Leading with Cultural Intelligence, 2012a
Leading with Cultural Intelligence, 2012a
Leading with Cultural Intelligence, 2012a
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Chapter 2<br />
Understanding Culture<br />
When my parents came to the United States in 1979, their world became vastly different than what<br />
they had known. Before their arrival, they lived in a small hilltop, tribal village in the mountains of<br />
Laos, like many of their ancestors before them. They had the simplest tools for doing their work and<br />
for living their lives. The natural world provided everything they needed. If they wanted to use the<br />
bathroom, they went outside—not to an outhouse but to the woods. When they were hungry, they<br />
cooked the meal in a pot over a large fire pit. When relatives asked them to attend celebrations and<br />
notified them that the celebration meal would begin sometime when the sun was to set, my parents<br />
knew that the path of the sun would let them know when they should leave their house.<br />
There were a lot of assumptions my parents made about their world. When they had to relocate to<br />
the United States, they found out how different their assumptions were when they were tested in an<br />
environment that contradicted their ways of being. They were not aware of a different way of living<br />
their lives, because the norms that shaped their lives influenced their actions and behaviors. The<br />
norms helped them to learn that what they did was the correct way to live.<br />
One of their most difficult challenges was to unlearn what they knew in a different context and <strong>with</strong><br />
different materials and tools that they did not have before. What naturally occurred was a process of<br />
culture shock and then a period of acculturation. When my parents’ sponsors showed them how to<br />
use the toilet by gesturing what to do and how to flush, my parents were embarrassed. Coming from<br />
a culture where modesty is important, they did not know how to respond to the American sponsor’s<br />
gestures, yet their embarrassment quickly turned into fascination when they saw how a toilet could<br />
dispose of materials.<br />
Interpreting body language became a critical piece of adaptation and learning. My parents found the<br />
exaggerated gestures of their sponsors turning on and off the stove “different.” But it was paying<br />
attention to the facial gestures and body language that helped them to understand how to operate a<br />
stove. They realized certain things were the same across cultures: taking out a pot to boil water,<br />
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