Multiculturalism Interview 1

Multiculturalism Interview:

Catholic Asian American Woman

Nicholas Hinh

PSYCH 401 017

Andrea Belgrade

April 21, 2021

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One of the things I was most curious about was how multiculturalism was reflected in the

workplace since I am still a student and I don’t have that experience full time. I think that the

workplace is a fairly representative place of communities that adults and young adults partake in

for a decent portion of their daily lives. I also think that it’s a very important place to

acknowledge multiculturalism because it can be very influential on how employees can see each

other in that environment. The company can choose to hire employees who represent a small

fraction of the multicultural space as well as embracing different cultures in their policies and

beliefs, or they can choose not to. I think the workplace has a lot of potential in influencing a

great population which can then reach more people. Because of this, I primarily focused my

interview about multiculturalism on the subject’s experiences in the workplace. With regards to

the interview, we will also be looking at how the concepts of compartmentalization, assimilation

idea of model minority, intersectionality, distance, and conflict all tie in with the story the subject

paints. The narrative given will create a story around the information the interviewee has given,

and it will address these concepts as the story is created.

The subject I interviewed was a friend of mine who I went to University with before I

transferred to the University of Michigan. Starting off the interview, I asked what she thought

was the definition of multiculturalism and gave her my description as well. She replied saying

that things such as gender or even hobbies could be considered a type of culture, but it made

sense that it can be. After getting a sense of the definition of what cultures can be, I asked what

kind of cultures she identifies with. She stated that she most identifies with being Vietnamese,

Catholic, and modern culture. Her definition of modern culture is just our first world life as

opposed to the Amish and third world country lifestyle. I thought it was strange at first that

modern can be something that we can even classify as a culture, but it makes sense that it can be
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a culture. Our daily life can be drastically different from others who aren’t from such an affluent

country. This can be a kind of socioeconomic culture that can divide us, and we’re not even too

aware of it. While we didn’t address this too much during our class, it’s important to remember

that the idea of culture can extend to people of different classes as well. While there are daily

routines that we do without thinking, we have to remember that not everyone has the same

luxury.

Going back to the kinds of culture my interview subject identifies with, I asked if there

are conflicts based on any of her identities. I asked this on the basis of her Catholic faith because

I know it can be subject to a lot of criticism as most religions are. She responded by saying there

isn’t too much conflict between her cultures she identifies with because she has accepted and is

in harmony with them all, but she did state some points about how others view her cultures. The

idea of conflict is when her cultures clash with others’ different cultures which causes problems

to arise. This can be in the form of not being able to empathize and not understanding each

others’ perspectives. She states that others of differing faiths can be potential grounds for

conflict. They mostly respect her faith and her decisions, but the main problem is that they don’t

completely understand her faith and make assumptions about what she believes based on it. She

says that the conflict derives from others labeling her a certain way while her beliefs aren’t

exactly as how they labeled it. Lastly, she states that in the professional world, there isn’t much

discussion about religion and beliefs in general, so it’s hard for people to be educated and

understand better. It’s reasonable that people want to avoid issues in the professional world for

the sake of just getting their work done in an ideal manner, so that’s why I think at this point, the

problem is a little bit too late to fix. This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to fix at this stage, but

it would be much easier if this were to be addressed at an earlier point in time.

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Continuing with the interview, I asked if association with certain identities can give a

positive or negative effect. Since we both grew up in a fairly diverse area that didn’t discriminate

against Asians, I expected her response to follow fairly in line with what I experienced as well.

She stated that she hasn’t ever really felt any negative effects because of the cultures that she

identified with. Overall, she said it was a neutral to positive experience in terms of interacting

with people of other cultures. In her workplace, the company employs a lot of women so in terms

of the common issue of unequal treatment of men and women in the workplace, it doesn’t seem

to be an issue where she works specifically. She also didn’t see any conflict among her identities

and her coworkers.

Since I have asked about the Catholic and gender part of her culture, I now asked about

how her views of being Asian is now in the workplace compared to the idea of a model minority

of Asians in academics. She stated that it’s fairly different in her workplace since it’s very

specific what she does. In her group, they primarily consist of IT recruiters who also recruit a lot

of international candidates of whom the majority are Indian. This means that the Indian workers

are the ones who typically do better than individuals who aren’t Indian. She attributed this effect

to a kind of cultural connection a bit like how we learned about ingroups and outgroups. She

added that a reason why the Indians do better is they can relate more to the candidates when they

say they need to have a visa to travel to America to work. Her coworkers have family who also

needed visas to go to America, and thus they can share similar stories of the process of moving

to the US. Because of their similarities, they can feel like they trust each other more and thus do

a better job. This definitely makes sense because of what we learned about ingroups and

outgroups. The Indians share the same ingroup and thus view more positive traits about each

other. They see the positive traits and attribute feelings of trust into each other to give each other
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good treatment. It’s interesting to see how the idea of a model minority breaks down in scenarios

like this where it no longer really applies. A broad sense of what the model minority is the idea

of Asian excelling in academics and work while being the minority race in America. Since the

trend of Asians doing well in school was only limited in that sense, the model minority no longer

holds up. In this case, I don’t think the model minority shifted to a different race. The Indians do

well at this job because of their association with others of the same ingroup and not necessarily

because of a track record of doing well in general. The model minority arose from the pattern in

Asians doing well in academics and work, but that only holds up in areas where that idea is

prevalent. In my interview subject’s workplace, that idea is no longer supported because of the

specifics of the job.

Regarding her workplace, I also asked about groups in the workplace and how they are

different or similar compared to an academic setting. I brought up examples of cliques in school.

In school, there are typical groups such as the drama kids, the ones who participated in sports,

and the ones who were too busy in their studies to be bothered with other things. She replied that

a big part of groups where she works was based on the age groups of the employees as well as

when they joined the company. Typically, the people who joined the company at similar times

formed groups with each other and stayed with each other more. Another group she pointed out

was the working mom group. Since they had families and children, they were able to chat about

their children since they had similarities in that aspect. A group similar to the school groups was

a sports club, namely a golf club. While she didn’t specify it, it seems like there would be a fair

amount of distance between the groups mentioned. In this case, distance can be defined as the

lack of communication and association with people of different cultures or groups. From

previous knowledge about those kinds of groups, they tend to spend time with each other outside
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of the activities that bring them together as well. They usually don’t communicate with people

outside of their groups too often on a more casual level thus increasing the distance felt between

people of different groups. While people of different cultures can be in the groups, it wasn’t clear

if that was the case based on the information the interviewee gave. These kinds of groups can be

both beneficial and detrimental to embracing multiculturalism because it can bring people of

different backgrounds together, but it can also cause separation for people who only stick to

others in their ingroup. As with anything, moderation is key. I also think that it’s quite important

for people to find others they can keep close to their side, so this is a lot more complicated than it

seems at first glance.

The next thing I discussed with my interviewee was about intersectionality. First, I gave

her the definition of intersectionality where it’s defined as a kind of new culture based on the

combination of multiple cultures the person has. While someone can be part of two different

cultures considered to be part of the minority in America, having a combination of the two can

result in others judging them differently. She brought up that the only thing that she can really

think about in her life was being both Asian and a woman. In the past, she never really thought

about the two together since that has never had an impact on what she did. She actually feels

very proud of her identity and can’t feel that both her identity as a woman and Asian were

attacked. She did bring up the recent news about Asian racism due to the pandemic. There has

been a lot of news about Asian women being attacked on the streets and in public areas for

seemingly no reason other than racial hate. My interviewee stated being a lot more scared about

going outdoors for that reason now that the restrictions on Covid have lifted a bit due to the

vaccine being distributed. Comparing this to my own views on the Asian racism, I still feel

scared, but I don’t think nearly as much as how my interviewee is since I’m a man compared to
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her being a woman. The intersectionality is really present here comparing how being both Asian

and women feeds more fear of being attacked as opposed to not having that intersectionality.

After these questions, I asked a final question of what strategies she had for adopting

biculturalism. I made sure she knew what I meant by that before continuing. She said that there

are certain sides of herself that she shows depending on who she is interacting with. If she is

interacting with her family, she displays her Vietnamese side more by, for example, speaking

Vietnamese to her parents. In her workplace, she displays a more American and professional side

that is far from the Vietnamese side she “uses” at home with her family. She even mentioned that

she even feels a bit of pressure to buy food from her work to try and be more like them. While

she didn’t mention this, it might be to feel a bit more American because she wants to show that

side of her in a professional space. When she’s with her friends, she feels more comfortable

showing a more blended kind of culture where it doesn’t have to be strictly American or

Vienamese. Since I know a few of our mutual friends, most of us are also biculturals who

understand how it feels to be part of more than one culture which makes it much easier to share

both our American and other cultures with each other knowing that we all understand each other

in that aspect. From the information my interviewee shared about expressing her cultures, she

uses compartmentalization as a way for bicultural identity integration. Compartmentalization is

when a person switches between cultural identities depending on the environment they’re in. In

this case, my interviewee changed from her Vietnamese identity around her family to her

American one when she’s at work. While it seems that full integration is the ideal method, I also

think compartmentalization is a very good and healthy way of bicultural integration as well. I

think it’s very good to be able to switch because then you can fully maintain your family’s

culture at its more pure form as well as relate and communicate with other groups.
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Compartmentalization is more about keeping tradition as how it is as opposed to mixing

everything into something completely new. A good mix of integration strategies is needed for

healthy multicultural integration.

Another strategy my interviewee used was a bit of assimilation as well. Assimilation is

when a person integrates into another culture by gradually changing their behaviors to match

those of the dominant culture in an environment. While it wasn’t used much, one example she

gave was when she felt inclined to buy lunch at her work rather than to bring food from home.

There are many reasons as to why she would want to, but from the context of the interview, it

seemed like she wanted to be like the others at work to share in the food that they ate too. In this

way, she is assimilating by picking up on things other people did to be a bit more like them.

While assimilation in Berry’s model of acculturation extends to things much further, this is an

example of how a person might be taking steps in their process of assimilation.

After all these questions and the interview, she gave me some closing thoughts after

thinking about culture and multiculturalism at work. She did say that while her workplace is

fairly diverse, they don’t talk too much about it if at all. She said that it would be a bit beneficial

to have each other talk about it more because just having many people from different

backgrounds isn’t enough. In general, I think it’s kind of a taboo to bring it up because of the

potential conflicts and extreme views people may have. They fear that it will cause more conflict

and chaos than it would help. If people were to be more educated on the subject, I feel that we

can all come together to have civil conversations about how we can more freely communicate

and get along with each other. While it won’t be immediately filled with harmony and perfection,

I think it can certainly be better than what it currently is.