Here I am. Traveling again. This time I am at the city full of history – Kyoto. I have walked A LOT today and took pictures at several sites of UNESCO World Heritage. I will post some photos later. But I’d like to share some thoughts here.
I started thinking about the definition of home, when I am away from home. Why some people would want to go to a certain place when they are tired, I meant mentally. For people like me who have moved several times in my life, I have several places I could have called as home. But if someone asks me, I will naturally called Taipei as my hometown. Why? Would it contradict my global village dream? Well, I don’t really think the ‘hometown’ identity problem would affect me much since that I think it is just a relative concept. I think it reflects a certain bound of memory in my life. I do feel that I can stay in a place other than Taipei and make it a ‘home’ – if I want to. In a good way, you can say I am easy to adapt to new environments. But in another way, one can say that I have an identity problem.
However, this brings to a new level of question. What is an identity (ethnic or social identity) and why a vague identity could be a problem, at least to someone?
A couple of days ago I was observing some social identity behavior, when I saw people were crazy in celebrating Mavericks won the NBA title or Bruins won the Stanley Cup. Really crazy. Tens of thousands of sports fans were on the street. Why do people do so? How do we make ourselves acclimated to a city or a country? What is the sense of it?
Not to mention the World Cup that can bring the people of the whole country to get involved. Although everywhere has sports fans, they are crazy on different things. I also did the same thing when I was a kid, cheering some baseball team from Taiwan won a ‘world’ game, like it was a major honor. It is an honor, so to speak, don’t get me wrong. I only found out those games were just one of the international ball games when I grew up. Suddenly I don’t feel it is a big deal anymore.
But think of it. Baseball is the major sport in the US, and countries like Japan, Taiwan, and several others, but not quite so in Europe and India.
Football is popular and a huge part of younglings in the North America, but not much people care from elsewhere. I bet the boys in most of the (larger) high school from the US will join teams of baseball/football/basketball. I would not image if there is any high school at Taiwan wants to have a football team.
Cricket is only famous in countries of former British empire, including India. I believe there are a lot of people in Taiwan (and probably so in many other countries) even never heard of this sport.
American sports fans would be angry if their National baseball or basketball team lost to others, but they would not care much if the US National team of soccer or cricket team lost.
So, what are they thinking? Can emotional fluctuation on ethnic identity be justified at different situations? Why someone can be weak on country identity, but strong in religious identity, and vise versa?
Ethnic/social identity conflicts have always been a major problem in humankind history. The conflict can be between local populations, different countries, or different religious groups. People tried hard to overcome the problems by setting out laws and regulations, or hope to improve the understanding among different ethnic groups. But it is very difficult. People would be afraid of losing identity when the communication and interactions were increased. For example, the Chinese food would not be ‘authentic’ if you tried to add cheese or milk in the cuisine. But I don’t see milk-tea hotpot (奶茶火鍋) is not that different from other hot pots. Maybe food is not a good example, since it evolves. A couple of hundred years ago there is no tomato in Europe and no chili pepper in Eurasia. It is hard to image an Italian food without tomato sauce and kim-chi without chili pepper.
People live in different countries and/or speak of different languages. It is not easy to put two people with different backgrounds, especially when they cannot talk to each other. When the communication causes problem it is not easy to integrate different ethnic groups. It is extremely difficult when dealing with the situation for people from different religions and countries. People get so sensitive when they know they are placed on different sides. I don’t have good solutions anyway, but I do hope for a better understanding among people, so that we can share the life on the earth, happily.
