"Tiger Writing" by Gish Jen: Independence vs. Interdependence

Independence versus Interdependence
Student’s Name
Institution
Independence versus Interdependence
A fundamental difference between Eastern and Western cultures is the role of an individual in the community. While the Western culture of independence focuses more on the traits, abilities, values, and preferences that make an individual unique, the Eastern culture of interdependence stresses more on the common factors such as places, roles, duties and loyalties and tend to look at things in context. However, there are people caught in between the two opposing cultures. The best way forward for them is for to strike a balance between independence and interdependence.
The need for a balance between the principles of independence and interdependence arises in marriages between people who grew up on the opposite ends of the globe. For, example a Chinese woman gets a scholarship to pursue her higher studies in the U.S and eventually settles and gets married to an American man and they have children. Questions are bound to arise about how to raise children, what cultural beliefs and values to instill in them, and what traditions to pass on.
The parenting style of the Eastern culture “explicitly intends the humbling of the individual self in favor of the needs of the broader collective” in the aim of creating “an interdependent self, defined not by its sense of inner autonomy, but by its sensitivity to the social roles it must play depending on the context in which it finds itself” (Wesley, 2013). On the contrary, in the Western parenting style, the focus is the individual qualities of a child. Children have the freedom to make their own choices. T...