As a child in preschool, the primary influences in my early life stemmed from the comfort and guidance of teachers. I remember them as being like second parents to me. I respected their judgements and conformed to their ideals and found comfort in their authority. Of course, the most significant influence was my parents. Having spent so much time with them, their behaviour was what I modeled myself after. They were the first stimuli presented to me, and thus their opinions and biases transferred onto me quite naturally. In addition, the peers in school also provided an important influence as they lay the foreground for the process of socialization and interaction among other individuals. At that period peers did not influence me in a political sense, but that process of communication, comradeship, competition, and even manipulation induced the beginning of political values.

Within my family consisting of my mother, my father, my brother and I, the authority in the household

was usually shared between my parents. The division of "power" was pretty divided, although my mother always had the "last word" on just about everything. Therefore it is even fair to say that my family is based upon that of a matrilineal system. My parents believed in sharing the tasks of household work and thus since the very beginning we have been asked to help complete chores, and assist other family members if they needed help. We never had an extremely clear division of labour. My mother would often complete the tasks often thought to be "manly" or masculine in nature, simultaneously my father would do much of the chores that were seen as feminine. Very early on, I learned that my parents worked very hard at their occupations for the benefit our family. Therefore, at a very early age, I was pushed to work hard in my academics and they saw it as an extremely important foundation for the well-being of a satisfying life ahead of me. I remember my parents were always and continue to watch numerous news programs and always exposing themselves to various newspapers and television documentaries. I take it that this is where my interest in politics and social issues derived from. I even remember this tradition of theirs of watching the nightly news in Hong Kong where I grew up until the age of six. In the preschool days of my life however, I was living in my place of birth, Hong Kong, and therefore was not exposed to Canada's customs. Whatever the situation though, or no matter how busy they seemed to be, they always reminded that whatever I wanted to achieve I ability to do.

In regards to government issues being presented in the classroom, I myself became aware of government elections and political issues in the second grade. By then, I had a heightened sense of what was going on in local politics as well as in the politics back home. I had known the reasons that my family had decided to move to Canada and those issues were of political nature, thus I had an early interest in what was going on around me.

I've always been interested

Some common words found in the essay are:
English Cantonese, Preschool Period, Adolescence I've, School Age, Adulthood Yes, Hong Kong, North American, political issues, , hong kong, school provided, significant influence, popular girl, remember parents, political party, influence political,
Approximate Word count = 1392
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)