Journal 1

I was born in Singapore and grew up in Shanghai, China. I went to an international school filled with students that like me, grew up in an extremely heteronormative culture with parents who enforced ideals of a male and female. Growing up in an extremely heteronormative asian culture, I was brought up with the heteronormative ideas of binary genders and specific roles that men and women play in society. I was taught that girls were feminine and boys were masculine. My grandmother often told me that I won’t be able to find a husband/no one is going to marry me because I didn’t know how to cook. My parents, while more progressive than my grandparents, were also out of touch with conversations on gender and equity and I could often see discomfort in their faces when talking about these topics. While I did get insight into the development of gender and sexual identity ideas overtime through social media like instagram accounts of social activists, I was rarely exposed to the kind of conversation that people had here in America.

When I came to America for my undergrad, part of the culture shock that came with it for me was the culture of “political correctness” here when speaking about sensitive equity issues like race, class, or gender. While I was not completely unattuned to these issues, I felt myself getting nervous when approaching conversations about these issues because I was afraid of offending or upsetting someone because I used the wrong language. I was never really educated to use such a language while I was growing up, nor was I educated about it in a classroom setting in school. Overtime after spending more time in the US, I have grown more accustomed to the ideas not only from my peers and social media, but also just from talking to different people in my everyday life. However, I do think that I can still learn so much more on gender and equity and I am so excited to learn more from this class and take what I learn to actually have conversations with people comfortably with the “right” language.