Despite the semester being almost finished, the past week has shown to me how different my cultural background is from everyone else, and how little people know about Asian culture here. It started on Monday, when I was talking with my communications professor, and she noticed I had nearly opposite values of the other American students in the class, based on Hofstede's cultural dimensions. I then explained to her that despite being classified as "American" in the class, Hawaii is far different than the rest of the US, due to both Asian and Hawaiian having stronger collectivist values.
In my economics class, a portion of the time was discussed about relationships within Asia, and I could tell that the professor was calling on me more often than the other students, as I'm the only Asian person in my class. I actually appreciated this because I likely have the most knowledge about Asia, and it showed she respected my opinions. Finally, the other day my home stay family noticed I walk around the house barefoot, so I explained to them that it's just a reflex, and I didn't realize other cultures don't take off their shoes when they're indoors. While I didn't expect people to know much about Asian or Hawaiian culture, it was just surprising how much of my culture I had to explain this past week. Comments are closed.
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AuthorThank you for visiting my blog. The purpose of this blog is to document my time while studying abroad in Italy. Archives
December 2019
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