Culture

Culture is an essential feature within all mankind. Culture has its predictable form and content, which shapes an individual’s behavior and consciousness within a human society from generation to generation. All human entities have experience culture in one way or the other with different expectation. Culture plays a big role in our daily life. Culture is the way we dress, the way we act, the way we treat others, the way we express our feeling, and our instinct of knowing what is right and wrong. Many people in United States had experienced the cultural diversity due to a large population of foreign immigrants from around the world. As many cultural approaching together, sometime the divergence in cultures are too great to combine to form one; difference in belief system and insufficient knowledge to adapt to a new culture causes estrangement among the individual from family and society.

Each culture possesses its unique identities; therefore, none of the two cultures are identical. Everyone must cultivate in at least one or more cultures. I was born in a country called Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, located in Southeast Asia, bordered by Thailand, China, and India. The fact that I was born in Myanmar, I am accustomed to Burmese culture learned from my parents. Simultaneously, I am very comfortable with the American culture since I grew up here, moreover, lived here more than half of my life. I adopted the new American culture while I attended schools and socialized with friends and classmates. Burmese culture is very age-oriented. Respect and manner are the most significant fundamental in Burmese culture. It’s the first and foremost element elderly look in the young ones. The young ones are obligated to give full respect to the elders; never argue or disagree with the elders in any situation, even if they are wrong, you must keep everything to yourself. In contrast, schools had encouraged me to convey my feeling, stand up for what I believe, be creative and outspoken. I was caught in the middle of the very complex worlds. I was struggling to fit in at school and home, numerous amounts of times I was baffled in two cultures and secluded myself from the society.

As times went by, I was able to manage to inhabit in the two different worlds of school and home by changing my focus. As Richard Rodriguez mentioned in “The Achievement of Desire,” he became more and more tactful and careful to separate the two very different worlds of his day, which he was referring to being the scholarship boy at school and fitting in with the family lifestyle. (563). Richard Rodriguez committed to books to isolate himself, where as, I dedicated my after school hours spending times with my friends. In fact, I was happier at school than I was at home. At school, I am more at eased and relaxed because I got to do many activities that I enjoyed, such as drawings and played sports. My parents don’t allow me to do any activities other than studying. In addition to that, they were never satisfied with what I accomplished at school because I was not an honor student. As I spent