When Culture And Tradition Are Abandoned
When culture and tradition fall away, we like to imagine we become freer, lighter, more “ourselves”. But what actually happens in the quiet is more complicated. This essay looks at what is lost, what is quietly smuggled into the future, and what we become when we no longer have a script to follow.
There is a certain pride now in saying, “I am not really into tradition.” It sounds modern, independent, self‑made. We imagine ourselves as clean slates, choosing everything from scratch: our values, our rituals, our relationships, our beliefs.
But culture and tradition do not disappear just because we stop naming them. When we abandon them, something else rushes in to fill the gap. The question is not whether we have culture, but whose culture we are quietly living inside.
As a South African‑born Chinese, third generation, I have watched this play out in small, ordinary ways. The language that slips. The festivals that become optional. The recipes that no one bothers to learn. The stories that are “too much effort” to tell. The slow, almost invisible thinning of something that once held us together.
When culture and tradition are abandoned, what are we then? Freer? Or just unmoored?
The weight of what we inherit
Culture is not just lion dances, red envelopes, braais, or national holidays. It is the way people greet each other. The way they argue. The way they show love without saying the word. The way they handle shame, success, illness, death.
Tradition is not just the big rituals. It is the small, repeated acts that tell you who you are and where you fit.
In many families, especially in diaspora, culture arrives as a mixed bag:
Some of it is beautiful: hospitality, respect for elders, care for children, a sense of responsibility to more than just yourself.
Some of it is heavy: rigid gender roles, silence around mental health, pressure to perform, fear of “losing face”.
It makes sense that people want to put some of it down. No one wants to carry rules that hurt them. No one wants to repeat patterns that kept their parents small.
But when we throw everything into the same bin marked “old‑fashioned”, we lose more than we realise.
The slow fade
Culture rarely disappears in one dramatic moment. It fades.
First, we stop insisting on certain things. The language at home shifts to English because it is easier. The traditional holiday becomes a casual meal. The old stories are “too long” for children who are already tired from school and screens.
Then we stop explaining. We do the ritual, but no one knows why. We light the incense, but cannot say what it means. We cook the dish, but the story behind it is gone.
Finally, we stop bothering. It feels like performance. It feels like work. It feels like something that belongs to another generation.
In its place, we adopt whatever is around us: Western holidays, global internet culture, whatever is trending. We know more about fictional characters than about our own grandparents. We can quote memes but not proverbs.
None of this is evil. It is just easy. And ease is seductive.
What we think we are choosing
When we step away from culture and tradition, we often tell ourselves a story: “I am choosing myself.”
We say:
I do not want to be bound by old rules.
I want to decide what family means.
I want to raise my children differently.
I want to be free.
There is truth in that. Some traditions are genuinely harmful. Some cultures have never made space for people like us to breathe. Questioning them is not betrayal. It is survival.
But “choosing yourself” is not the same as choosing nothing. You are still shaped by something. If it is not your grandparents’ stories, it might be advertising. If it is not your community’s expectations, it might be the algorithm’s.
We trade one script for another. The new one just comes with better branding.
The quiet grief
There is a grief that comes with realising you cannot fully access the world your grandparents came from.
You visit the “old country” and cannot speak properly. You stand in a temple or a church or a family home and feel like a guest. You hear relatives talk and catch only every third word. You laugh when everyone else laughs, hoping you have understood the joke.
Back home, you are also slightly out of place. Too Chinese to be simply South African. Too South African to be simply Chinese. Too Western for some, too “ethnic” for others.
In that in‑between, it can feel easier to let go of culture altogether. To say, “None of this is mine. I will just be… me.”
But the grief does not go away. It just goes underground. It shows up as:
Embarrassment when you mispronounce a word in your “own” language.
Awkwardness when someone asks about your heritage and you have nothing to say.
A strange ache when you see other people who seem rooted in something you cannot quite touch.
We do not always name this as grief. We call it “not being that into culture”. But the body knows.
What replaces what we abandon
When we stop practising our own traditions, we do not become neutral. We become available.
Available to:
Consumer culture, which is very happy to sell us identity in the form of products.
Nationalism, which offers a simple story about who we are and who we are not.
Online communities, which can feel like home but are often fragile and fickle.
We start to measure ourselves by:
Productivity instead of character.
Aesthetic instead of depth.
Performance instead of presence.
Without older anchors, we drift towards whatever is loudest and most rewarded.
This does not mean we must cling to every old custom. It does mean we should be honest about what is shaping us now.
Choosing what to keep
The alternative to blind loyalty is not total abandonment. It is discernment.
We can ask, honestly:
Which traditions make me feel more human, more connected, more grounded?
Which ones crush me, shame me, or erase parts of me?
Which practices help me remember I am part of something bigger than myself?
Which beliefs keep me small or afraid?
From there, we can choose.
We might keep:
Cooking certain dishes on certain days.
Greeting elders in a particular way.
Telling family stories at gatherings.
Marking births, deaths and marriages with rituals that feel meaningful.
We might let go of:
Silence around abuse.
Expectations that only sons matter.
Rules that punish people for who they love.
Ideas that mental illness is weakness.
This is not a neat process. It will upset someone. It will confuse others. It will sometimes confuse you.
But it is better than pretending that abandoning everything is automatically progress.
Becoming something new
When culture and tradition are abandoned, we do not become blank. We become something new, whether we admit it or not.
We become:
People who can move between worlds, even if we stumble.
People who can see the cracks in both “old ways” and “modern life”.
People who can choose rituals that match our values, not just our history.
People who can create new traditions that honour where we come from without repeating all its harm.
Maybe that looks like:
A Chinese‑South African table where dumplings sit next to chakalaka.
A family WhatsApp group where elders send blessings and younger ones send memes.
A home where ancestors are remembered and therapy is normal.
A life where you light incense and also light up group chats about politics, art, or football.
We are allowed to be inconsistent while we figure it out. We are allowed to be learning.
What are we then?
So when culture and tradition are abandoned, what are we then?
If we abandon them thoughtlessly, we risk becoming whatever the loudest voice around us wants us to be. We become easy to market to, easy to move, easy to forget.
If we abandon what harms and keep what roots us, we become something else:
Heirs who are not trapped by inheritance.
Children who can bless and critique their parents in the same breath.
Ancestors‑in‑training who are trying, clumsily, to leave something kinder behind.
We are not pure anything. Not fully “traditional”, not fully “modern”, not fully one culture or another.
We are the messy middle. The experiment. The bridge.
Maybe that is enough.
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