Personal Reflection on Culture

Culture is an important element that builds and construct an individual’s overall. In my case, culture really do play a big part in constructing who I am.

In the past 20 years living in a multi-cultural society, whether it’s through physical or mental or any form of culture, I’ve received different influenced from every aspect. It made me a tougher person and helped me gain acknowledgement on who I want to be and what I should avoid.

As you know me, I’m Victoria Ashley. I live by that name, both names. During my younger days, I was known as the typical obedient Chinese child. I was a self-discipline, strict, positive and smart kid. The main source of where I’ve learned that was due to my growth in a Chinese cultured family. I was taught that positivity is important, and it is a must to always keep a smile on, whether if you’re feeling up or down and that being strict to yourself would bring better outcome in the future and able to keep yourself on the right track of life. Hence then, I grew up only portraying happiness to everyone. Honestly, I think that it is a bad practice as I wasn’t taught to express my true emotion properly. I couldn’t defend my own opinion and I lived as if I was a robot, always waiting for orders or instruction from people whom I think was respectable and honourable. Due to the mindset I had then, it stressed me out and it felt like I wasn’t living life like it was mine.

Being raised in a Chinese cultured family, it’s commonly seen that three generation of a family stays under the same roof. The eldest of each generation holds a primary responsibility, which in my situation, I was the eldest child of my family which then added up more pressure and tension in my growth. I took up a huge task since a young age as the elders had manipulated me into behaving properly as the rest would grow up looking at me as their role model. I was somehow put in charge of the growth of my younger siblings and relatives by the elders and I hold on to that lesson for a very long time until it became the cause of my rebellion against them as I aged and realised that all I needed to do was priorities myself over others.

As I entered my teenage years, my mental health had gone through so much explosive moments due to some family issues which then lead to my action and personality of being a rebellious and self-centred person. During then, I started discovering more rebellious individuals. Those rebellion and peers, they influenced me into going against an individual’s discipline, family, society and everything and that we should live life out of the box and not stick by the rules. I started mixing and blending myself into them, unrealising. I constantly had a reminder to myself that it is good to adapt to these people as I’ve never felt so in control of my own existence and the feeling of appreciation of my uniqueness. I felt as if I’ve finally found the people that shares the same values and beliefs as myself. Although we somehow became similar, but each of us comes from a different background, yet we had one same trait which is that we think and act the same. We wanted to take full control of our life and not live it with any regrets, even if it means that we would be alienize by the society. As time goes by, my anarchist side created a terrible and negative lifestyle for me and at a point, I see fear in the eyes of people when they look at me.

On top of that, due to the person I became after, it also created a contrast between the way I think compare to others. I would think of the wildest and weirdest ideas which is not always acceptable to others. The contrast had brought both advantages and disadvantages to my life. I sometimes come up a little too strong when it requires me to voice out my opinion which hence then occurs conflict between myself and others. Besides that, my personality is somewhat influence by the youth culture of the specific group I mix with as I act and react as most people do those time but deep down, I have a self-centred mind that priorities my wants and needs more than anything else. I became extremely selfish. I had produced a behaviour that no one in the world would ever find fully of acceptance.

On the age of 18, I came up to a realization that I should restart everything as I’ve entered a new phase of life. I started to appreciate people of my surroundings more, my friends and family as they’ve always been by my side, adapting themselves into my good and bad. Besides that, throughout the years, my vision and mission became clearer as I grew to becoming a more mature and rational person due to the hard times I’ve been in, but I wanted to create a balance of both good and bad aspect of myself, so I decided to go for an escape, in order to explore my true self. I spend a whole year in the beautiful island of Penang and worked as a bartender. Away from the city life, I lived and worked by the beach and gain the opportunity to get to know people from all around the world with different stories. We shared experience with each other and created a strong connection and meaningful bond, putting aside our differences. Meanwhile, I too gained a lot of knowledge on foreign culture and practices. Other than that, the amazing island contained nature elements such as the ocean, rainforest, waterfalls and many more. It became a habit to at least visit one of these places once a week as a getaway and get to learn to notice the beauty of nature and how calm life could be.

Furthermore, through the times I’ve spend with nature, I’m now a very artistic person. I find art as the solution to my problems in overall as one day I stumbled through and bumped into some tribes which was doing the tebori tattoo also known as hand poke and since then I was hooked with the tattoo culture. I’ve started an apprenticeship at a tattoo parlour. Tattoo is a form of art that wasn’t seem acceptable then but now, it became a blend on both high and popular culture, depending on personal perspective. To me, every tattoo is like a seal. It gives an end to a story and it could be used as a reminder. The art of tattoo is difficult but interesting which then, creates a challenge to myself to build my patience and stimulates my creativity. I never actually find myself talented in drawing until that one day I was inspired to get my first tattoo and it took me months to draw it but at the end, it was all worth it and the gain of a sense of achievement. At this moment, creating a new piece of art is much easier than before as I keep myself productive in doing research and exploring different ideas in order to expand my brain capacity, making it limitless and daring against any possibility.

To conclude, I’ve never expected myself to be the person I am now. I would say that my identity is created by the fusion of various culture, which some comes in major and some in minor. They made me the true self I am today even though there were some tough moments, but in the end it was all necessary in order to construct a better and distinctive me as an individual.