My Chinese heritage, in brief : not much

 For a chunk of the CE 2nd millennia, China's org-chart had four layers :

• - 士 governors / upper
• - 农 farmers / cyclical
• - 工 artisans / lower 
• - 商 traders / lower

During the most egalitarian periods, class transition was facilitated by exams. Exams! Grades! But with immediate, formal, class ascension : so "academia" was important among parts of this culture.

Value systems mutated over the centuries, around economic cycles, and geopolitical events : some periods were more egalitarian, others were more oligarchic. In the 21st century, where are these, on the global scale, beyond Chinese society?

• - 商 traders / global trade development has brought most emphasis on this class of the world's citizens; esteem is reserved for the lowly masses, but respected in their approach to ascension.
• - 士 governors / law makers are subservient in many parts of the world, but it is a political age, and so they hog the limelight, without true accompanying power.
• - 工 artisans / technologists have grown in esteem as turn of the 20th/21st century has seen a small renaissance of software. (Broadly, all manufacturing entrepreneurs would fall into this category.)
• - 农 farmers / again, the global trade environment has stratified these into the haves and have-nots. On one hand, no one wants to be a servant farmer ( orange picker ), on the other, everyone wants to homestead ( do the farmergram ).

I'm ethnically Chinese, though I've never been there. Most of my life has been lived in Malaysia, just down the coast, where my fathers's family moved when he was a child. My mother's family has been here for a few generations.

My father's culture comes from a family of the 士. My mother's from a family of the 商. Most Chinese Malaysians, as diaspora were of the latter variety. My father's type results from the wars of the early 20th century.

As an anthropologist, I've made a point to circle through as many types of cultures as I can get access to. Most of the last 20 years has been focused on supplementing my orientation as 士, with knowledge about the 商, and along the way I have developed some capital as a 工.