Heritage
ageTrace back to last century, one of the biggest cultural disaster engulfed whole China. During the Cultural Revolution, everyone had to hand over their properties and waited for redistribution. Therefore I haven’t got any experiences on material goods heritages from my family. However these are not very regretful, because China had already developed for more than 5000 years, our ancestors remained a lot of cultural heritages, everyone was growing up in an abundant cultural environment, people are inheriting these heritages, and they are fostered by their cultures.Of course, most of our traditions are originally come from superstitions, for instance, we are not allowed to cut off our hair in the first month after spring festival (Chinese New Year). Fishers are not allowed to turn over fish when they eat it, because it represents that their boats will turn over in the sea too. However, since the sciences are accepted by most people now a days, these old traditions can’t exist anymore. Some of traditions are still used in our daily life, because they are considered to be morality.One of moral traditions is respect, Chinese people respects to elder and children, because we think elder and children should be taken care as weakling. When I was child, we lived together with my grandparents, because it is our responsibility to take care of them, when they get old. Otherwise it will be considered to be unethical. These moral heritages can be found in everywhere of my family, for example, in the new year eve dinner, the oldest generation will always eat first bite, these could show that younger generation’s respect to them.Since I was growing up in this family and been influenced by this moral tradition, I have already accepted this heritage automatically. Sometimes I feel sorry to those elder beggars, because they should be taken care by their family or our society. Moreover the language I use to talk to elder is different with when I talk to others, I usually use “thou” instead of “you” in order to show my respect to them. Respect to elder is a nice tradition which educates people to help weaklings. I think it will be passed to my next generation as their first moral education in their life.Not every cultural tradition can be accepted or passed on by majority; some old Chinese traditions are contradicted with modern life. Gender discrimination could be a typical example in our cultural heritages.The men-dominated family is obviously counted as gender discrimination. In the movie” The Joy Luck Club” has showed it many times. For example, YingYing thought her responsibility is to cook for her husband everyday. She has to ask what does her husband like to eat. In this type of family women lose their own personality; they are acting as a servant in family. In the modern city, more and more females go out to work. The men-dominated family are beginning to fade, in most families women have right to say and decide something in their family. For instance, my family is not the men-dominated family, my mother has same position as my father do, and they share our housework. Sometimes my mother even has more powers in control of my family, because my mother controls the consumptions of our family, so my father has to give his salary to her every month. Gender discrimination has never been accepted by me, because it is unfair and ridiculous. Maybe I was ever dreaming about to live in a man-dominating family, just because the privileges I will have. However when I think about the meaning of marriage, it is a wife-husband relationship, not master-servant connection. Even although there are still a lot of men-dominated families in countryside, because their families’ income are still entirely depended by men. This form of family can’t last for long time, while our society is developing.Our historical heritages are splendid and resplendent, we had contributed a lot of achievements for world in past, everyone is proud of that, but in sometimes the historical heritages have bad effect on developments of society or building up friendship.From the Second World War, history leaved hostility between Chinese and Japanese in their next generation. I had an experience about it a year ago, there
Was a café in Beijing and the boss of café hanged a signboard that wrote “Japanese are not allowed to enter”. This unjust situation will be definitely considered to be a unethical action, because it was racist, but by understanding the emotional factors and historical backgrounds between China and Japan during the second world war, this behave could be understandable.I had been influenced by these historical heritages more or less, while I was studying history in China, because our history books have a lot of pages which is dealing with these parts of our history. For example, I usually call them “small Japanese” or “Japanese devils”. These historical heritages seriously hinder the development of Chinese-Japanese friendship, but since the people are eager to build up their friendship and try to forgive their revengeful past, the influences of historical heritages will gradually vanish.These plenty cultural heritages have built up our personal experiences and our thoughts, behaves are influenced by those heritages. In order to be a nice human being, we can’t act as a force-feed duck to eat everything that farmer give to them, we have to use our filters to decide which cultural heritages should be accepted and which one should be dropped. After that, we can say:” I am rich, because I have a lot of cultural heritages.”
