Culture

Culture, to me, has always been a way of life largely defined by customs and shared experience. Bell’s article seems to confuse ethnicity and nationality in his definition of what constitutes being Chinese where his sense of being Chinese means simply emulating Chinese culture. Unfortunately, what Bell doesn’t understand which Yam points out is that being Chinese for some is more than emulating the culture. Yam calls out what she perceives as Bell’s white privilege implying that to be Chinese means to be Chinese in every sense of the word, even genetically for it is these genetic roots that depict, inform, and shape experiences for certain ethnicities, Chinese in particular. This made me realize as we were discussing in class with Dr. Woodhouse referring to herself as lacking culture that culture also has roots. For clan culture, ethnicity is also a factor in being a certain nationality whether it be Chinese or Marshallese because each member of that particular ethnicity can trace their ancestry to a common ancestor and totem that give them basis to a legitimate identity. Thus, for some cultures, being a certain ethnicity (e.g. Chinese to Yam's way of thinking) requires genetic underpinnings to legitimize the claim that a shared experience is met. For Bell; Yam is angered at the thought of white privilege where he (Bell) misses the point that he will never experience the types of experiences that inform and shape what being Chinese is all about because bluntly put, Bell is not ethnically Chinese. Hence, my only response to Bell’s article in due regards to Yam’s meaning is that I too sympathize with Yam because being a certain ethnicity informs identity particularly in ways we are defined by our immediate observers

who often seek to tell us who has culture and who hasn’t or more so who has high culture and who has low culture (e.g. "We write Symphonies")