Reflective Journal 2

Both the Chinese and Western perceptions of oneself have affected my life greatly. The Chinese perceives that one should abide to the social hierarchy of the society, whereby the individual listens to his father and others of the higher authority than himself, and respect these people. In my life, I have been always respectful of my father, who seems to be the strict and authoritative person in the family, and thus I would invariably listen to his lectures and instructions. I think that this is because my father had left a strong impression that he was fierce and fearful when I was young, which made me respect him since young. Even though today, my father had long stopped caning and changed from scolding to persuasion, and I had learnt to understand that my father is not as strict as he presents himself, yet, I still respect him, but this time, it is without the element of fear, with the knowledge that he teaches me well and making me the person today.

I am also rather respectful of my teachers, although it was more during my primary school life. I always listened attentively to teachers, and rarely rebut to them. I think this is also because since young, my father had told me of the importance of having respect for teachers, and how the older generation had respect for teachers. He told me that even if I did not like the teacher, we should at least feel grateful for the simple fact that teachers teach us knowledge, thus they rightfully earn our respect. Thus, I would say that I never have been disrespectful to teachers before.

The Chinese also emphasizes on respect and “li”, which could be said as etiquette, courtesy and manners. I also uphold these values, of which I think could be found in most traditional Chinese families. In my family, we, as children, would always be polite and invite our parents to eat first, and this, in turn, is also a way in which we children show respect and gratitude to our parents. In Singapore, it is also emphasized in schools that students greet teachers in classrooms when they enter, and also bow to teachers when students see them in the school compound. We also address them with proper manners by adding a mister, missus, miss or madam in front of their surname. This is very unlike how schools function in some Western countries, whereby students call their teachers by their name directly.

I think that the Western perception of self only started to influence me, or impacted me when I was more exposed to their ideas in the secondary school, when I first heard words like human rights and democracy. It was during this age when I started to question the reason for sticking to social norms, and the Western philosophy greatly appealed to me since it advocated ideas related to liberty and freedom.  As it was also this age when I was becoming increasingly aware of Singapore and its politics, I thus began to think about the policies implemented by the government, whether is it good for us Singaporeans. I found out that many a times, what the opposition party said about the downsides of any policy is very true, and it is actually good to have opposing voices which serve as a check-and-balance. Therefore, with the introduction of Western perception into my life, I have begun to question myself more about governmental policies and matters regarding human rights, especially those pertaining to Singapore. I think that Singapore is generally more democratic as compared to other Asian countries, of which quite a number are led by totalitarians, yet the degree of democracy in Singapore is still incomparable with countries like America, since in American, the citizens have more freedom, liberty and human rights, and they easily voice their concerns to the government.

Another way that the Western perception of self had greatly influenced me is the stimulation of the question of what I wanted to do with my life. In the Chinese society, I rarely thought of questions as such because we are told to do, rather than we initiate it ourselves, since Chinese social structure is generally more rigid. Hence, I am rarely led to do the simple notion of thinking and questioning. The Western society, however, is greatly different. It calls a lot upon self-initiative, and it advocates more on self-learning and passion, such as Google’s 20 percent rule, which allows employees of Google to pursue their passion in 20 percent of their work time instead of completing assigned tasks and works. Of course, it is not only the Google’s 20 percent rule which stimulated my thought of my future, but my general understanding of the Western perception of what is expected of a person. Hence I have also benefitted a lot from the Western perception, namely human rights, since it led me to think that it not up to others to determine what we want to do, it is up to ourselves.

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