The culture-related experience that I noticed during my time studying abroad had to do with one of my classmates. He was from Hong Kong which still has a very patriarchal culture, and this created some situations during our time working together where he did not respect or follow the direction of the female leaders in our group. The teammate repeatedly disrespected the team, refused to communicate, and disregarded assigned responsibilities. This made working with him incredibly difficult. The teammate also acted in this way outside of project duties and showed completely different levels of respect when comparing his actions towards the boys vs the girls.
I found this experience incredibly frustrating and discouraging. The project we were working on was semester-long, required lots of communication and research, and was our final for the global internship class. This meant there was not an opportunity to simply avoid this teammate or that the project lasted only a few weeks. His behavior shocked me in several instances, and working with him was probably the worst experience I have ever had working with another person on a group project. Overall, I found his behavior to be completely inappropriate for school and the project and found his blatant disrespect of the women in the group compared to the men shocking. I understand that his culture focuses on the patriarchy and that women may hold different roles, but his complete disrespect and refusal to communicate with members of the group was completely inappropriate and very frustrating.
Taking off my cultural glasses and looking through the eyes of someone from my host culture in the UK, I think an individual would be equally surprised at his behavior and would have wanted him to change his actions. His disrespect of the women in the group as well as his refusal to do assigned responsibilities is not appropriate for school environments in either culture, and it would equally surprise someone from the UK if they were face to face with his behavior. Overall my experience abroad working with my internship and at school were both pleasant, and I believe that any individual I interacted with during my time abroad would agree that his behavior was not respectful or appropriate even when thinking about his patriarchal cultural background.
This exercise deepens my understanding of culture and prepares me to navigate successfully in a multicultural and globalized world by giving me the opportunity to reflect on some of my experiences abroad and remember the ways I navigated working with someone from a very patriarchal society through communicating the issues with my instructor and other teammates. I believe that this student’s behavior was likely influenced by his culture, but I stand by the thoughts that someone from my host culture would have found his behavior surprising and would have acted in the same way I did to respond to his actions and get the project done. Overall, my experience abroad was a positive one and other than this one, I had very few negative cultural experiences.