My cultural lineage
Wenqing Zhong
Professor King
English 1A
30 January 2015
My Cultural Lineage
As can be told from my face, I’m an Asian. To be more specific, I’m a Chinese. Unlike many big families in my country, my family doesn’t keep a genealogy, which is a vital means by which people can record their domestic history. I believe part of the reason has something to do with my family name. My family name is Zhong, which is very rare even in China. But thanks to that, it’s easier for us to find our ancestors since we just need to find anyone with a same family name. Some family names are very common in China, like “Zhao”, “Zhang”, etc. People having the same family name don’t necessarily have blood lineage. Therefore, they choose to keep a genealogy to make it easier to tell who their “real” families are. It’s said that my family are descendents of Confucius’s first apprentice whose name is You Zhong. That’s just a speculation by my father and no proof has been found. We always talk about it as a joke. But what if it’s real? I can’t imagine that I’m the descendent of such a famous person whose name even occurs in our textbooks.
Comparing to many families in China, my family is relatively modern, which means we don’t follow a lot of traditional customs. That’s also a kind of cultural lineage, I guess, to have a strong adaptive capacity to new things. However, as I told we don’t follow a lot, we still follow some of the customs. For instance, though we don’t have a fixed recipe for every Spring Festival (i.e. Chinese New Year), we do make a big dinner and start to prepare it from the morning of Chinese New Year’s Eve. Besides, every time I have a test or exam, my breakfast on that day must be noodles since we think noodles are smooth, hoping that everything will go on smoothly during my exam. By the way, there is dress code for test day too, which is a pair of Nike shoes. The reason is the tick logo of Nike. We hope there are all ticks and no cross on my paper. I have to admit that
Professor King
English 1A
30 January 2015
My Cultural Lineage
As can be told from my face, I’m an Asian. To be more specific, I’m a Chinese. Unlike many big families in my country, my family doesn’t keep a genealogy, which is a vital means by which people can record their domestic history. I believe part of the reason has something to do with my family name. My family name is Zhong, which is very rare even in China. But thanks to that, it’s easier for us to find our ancestors since we just need to find anyone with a same family name. Some family names are very common in China, like “Zhao”, “Zhang”, etc. People having the same family name don’t necessarily have blood lineage. Therefore, they choose to keep a genealogy to make it easier to tell who their “real” families are. It’s said that my family are descendents of Confucius’s first apprentice whose name is You Zhong. That’s just a speculation by my father and no proof has been found. We always talk about it as a joke. But what if it’s real? I can’t imagine that I’m the descendent of such a famous person whose name even occurs in our textbooks.
Comparing to many families in China, my family is relatively modern, which means we don’t follow a lot of traditional customs. That’s also a kind of cultural lineage, I guess, to have a strong adaptive capacity to new things. However, as I told we don’t follow a lot, we still follow some of the customs. For instance, though we don’t have a fixed recipe for every Spring Festival (i.e. Chinese New Year), we do make a big dinner and start to prepare it from the morning of Chinese New Year’s Eve. Besides, every time I have a test or exam, my breakfast on that day must be noodles since we think noodles are smooth, hoping that everything will go on smoothly during my exam. By the way, there is dress code for test day too, which is a pair of Nike shoes. The reason is the tick logo of Nike. We hope there are all ticks and no cross on my paper. I have to admit that