I’m a full blooded Chinese, and just like my parents, I was born and raised in the Philippines. This being, we’ve been detached from the traditional Chinese culture and have been used to some of the Filipino (and Western) customs. Nevertheless, our family, and particularly I took great pride of our ethnicity and have always been convinced that our race was the best there was. One of the biggest ethnocentric attitudes I had was that when people complimented me for my complexion, I felt really proud; I thought being “white” was the standard of beauty and people who were darker were plainly unfortunate. There were even some moments of my life where I considered not marrying Filipino men as to not “taint” the complexion of my bloodline. To my surprise, skin colour apparently plays a big role in health; and in terms of being prone to skin cancer, darker people are at the advantage.
Another thing that caused me to think ethnocentrically was because apart from the Filipinos I knew from the limited society I revolved in, I had stereotypical ideas about the rest of the Filipino people –the labels of being lazy, inferior, and lowly. Being in this age and society where multimedia access can give you information regarding just about everything, I was conditioned that I had the power to be familiar with everything, therefore I had the notion that the simplistic things I knew about Filipinos enabled me to truly understand the entirety of the Filipino culture.
I now realize that I’ve just been exposed to a very little fraction of the culture and its people’s fascinating nature – to say at the least, their exotic beauty and sophistication throughout generations. I’ve never known enough because I’ve always been in my comfort zone- my home, my school and my routine schedules, all this has deprived me from seeing the bigger picture. When I became aware of the world beyond me, I realized that the even the rich culture of the Philippines by itself can be very overwhelming, what more for all the other parts of the world. Now I just regret that I can only experience so much. If I could, I would marry myself into each and every culture, live in each era there will be even if it means to just to have a glimpse of the world’s rich diversity. I know now that one life time is not enough, and I certainly would not want to waste it by confining myself in my comfort zone. Indeed I want the world to be my oyster.
Another thing that caused me to think ethnocentrically was because apart from the Filipinos I knew from the limited society I revolved in, I had stereotypical ideas about the rest of the Filipino people –the labels of being lazy, inferior, and lowly. Being in this age and society where multimedia access can give you information regarding just about everything, I was conditioned that I had the power to be familiar with everything, therefore I had the notion that the simplistic things I knew about Filipinos enabled me to truly understand the entirety of the Filipino culture.
I now realize that I’ve just been exposed to a very little fraction of the culture and its people’s fascinating nature – to say at the least, their exotic beauty and sophistication throughout generations. I’ve never known enough because I’ve always been in my comfort zone- my home, my school and my routine schedules, all this has deprived me from seeing the bigger picture. When I became aware of the world beyond me, I realized that the even the rich culture of the Philippines by itself can be very overwhelming, what more for all the other parts of the world. Now I just regret that I can only experience so much. If I could, I would marry myself into each and every culture, live in each era there will be even if it means to just to have a glimpse of the world’s rich diversity. I know now that one life time is not enough, and I certainly would not want to waste it by confining myself in my comfort zone. Indeed I want the world to be my oyster.
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