Growing Up Between 2 Cultures: Chinese / German! Differences, Experiences, Travels & more

I am half-chinese and half-german, and today I decided to take Steemit on a journey between 2 cultures.

嗨华人社区 ! Hallo deutsche und chinesische Steemit Community!

 These are the topics that I will cover in this post: 

• - Growing Up 
• - Belonging to one culture or the other 
• - Beauty Standards 
• - Chinese Language  
• - Chinese New Year 
• - Family gatherings 
• - Trips to Asia   

Growing Up

My Mom is Chinese, and my Dad is German.
I was born in Germany though. Growing up, Chinese Culture has always been a huge part of my life.  

My Chinese Grandparents fled to Germany in 1960, right before Mao took control and shut down the borders (My great-grandmother was trapped there for 30 more years).
Their story is very interesting – I could write a whole post about this story. 

But to make it short, they came to Germany with 2 kids and the 3rd one on the way, not knowing the language. For that, they are my heroes.   
My Grandparents founded a company which my Mom took over later. This was in a small town about 30mins away from Hamburg, Germany where me and my family lived.
I went to kindergarden and elementary school there, so after school I would always be at my grandparent’s house until the evening when my Mom was done with work and we would drive back home to Hamburg.

Probably the most asian-looking picture of me that you'll ever see! Yes, that's a panda on my bedroom wall, which my mum drew herself!

I loved being at my grandparents’ house. We always had chinese food for lunch, and my grandma always bought the best Asian snacks.
I can’t even name them, but whenever I walk through an Asian supermarket, I’m like a kid on Christmas day. “Oh my gosh! I remember that from back in the day! I used to eat this as a kid” is what you’d hear me say. 

Now most of you will obviously not be too familiar with german culture either, so I’ll talk about that a little bit as well: It’s probably not as strict or serious as you imagine it to be.
I had a very joyful childhood, and had lots of german friends. I almost never had any experiences with racism. My father definitely has some german core values that my Mom doesn’t – for example that you don’t do anything loud to disturb your neighbors on Sundays, that punctuality is key, that you should answer in writing when receiving an invitation and much more!     

Belonging to one culture   

Growing up, I have always felt more german than chinese. Simply because I grew up here, I spoke german all day, and my friends always made me feel like I was one of them.
My school was very multicultural anyway, so I never really felt as if I was different. 

Then my friendship group shifted, and for the first time I met people who actually thought that it was “cool” to be Asian. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that my other friends had anything against it – they were just neutral. They didn’t actively encourage me in embracing my differences.
I remember as a kid or young teenager I was always traveling to Asia with my parents, but all the “cool kids” in school were traveling to the US, so it never felt that special to me.  

But then, my new group of friends was actually interested in that, and ever since then I feel like I have embraced my chinese side more.

So right now, I can’t really tell if I feel more chinese or more german. I definitely feel more chinese than I did as a kid.    

Beauty Standards. 

Did you know that eastern beauty standards vary greatly from western ones?
For example: Being tan is considered unattractive in Asian culture. Ever wondered why those Asian tourist walk along the beach with an umbrella – now you know why! Being tan symbolizes that you are so poor that you have to work outside (as a farmer). This is what used to be the stigma and it’s still thought of this way. Instead of self-tanners, drugstores in Asia sell “whitening creams” that lighten up your skin! 

Also, big eyes and monolid-surgery are huge topics in Asian beauty – obviously, because most Asians have rather small eyes, and many of them hooded. 

Next up are feet – feet are generally considered not-clean in Asian culture, which is why you would never show your bare feet in traditional chinese culture. Also, beautiful women’s feet are supposed to be small – the smaller, the better! My Great-Grandmother actually still had her feet bound! The “Lotus Foot” is a brutal beauty ideal that was formed in china’s emperor age. Women’s feet were purposely broken and then tied together, so that they would look smaller. Obviously, this procedure was very hurtful and the women could never really walk well for the rest of their lives.   

Language   

Chinese language has a very different concept than English or german. For once obviously they won’t use an alphabet, so writing is very hard. There are also differences between traditional and simplified chinese characters. 

But what’s also very interesting is that a word can be pronounced in 4 different ways, and the pronunciation alone could change the meaning of the word!   

Learning the chinese language was quite tough for me. As a Toddler, I understood every word of chinese and also spoke, but growing up I gradually spoke less and less. After graduating from primary school, I wasn’t staying at my grandparent’s house everyday anymore, so of course that influenced me as well. 

The difficulty was also that my family is from Shanghai originally, so they speak the shanghai dialect. That is very different from Mandarin though. It doesn’t only have different pronunciations, but sometimes even completely different words so it’s hard to understand it when you only learned Mandarin and vice versa. 

So I had to visit chinese school later on where I would learn Mandarin. But being a Teenager, you don’t really want to spend 3 hours at Chinese School on Sundays when you already go to school 5 times a week, so I stopped going after about 2 years. 

And although I regret that a little bit nowadays, I also remember exactly that I had absolutely no fun in going there, so I know that I may have missed an opportunity but also know that there was a reason behind it. So afterall I don’t feel too bad about it.
I can still understand the shanghai dialect and some parts of Mandarin, although I don’t really answer or read/write, but that’s enough for basic communication and I’m happy with that.   

Chinese New Year   

If you know anything about Asian culture, you know that chinese new year (or Lunar new year, to be correct) is a huge celebration. Since most people in Asia don’t celebrate christmas or new year on the 31st of September, their biggest annual holiday is the lunar new year. This is based on the calendar of moon cycles, and appears around late January or early february.
Even in my city hamburg, the chinese association always organizes a big celebration dinner with performances, speeches and more.  Characteristic for the New Years celebration is the dragon dance, a performance where several people hide underneath a dragon costume and move so that it looks like the dragon is dancing.

 This is traditionally accompanied with drumbeats.   

Family gatherings   

The Chinese side of my family (my mother’s side) is very large. She has 4 siblings, and I have 8 cousins + my sister! As you can imagine, there was never a dull second when our family came together. And it’s always someone’s birthday or some reason to get together! 

When I was little, my grandparents still had their own chinese restaurant, so we always used to meet up there. I remember always playing outside with my cousins, inventing the funniest games, to kill time why the adults were talking about boring stuff! 

Me with my grandparents and some of my cousins (I have blurred all other faces except mine since I don't know if they want to be pubic and you can never delete a steemit post)

When our family meets up, my Grandma always pre-orders all the food. We sit at 3-4 huge round tables (8-10 persons on each table) and all the food gets put onto the spinning middle part of the table. I always loved this as a kid, because you don’t know what will come next. And very often we didn’t even know what we were eating, we just knew that it was somehow familiar to us and tasted nice.
The highlight of every meal was of course always a Beijing style duck, which I still love until today.

If any of you readers could participate in one of these family gatherings, I’m sure you would have a great time and laugh continuously. I always feel like it’s so stereotypical, that it could literally be a scene form a movie. It’s just so funny to see how my Asian grandparents talk with their chinese accent, how the main topic of the evening is food, how they always worry about us not eating enough or want to give us more of their food.. It’s hard to explain and seems like very hard to think of examples.
But it’s just the general behavior, the jokes that they make, the way they express things or tell stories – it’s just different than in a western way.  

My german side of the family is much smaller, and we don’t meet as often because my Dad’s only brother lives in Belgium. It’s not that that side of the family is particularly strict or serious as some of you might imagine when hearing the word “german”, but it’s just a totally different mentality.
Different topics, different way of expressing yourself, different food obviously, different habits. And in some ways, I guess my german side of the family is a little bit more serous.   

Trips to Asia 

I was fortunate enough to travel to Asia almost every year in spring (peak season in southeast-asia) with my parents during my childhood. 

My travels have included trips to China, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. 

Of course, my first trip to China was especially close to my heart. Experiencing chinese culture is something different than just living it in your grandparent’s house as a kid. 

Forbidden City, Beijing

Climbing the Great Wall of China was also a special event for me - I remember exactly how hot it was, and how the stairs seemed to be endlessly long!

I enjoyed it and was very fascinated, although I have to say that some communist chinese people can be quite rude and egoistic.
What touched my heart was definitely India, a huge country where poverty and wealth, joy and pain are closer next to each other than anyone else.  
My favourite has to be Thailand though, we always stopped for a few days in Bangkok before flying to any other destination. Thailand was also the destination o my very first Asia trip in 2005. The Thai people are just so incredibly kind-hearted, and I love the culture, food, and of course beautiful islands and beaches.  

Another very fascintating destination was cambodia for me, especially Angkor Wat. Seeing these enormous temples and statues, all carved in stone, and the huge roots of trees that cover them.. Simply breathtaking.

Angkor Wat

I hope you enjoyed this post, and a little tour around Asian Culture. 

Let me know if there is anything I missed, or a topic that might interest you!