Cultural Psychology

 This last post is going to be about an experience form 2017 as I was recently looking at photos from my trip to China. One of my funny cultural experiences was when my whole family went back to china. For the residents there was a total cultural shock as the places that we visited often did not have tourists. One of the funny moments was we were at a tea house and there were many fascinated old men trying to get to my sisters because they were white. However they also very much so pushed through them to get to the sister with red hair and was stroking her hair and pulling it as it was curly and consistently shaking their heads because they had never seen a red head. I think this also goes well with communication because even though we did not speak any Mandarin we still had a small idea of what he was saying due to social cues like shaking their heads and pulling on my sisters hair. Well I hope that story leaves you well. 

It is no shocker that “students of Asian background speak up less in class” as I often find us taking things in, personally lots of my friends who are Asian often have very good debates on topics after we have heard everyone else’s opinions. I find myself often sitting in the back of the classroom also to take everything in, like the behaviour of people. I also found it interesting to hear that Asian Americans perform poorly on tests when they are talking as when I’m writing a quiz I need it to be absolutely silent or even writing a paper as I find it makes me lose my train of thought. In relation to this, I find it very difficult to listen to different conversations or many people talking to me at once. I also find myself often eavesdropping and listening to conversations to get a scene of people and to hear all their opinions before voicing my opinion.  

Cultural values and practices have positive as well as negative impacts, personally one of the things is the stigma that occurs around education. In the education system, education is extremely important in Asia and highly prioritized whereas in Canada the education system is not as important and is not prioritized. There is a stigma that children are very good at math and are very smart, as well as put in long hours and are very focused on education. From this stigma, I have a learning disability and have faced challenges due to the stigma around Asian kids being extremely smart. At some points, I felt overlooked because of the stereotype that Asian children face day to day in relation to education. I also would say another thing that is overlooked is weight gain, as often those of Asian descent are seen to be skinny, even though bulimia is not really seen in Asia, due to Asian people being skinny there is also a stereotype that all Asians are skinny and don’t have any fat. This has a...

The aspects of my family’s past history does have an impact on shaping my thoughts and feelings. Due to the timing of me going into an orphanage, my family’s history is unknown, and this can be overwhelming at times not knowing because going to doctors appointments or when people ask, sometimes I feel ashamed of not knowing the answers. At a young age “moving to a new culture involves psychological adjustment,” looking back to my adoption I can remember hearing stories for example, when I came to Canada I was petrified of men as they were not seen inside of orphanages. I would also say that I also had an adjustment period after immigrating to Canada as things like pizza and pastas were not part of my food pallet and communicating in English was originally a challenge. My older siblings would tell stories of me biting them and hitting them when I didn’t get something I wanted, they would get frustrated as well because when they would tell me something I never had any idea what they were...