Looking Forward, Looking Back: Family History

Looking Forward, Looking Back: Family History

Introduction

China is one of the ancient civilizations with known traditional and cultural value system with development in health and education fields. Chinese herbs and medication are an excellent example of their rich practices in the field of cure and health maintenance. Association of great inventions and discoveries also reflects the strong educational and learning heritage of Chinese culture. Chinese family and cultural trend believe on joint family system with large number of family members living together, each family having three or four generations (Wheaton, 1975). With the passage of time, there have been various changes in the Chinese tradition and culture, with the change in their lifestyle, immigration history, and modernization of culture.

New generation is very different from the previous generations, who are still stick to their traditional and cultural values even after such a long time. In order to explore more about the traditional and cultural values, I interviewed my uncle, he usually visits us and I liked him very much. I asked him to that I want to interview him as part of my studies. He happily agreed and I asked questions about his life experiences, how health and educational systems were working, when he was younger, and what were his thinking about safety in that society. What he thought about the future or his career, what hopes he had when he was young and whether he get what he wished in his life or not. What was the best thing about his youth and growing up? He told me everything in detail and I enjoyed every part as if I am really experiencing all those moments with him.

Interview

I have always been very energetic and dynamic with spirit to achieve more and more in my life, during twentieth century, when there was a wave of migration to western countries from Asia; I also wanted to take my chance and to earn more money. I wanted to do business and during that time, there were more chances for the trade and export. In china we always used to live in large families and we enjoy living there with our traditional and cultural values. Therefore, it was very difficult for me to thought of living alone away from my family. It was the time of major shift in culture with trend of modernization. I was young and I also wanted to have all of that. In China, there were major issues for the youth as there were changes in the political system, such as during 1949 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made various policies for providing better housing and other facilities. One major issue for the government was to manage problems associated with big population as it was not an easy task. During that time, health, education, and accommodation were the major concerns. (Still today, many countries are facing these problems. Major hurdle for government was managing population). It was very difficult for everyone to get better education or ...