Category: Cultural Values

My Cross-Cultural Experiences

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Neema Ejercito (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

 

My first cross-cultural experience was when my family and I moved to Hong Kong from the Philippines when I was in Grade 7. I remember looking across the school playground during recess with a new Malaysian-Danish friend (who became one of my best friends) and finding it amazing that, in my classroom alone, so many different cultures were represented. My best friend alone represented at least three, with Hong Kong culture being one of them, since she lived there for a couple of years already.

 

I remember feeling overwhelmed with the opportunities that our move opened. For example, instead of choosing among the top three universities in the Philippines to go to after high school, I could now choose among the universities in the U.S.! That’s where my international school was prepping students to apply. I was not only overwhelmed with the differences in cultures geographically: the popular culture that I had only read about in Sweet Dreams or Sweet Valley High became my reality.

 

In my experience growing up in the Philippines, one was popular because they were smart, sporty or active in a student council. Wanting so much to be popular in my new environment, I actually studied how the cool kids wore their hair, talked and spent their weekends, and the list went on and on. There was too much to keep in mind, but I kept trying.

 

Fast-forward to my next cross-cultural experience in Japan, when I won an exchange program scholarship to study there for a year during my last year in university in the Philippines. I had found the exchange program at the student affairs office of the university. I had come home after high school graduation in Hong Kong feeling the itch to travel again.

 

After receiving the scholarship, I was again excited by the thought of living in a different country and learning about different cultures, but also being immersed in a more homogenous culture than Hong Kong. In high school I learned Mandarin and Spanish, but in Japan I focused on Japanese. I was initially going to study sociology there, in connection with my university major, social sciences. After a week of classes, however, I felt that I would maximize my immersion into Japanese culture by focusing on the language. When I took the language aptitude test so that the school would know which class level to place me, I found that, because of my Mandarin background, I could understand the meanings of Japanese kanji. Building on my language background, I felt I could use my language skills in Mandarin to give myself a leg up on my beginner Japanese. As a result, I was actually placed in the intermediate class.

 

Although I was doing well academically, my socio-cultural experience suffered. Having experienced a popularity failure in high school, I embarked on being popular in my new cross-cultural experience. By the time the year was over and it was time for me to go home, I had hurt a lot of people, including myself. It took years of accepting that the one year in Japan wasn’t my lifelong reality, and that I had to move on. I found many years later, when I watched Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach, that my Japan experience was acutely similar to his character’s Thailand experience.

 

I have since lived in San Francisco and traveled to so many other countries aside from the ones I previously mentioned. Some of the more unusual places I’ve been to are Iceland and Machu Picchu. In the year before the pandemic hit, I actually traveled to four different countries: France, the U.S., Japan, and the UAE.

 

When my family and I moved to Vancouver in April last year, I felt very confident about my openness to another cross-cultural experience. I was mistaken. Let me try to explain it by what people have told me about their experiences with the weather. I thought that my new friends who had recently moved from Calgary and from Korea didn’t have to adjust to the cold like me. But they both described different ways of feeling the cold weather from where they came from. Cold weather wasn’t the same for everyone across the board. Similarly, my cross-cultural experiences weren’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all adjustment, especially since my move here now involves me as a mother and wife. This is so different from when I was a teen or a single adult.

 

I also took for granted that speaking English well meant that I wouldn’t really need such a big cross-cultural adjustment here. I am still making sense of my adjustment, and oftentimes it gets complicated with the pandemic, the weather and, basically, life as I know it. There have been days I find myself hating this muddled period that doesn’t move according to my preferred timeline. But perhaps this seeming lack of clarity is what I’ve got to accept so that I can keep moving forward.

 

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Neema Ejercito is a professional writer, director and creative writing mentor. Her 3D edutainment series for beginning readers, AlphaBesties, is showing in YouTube Japan and Prairie Kids. When she’s not writing or mentoring, she manages her household with her very supportive husband and three children.

The Disappearance of Rituals

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Raghavi (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

 

Growing up in a Hindu family, there were a lot of rituals. It was part and parcel of our religion and culture, and was embedded in our day to day life. They covered birth to death and everything in between. Most of them had been passed down for generations. There were also some more recent additions, like squishing limes under the tires of a new car before driving it for the first time, for good luck — I always wonder how that particular one came about. As a child I observed my parents as they carried these rituals out, making us participate along with them, and I put it down to one more thing they made us do. My younger, impatient self was not very interested in these things, favouring my western books and TV. We rarely discussed the meaning and significance behind them; I am not sure how much my parents knew or even understood themselves. Now, as an adult, I am no longer dismissive of these practices, and I am interested in learning and understanding more. It intrigues me how these rituals — not just the ones belonging to my culture, but rituals from all over the world — came into being and managed to survive the passage of time. 

 

When my father died unexpectedly, we had a traditional funeral for him. At that time, overcome by grief, I just wanted to grieve in private and not have to go through the very public process that is a Hindu funeral. Some of the rituals that involved my newly widowed mother were cruel, and watching grown men argue over my father’s dead body about the order in which certain rites were to be performed filled me with unspeakable anger. But looking back now, the many other rituals helped me achieve a sense of closure. Death, especially when it is sudden, is hard to grasp. With those rituals, we marked the end of his life and the passing of his soul, and moved a step further in our grieving process. 

 

Now having moved from the East to the West, I am far away from the culture I grew up in, and with the distance it is easy to forget the rituals of my childhood. It is not easy to carry out these rituals alone, without your elders to guide you. Some of them feel pointless in the absence of family and friends. However, while I have lost touch with some rituals, I have also gained some new ones. I have adopted rituals like putting up a tree and decorating the house with lights every year for Christmas. These help me celebrate the gloomy winter months, and embrace and settle into my home here. 

 

Rituals mark moments in our lives, both big and small. They are an opportunity to slow down and reflect. A way to say thank you, like our harvest festival growing up, and Thanksgiving here. A time to celebrate family and friends, like Diwali and Christmas.  As our lives become increasingly fast-paced, we have less time for our rituals. Some rituals are better off being forgotten; we can leave the not-so-nice ones and carry forward the better ones. 

 

Rituals are not just associated with religions and cultures. They can also be the things we do for ourselves. A warm bath at the end of a hard week of work. The tea I make myself every morning that is pure comfort in a mug. Journaling. It is so easy to forget them as we hurtle through life, trying to juggle everything on our to-do lists, but we must make sure to make time for these rituals. These are the most important ones, the ones that we must make time for in order to cherish ourselves, to celebrate ourselves, to recharge ourselves in order to keep going and to find the best version of ourselves.

 

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Leave your thoughts for Raghavi in the comments below — better yet, start up a dialogue with the Low Entropy community in person at a Conscious Connections meeting or online at our community site. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube to stay up-to-date with Low Entropy news!

Cultural Thing

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Olivia Callari (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

 

Does anyone truly know the meaning of culture? Surely, when asked about our own, the idea feels as familiar as the back of one’s hand. Culture surrounds us, it is us and it becomes us.

 

When culture is rooted within us, regardless of how we came to be immersed in it, it is appreciated and held with a high level of pride. With this pride can come infinite possibilities, both good and bad. A deep love for one’s culture and being connected through it can revive those who feel lost and disillusioned. It can mend the broken and help them carry on for years and years. But it can also be like asking a patriotic person what they think about their country. Their response might be “I love my country,“ but when questioned about the controversial issues about it, their response would simply remain that they love their country. 

 

Is it common for us to love our cultures without recognizing and holding them accountable for their negative aspects? This was a question I had lingering in my mind for years and years while growing up in a rather traditional Italian culture. I have so much love and pride for my community and my roots, but there were many things that made me itch my head and wonder how they could be played off as part of the culture and tradition.

 

The main thing I wondered about the most was the excusing of hurtful behaviour amongst members of my family. Time and time again I witnessed many fights and many hurtful things being said, as well as some physicality every once in a while. While re-reading this, I heard the little voice in my head say, “Yeah, but that’s how Italians are.”

 

As I began my path to healing, once and for all, it was time to face the parts of me and traumas that I had neglected because I was conditioned to believe the behaviours that caused them were just a “cultural thing.” It was so embedded in me to attribute those behaviours to my culture that I had, in fact, developed a resentment towards it. I wasn’t able to separate my relatives’ individual actions from my culture.

 

With the need to separate from the people who made me feel unsafe, sad and afraid around them came great backlash. I was made to seem unfit to ever be a proper “Italian woman.” I was seen as weak because I chose to appreciate my culture in my own way after healing. 

 

The only regret I had was not knowing sooner that I could be happy in my culture by allowing myself to interpret it my own way. By detaching myself from a cycle of excusing my emotions in the name of culture, I found myself appreciating it even more.

 

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Olivia is a film and television certificate student at NYU Tisch and a recent graduate from Dawson College in cinema and communications. Having grown up in Montreal, Quebec, Olivia has surrounded herself with different cultures and means of creative expression, with hopes to one day incorporate it into her film and television work. Through writing and other forms of artistic expression, Olivia has a natural desire to help others overcome their inhibitions and reach their fullest potential.

New Again: Overcoming Culture Shock

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Grace Cheng (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

 

Coming to a new country is daunting and overwhelming. It is normal to experience culture shock, because suddenly you are confronted with a different culture, language, customs, gestures, signs and symbols. People who are not afraid of change have an easier time adjusting to it.

 

In the beginning, it may be difficult for newcomers who must establish new support systems. How long culture shock lasts depends on how well the person can adjust to the new country.

 

Having immigrated to Canada, I had to adjust to paying sales taxes and tips, as neither were required in Hong Kong. My biggest cultural adjustment at school was learning to speak up, because it counted for participation marks. In my hometown, students were not encouraged to speak as often, and there was more deference to authority. In Canada, I was expected to speak up and contribute a lot. My teachers told me they hoped to hear me speak more frequently in class. This was challenging for me since I was an introvert, in addition to being raised with that aspect of Chinese culture.

 

Initially, I was also unaccustomed to small talk, since it was not common for people to converse with strangers on the streets of Hong Kong. I learned that because small-talk topics were light and uncontroversial, they provided a safe environment for people to assess your comfort level and find common ground for conversations.

 

Tips to overcome culture shock:

 

  1. Remember that culture shock is normal

 

Keep in mind that most newcomers and immigrants will experience culture shock. As soon as you get over your culture shock, you will be able to look back with fond memories of your new culture and country. You will be glad that you can live in a different country and experience a different custom and culture.

 

  1. Be open-minded

 

Embracing new experiences is one of the most effective ways to overcome culture shock. By learning and respecting a new culture, you will grow and appreciate new perspectives on life. If you converse with people from different cultures and backgrounds, you will broaden your horizons. Consider attending parties and events, eating food from other cultures, making new friends and inviting friends to your home.

 

  1. Learn the language

 

When you learn the local language and understand what the locals are saying, you will experience less culture shocks.  Your efforts in speaking the local language will make your life easier and will make the locals appreciate your efforts.

 

  1. Learn how the locals live 

 

You will be able to adjust to a new country and overcome culture shock more quickly if you familiarize yourself with local customs and behaviors.

 

  1. Expand your social circle

 

Make new friends from different cultures and backgrounds to broaden your social circle. Taking part in neighborhood activities, community events and meetup groups are good ways to meet new people.

 

  1. Explore the city

 

See what your new city has to offer. Take public transportation to visit different places every day and act like a tourist. When you visit new places, bring your camera with you and take pictures. During this process, you might discover a faster route to take home from work, learn about a new relaxing spot or capture an interesting photo that can be shared with your family and friends.

 

  1. Find a new hobby

 

Consider finding a new hobby, such as hiking, walking in the park, visiting art galleries and museums, or taking recreational courses. When life becomes stressful and difficult, these activities will help you cope with culture shock and cheer you up.

 

Remember that culture shock is a normal reaction newcomers experience when arriving in a foreign country. It can serve as an opportunity for you to become more aware of your own culture, as well as the new culture that you have accepted.

 

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Grace has an accounting and finance background. She enjoys reading, writing, listening to music, watching movies and playing sports.

From Manila to Alberta

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Julia Magsombol (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

 

I was reading some news about immigration, and it stunned me how there are so many people from different countries wanting to live here in Alberta, Canada. Canada opened its doors to over 400,00 new permanent residents in 2021. I wonder why so many people wanted to live here. Did they have the same reason as my family? 

 

Almost eight years ago, my family and I packed our things and left the Philippines to move to Alberta. I was never part of the decision to move here. It was a huge decision that both my parents made for me and my siblings. 

 

My aunt sponsored my family. I never really cared about immigration applications, but I knew that it took many years and effort for us to validly live here. I tend to question my parents and even our fellow immigrants in choosing this path. Why this? 

 

When my family and I were starting out in Canada, it was a difficult time for all of us. My parents’ life completely changed in Alberta. They were both homesick, but for the sake of our future, they persevered and stayed here. They had the strength to stay in this strange country for us, their kids. 

 

My life completely changed when I moved into our new home as well. I remember one incident that I will never forget. After two months in Canada, I started going to school. Everything was new to me, including the system, the people and the culture. I was like a lost kid who was trying to find her mom, but couldn’t. What was more annoying was that I couldn’t talk about this loneliness to my parents because we were all adjusting to this new place. 

 

At school, there were times when I would sit in front of the lockers or inside the washroom all by myself and stay there for a very long time just to kill time before classes started. I would get lost on my way home too, because I would take the wrong bus. I had no one to talk with about all those things, and I wish I did during those times. 

 

I believe that there are two types of loneliness: the kind that we choose, and the kind that we don’t.

 

During those times, it wasn’t my choice to be alone. I didn’t want to be alone, especially when I needed to talk to somebody.

 

But not long ago, I found friends. In all honesty, they were people I wouldn’t think I could be friends with, but I felt comfort and relief. That was enough, and I felt happy. 

 

When I moved to Alberta, I wanted to be someone else, someone better. As my friendships developed, I found myself changing in the most bizarre ways. They weren’t changes that I wanted to because of my own will; they were changes that I needed because of other people, and perhaps their acceptance. Those changes were not good. I felt far from not only my home or my family, but also from myself. 

 

As I spent more time with my friends, I changed the way I dressed and spoke. I changed my attitude and the things I liked. I spent less time with my family. 

 

My mother started to get frustrated with the new me and how I spent more time with other people. I felt guilty then, because I knew that she was also trying to adjust to everything, yet I was ignoring her. Still, I didn’t listen to her,  only to myself.  

 

My mother’s frustrations grew bigger, and we would fight constantly. I have always guessed that she never understood me and how I felt lonely all the time. I said words that I should not have in those fights, because I knew how hurtful they were to my mother. I hurt her a lot. 

 

One day, when I came home late in the winter, I found my mother crying in the living room. The lights were off, and it was very dark. I went to her and asked her what had happened. She wouldn’t say. 

 

I wondered if my dad was fired from his job, or my siblings were bullied at their school, or maybe she was frustrated because she couldn’t find a job. I couldn’t guess. 

 

Then my mother suddenly reached for me and hugged me. It had been a long time since she hugged me, and it felt odd how her hands were so rough. Her tears fell onto my face, and I wanted to pull away from her. But she hugged me so tightly that I couldn’t move. 

 

Still crying, my mother told me that her grandma had just died. She said that she couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t go home because we’d only been in Alberta for two months. It wouldn’t be ideal to go back to our home country and spend a lot more money when our new lives were still not settled. 

 

I wanted to cry in that moment, but I knew I had been so selfish. I only listened to myself and my feelings, but not my mother or the rest of my family. My feelings were valid, but I should have at least cared for my family too. I knew they felt lonely like me. 

 

I couldn’t do anything, but I reached for my mother and hugged her too. I felt some comfort, and maybe a hug was all we needed. 

 

From that winter onwards, everything indeed changed. I changed, and so did my perspective. My parents changed. My siblings changed. Our lives changed. But I know one thing: our relationship with each other never changed. Though we all felt somewhat estranged, we were still warm. 

 

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Julia Magsombol is currently a journalism student from Edmonton, Canada, who desires to bring hope to people through her writing. When not writing or reading, you can catch her sewing clothes, painting nature and drinking instant coffee.

The Colours of Rain

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Susan Turi (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

 

© 2022 Susan Turi

 

I am classified as a white person somewhere in a file and in someone’s mind. But to be honest, I don’t know what it is to be white beyond the biological colour of my skin. I have been told that I have a culture related to being white, which is of European ancestry. If I am left-leaning politically, I may think of my white culture as privileged, politically and economically entitled, and elitist. I may have white guilt. If I am politically right-leaning, I may have a favourable opinion of my white culture and feel superior and insulated, yet insecure in my white bubble. But then my inherited generational tastes, as well as access to social and news media, may suggest more subjective, varied labels on me related to whiteness, ranging from tastes in music — as in generally liking rock, classical or country music — to traits such as being a bad dancer and liking bland food. As there is a white culture, there is black culture, summed up in words such as economical marginalization, hip hop music, slavery and Black Lives Matter. But as I am white, my everyday experience is lived through my skin colour, and I can only try to step out of it from time to time to analyze my whiteness, and imagine what it’s like to belong to a different race. Labeling people according to their race is such a reflexive impulse in society that it is easy to never question the origins of this habit. I do it myself, and in writing this article, I had a hard time selecting the right words to use, as the issue of ethnicity and race is emotionally charged. But in order to put this analysis in context and diffuse the emotion, I needed to trace the history of race and its normalized reference points.

 

The meaning of the word “race” — which is the classification of a group of people and their customs based on physical traits like skin colour and hair texture — dates from the colonial period, according to Wikipedia:

 

The modern concept of race emerged as a product of the colonial enterprises of European powers from the 16th to 18th centuries which identified race in terms of skin colour and physical differences. This way of classification would have been confusing for people in the ancient world since they did not categorize each other in such a fashion.[46] In particular, the epistemological moment where the modern concept of race was invented and rationalized lies somewhere between 1730 and 1790.

 

If the designation of race is an inherited colonial concept based on physical traits, then associating a culture to it must serve to legitimize this artificial categorization, which is further explained by Wikipedia: 

 

Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society.[2] While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning.

 

But as I am neither an anthropologist nor a sociologist, all I have to go on to understand racial and cultural labels is my natural curiosity, and an admission of confusion about them.

 

The issue of race and race relations has been spoken and written about exhaustively throughout post-colonial times, and I am in no position to contribute any new sophisticated arguments to the discussion. But I continue to question labels like black and white and the need to assign cultures to them. As a white person, I am still clueless as to what it means to be white, let alone identify with the culture assigned to me, as I don’t define myself in such narrow terms. My tastes and beliefs are open to development, though I acknowledge my current preferences. I listen to all types of music except maybe country, I grew up eating homemade ethnic dishes, I attended an art and dance school, and my maternal grandfather was a French Mauritian from the island of Mauritius. But no one would ever know this unless I told them so. I am perhaps an exception to the cliche of white culture, but like everyone else, it is suggested that, because of my skin colour, I must follow a cultural stereotype and bear the burden of it. What if the term “white culture” — or any racial culture — as the social construct that it is, does not exist and is a catchphrase used for a hidden agenda?

 

When I was a child, I lived through the Soweto riots of 1976 in apartheid-era South Africa. I remember there was minimal media coverage at the time. It was only many years later,after leaving the country and its censorship, that I found out what it was all about — the identification of a language as a symbol of white oppression and a rebellion against it. Afrikaans was the official language of the white Afrikaner minority government of the racially divided country. A law was passed to make schools use Afrikaans in equal amounts as English in segregated black schools, which led to the Soweto township riots. But there exists a paradox in that Afrikaans was and is also the dominant language of the mixed-race descendants of Malaysian slaves and indigenous San and Hottentot tribes, known as the Cape Malays. To associate their language with white oppression, under which they were also living, was confusing to them. English was also an imposed colonial white language and infringed on indigenous languages, yet it rarely felt oppressive to the majority since English was the language of business and a gateway to the democratic world (which the fatigued yet pragmatic majority understood and accepted).

 

This is an example of how a component of a culture — a language — can be confused with race, leading to marginalization of groups, in this case the Cape Malays, who were seen at the time of the riots as white sympathizers. But South Africa was and continues today to be a culturally rich blend of languages, culinary imports and customs, despite its legacy of apartheid. The Afrikaans language itself is a potage of Dutch, Malaysian and local Bantu dialects, whether the white oppressors of the apartheid era acknowledged it or not. Traditional South African dishes like bobotie pie — a meat dish of Malaysian origin — has been enjoyed by all national ethnicities, which brings me back to the same question of whether a simplistic racial culture can exist if there is so much genetic and cultural diversity in modern societies?

 

A population and its culture, as a prism of many reflected colours and flavours, is just like light split into a spectrum by rain — far more complex than its appearance. People cannot be summed up in a crude, minimalist way and assigned a culture according to their skin colour. In addition, it can be easy to confuse racial struggles with class and sexual inequalities. Racial culture expands on the idea of an individual ethnicity with a symbolistic, invasive mindset. It is time to put racial labels like “white” and “black” and their “cultures” into their historical context where they belong, as they are reductionist, divisive and unhelpful in moving toward a more inclusive society. Even if society continues to habitually categorize its population according to shared customs, tastes and ethnicities for convenience’s sake (as I was compelled to do when writing this article, for lack of better words), racially labeling people limits social progress. Just as there was a sexual revolution, maybe there needs to equally be a racial revolution. We have no choice in the inherited colour of our skin or other physical traits, but we can choose to create stronger communities free from racial labels — communities enriched by their diversity and judged by their collective and individual deeds. To quote Sidney Potier, “I never had an occasion to question colour, therefore I only saw myself as what I was . . . a human being.” 

 

References: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soweto_uprising 

https://www.inspiringquotes.us/author/6037-sidney-poitier 

 

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Susan Turi is a writer, illustrator and painter living in Montreal, Canada with a degree in fine arts. She began her career as a production artist for design studios and ad agencies, before deciding to devote herself purely to self-expression through writing and painting. She is currently at Concordia University majoring in creative writing and English literature.