Learning to Adopt New Cultural Values 

When we enter this world, we know nothing. We have no guideline for how we should live our lives other than by the people who brought us into this world. As a result of this, our early developmental years are considered among, if not the most important area within our lives. It is at this time that we are given a model of the world that we live in, by the people that raise us. As youths, this is helpful in allowing us to construct our initial perspectives on the world. As children, our parents teach us the world as they have experienced it, and we are taught that their interpretation is what is best for us. These ideas begin to flood into us without much consideration for any opposing or dissenting thoughts, as these serve as our introduction to what we consider as reality. As the ideas of the previous generation are passed on, cultural values are passed as well, and as we develop further as people into our own identities, we truly become our own beings. Though, it is difficult to learn to think for ourselves, as what we interact with ends up shaping our reality. We hardly ever get the opportunity to experience life outside of our own perspective, outside of the world that we have taught ourselves to view in a certain way. Therefore, when I received the opportunity to interview a friend of mine that I had known for what feels like all my life about these experiences, I made sure to notate questions on relatively every parameter of his life. As it turns out, our experiences were different in areas that we expected to be similar, and far more similar in areas that we expected to be the same.  

I met Andrey 7 years ago on an online chat room for a series we liked. He is 7 years older than me, and he has also struggled with finding his own identity within the world. He stands at a rather tall 6’4, and is a Brazilian man of color, with straight dirty-blonde hair. Ever since we met, we have been great friends and have communicated almost every day for the past 7 years. It is fair to say that he has seen me develop into the young person I am today, and though he has gotten the ability to see my perspective repeatedly throughout the years, I never truly had the opportunity to gain his perspective. In performing this assignment, I made sure to ask him about all of the sections of his life that I was curious about, that I had not seen in great detail in our 7-year friendship. We spoke about his family and the influence that his family held on his views as he matured. He prefaced to me a little about what he had known of his family before he was born, describing to me his family’s trade and how his father and his mother had met. It was clear from his short preface that his family had familiarized their viewpoints from a different time than the present day, and that they would probably get upset at him, had they known what he had agreed to. Luckily for myself and him, Andrey is legally an adult and was capable of making his own decisions, but as if almost on cue, his maternal figure suspiciously questioned what her son was up to. 

His mother, who I would also hear in the background in our bi-weekly gaming sessions happened to be just as curious about me as I was of her, due to her superstitious beliefs regarding technology. We silently held back some laughs, as he translated the Portuguese that his family spoke, accusing me of being a much older man in disguise, who had conducted a scheme to abduct their son. Looking back on this moment in our discussion, I can recall the many times my own grandmother, who possesses a more traditional view on things, had accused some of my longest friends of the same thing. This provided me with some sense of relief, to know that others harbored my grandmother’s taste for dramatic fanaticism. It also brought me a large amount of concern, that so many people would hold disdain against something before they would even give it a chance. His family, like my extended family in the Dominican Republic, elected to purposely make their lives more difficult instead of embracing modernity as if to prove a point. The point that Andrey described as their, “Pride in Tradition.”  

Once his family’s concern for his safety had been satiated, I finally learned about the world he experienced growing up and how it differed from my own. His experience was like the experience I shared whenever I visited the Dominican Republic. Just as my own, most elders within his family often cursed technology, and preferred to keep their lives as simple as possible, rather than conforming to the times and utilizing the tools of the modern era. He lacked the element of transience that I had access to, being able to separate me from the person I was in the Dominican Republic from who I was in the United States, which caused somewhat of an identity crisis for him. As our own generation continues to advance further and further into the future, we seem to have become the subject of scrutiny for our predecessors. I recalled how every time I visited DR, I would have to hide my electronic devices in certain areas or around specific family members who would often get upset at me for my inability to detach from the internet. While it stands to reason that concerns for a possible addiction to technology would benefit me, I did not recognize this aspect, because I knew that this argument originates from superstition. I felt sympathy for Andrey at this moment once I had realized just how difficult it must have been for him in the early years to explain his passions to his parents. 

These predecessors claim that these new innovations are the new instruments of the devil and that they were merely new tools constructed to control us and deter us from the people who we are from birth. I subconsciously began to associate the conversation I had with his mother with some of the conversations I held with my extended family in DR. Though their purpose for their beliefs was inherently different, they advocated for the same thing. Though this was established as somewhat of a taboo within his family, some part of him continued to defy the beliefs of his predecessors. While his family was not exactly wealthy for where they live, he was fortunate enough to have been able to access a lot of modern technology and was able to quickly immerse himself into the world of literature at a young age. He read a lot of fictional stories from franchises across the world, and eventually ended up getting interested in the world of gaming, where we would meet. He tells me in detail the story of when he got his first computer and the world that was opened to him. He describes it as a pivotal moment in his life, where he first obtained access to other opinions and thought processes other than the books he read, or the commercials on the television at his Uncle’s house. It was also the moment where he realized the true value of knowledge, and he understood even if partly then, why his parents had been so cautious of the internet. The ability to easily access information was powerful, especially in sections of the world that lacked the development of industry, and it was not soon before “Andrey”, became the “Smart Alec” of his family. 

Though he discovered that there was more to the world than the cracked pavement of the “plays”, or playgrounds that his parents would take him to – he also discovered that it was not all that he had initially made it out to be, as he had encountered some of the people his parents would warn him about with great repetition before he knew how to deal with those people. His earliest experience was when someone had obtained his IP address from a video game that they played, and how they would toy with his internet service. His parents were already against these implementations in the first place, so they excused the faulty service as a result of circumstances like the weather. Though Andrey became apathetic to the nature of the internet over time, as he realized those bad people will always attempt to ruin good things, such as the games he grew to enjoy being populated by a toxic community of gamers who used their knowledge in software to abuse others. I thought back to the many times that I had gotten “booted offline” by gamers on my first console, the Xbox 360, and the strange excuses I had to conjure for my mother when she was unable to finish her assignments from work. I knew the strange feeling he spoke about, and how it almost instilled a sense of early wisdom in online safety at a young age for us. I could recall first experiencing this sense of overwhelming disappointment on the internet, and then later realizing how it was the fault of the people who exploited the system of communication. We connected through these mistakes, and though his experiences were different from our own, I could still relate to his statements on a personal level, as if they had also applied to me. 

 From here, he spoke about his life as a young adult, and how his time as a student studying abroad in America impacted his experience. He spoke of what it was like to visit New York, and how great that space differed from his own. New York was his first choice, given how it was portrayed as some form of a holy grail within the minds of foreign families who sought to give their descendants a better future. Not to mention that in fiction and various other forms of media, this space was established as the cultural melting pot. In his own words, “even a dark-skinned Brazilian boy with weird hair”, could aspire to fulfill his dreams. New York was an opportunity for him to pursue what he wanted without the judgment of his family. He learned briefly of other cultures and decided that he wanted to teach English, because of how he believed his life would become diverse. We finally concluded to speak about his past, and we began to discuss his current experiences. He informed me that it was not until recently that he had convinced the rest of his family to put aside their traditional beliefs and to give the innovations of the future a chance, as his mother had recently become obsessed with electronic kitchen appliances that helped her cook, and how his father finally upgraded the old car he had for twenty years with a functional Jeep that he immediately grew attached to. He had taught his parents to give new things a chance. Though they would still harbor the unique perspectives that gave them their identities, Andrey had managed to convince them to see these new advancements within the same sense of wonder that he and I experienced so many years ago.  

At the end of our discussion, I compared many of his experiences to my own. How I had grown up in a place that was not particularly very expensive, and not particularly very cheap. Because of this, I also have been able to experience the world to a great extent even at such a young age, and I have found in him many similarities that I shared with my own self. Although my family was not as large as he was, I harbor an affinity for family and the smaller things in life, within a more traditional perspective, which seems to be a lot more common around people whose families originate from other areas, such as Brazil or the Dominican Republic.