My name is Lyla, I’m a senior at Wesleyan University majoring in East Asian Studies and minoring Global Engagement Minor. As a Third Culture Kid whose parents are from New York and Karachi respectively but grew up around an international community in Bangkok, Thailand, I’m fascinated by issues of cultural identity. I myself had a fraught relationship with my own sense of cultural identity when entering college, thrust into an unfamiliar culture with people from all different backgrounds and walks of life. Throughout my life, I always found myself relying on one of my greatest interests—Music. A form of storytelling and expression that bridges cultures, music has always been a refuge for me whenever the ground beneath my feet felt unstable.
I grew up visiting my grandmother in Woodstock, NY which has a long-standing musical tradition, being the location of the titular Woodstock Music Festival of 1969. I grew up going to drum circles and concert halls, and my interest in music grew when I fell in love with the Japanese Jazz album by Yoko Kanno, composer for the famous 1999 anime Cowboy bebop. Music was a way for me to connect with my family and community across cultures, and my interest in Japanese Jazz music quickly grew into an interest in the musical culture of Japan entirely. My foreign language journey began in college, when I started taking Japanese classes hoping to one day understand the lyrics of my favorite music. However, as fate would turn out, I fell in love with my Japanese classes—not just with the wonderful experience of learning a new language and culture, but with my encouraging professors and supportive classmates.
Declaring an East Asian Studies Major, I was attracted to GEM by its incredible flexibility: it fit in perfectly with my language study, and the global coursework requirement allowed me to take classes about a myriad of cultures focused on my central interest. It allowed me to further explore my own cultural identity. I was a part of Wesleyan’s Chinese Music Ensemble, where I learned about an unfamiliar and fascinating musical tradition. I took my advisor Scott Aalgaard’s insightful class on Modern Japanese music and its impact on Japanese culture sparked my interest in Japanese History. Inspired by his class, I took a comparative history course on Japan and German political systems after World War II. Finally, in an effort to deepen my understanding of my mother’s culture, I took Intermediate Hindi-Urdu, which gave me wonderfully unique opportunities to reconnect with family members in Pakistan.
This portfolio is a showcase of my navigation through the Global Engagement minor. My time at Wesleyan afforded me the opportunity to study my interests of Japan and Music through an interdisciplinary lens, and I’ve presented what I’ve learned and found fascinating here in the E-portfolio, in addition to my personal reflections and revelations on notions of cultural identity and belonging.
hrough learning about other cultures, my once fraught cultural identity has slowly solidified. My study abroad in Kyoto the spring of 2024, as well as my study with CLS (Critical Language Scholarship) in Okayama the summer of 2024, both indirectly taught me what it means to me to be an American. I will take the experiences I’ve gained from the GEM minor, as well as the personal revelations it has afforded me, forward on my journey to being an interculturally competent global citizen.
