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After Marco Werman’s visit to our class, I got really inspired for our final project. In particular, the documentary style of his work and his interviews with people is something I want to emulate for this project.

The topic is going to surround cultural dissonance. More specifically, I want to look at how this phenomenon has affected different generations of immigrant families. Many of us may be familiar with our parents’ stories of coming to the United States and the process of assimilation that had to occur. That may even be the experience of some of the students in this class. However, there is also the next generation that has little to no connection to their heritage entirely. In my Korean language class, many people raised their hands when asked if their parents could speak the language but they could not. Even more of them said that neither they, nor their parents spoke the language. In my experience, my parents were so assimilated, or “white washed” as we often say, that I have a very weak connection to my ethnic background. And this has made it difficult to relate to some of my peers who technically come from the same background.

And as I have seen with myself, and many of my friends, we have come to really appreciate and enjoy the cultures of other people. And I wonder if there is any feasibility to the idea that we may sometimes attach ourselves to other cultures, in part, due to a lack of identifying with our own. It sounds like a fun thought experiment.