Some of the friends I have made with completely different cultural backgrounds. Thanks to them, I have been exposed to Korean barbeque. However, none of my new cultural experiences have been as intense as those with my roommate.
Halloween shenanigans---We have all kinds of cultural traditions in common. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas...it is in other, more basic principles that we differ.
My roommate and one of my closest new friends is Kazak. Living with her as well as becoming close friends, I have witnessed and become involved in a series of conflicts and new challenges that at first, dumbfounded me. The Kazak culture stresses the importance of family so much that this concept is thoroughly embedded in its young. But no matter how many times my roommate reiterated this to me, I couldn’t really understand. There are some fundamental differences in our set of beliefs that cannot be resolved. I’ve learned to just accept these differences and move on.
The first time I attempted I struck the rock bottom of one of our differences occurred when I tried to help my roommate with a “boy problem”, listening to her lamenting her ending of some past relationship. She seemed so heartbroken, yet so resolute that the relationship must end. I inquired as to why she felt so strongly about the necessity of ending a relationship so dear to her, and she replied simply, “Well, I can’t disappoint my family.” It turns out that she must marry within her culture, a Kazak, and anytime she gets too close to a significant other in America, she ends the relationship in an attempt to spare both the inevitable pain of parting.
I feel now as though I shouldn’t have been surprised upon hearing this. Of course I had heard of arranged marriages and familiar obligations before. But in my American, individualistic, self-centered views, I immediately felt angry with her family, as though they enfringed upon her rights as a young woman to date or marry whomever she pleases. I naively came to the conclusion that she must eventually give up on her family in order to be happy. I was wrong.
My roommate explained to me that in her heart, family preceded anything else, friends, loves, accomplishment. She said that she could not ever find happiness knowing that she had disappointed her family, even if it meant giving up love.
As an American girl taught from birth the virtues of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, I cannot relate to this. For the first time, I had to accept the difference between us without trying to understand it. And now that I have accepted it, my sentiments have changed. There is something beautiful in achieving happiness by making your family happy.
This acceptance, all the while knowing I will never understand, has taught me the meaning of respecting differences. Reading Ramayana has enhanced this experience because it centers around a set of beliefs and virtues fundamentally different from my own.
At first I noticed a parallel between Swallow and my roommate in the emphasis on loyalty to family. Swallow dutifully respected her parent’s decision to sell her, and knew she could never return because, her parents, “…having taken the rice, would have no option but to hand her over” (1009). Yet further in the reading, I found a different kind of loyalty, that of a wife. Sita sees through all of Ravana’s trickery in her courageous rebuttals again and again.
“ ‘You speak of love, but it is not to love that you invite me but to debauch.’ “ (1045). Sita’s strength despite her husband’s absence exhibits the emphasis on wifely duty so valued in the middle eastern culture. However, my understanding of the Ramayana’s emphasis on loyalty muddied in the denouement, when Sita sees her parents after being reunited with Rama, and decides not to speak to them.
“After her experiences on Wu Shan and beyond, Swallow viewed her parents with fresh eyes. She had a revulsion of feeling. ‘I do not want to go in,’ she said” (1077).
During my first reading of this, I misinterpreted Sita’s revulsion as betrayal of her family. However, after reading it again, I came to a different conclusion. Sita was not truly born of this village family, she was born of divine descent, transcending the heavens and earth through meditation. She was put on earth for the sake of Rama, her husband, to whom she remained steadfast throughout incredible trials and challenges. Her loyalty is analogous to that of which the middle eastern culture values in its marriages, and to that of my roommate to her family. Thus, both cultures hold the family unit in much higher esteem than I, an American, have ever been exposed to. Again, I accept this difference and don’t try to understand it. I think it’s beautiful.
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