My Big Fat Greek Wedding Refletion Paper

Eunhye Kim

May 18, 2016

After Watching “My Big Greek Wedding”

The movie “My Big Greek Wedding” is about the wedding between Tula, who is a Greek-American and was wearing out of fashion style and Ian who is local American white man. Even if now she is in her early thirties, her mother and father want to find a husband in hoping of sending her to Greece. At this time, she meets a perfect guy who is American. The major conflict in this movie came out after she met him. In this movie, there are a lot of cultural things that have learned in this class. For example, dominant culture, a minority group, oppression, culture difference, and collectivism. Here are the reasons why I thought of many those concepts.

First of all, this movie showed the family living in America with Greek culture, showing dominant culture and a minority group. At the start of this movie, it illustrated how this girl had grown up in America. Since this Greek family immigrated to America, the dominant culture is American culture. So, Tula was illustrated adjusting in American culture was hard, avoiding other American girls. However, her family was different. Even if they are in American, they didn’t remove their own culture, especially their house. In the movie, they lived in normal Chicago town. Whereas other houses are similar with American traditional style house, her family houses are similar with the temple of the Parthenon. Indeed, they always have their meal with Greek food. In this point, even if they are in the middle of American culture, which is a dominant culture in this movie, they have maintained their own culture in their own ways.

Second, this movie demonstrated the culture difference and cultural oppression. In the movie, Tula’s parents kept asking her to find a Greek husband. However, she met a perfect American guy who is Ian. However, the two things that Ian has made her family shocked: he is not a Greek, and is a vegetarian. So, her family required lots of things to Ian so that he gets married with Tula. They didn’t admit the culture difference between American and Greek. So, they forced to be baptized in the church to become a Greek. Indeed, when arranging a meeting between the families of the bride and the groom, Tula’s parent held a huge party with whole her family more than 20 people. But, since Ian’s parent was just expected small meeting between both of the parents, they were shocked. And Tula’s family forced Ian’s family to drink strong liquor, even if they rejected. I think those are cultural oppression, because they didn’t take American culture as it is as well as they forced to change to their own culture.