for human behaviour. The first section of the essay will examine the thesis in further detail and the second will assess how Parfit’s claims fare in the face of criticism.

What is personal identity? This question has been asked and debated by philosophers for centuries. The problem of personal identity is determining what conditions and qualities are necessary and sufficient for a person to exist as the same being at one time as another. Some think personal identity is physical, taking a materialistic perspective believing that bodily continuity or physicality is what makes a person a person with the view that even mental things are caused by some kind of physical occurrence. Others take a more idealist approach with the belief that mental continuity is the sole factor in establishing personal identity holding that physical things are just reflections of the mind.

In this paper, I will argue that the Memory Theory of Personal Identity is the closest to the truth. I will do so by showing that the opposing theories – Body and Soul Theories – have evident flaws and that the

The air would always be humid and stuffy while riding the bus to school, and the slightest bump in the road would result in tossing up the kids like salad. The backseat would provide carriage for all the popular and tough kids shouting out at pedestrians on the street or flipping off a middle finger to the bus driver that would shout for them to calm down. I despised those kids in the back. They were the same people that made my life a living hell, while growing up and attending an American school.

Asian Americans are a diverse group of people who are among the fastest growing minority groups in the United States. Despite their minority status, they often surpass Whites in America and do so while holding on to their cultural values regarding family, education, and success.

Sitting in a circle, most of those who were staring at me also looked like me – black hair, squinted eyes, and yellow skin. Not twenty minutes ago, I paced around the heart of a predominantly white college campus. Now, I was introducing myself to the members of Asian Students United (ASU). While I was never a part of ASU, I asked one of the organization’s executive board (eboard) members – Tien, who happened to a Facebook friend – if I could attend a couple of their meetings to conduct research on Asian American identity. He delightfully agreed. After all, from an outsider perspective, I would fit right in. At these meetings, I participated in many of their activities, which included making a quilt and participating in discussions. Yet, I was always observant and somewhat detached because this was all new to me, making me an observer-participant. This allowed me to observe a range of details; however, because I was so new, such details may have been unimportant to those whom I studied. On the other hand, my Vietnamese church was all too familiar. As a full participant in the church and a former participant in Youth for Christ (YFC), I was pressed to critically observe and dissect these interactions. While I still asked the group leader for a chance to observe YFC meetings, data from this second site may be more biased toward the way I have known people in this institution from prior years. As a tradeoff, though, being a participant-observer may have allowed me to note more

Asian-American students are often assumed to be the ones who finish on top academically. Due to the amount of high-ranking Asian-American students in schools throughout the United States, a cliché stereotype has been developed claiming all Asian students are “whiz kids.” The culture which Asian individuals practice differs by region however, majority of Asian individuals celebrate a different culture than mainstream Americans. I interviewed Susan, an Asian-American female who was born to an Asian mother, and an American father.

Identity is officially defined as the condition of being oneself or itself, and not another. A person’s identity can be shaped by many factors, like family and culture. The graphic novel American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang is a book that really focuses on identity and who someone actually is. In American Born Chinese, all the characters struggle with their identity and accepting that they are unique and different because other people judge them for being who they are.

The pain and the suffering, the oppression, and the exclusion all describe the history of Asia America. When they arrived to the United States, they become labeled as Asians. These Asians come from Japan, China, Korea, Laos, Thailand, and many other diverse countries in the Eastern hemisphere. These people wanted to escape from their impoverished lives as the West continued to infiltrate their motherland. They saw America as the promise land filled with opportunity to succeed in life. Yet due to the discrimination placed from society and continual unfair

I am Japanese and I know that growing up Asian in America could be difficult for some people to do. Many people are still prejudiced towards Asians. I wish that we Asians can have a better life.

Do you have an identity? Do you understand your culture? Are you going against your culture by being yourself? Being raised by an extremely hopeful mother who wishes to live vicariously through her daughter’s success, we find Jing-Mei struggling to understand her cultural identity. But, what exactly is cultural identity?

Personal identity is a concept within philosophy that has persisted throughout its history. In the eighteenth century this problem came to a head. David Hume dedicated a portion of his philosophy in the attempts to finally put what he saw as a fallacious claim concerning the soul to rest. In the skeptical wake of Hume, German idealist, beginning with Immanuel Kant, were left with a variety of epistemic and metaphysical problems, the least of which was personal identity.

There are various kinds of identity (individualized or shared) that people are expected to possess. (Hollinger, 2004) namely; personal identity which is known as a

Hey if I have a chance to see you again, I'd say I forgive you for bullying