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Wanyi Zhang

Instructor Marie Webb

Linguistics 12 - M/W 11:00 AM

10 February 2019

the Power of Culture

When people are accustomed to their comfort zone, acquiring a different culture

will help change that situation and force them to make a progress. ― Wanyi

Zhang

A different environment with different culture will make people disenchanted and face up

their shortages. Acquiring the culture of my hometown when I was seven years old really makes

a difference to my life both academically and socially.

It was a winter before the Spring Festival. Trees were wrapped with the cloth and the

grass on the playground was dried up with a color of dark yellow. The city was extremely cold in

that time and everything seemed lifeless. However, in the classroom, with forty pupils who were

seven years old, the Chinese class was experiencing a hot debate. One boy said, “I think the

author wants to use the environment to depict a sad scene!” The other boy argued, “Oh, come on,

you think too much, it’s just a description! My point is that….” My Chinese teacher Mr. Liu was

very satisfied with this debate. Smiling on the platform, he carefully observed his students to find

out who was not participating. Soon, he found me. “Wendy, what’s your opinion about this

article?” Nervously shaking, I was afraid of speaking my opinion in the class, “I…um…I feel the

same with them.” Mr. Liu was obviously not satisfied with this answer and he tried again, “Do

you have any problems?” Actually, I did have problems. I struggled in my mind, “Will it be

embarrassed to ask in front of forty classmates? Will my question sound stupid? What if my
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classmates laughed at me about asking that question?” Then I replied, “No, I have no question.”

At that time, I found my teacher sighed and looked at me with sympathy. I was not comfortable

with that, I wanted to know the answer, I had my opinion about this article, but I was afraid to

talk in public. I locked myself in a box to prevent any interaction with the public. That was me

when I was seven years old.

At that time, I thought that I could lock myself forever because I fitted in my primary

school by acting like a person who had no sense of presence. But I was wrong, there was

something that I couldn’t avoid, the Spring Festival. As one of the most important festivals in

china, the Spring Festival is aimed at togetherness and accompany. people go back to their

hometown in the cold winter to experience the warmth brought by their family. Although the

Spring Festival is a nationwide celebration, it was a suffering for me when I was seven years old

because I was forced to be exposed to the new culture in my hometown.

“Wow, look who comes back, my dear niece! We missed you so much! Are you cold?

Come inside!” This was my aunt. I had only seen her for several times but she could act like that

she cared me more than my mother. Holding my hands, my aunt was eager to talk to me, “You

really need to eat more, you are thinner than last year!” “You must be tired in school because I

know you work really hard.” “I always wish that you could be my daughter because you are such

a good girl….” I had no idea about how to respond to her enthusiasm, so I smiled. Smiling was

never wrong and I faked my smile whenever someone talked to me. My aunt finally got tired

trying to communicate with me because all my response was smile. “I need to check about the

dinner in kitchen, enjoy yourself and be comfortable here.” She found an excuse and left me to

find someone who can talk. Siting alone in the sofa, I found my family was communicating hotly.

They gave compliments to each other and act like they were extremely concerned and cared
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about each other although they might not even know the person they were talking to. This was

my culture. This was my hometown, AnHui. Obviously, my appearance here is like a square peg

in a round hole.

My hometown is a place where gives birth to hundreds of emperors in ancient China.

Even in recent years, many presidents came from this province, AnHui. With such a long history

of the education for future governors, AnHui is a bureaucratic province. Social contact is most

crucial for people in AnHui. Interpersonal relationships need to be handled very carefully and

thus everyone will treat others extremely polite. However, when I was young, I hate this kind of

communicating and I regard this as hypocritical.

I disdained to fit in that culture because I thought people are hypocritical. But to be

honest, I disdained because I was afraid to act like them. Thus, I found myself a perfect reason

and kept locking myself in my box. Although it was boring to sit in the sofa all day long, I was

safe in my comfort zone and I had no plan to change. But that year when I was seven, something

happened out of my control.

I probably had eaten something too cold and oily the night before and I felt really sick the

next morning. I stayed in my bed the next morning with the feeling of nausea. With her hands

patting on my back gently, my mother asked, “Oh, dear, how are you feeling right now?” “I am

feeling so sick, can I stay in my bed this lunch? I don’t want to go.” My mother was indulgent

with me and she would agree to me without hesitation. However, my father was different. After

hearing that I couldn’t go to the lunch, he left without saying a word, but the great noise he made

by slamming the door showed that he was angry. Soon after he left, he called back, “Are you

feeling better now? Come to the lunch as soon as you can.” “But I am not comfortable!”

“Everyone is waiting for you! You must come here! Don’t make me scold on you.” I was scared,
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grabbing my bag and rushing out to the lunch to avoid punishment. However, I was still late for

that lunch.

When I stepped into the dinning room, the scene was exactly what I thought. My cousins

were playing around the table yelling and laughing with the television turned up to the maximum

volume. My mother and my aunt were still in the kitchen preparing dishes and the sound made

by the kitchen ventilator was extremely loud. However, the noisiest part in this room was not

made by children and machines, but my relatives who were toasting. “My dear brother, I respect

you a glass of vine. You helped me a lot in the past year and I couldn’t imagine what I might

become without your help. In the next year, I hope you could be healthy and wealthy….” This

was said by my uncle to my father before drank his vine. Then, I found my father came up with a

long speech in response. I was shocked every time when they toasted and wondered how could

they say so much before drank a vine? Other people started toasting too and I slipped into the

bustling room without causing attention. My father whispered to me, “Go toasting to the elder

members of the family to apologize for your late.” Although I was afraid of speaking in public, I

had no choice but nodded. I struggled for the whole lunch. I prepared what I could say and even

came up with the movement I might use when toasting. However, every time when I tried to

stand up, I failed. I stole a glance at my father and I found the look on his face was terrible.

After coming back, my father assailed me with a displeased tone, “Why didn’t you

toast?” I replied, “I am afraid.” “What makes you become such a cowardly girl? Teachers have

told me that you are shy in class but I have never thought that you couldn’t even speak in

public!” He left with anger and disappointment, and I stayed in my room for the rest of the day

alone. Without doing anything in that afternoon, I thought a lot in the silent room, and finally, I

decided to change.
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Back to the classroom after the Spring Festival, Mr. Liu asked, “Who knows the answer

of this question?” I raised my hands up and answered loudly, “I know! I think that ….” This was

my first class after that Spring Festival, and I think I made what I thought that afternoon came to

reality. I wanted to change, and fortunately, I made it.

I really want to thank my father and the special culture of AnHui. Although the process is

painful, the outcome influences my whole life. Every time you are forced to make a change, you

are forced to grow up and you have to pay the price for the growth. If I stayed in my comfort

zone without changing, I might never be able to speak in public. What’s more, my grades might

be extremely low because I was afraid of asking questions. However, the new culture forced me

to step out the comfort zone and made a progress. Thus, culture can really make a difference to

your life.
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February 10, 2019

Wanyi Zhang
Phelps Hall 2536
Santa Barbara CA 93106

Dear Wendy:

As the story stated before, you were shy at first but you changed. After so many years, you are
still very proud of your change and grateful for that experience. Before coming to The United
States for studying, you always felt satisfied about your personality and regarded yourself as
outgoing. However, the culture shock made you realize that you still needed further
improvement. When actually living and studying with American students, you soon found that
your braveness was nothing compared with theirs. You are afraid of acting like those American
students who can ask questions directly in the class in front of hundreds of other classmates; you
are afraid of making friends with American students after almost half a year; and you are afraid
of expressing yourself in front of strangers. You had made a big progress when you were seven
years old, but you still need to further improve yourself in the different circumstance without
your familiar families and relatives in order to be more successful both academically and socially.

There should be a reason for why people are so eager for famous universities in the United States.
Fortunate for you, after attending such an institution of higher education, you understand that it
is the atmosphere that makes the university unique. You were really shocked at first when you
found students speaking and asking questions during the class, which was kind of an interruption
from your perspective. In China, you were not allowed to interrupt the teacher during the class
because lecture time was not your private time and asking your own questions in class was
selfish because you occupied other classmates’ time of learning. However, after hearing those
questions asked in American classes, you found out that professors were actually happy to
answer those questions which could help them figure out which part was not clear enough for
students and he needed to talk more about that in order to benefit all the students in the class. It
was true that the majority of questions asked in class were helpful because they were either
questions you wanted to ask too or questions you hadn’t thought about before.

According to the paragraph above, asking questions in classes is very beneficial, but why can not
you ask like those brave students? The answer is your fear of speaking aloud in front of hundreds
of people. You had questions in every class but you just waited for somebody else to ask for you.
If nobody had the same question as you did, you just left it away and kept the question forever.
Thus, can you be more brave? You clearly know that if you do not ask during the class, you will
forget the question and when questions become more and more, your study will be affected
seriously. In the book Lab Girl, Jahren emphasizes that “her inability to let things go coupled
with her tendency to overdo everything were exactly what her professors liked to see”(Jahren 18).
She will not let anything she does not understand go away and she will overdo things to find the
accurate answer. It is that quality that makes Jahren finally become a successful scientist. Thus,
for academic study, you should be more brave and more outgoing. It is not possible for you to
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change a lot in a second without somebody like your father to push you so hard. But you can
achieve that step by step. At first, you can solve your problems after class and communicate with
your professor privately. As you become more familiar with your professor, you can try to
express your idea in some small classes with fewer people compared with big lectures which can
host up to eight hundred people. Linguistic classes and sections are suitable options in this period.
With about only twenty people, you can be more active in class and express yourself. As time
goes by, it will be easier for you to speak aloud in small classes and you can finally try to put
your hands up and ask your questions in big lectures. The process may be challenging, but for
your further academic success, you need to follow the steps and force yourself to solve those
questions and do not let them become your latent danger.

You had dreamed a lot about your life in America before coming to here. You dreamed about
your classes, your everyday life, and, most importantly, your friends. Your teacher had told you
before you left China that you can not just play with Chinese because that would lose your
meaning of studying in America. You were always eager to make friends with American
students. However, after half a year, it turned out that you failed. It sounds impossible that for
such a long time, you only have Chinese friends. You tried before, but all you could do was
simply smile. You smiled to people living next to you when running into them in the hall way.
Those friendly people smiled back but that’s all of your progress. You were a failure who could
not even talk to the people living next to you. Making American friends is not only about fitting
in and meeting different cultures, but also helps a lot for your language study. Speaking honestly,
American friends can help a lot for improving your English. However, you should not make
friends with the intention of improving your English because you need to treat your friends
sincerely. But as you communicate with them, you improve your English speaking, and
furthermore, simultaneously, your writing and reading ability will be affected and your literacy
skills will be improved. Thus, for your literacy success, you should try harder this time to really
fit in with this new environment.

Thus, how can you fit in? Nothing can be accomplished in one second. You still need to change
gradually. Firstly, try to say “hi” to people you meet everyday instead of smiling. You can
prepare the night before about what else you can say with those familiar strangers. You may
choose a topic previously and find your answer and respond to that topic so that your
conversation may be fluent and that will make you more confident. For instance, study is always
a good topic for students especially when both you and your “potential” American friends are
freshmen. You can ask about their major and what courses they are taking now. What’s more,
you can discuss together about which course is easy to take. With the increasing time you talk
with American students, your conversation may become more meaningful instead of simply
“how is your day” and “what is your major”. Gradually, you do not need to prepare your
conversation the night before and you can communicate freely. Then, you can try to make a
friend because at that time, you can at least chat. From that time, your dreamed American life
become true and your literacy skills improve at the same time.

Currently, you have the ability to communicate with those relatives whom you are not familiar
with, but when you face total strangers, you are scared. We all face the problem that one day, we
will leave our school and step into the society. Different from your school in which study is the
only thing you need to do, society requires more about emotional quotient (EQ) than intelligence
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quotient (IQ). When you enter a company in the future, you need to maintain good relationships
with your colleagues so that your working place will be comfortable to everyone. As Jahren
states that “her lab is both private and familiar, populated by a small number of people who
know one another well”(Jahren 19), her lab is no longer a working place but somewhere like
home where everyone gets along well with each other. What’s more, good social relationships
help you to get promotion. Since we are not only talking about academic success, in reality,
promotion is really important for your later life. Everyone wants a better job to earn more and do
more challenging things instead of basic ones. On the one hand, this should relate directly to
your ability because company needs people who can handle challenging things. However, on the
other hand, when people with similar ability are compared together, the one who is more popular
with colleagues will be more suitable for that job because she will be better at assigning works to
her colleagues. In order to achieve that, you should be able to express yourself in front of
strangers and build good relationships with people whom you are working with. As stated before,
step by step, you can first try to communicate more with people in your dancing club. You may
start with communicating about the dance you are working on and then move on to some more
interesting topics just like what you will do to make American friends. When you are familiar
with people in the club, you can move on to more challenging places like the Chinese Students
and Scholars Association. Finally, you will be fully prepared for your later career life.

It’s not an easy task for you to become more brave and outgoing, but you have to push yourself
to accomplish this goal for your own benefits academically and socially. After you make a
change, you will be able to ask questions during the class, make American friends, and express
yourself in front of strangers. Those abilities which are crucial for your life need to be acquired
step by step. Although challenging at first, you will finally become successful.

Sincerely,

Wanyi Zhang
Phelps Hall 2536
Santa Barbara CA 93106
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Works Cited

Hope Jahren Lab Girl 1st edition Vintage Books 2017.