Essay On Fish Cheeks

Throughout the semester while learning about multiple ethnicities and cultures, there were a few main concepts that were frequently repeated in the text or films viewed. The main concepts that were recurrent themes were: cultural acceptance, stereotypes, cultural competence, cultural biases, equal rights, racism, and discriminatory practices of white Americans toward people of color and minorities in a multicultural society.

Multicultural America includes people from various ethnicities like African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese Americans and Hispanic Americans. With the various cultures comes cultural biases. Such cultural bias was displayed in many of the text that I read, but was best portrayed in the article Just Walk on By. In

Amy's family is Chinese, and her mother is planning to cook all the family's favorite dishes for their Christmas Eve dinner. In addition to their family for dinner, friends will be attending. Amy is concerned that their guests will find the food that has been prepared strange, and may be embarrassed of what the guest will think of customary practices of her culture, Amy is nervous about the etiquette during the eating experience and traditions of her family will be viewed by their guest, to the extent that when they begin eating, she is concerned that the guests will find her older relatives rude because of the noise of the chopsticks and because they reach across the table into different dishes, rather than just passing them to each other. Another family custom is “burping”. In the Chinese culture, burping is surprisingly acceptable behavior because it shows appreciation for the meal and condolences to the cook. Having cultural acceptance on Amy’s behalf is needed because she doesn’t accept her cultural traditions and feels that she has to explain traditions to non-chinese guests to make them feel better about themselves, rather than Amy being proud of her own