Prompt: Describe an experience of cultural difference, positive or negative, you have had or observed. What did you learn from it?
This is my start to this essay, and it is definitely not finished but I would love any feedback for it. Any advice or edits you can give me would be amazingly helpful. Feel free to tear it apart too, don't be scared. :)
If there is one thing that is universally true about human nature, it is this: we all want what we don't have. People who have curly hair want straight hair, people with blue eyes, want brown or green or hazel. It is not that people are greedy, it's that the exotic intrigues us, makes us desire what we can't possess. This phenomenon occurs not only in wishing for something different, but also in the admiration of something that one may consider ordinary. For example, who we are, where we grow up, how we speak.
The summer before sophomore year, I went on an exchange trip with 8 other students from Sonoma County to Japan. In Tokyo, there's not much of a difference in living, ignoring the food and language-it's a city life, just like San Francisco or New York with thousands of people of all different races, not just Japanese. The cities like Hiroshima and Kyoto are not so close to American culture but, seeing as they are very popular tourist destinations, they still attract a wide variety of peoples-Hiroshima being the place of the nuclear bombing, and Kyoto being known for it's spiritual destinations. Even in these cities, where people of different ethnicities are not exactly "the norm" but not sparse either, we began to notice strange things like the eager waves from people we've never seen before and the excitedly whispered conversations off to our right and left. It's not something that you really ever stop to think about, but looking back it occurs to me that that was something different. It's not everyday that somebody gets excited when you walk down the street; it's as if they thought we were famous.
The last stop on our trip was the sister city of Santa Rosa: Kagoshima. Our first few hours there were nothing different than where we had been before; then that night, my host family took me to a traditional summer festival and this is what I noticed: groups of teenagers and younger children would huddle together and stare at me as I walked past as if in awe and amazement. As their courage grew they would send scouters to approach me asking me for pictures with them and to talk to them in English and scampering excitedly back to their friends to show it off. It was the weirdest experience of my life. They treated me like I was some kind of rare bird that to catch on camera was a proud accomplishment. To them, we were amazing, new, unique. They found it so spectacular, the idea of being "white," in such a positive light. It felt as though sometimes there was a wish for that, to be Caucasian instead of Asian: the died blonde hair, the obsession with pictures and the language, the colored contacts. It's something that I've never seen at home, or at my school but it is something that is definitely there. That desire for difference is strong, but whether in a good way or bad, that is still yet to be decided.
This is my start to this essay, and it is definitely not finished but I would love any feedback for it. Any advice or edits you can give me would be amazingly helpful. Feel free to tear it apart too, don't be scared. :)
If there is one thing that is universally true about human nature, it is this: we all want what we don't have. People who have curly hair want straight hair, people with blue eyes, want brown or green or hazel. It is not that people are greedy, it's that the exotic intrigues us, makes us desire what we can't possess. This phenomenon occurs not only in wishing for something different, but also in the admiration of something that one may consider ordinary. For example, who we are, where we grow up, how we speak.
The summer before sophomore year, I went on an exchange trip with 8 other students from Sonoma County to Japan. In Tokyo, there's not much of a difference in living, ignoring the food and language-it's a city life, just like San Francisco or New York with thousands of people of all different races, not just Japanese. The cities like Hiroshima and Kyoto are not so close to American culture but, seeing as they are very popular tourist destinations, they still attract a wide variety of peoples-Hiroshima being the place of the nuclear bombing, and Kyoto being known for it's spiritual destinations. Even in these cities, where people of different ethnicities are not exactly "the norm" but not sparse either, we began to notice strange things like the eager waves from people we've never seen before and the excitedly whispered conversations off to our right and left. It's not something that you really ever stop to think about, but looking back it occurs to me that that was something different. It's not everyday that somebody gets excited when you walk down the street; it's as if they thought we were famous.
The last stop on our trip was the sister city of Santa Rosa: Kagoshima. Our first few hours there were nothing different than where we had been before; then that night, my host family took me to a traditional summer festival and this is what I noticed: groups of teenagers and younger children would huddle together and stare at me as I walked past as if in awe and amazement. As their courage grew they would send scouters to approach me asking me for pictures with them and to talk to them in English and scampering excitedly back to their friends to show it off. It was the weirdest experience of my life. They treated me like I was some kind of rare bird that to catch on camera was a proud accomplishment. To them, we were amazing, new, unique. They found it so spectacular, the idea of being "white," in such a positive light. It felt as though sometimes there was a wish for that, to be Caucasian instead of Asian: the died blonde hair, the obsession with pictures and the language, the colored contacts. It's something that I've never seen at home, or at my school but it is something that is definitely there. That desire for difference is strong, but whether in a good way or bad, that is still yet to be decided.
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