Social Influence Versus Personal Choice

Social Influence Versus Personal Choice During our lives, decisions are not always be made by myself, due to other seemingly undirected factors like my birth place, the surrounding neighborhood, my ethnicity and my family. These factors indeed seem not as important as personal choice. But in fact, they have remarkably influenced me in the way I did not see. To figure out why I am here and what I have done that change my life forever, I combine the social factors, my birth place, my ethnicity, my family, with my life, to see exactly what have happened. The immigrant background has a tremendous influence on one’s life because it means moving from one place to another place, from one cultural environment to another totally different …show more content…
To begin with, we need to look back to the history of my native place, Tayshaun. Taishan is a small county in Guangdong, wit h a population no more than 1 million. But it was from here my ancestors began moving to the United States many years ago, resulting in hundreds of their descendants stepping in this foreign country since that. The reason is following: In American history during the Gold Rush, many Chinese arrived in America looking to strike it rich with hopes of being to send money back to their poor family or of returning to China after a few years with newly acquired wealth. Among these ambitious and hard-working Chinese, a larger part of them are Taishaness. After several years settle down in America, Taishaness owned the permanent resident identity and they began to apply the rest of the family members in Taishan come to America with the intention to having the entire family get reunited. Generation after generation, many people in Tayshaun today mostly have relatives that live in America, which means that they can come to America anytime they want as long as they apply. This is somehow an advantage, compared to Taishaness, people of other places that want to immigrate have to go through a much complicated process like investment, which of course cost more physically and economically effort. Because of that, many people lived in other places cannot understand why it means so …show more content…
She didn’t have a college certificate even not finished their high school education. But it doesn’t seem strange at all, instead it is neatly the norms of the majority of Chinese families in 1990s, when China was dealing with the food production in need of the contribution of the whole society. Living in a big family, but having limited food to share, is the natural phenomenon of typical poor Chinese families. In this tough situation, almost every member of the family had to work outside to earn money to make ends meet or work hard in the field hoping the harvest would be better than normal so that the whole family would not struggle to hungry. In contrast to work, few people would choose further education when the whole time of people still faced the hardship of poverty. Only those, ambitious and farsighted families, were willing to choose this seemingly risky path. My uncle was one of the lucky. Being the only boy at home, my uncle bore the expectations of the rest of the family to study, or to say, he studied for the future of the family. After years of painstaking study day and night, he ended up the only university student in the county. Since then, my uncle got a decent and well-paid job after graduation, truly realizing the original wish to break down the poor and unfortunate background and leading the whole family to a rich and prosperous life. Having the successful example before, it is not surprising for my