Personal Narrative: Cultural Experience

I am an American citizen and I have been living overseas for more than 26 years (over half of my life). I am currently the Head of Upper Primary Department in the U.K. managed Bell department of a well-known school in Bangkok, Thailand. I thrive in this educational management role and I thoroughly enjoy the school and everything about it. At nearly 52 years of age, I often wonder how I got to where I am now. After all, being a teacher is not a career that most people would consider a ‘dream job’, but it is for me. I’ve lived through two other careers based in six different countries to be where I am now and each of those careers and countries had a profound cultural impact on my life. Even though my previous careers were upper middle class

Reflecting on the cultural experience of Australia, I realize that the local people that I interacted with really enjoyed experiencing me as an American as much as I enjoyed experiencing them as Australians. This experience was actually more like dipping my toes in the water before diving into the pool. After all, the Australians that I met were mostly upper middle class, Christian, Caucasians like myself. The more prominent cultural experiences happened when I was recruited by a German trading company as general manager in charge of establishing an Asian headquarters in Hong Kong. I was ready to dive head-first into the Asian culture. I had a three month holiday before starting my new career in Hong Kong, so I left Australia and travelled through the South East Asian countries of Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. The region was a virtual explosion of cultural phenomena. There were foods that I had never tasted, odors I had never smelled and languages that I had never heard before in each country. By the time I reached Thailand from Malaysia, I realized that I would have to separate myself from the hordes of other tourists that flowed through these countries in order to truly immerse myself in the culture. So I took a train to Nong Kai where I rented an off-road motorcycle in

I didn’t even speak the dominant language anymore and simple communication was always a challenge. One day, I followed an off road trail that led to a remote village. The reception I received when I rode into the village was overwhelming. Children ran up to me laughing and saying “Hello”. People all around were smiling and friendly. Communication was challenging, but I had a phrase book that helped. They very quickly offered me food and beverages and would not let me pay for anything. They invited me to diner and I even spent the night in one of the family’s home. It was an experience I will never forget. Culturally, it was beyond my comprehension how these people were so happy yet so very poor. Looking back on that experience, I wonder how much of a factor my age played in receiving such a warm welcome. It’s easy to welcome a young man out seeking adventure, but how would they respond to a more mature man in the same situation? I’ll never know the answer to that question because it’s not an experience I would like to try and recreate at this age. After all, I got food poisoning several times, suffered severe dehydration, and got malaria-like symptoms from a daytime mosquito bite during that three month