Cross Cultural Interview

YOU HAVE AN OPTION ON SELECTION OF AN INTERVIEWEE

OPTION A) Identify someone from a culture different from yours. These individuals can be from any walk of life—students/ professionals such as teachers or businessmen or businesswomen or diplomats/a neighbor /a friend/a family member. The individual can be an immigrant to the U.S. or someone born in the U.S. who nevertheless identifies as someone from a different culture than yours such as Asian-American.

I conducted the interview with Abdullah Alqahtani, who came to the USA from Qatar around 10 years ago. His age is 32 years at the moment. Just like many other people who migrated to USA, Abdullah Alqahtani also had the dream of getting access to a good life which was not available to him back. Abdullah Alqahtani shared his life experience with me very honestly. In fact he was really happy to share his life story as he believes that this is one of an example of the American Dream coming true. He depicted that he was indeed an example of a person who is able to adopt to the US culture for good. As he stated, “this is our own experience that American people are very welcoming. They have big hearts. We do realize that there might be some issues when many people come to America but the people coming here learn the culture and try to adjust to it for better results”. Essentially, America is a land of opportunities and has a rich culture that evolves and accommodates all who come here.

It was hard to culturally adopt to the US culture but he became open to it. He started to observe the culture of the USA and learned and compared it to his own cultural norms that he had in Arab. He said that it did not take him long to conclude that USA has developed a culture over time which believes in equal opportunities for everyone. This is something unlike Arab he said. Also his wife was already an American born. The actual boost that he got in adopting to the US culture was when his kids got growing and were more American than Arab.

Author: Abdullah Al-Marri