Honor And The American Dream Essay

The ideas of honor and the American Dream are two ideals that are not easily reconciled. Honor implies a good name and esteem from the community. A person shows honor to another person in many ways in the Chinese culture, one of which is to simply obey their parents and the elders in their family. It also denotes a sense of ethical conduct inherent in the Chinese culture. (Merriam-Webster Honor) Indeed, if any one person is asked the first word they thought of when they hear China, honor might be that word. The American Dream, however, has quite the opposite connotation. We think of the Westward Expansion and gold rushes to acquire as much personal wealth and property as possible. This Dream tends to be self-serving, egotistical, and greedy, yet is adopted by many who come to this country in search of any life that is better than the one …show more content…
In the Western part of the world, we emphasize personal freedoms, rights and privacy. In China, there is a term that is loosely translated as personal connections in which a person can make unlimited demands on the other. This is at the core of the family system. If a child blatantly disobeys his parents, it is considered a personal affront to the parents, their community, their system of beliefs, their culture, and even their county. For Jing-Mei to unashamedly refuse to continue practicing her piano, she was renouncing her heritage in her mother’s eyes. When she said she wished she had never been born and had died like the rest of her mother’s children did in China, she was saying that all her mother had done for her to make their lives better, had been a waste of time and she had been stupid to do it. Her mother was so proud to be able to give her daughter everything and she was doing absolutely everything that she thought was in Jing-Mei’s best interests, only to have her efforts and love thrown back in her face as if it were