Cultural Chameleon :: Essays Papers

Cultural ChameleonFor me, being late to school meant chasing shoot tweak taxis at 715 am and hurriedly telling the driver, in broken Cantonese, to please hurry. A day of shopping meant searching the Hong Kong marketplace streets for a pair of shoes larger than a size 7 and bargaining for thirty minutes with the shopkeeper to bring the price down to fewer than ten dollars. Lunch with a friend was being the exclusively white girl in a small noodle set up tainted by the smell of the ducks and chickens hanging in the window, my voice drowned bug out by music blaring through Cantonese speakers. Sometime in the cardinal years I had lived in Hong Kong, between speaking a petite Cantonese and knowing the downtown streets comparable the back of my hand, I was promoted from my status as a typical American blonde to a true Hong Kong kid. When I moved away the summer after my sopho much year in high school, I was leaving central office and going somewhere entirely foreign. Texas.I wil l always remember the first day of familiar school. My mom dropped me off at the front of the school, as kids sped by us in their huge SUVs to viciously snag a lay space. Inside, I was met with a swarm of Abercrombie-clad blondes and brunettes in every hall and at every corner. My thoughts were drowned out by singing of the latest songs on the radio, gossip, and laughter. sightedness as these were people who spoke the same native language as me, who looked the same and sounded the same, you would think that I would finally feel at home and relieved. But I had never felt so foreign in my life.This American glossiness that my parents called their own, did not at all feel like something that was mine. I was confused by the fact that I felt more at home and at ease in a acculturation where I stuck out as blatantly different, than in one where I blended in completely. It was this challenge and these feelings that established me as what is commonly referred to as one of the worlds Th ird Culture Kids. In their keep so titled, David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken describe in concomitant the concept of what it means to grow up in a culture other than that of your own native culture, and the challenges and emotions that are often met.