Personal Narrative: A Cultural Interview

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Pages: 4

I had a chance to learn about my friend’s, who is from Mexico, childhood when he was living in out of the country. During the interview, I was noticing many similarities and also many differences when it came to the way we were raised as a child. The person I interviewed was the same age as I am but he is in a different cultural group. Most of the things that were similar are the common things like our parents being immigrants and also had to learn a different language while learning English. He told me that growing up was very difficult for him because his parents had money problems when it came to paying for the cost of living. While I was comparing his life with mine, I noticed that he went through more hardship than I did and he used to …show more content…
He told me that his parents weren’t never home because they were always working to provide a living. Also, he said that his parents didn’t care if he had good grades but they expected him to stay out of trouble when they are not around him. Comparing to what he told me about his family to mine, it showed that I had the opposite up bring. In my household, my family raised me in a very strict environment because they were raised the same way when they were a child. They wanted me to understand what hardship they had to go through when they were young. You can see the difference when it came to the way our parents taught us by seeing the effort our parents made when taking care of us. When it came to our education, we had many differences like my parents forced me to study every day to get good grades. His parents didn’t care if he had good grades but expect him to fend for himself. The surprising similarity we have is our understanding of different language. He also mentions that his parents didn’t want to get involve with his personal life because they didn’t understand anything with the language barrier they …show more content…
My friend’s family wanted him to learn Spanish and also learn the Mexican heritage. My family wanted me to learn Tigrinya, which is one of the many languages we have in Eritrea, and they also wanted me to learn the Eritrean heritage. Both of us had to go to a school language program called ESL (English is a Second Language) which is a program that makes us stay after school so we can learn how to correct our understanding of the language. My family wanted me to understand all the mistakes they made as a kid and push me to learn another language. They didn’t understand the hardship we had to go through when we were misunderstood at school because of the problems we had at school we force ourselves to learn English and put the other languages on the back burner. For our parents, the language of their country provide them a way to communicate with us and provided a way for us for little kids to learn our cultures heritage. By the end of our interview, we learned that we had more differences than similarity but it showed us that everybody was raised in different ways. My friend also thanked me for interviewing him because he wanted to see what another person would say about his childhood and wanted to compare it with another person’s