European mutlicultural, sociocultural values and Deaf culture

Dear Jared, Tayler, Ridor, Moi and "Anonymous",

Check my response in my old post. The eleven people who sent me emails, I responded back! =) I'm terribly sorry about not being able to respond promptly. More about my week's absence in the lowermost comment below.

Anonymous pitched a strike-outable baseball into Europe's sociocultural values which knocked me out of the "America-plugged" climate. Read their comment:

You are somewhat at an advantage being a foreign exchange student. America's sociocultural values might be different than the values of your country, and your country's sociocultural values may be better regarding people who are disabled. I say this from firsthand experience and from the experiences of others who have visited the different European countries and told me this.

While I cannot say for other European countries or regions, Anonymous rightly spotted on the family-oriented affluent locale I grew up in. I was raised in a multicultural family. My papa is an Israeli Jew and my mama is an French Jew. They moved to a non-English european country (that's a secret for now) from Israel when my mama got pregnant with my big brother. My big brat and I grew up in an area where the culture and language differentiate from our already-multicultural cultures and languages. For some years, we, ultimately, learned how to cope and adapt with different languages and cultures. There were some Muslim, visually disabled and handicapped families living proximately next to us and they were way friendlier and more family-oriented than other families. I had considered them as my non-blood relatives. I knew everyone, literally, everyone resided in the locale. I was taught to be tolerant, to be empathetic and to be a receptive person. My papa had an adage, "Don't give someone a stale challah if you don't like to eat a stale challah". That was what I was accustomed to in the whole of my childhood. As a matter-of-fact, my American friends were recurrently dumbfounded by my good-natured cosmopolitan attitude and decorum every once in a while.

A few weeks ago, I was exposed to Deaf culture by this former classmate of mine, Chris, as well as by an interpreter I befriended. In the few first confrontations with Chris, I made some uncultivated mistakes but I've learned subsequently. What I experienced and stimulated culturally in the mutlicultural neighborhood was comparatively different from what I've just learned from Deaf people here and there regarding Deaf culture. Now, Anonymous is right in that I had an advantage over many people in sociocultural value areas. I hadn't had a chance to observe my conditioned stimulus response and behavior in dealing with Deaf people until Anonymous made a strikeout.

In no time, with Moi, Anonymous and others' exegesis of their seasoned (clearly) experiences, I began to comprehend the culture Deaf people grow in. Or as I sanguinely believe. Is my observation legitimate in that Deaf culture is a mutlicultural culture? Given various circumstances: ancestral, Deaf-centered/hearing-centered parental and diversified socially generation including religion and belief, D/deaf people have more identities to cultivate, to habituate and to incorporate? Or Deaf culture prevails all over other cultures?

If not for the comments by DeafRead bloggers, posters or those emails I received, I might have been at a loss with the feelings I had with the Hydrogen Bomb my best friend, Stefanie, bombarded at me. Thank you all with all my heart! Although, I have only one regretful thing about DeafRead: hearing people who are interested in Deaf culture or ASL are not aware of the DeafRead site.


As I said in the comment, I was pledged for casting in my friends' Media project. It's “WAG”, a student-level TAG Body Spray parody commerical. I figured I owed them a favor that I hadn't been able to repay so my free time was snatched by them. It took a bit more than a week of acting to finalize their first take but it isn't over. I'll cast again shortly to finish their other take. Aside from that, it was a lively week for me until last Friday, I got an injury in tennis practice. It was my right wrist. Under the sport therapist's examination, it was revealed that I had a cyst in my right carpals. That was when I found out that I'm human, in a manner of speaking. Figuratively, of course. It's operatable but I was given the limited choices: 1. if I had the operation, I might not be able to play in the games this year; 2. if the operation was postponed the condition might get worse and I would feasibly drop out in the middle of the season, most likely with another sprained wrist too if continued. I'm trying to break my university's record in tennis which is achievable considering the low amount of losses in my record, but if I opt out this year, my record will be expunged (the university record has an average fix on the amounts of games). To my own dismay, for almost 50 hours, I could not use my right hand to type or write (I'm right-handed). Life is such a shit sometimes.