Hawaiian Culture

An important part of teaching someone about your culture and worldview is showing them where you come from and how that has affected you. The three items I would choose to represent these aspects of me would be a lei, a photo of my mother’s house in Laos, and a photograph of Pale Blue Dot. These three items provide a mixture of my personal history as well as an accurate depiction of who I am as a person. The lei represents my upbringing in Hawaii as well as my admiration of the Hawaiian culture. Unfortunately, I think that there are many people who only think of Hawaii as a vacation destination with pretty beaches and palm trees when in reality it is so much more. Hawaiian culture emphasizes the importance of community, which I believe is very important, especially since we live in a capitalistic society where everything is a contest to see who can get ahead. Hawaii is also a very diverse place where multiculturalism is something that is embraced, and I believe that this type of open-mindedness is the key to peace. If people were able to respect each other’s cultures and beliefs then there would be no more hatred in the world, because we would be a lot more empathetic. The purpose of a lei in Hawaiian culture is to show respect for one another. It is believed that when you …show more content…
My mother’s family is from Vientiane, Laos, where they lived in poverty and under a strict communist regime. Towards the end of the Vietnam War they fled to Thailand, and after four years in a refugee camp, come to Hawaii. My Southeast Asian culture is extremely important to me, because I grew up surrounded by people who didn’t know anything about where my family was from. When people told me they had never heard of Laos, it caused me to be ashamed of my ethnicity. However, I have learned to embrace it and instead educate others about