I misplaced my native culture

“Cultures sit on a spectrum of directness,” said our instructor in a cross-cultural skill training session when I trained to be an international church worker a decade ago.

“On the one hand, we have indirect cultures like China, Japan, and the UK; communication tries to save face. On the other hand, we have direct cultures like Germany and the USA; communication tries to save time. East Africa, where we’ll go next week, is on the indirect side of the spectrum.”

Then the class looked at me. They know that I was very direct in my communication style, even though my native land of Hong Kong was culturally a hybrid of Britain and China, both indirect cultures.Yes, I know I didn’t fit. I was always aware that I was much more direct than my parents and grandparents to the point of being irritating. I felt quite at home in the straightforward academic culture of Cambridge, and indeed in Germany – the “direct” end of the spectrum.

“Of course, this is a great example of inherent diversity,” continues the instructor. “Not everyone fits their native culture and this is a good reminder to refrain from stereotyping people.”

I didn’t fit my native culture – or so I thought.

It was only many years after that session that I knew better. When the UK opened its borders to the citizens of the former British Hong Kong seeking a second life away from an increasingly suffocating regime, I joined a community programme meant for British locals who want to serve new arrivals from Hong Kong. I took their cultural training webinar as a joke because I was bored by covid lockdowns, thinking I already knew both cultures perfectly well after living for a decade and a half in each of them. I was proven wrong.

“Hong Kong culture is highly commercial and very direct. So don’t feel offended if they make straightforward criticism,” says the training material.

I was surprised, but podcasts that talk about Hongkongers moving abroad in recent years seem to agree with this perspective, with similar culture clashes in both Taiwan and Britain.

The best explanation I’ve come up with is that some culture shift happened in Hong Kong towards the end of the 20th century, i.e. in my parents’ early career years, when the rise of commercial culture shifted Hong Kong culture from the reserved end to the direct end of the spectrum. My family preserved an older generation’s habits so I assumed what they did was the norm, when wider culture had started shifting. And it would be reasonable for generalist cultural training material to assume Hong Kong was like Britain and China – why wouldn’t it be? It makes sense that it takes a whole generation for cultural training material to catch up with a culture shift on the ground.

What’s the moral of the story? People can change and cultures can change too. It’s okay to misunderstand, as with experience we will mellow and correct course, whether it’s because we were wrong or because the targets have moved.

My grandparents are now Christian!

Family meal in Hong Kong. Much fusion cuisine.

I bring the joyful update that two of my grandparents (my gunggung and popo) have placed their trust in Christ in the past year!

When asked for a “short” story of what converted them, I said, “There is no short version. It was 25 years of perseverance on my mother’s part.”

I helped grandma install an audio Bible when I visited her recently. She said “This sounds familiar. I’ve read it from the book.” So I asked what book it was, expecting some gospel brochure for new Christians. She pointed to a book titled something like “Good News for the elderly” and gestured she read “this much”, pinching roughly the 3/4 mark of the book.

The first 2/3 of the book was the unabridged text of Mark’s Gospel in Chinese.

She has already read an entire gospel cover to cover, plus a section of basic Bible commentary for elderly new Christians. I’ve almost forgotten that she was a star student in her teens, and I’m glad she rekindled this fervour with her Bible reading!

Praise the Lord!

My journey as an engineer

(This post was derived from a talk I gave at Magdalene College and a similar article I submitted to Tonbridge School, both of which invited me to share my professional journey recently. I’m reposting it here for wider circulation.)

The housing estate in Hong Kong where I grew up

I grew up in a housing estate in Hong Kong which sits directly on top of a railway station box and in close proximity to a former landfill which has been rehabilitated into a park. From a young age, I have been fascinated by how things work, especially the road and railway infrastructure that took me to school and back every day. As I grew up, I learnt that engineering is the university subject where science is applied quantitatively to understand how things work and to make things work. When I went to Tonbridge for sixth-form, the joys and frustrations of British railway travel confirmed my desire to study engineering so I could contribute to the infrastructure industry. So I applied to study engineering and was fortunate enough to be offered a place at Cambridge.

Dubai is a prime demonstration of what human ingenuity can do, but also warns us of the fragility of human civilisation.

My time as an undergraduate engineer in Cambridge were the most enjoyable years of my life to date. I liked the broad-based first and second year engineering course, which taught me just enough maths and science to understand how everything works in daily life, be it computers, concrete bridges, or culverts. I also had the opportunity to study German as part of my degree, which rekindled my side interest in modern languages. The collegiate system in Cambridge let me live in a close community with students from all subjects, which developed into lifelong personal and professional connections. I also took part in the Christian Union where I finally developed a full-fledged faith in the religion I was brought up in.

Looking down towards the YWAM Hopeland campus in Jinja, Uganda, 2013

Cambridge does not offer an engineering specialism on transportation, so I chose civil engineering in my third and fourth year, which was the most relevant to infrastructure design. When I completed my master of engineering degree, I decided to take a post-university gap year out of “mainstream” engineering practice and work cross-culturally as a civil engineer and language teacher for two Christian missionary organisations. My projects took me to Uganda and Kirin. These trips helped me understand the full force of civil engineering. The provision of infrastructure can connect people and build communities, but they are also inherently political as the repurposing of land will also uproot and divide other communities. I realised that moral values and scientific integrity are the most important virtues in all good engineering, and in that order. So when I came to the end of my gap year, I decided to return to the UK for a research position, so I could hone my technical skills and contribute in a greater capacity in the future.

Liverpool Street Crossrail construction site, 2016

I am currently working towards a doctorate in civil engineering and my current research project looks at what people might call a “first-world problem”. When a new basement structure, such as a railway station box, is built in London Clay, the construction process is typically complete within two years, but the contact forces between the structure and the soil keeps changing slowly for over a decade afterwards, sometimes displacing a centimeter a year for several years. Engineers must use past data to predict these delayed movements before building the structure, but the dearth of data – because buildings are typically left alone once they’re finished rather than monitored continuously for decades – led to much conservatism in the industry. My work involves using a 10-metre-diameter centrifuge to replicate this phenomenon in the laboratory, so we can make predictions using a 1-in-100 scale model and simulate a decade’s worth of movement in a day.

My centrifuge experiment

My work only provides incremental technical improvements to the wider issue of infrastructure provision. Ultimately, one needs to have clear moral values if one’s scientific contribution has political consequences. To this end, I look no further than to the Holy Bible for inspiration. Jesus said, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Infrastructure ought to build people’s lives and enfranchise disadvantaged communities by connecting them to economic and social wealth. And it is with these values in mind that I strive to contribute to society as a Christian and a civil engineer, because “unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain.”

An engineer’s guide to multiculturalism

As part of my work, I gave two presentations on cross-cultural communication to my colleagues. The first presentation was to my Engineering Excellence Group colleagues in Dartford; the second to my Future Infrastructure and Built Environment colleagues in Cambridge.

The two presentations used similar slides and I’m sharing them here for the benefit of my readers. I hope this will be a useful reference for you as you encounter people from different backgrounds in your life.

If the slides interest you in any way, please do comment or get in touch to ask me about them!

I will never be home again

Photo by Citobun / Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0

About a year ago, I wrote that multicultural people will return home to a foreign country. Their home hasn’t changed much, but they have changed a lot through their life in a different culture.

But sometimes your home does change overnight. Last month, tensions between Hong Kong’s people and an unrelenting Chinese government finally broke out with 165,000 literally occupying the streets of Hong Kong. Police used batons, shields, pepper spray, and finally tear gas to disperse crowds without success, though many left at the threat of live gunfire. Several friends texted me saying they were about to die – fortunately nobody has died as a result of the protests so far.

As the tear gas thinned out, people came back and reoccupied the motorway by the government headquarters. Three major thoroughfares of Hong Kong became probably the world’s biggest street party. A new order is established in the occupied zones with volunteers keeping order and operating “municipal services” to a standard described as the world’s politest protesters, with an absolute defiance in the face of riot police operations. Three weeks have passed and there is no sign of either government conceding anything, so the streets are now occupied for the long fight.

For better or for worse, Hong Kong will never be the same again. I will still love and identify with my family and old friends out there, and perhaps reminisce our memories together whenever and wherever we meet. And I hope that my friends and family out there, armed with a staunch adherence to non-violence in their fight for democracy, will prevail over the oppressive regime. But Hong Kong, as I once knew it, is no more.

I will never be “home” again.