My Cultural Autobiography: What Really Defines my Life

Multicultural Literature
Final Exam Assignment: The Personal Essay – A Cultural Autobiography (5-7 pages)
Consider all of the texts from this year. Despite their differences, they all have one major theme in common: Culture & Identity.
Throughout our studies of all of these texts, we have analyzed the effect that culture (and micro-cultures) has on one’s sense of
identity. Throughout the year, you have been invited to explore your own sense of culture and identity. This is your opportunity to put it
all together into your personal cultural autobiography.
This assignment is broken into a four-step process below.
Step 1: Ask yourself some questions
What should you think about when designing a reflective, self-analytic story of your “total way of life” and the experiences that have
shaped who you are? It’s a pretty tall order, so let’s begin with the basics. First, go through and provide answers to some of the primary
micro-culture categories:
• Age
• Gender
• Race
• Language
 Ethnicity
• Religion
• Socioeconomic status
• Gender/Sexual orientation
• Exceptionality (mentally/physically disabled or gifted)
• Geography
Examine the subgroups and your roles within them, in relation to each micro-culture. The subgroups, are where you fall in the micro-
culture. For example, in socioeconomic status it refers to underclass, middle class, upper class or somewhere in between. For race it
refers to Caucasian, Asian, Hispanic and more. Ethnicity, on the other hand, refers to where a person is from: Africa, Latin America,
Asia, Eastern Europe, Central Europe or elsewhere. Geography refers to the region or environment a person is from like mountains or
the ocean. For example, a Caucasian male would fall into the dominant subgroup in both race and gender but if that same man spoke
only Gaelic in the United States, his experiences would be much different than someone who spoke only English or was multilingual.
Once you have this basic list, you want to begin to consider other elements of your experience and environment that are not usually
measured as statistics.
• Where did you grow up?
• Where did you go to school?
• Who was/is in your family?
• Who are your friends?
• What are some of your favorite places?
• What was the most important/saddest/happiest moment of your life?
• In what ways has your culture been taught to you?
• What objects or artifacts are or have been important to you?
• What was your first job?
• How would you describe your style?
• What’s your native language?
• When did you learn to read/write?
• What’s your career goal?
• How would you define success?
Consider how your experiences within the cultural subgroups that you inhabit have shaped your personality and identity in relation to
others in your life who may fall into different cultural subgroups. For example, the only girl in a family with six brothers will have a
different societal and cultural outlook from another female, who falls into all the same subgroups but grew up an only child or with
sisters.
Step 2: Turn your answers into a companion narrative:
Try to consider the stories that accompany your answers. Then, choose one experience that stands out to you as meaningful in terms
of who you are today. Or, you may choose many experiences/stories. You have the choice to write about one experience in detail, or,
about many experiences that make up a chronological timeline of your life.
Step 3: Organize your ideas:
Once you decide what you will write about, create a rough outline as a way to organize your paper. Write out your ideas and put them
in the order you want to say them. Also, think about how you would like to introduce the essay and how you would like to conclude it –
you can always write the introduction and conclusion after you write and organize the paper.
Step 4: Write your essay:
As you tell the story, reflect on how the experience has shaped how you value and evaluate the world around you, as well as how it has
shaped your thinking and your behavior. In other words, how was this experience important to you both as an individual and as the
member of a cultural community? Ultimately, you should present a paper that explores who you are and why – what do you think are
the opinions, beliefs, assumptions, stereotypes, and biases that serve to form you and your opinions, and, even more importantly,
where do you think they come from? You do not need to answer ALL of these questions in your final essay; rather, they are areas you
may choose to explore.
To write your paper the writer should give answers to very personal questions about you.
• Age :18
• Gender : Male
• Race : Chinese
• Language: Chinese
● Ethnicity : Chinese
• Religion: None, but I study in Catholic school
• Socioeconomic status : Mid class
• Gender/Sexual orientation: Normal
• Exceptionality (mentally/physically disabled or gifted) : mentally and physically strong, because I play boxing and fight every day
• Geography
• Where did you grow up? China
• Where did you go to school? River Grove, Illinois, U.S.A
• Who was/is in your family? father, mother
• Who are your friends? My best friend Percy, he's a really disciplined person interested in computer science and informatics
• What are some of your favorite places? None
• What was the most important/saddest/happiest moment of your life? saddest: I didn't obtain a good grade record in the American school, even I study really hard. Happiest: None. The most important: None
• In what ways has your culture been taught to you? respect, politeness, and kindness
• What was your first job? Never work
• What’s your native language? Chinese
• When did you learn to read/write? started learning English during 7th grade, middle school
• What’s your career goal? 1. work in government and involve policymaking 2. Lawyer