Thoughts on the Chinese Cultural Exchange

For me going into a discussion on popular music is nothing short of terrifying. The reason for that is simply put I have no experience in what is popular music. I don’t listen to the radio and the majority of the music I listen too is what I randomly find on internet sites like youtube, my old high school website (yay to Scottish pipe bands), and imeem (which no longer exists) or from an online game I play (well school kind of stops that) called osu!.



So after going into this discussion my worries were further spurred by questions like ‘what is current popular music’ and ‘what is the folk music of this area like’. However the class’s responses made me realize that America has no real definition for this since we all come from different cultures. After getting over my initial disappointment that I’m not as much of a nut that I think I am I began to think why we lack such a regional culture. China is just as big as the USA if not larger and has a much larger population. So why would they have set cultural songs for their different areas while the United States does not.

So after some thinking I came to the decision that it really relates to our family structure. Coming from a family in which I am literally the only child (I have no cousins on my mother’s side and well we don’t know what happened to my relatives on my father’s side) I tend to value the extend family less than the immediate family and am willing to explore opportunities far off. However from what I’ve heard about more Eastern oriented families there is a very high value placed on the family and such members are less likely to leave their place of birth as much as us Westerns.

This concentration of families in turn leads to concentration of cultures not seen in Western cultures. Thus I believe this is the reason why we have much less of a set cultural identity for each of our regions.