The Search for My Heritage Essay

All my life people have always questioned my ethnicity. My mom says it makes me mysterious and intriguing. She says, "You look like you could be born in any part of the world". Any time I 'm in a crowd the question always comes up, "what 's your ethnicity?", "are you mixed with anything?”. I look at them and smile thinking in my head of course you just asked that. I give a big sigh and say "I 'm white and Pakistani". Some look at me with great confusion and ask, "What is that?" I hit them with a huge eye roll and I have to explain where Pakistan is located in Asia. I really think some people did not take World Geography because they 're still so lost. They usually just blurt with "oh, so you 're middle eastern?" It boggles my mind that

The word family has changed so much in the past century. A family back in the 1950’s was probably considered a husband, wife, and one or more children. Times have changed and families have become much different. The Interpersonal Communication: Relating to Others book defines family as a, “Unit made up of any number of persons who live in relationship with one another over time in a common living space who are usually, but not always, united by marriage and kinship” (Beebe, Beebe & Redmond, 243). Families can be broken up into five different types. The first is the traditional family, which includes a mother, father, and their biological children. Next, is the blended family which includes

This poem is titled “Heritage” and is by Countee Cullen (for Harold Jackman). The social issue that motivated Cullen to write Heritage is the oppression that blacks faced and their eagerness to go back to the place that their ancestors were taken from. In the poem Cullen reflects the urge to reclaim the African arts, during this time, the Harlem Renaissance, blacks called this movement negritude. Cullen depicts the negro speaking on the view of Africa, by the all negroes. In the poem, Cullen uses auditory imagery, organic imagery, and visual imagery.

As a young child, I lived life colorblind, unable to grasp the concept of race or skin color. Growing up in Florida as the only Asian in my elementary school and never being bullied for being different, I assumed everyone was white, including me. But then came that earth-shattering epiphany: I realized I wasn’t white. I started to notice that not every supermarket sold Pocky or bubble tea and that it’s not common to get money in shiny, red envelopes on New Year’s. I realized that not everyone knew how to use chopsticks, that not everyone ate rice with every meal, and that when some people spoke slowly to me, it’s not because they were trying to articulate, but because they thought I didn’t understand English.

One tradition I have is, on Christmas morning I wake up and drink hot chocolate and watch a Christmas movie to wait for everybody to wake up. Another tradition is while opening gifts we play loud Christmas music and eat cookies, and, my sister I play our 3DS and wait for people to come over. On Christmas weekend I usually leave to go to my grandparent’s house until Christmas morning, and that got me wondering, I wonder what my other grandma would say if I got a BB gun for a present.

Our individualized culture and history depends on us to better understand where we come from. It is necessary for each generation to preserve and continue our customs and beliefs.

There have been countless influential people in my life that I’ve come across. One who was a meticulous inspiration continues to be my grandfather. My grandmother had remarried to the one I call “grandpa” when I was at the age of five, and they both took to each other’s grandchildren as their own. With my mother and me only living a mile down the road from their farmhouse out in the country, I’d spent heaps amount of time there as a child. Indeed, I had been without a father but my grandfather stepped up to the plate and had taken me under his wing and willingly played the personification of a father figure.

Being a racial minority, I am constantly faced with adversity simply due to my heritage. Specially during my school’s annual Latin Americ Festival, I was ridiculed for not being “latino enough” because of my light complexion. I faced this ostbalce through a form of peaceful protest: art. To combat the culturally ignorant, I organized many acts to perform at the Latin American Festival. From comedic skits, to singers and dancers, to poetry readings, I silenced the racial slurs said about to and denounced the stigmas that were held to my heritage.

In Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," the message about the preservation of heritage, specifically African-American heritage, is very clear. It is obvious that Walker believes that a person's heritage should be a living, dynamic part of the culture from which it arose and not a frozen timepiece only to be observed from a distance. There are two main approaches to heritage preservation depicted by the characters in this story. The narrator, a middle-aged African-American woman, and her youngest daughter Maggie, are in agreement with Walker. To them, their family heritage is everything around them that is involved in their everyday lives and everything that was involved in the lives of their ancestors. To

Sir Frances Bacon said, “If a man be gracious to strangers, it shows that he is a citizen of the world, and his heart is no island cut off from other islands, but a continent that joins them,” (Jenkins, 1994). This quote represents all the core values that I cherish and to which I adhere. Personal culture doesn’t have to be linked to a certain country of origin or a specific ethnicity; it can be as simple as a person’s core values. The Southern way of life is a culture all in itself.

Culture is a pattern of behavior and values shared by an ethnic group. Cultural heritage is a set of traditions within the culture that is hand down from the older generation to the younger generation within the family. These traditions influence the family’s decisions in relation to their diet, education, daily living activities, religious beliefs and practices and also health and illness beliefs. In this paper, the author will focus on the usefulness of applying a heritage assessment in evaluating the needs of a person as a whole. Three different cultures including authors will be discussed about the health maintenance, health promotion, and health restoration. The author will also evaluate health traditions which

My first day at the Haitian Youth and Community Center of Florida (HYCCF), have most of the kids surround me from ages 3 to 4. The children stared eagerly as they challenged the fact that I looked very different from them, one little girl stated, “You’re white and I am black, see.” Her comment and ability to observe that there was indeed a difference, shocked me. According to Keller, Ford, and Meacham, “studies of person perception in children have shown that before children are 7 years old, they very often use physical appearance in describing others” (1978). The young girl was obviously going through the process of social comparison, however rather than comparing my abilities to hers as Myers and Twenge would say (2013); the young girl was socially comparing herself to me in a more physical sense, such as, skin color, different texture of hair, and other physical features. The young girl displayed thorough concept of self-knowledge. As Lewis would say, “There is one thing, and only one in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation” (1952). For example, he was elaborating on the concept

Due to my passion for travel and my ancestry I’ve based my Research Project around this topic. The project will focus particularly on furthering my knowledge on my ancestry; significant countries in relation to my family, and how to plan a holiday. This topic is momentous to me as I’ll be accessing new information, enhancing my knowledge on the culture and understanding the lifestyle my grandparent’s endured. Which by travelling and meeting new people will hopefully gain me a deeper appreciation of life by viewing what other cultures live like and tie in my ancestry and the new culture together. On this trip I’ll be visiting Germany, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia. These countries are relevant to my ancestry by locating sources which depicted my family up to my great, great; great grandparents lived in these countries. The cities/villages which will be a primary location for this trip is Mitrovica (Croatia), Novi Sad (Serbia), Budapest (Hungary) and in Germany Berlin. To travel to and from countries I’ll be using a hire car and air travelling.

I would like to consider my cultural heritage as diverse, but this is far from reality. Over the years as I matured through my teenage years, I was exposed to different cultures by life experiences and travel. I struggled to create both a personal and cultural identity while trying to adjust to my sight loss and with the support of my family I traveled overseas to experience other cultures for the first time. My family opened up their home to a foreign exchange program in turn allowing me the opportunity to travel over to Europe at the age of 16 years old. This opportunity started the slow progression of experiences that would open my mind to others who are unlike myself, especially traveling to a strange place and feeling different in

I’ve always been, for lack of a better word, different. With my caramel colored skin being lighter than the darker tones of my mother, father and brother, I swore I was adopted. The kids at school could never decide which box to put me in. “What are you mixed with?” or “Is that a weave?” they’d ask. They marveled at how I, a “light-skinned” girl with long hair, was just Black, and it only confused them more that most of my friends were white.