The life of Jie Zou

The life of Jie Zou

MY Now

Personal event 2

Event 1(Macro.):

Chinese Cultural Revolution

Event 1 (Micro):Middle School

Personal event 5

My Birth

I am in the young adulthood developmental stage in the human lifespan, which is defined as between the ages of 21 to 40. According to Erikson’s psychosocial stages, this stage focuses on the conflict of intimacy versus isolation. In this stage, people establish intimate relationships without worrying about losing their identities, which mostly reflects my life. I am living in a nuclear family currently in which my husband and I raise our child on our own. In order to land a job, I attend college and send our child to daycare. My husband’s working incomes support our whole family.

I would put myself in the identity achievement category in terms of Marcia’s approach to identity development, because I clearly know my priorities in my life and what I want to be. I have a strong commitment to my beliefs and values, which are honesty, dedication, gratitude, justice, freedom and equality. My experience in China lead me to this stage which involved working as a journalist for four years and as a college lecturer for eight years. My experience made me know what the purpose of life is and how I should be living the rest of my life.

My dream is to reunite with my parents in the US in the future. My parents are living in China right now. I am the only child for them so I have the responsibility to take care of them when they are old. My parents want to live with me in the future, although they would have to adapt themselves to the new language and living environment. I wish I could afford a big house for my family after landing a high-paid job.

I first became a parent at the age of 34. It was the intimacy versus isolation stage in terms of the Erikson’s theory. A mother had a natural intimate relationship with her children. My family was thrilled when my husband and my parents knew I was pregnant. From then on, my priority changed on a cellular level. I began to read parenting books, decorate the nursery room as well as change my lifestyle. I stopped drinking my favorite tea and eating sugary snacks; ate organic vegetables and fruits, did soft exercise every day such as yoga or walking at least 20 minutes, and went to sleep at 8pm every evening. My cognition on parenting and nutrition had developed at this time. I expected a new era—motherhood entering my life.

When I graduated from college, I was one of the two students in our major who was directly sent to graduate school at a prestigious university in the capital. I was stunned and excited by all I saw and experienced on campus. Although I was 23 years old, I did not have experience living in a modernized city, and had conversations with prestigious professors who were the authors of the textbooks. From the college education, I developed dialectical thought and postformal thought in cognition and emotion. I knew most of the things could not be simplified as right or wrong, white or black. There existed a grey area. In addition, I developed social abilities and built good relationship with my roommates and peers.

When I was 13 years old, I was admitted to the most prestigious school in my hometown and received my middle school and high school education there. Then I was admitted into college. During the six years at the school, I greatly developed my cognition and my emotional and social skills. I began to make friends who have become lifetime friends, be exposed to all subjects such as science, math, language and liberal arts, absorbed tremendous nutrition and prepared me to be an all-round person. This event was an age-graded influence because it was a scenario in my education journey, and impacted the people who were the same age as me. I selected this event because without receiving the best education at the school, I possibly could not pass the national higher education entrance examination (also called Gaokao) and earned an opportunity to attend college.

The event happened before my birth. Although the event did not directly relate to me, it built my parents’ educational philosophy. My parents were at the age of 13 at that time. When my parents graduated from elementary school, they were required to torture themselves at the countryside and experience the miserable life with farmers. Both of my parents spent 6 years in the villages and were deprived of the precious educational opportunities while still teenagers. When they came back to the city, they inherited the jobs from their parents. When I was very young, my mom always educated me about the importance of education and told me education was the only path to change the future. She wanted what she had lost in her life to make up in my life, so she invested all her energy and income in my education.

Personal event 4

I was born in a traditional Chinese family. My mom did not feel any discomfort during her pregnancy. She worked in a department store and carried or lifted the heavy boxes as if she was not pregnant. Although my parents lived in the downtown of a city, they did not have any transportation available at that time. My mom walked to the nearby hospital with my dad to prepare for the labor. I was natural birth like most children born at that time because anesthesia was not available in China those days. The labor was so smooth that after about 12 hours of being hospitalized, the next morning at 9:37 am I came out. My mom had stitches without anesthesia. I was pretty healthy with a weight of nearly 8 pounds.

I immigrated to the United States from China at the age of 34. My husband had studied and worked in the United States for ten years. I gave up my decent job in China and came to reunite with him. It is a brand new living environment for me. I had to adapt myself to the new culture, new language, new house, and new relationship in my family. However, I was positive and confident for I believed I could handle them. At first, I prepared to be a homemaker having many children. After one year of being a homemaker, I found it was hard for me to adjust to an idle day from an intense day in China, so I went back to school and wanted to work in the healthcare in the future. I greatly improved my English language skills, was more rational, prudent and humble. This was a non-normative influence because I never imagined I would settle down in the United States one day and spend the rest of my life there. I selected this event because it changed the direction of my initial life trajectory.

1990

2006

2010

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2017

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2014

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1978

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1980

Event 2(Micro)

Personal event 3

Personal Event 1

Event 2 (Macro):

One-Child Policy

Event 3 (Micro): Occupational cycle

When I was a senior in high school, my mom lost her job due to the economic reform in China. My dad became the sole breadwinner in my family, but his income could not support the whole family’s expenses and my education. Therefore, my dad left his job and started his own plumbing business. The business was tough at the beginning of two years, my mom often fought with him at home about money. I experienced role confusion instead of identity because I blamed myself for I could not do anything to improve my family’s economic situation. I was depressed and suffered high pressure both from family and school. I became more introverted and unconfident. Eventually, I did not get a high score on the national higher education entrance examination and failed to attend my dream college.

My Death

When I was 10 years old, my menstrual period had come. I did not know anything about it. I still clearly remember, after school I found my shirt was marred. I was teased and laughed at by my peers on the way back home because I was the first person in my school who had menarche. At the same time, I had a serious abdominal pain along with the period. However, I had to complete plenty of homework and went to school regularly. I was afraid to go to school and was in a slight depression. I began to hate myself and my self-esteem had dropped to a historical low point. My mom comforted me that a period was the fate of females. My menarche lasted for 21 days filled with my discomfort, tears, shame and guilt. I was isolated from my peers after that. I did not feel any guilt until 3 years later, when I met a nice biology teacher in my middle school. She explained the period to me and said I should be proud of myself because I had been blessed to be capable of being a mother.

I began my world trip when I turned 30 which indicated Warner Schaie’s developmental stage of achieving period. In this period, people use their intellectual abilities to choose a lifestyle. I found I had spent much time on the exhausting work, but did not reward myself in life. Due to my news work, I had been to most of the provinces in China, so I decided to go overseas to visit foreign countries and people living there. Within 3 years, I had been to 7 foreign countries include Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam in Asia and the United Kingdom, Austria and Switzerland in Europe. These trips used up most of my savings, but they enriched my thoughts with knowledge outside of books. I was so shocked that people led a completely different lifestyle in exotic nations.

When I was born, China had a policy of executing one child per couple for two years. All couples were allowed at most to have one child except if one child died or was disabled. If the couple wanted to have a second child, they would lose their official and decent jobs, be fined a huge amount of money and even be put in jail. An official job means a reliable and stable income, health insurance and other benefits. After being fired for that reason, the mom could not get any job because everyone worked for the government. However, the birth control policy had little effect on the peasants living in villages, because most of them were living in poverty and had nothing to lose. They survived on the products growing on their land. They still gave birth to a large number of undocumented children to supply labor. When I was five years old, I felt lonely and wanted another child in the family to play with. My mom told me, they could not have any more babies. In order to obey the policy, my mom had two abortions when the birth control method failed.

When I graduated from college, I landed a job at a local TV station as a news reporter. I also was an adjunct lecturer at a journalism school of a college. This was the beginning of my occupational cycle. I pursued my work full of ardor and aspiration. Through contacting and communicating with different social classes and witnessing many hilarious or tragic events, my introverted personality turned to open-minded, easy-going and extraverted. Daniel Goleman thought there were four aspects of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, managing emotion, reading emotion and handling relationship. The four aspects of my emotional intelligence had been improved through interviewing and talking with people in different socioeconomic status. For example, I built an extensive network with most of my interviewees; I could read people’s emotion, personalities, minds and status through their appearance and talking; I helped out lots of ordinary people who were suffering, by writing their stories to get public attention and contacting the local officers to solve their problems.

I will turn 80 and became an octogenarian in the year of 2060. I will be in the older adulthood, which begins at 65 years old. My physical status will became frail; I become shorter and will not be able to keep my balance, so I may need a walking stick. I will also have poor vision, so I will need to wear eyeglasses, while reading or watching TV. I will need the help of my children or grandchildren to thread a needle, when I do sewing because I have lost my visual acuity. I will have some sleeping problems, as well. I do not think I will have serious health problems, which might force me to take prescriptions daily because I have kept a healthy lifestyle during my middle adulthood. My working and episodic long-term memory will decline, so I may hardly recollect the information that happened in my past and process the information I am experiencing. My abilities including the numeric and verbal ability, perceptual speed, spatial orientation and inductive reasoning will decline. This is the natural and universal aging for everyone.