Preface

As we encounter each other, we see our diversity—of background, race, ethnicity, belief— and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.

— Dan Smith, The State of the World Atlas

How does encountering cultural diversity affect and change people's life? Curiosity to find this out propelled my four-year j ourney to Hawaii as an international student and finally resulted in this dissertation monograph.Although the case study detailed herein reflects only an initial attempt to address this question, it is hoped that a new perspective will be developed and added to future academic discussions on acculturation.

The study was conducted at the East West Center in Honolulu—a student community in-between Eastern and Western cultures, literally and geographically. As a member of this community myself, I had the chance to mingle with many interesting people there.Through my host family, I met my wonderful ohana sisters from Nepal, Malesia, and India.While organizing and preparing seminars, I made friends with students from Indonesia, Tahiti, and Vietnam.I even got to know a Polynesian immigrant and j ournalist, whom I read about in newspaper stories before.My study group included classmates from Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the Big Island of Hawaii.Our potlucks and parties are always full of exotic flavors and performances prepared by those from places I have never visited, such as East Timer, Okinawa and Iran.It is probably not difficult to find such a mixture of cultures in modern metropolis like Shanghai, but I had never engaged myself with it in such an intensive and meaningful way.Thus, I felt obliged to study about this community as it presents an ideal case of multicultural integration that I would like to understand deeply for both personal and academic reasons.

The design of the study was informed and shaped by the theoretical debates in the field of acculturation research.Three questions were investigated with an aim to provide a full picture of the multiple culture-encountering experiences of the students at the Center:① Defining acculturation as formation of social relations, how did the EWC participants acculturate in a multicultural community? ② How well did they adapt? and ③ what is the relationship between their ways of acculturation and their adaptation?

My personal experience allowed me to see the difficulty of applying the classic bi-dimensional model of acculturation to this particular case.Thus, I turned to social network analysis, which turned out to be a fruitful and inspiring choice.This approach not only enabled me to visualize social relational patterns in this multicultural community, but also provided useful indicators of cultural diversity and techniques for identifying naturally formed social groups.It prompted a network view over a typological categorization of intercultural relationship.

The findings show that cultural diversity in individual social network is more of the function of the overall network diversity characterizing the community than that of personal choice.A closer look at the structurally identified groups within the community reveals that the vast diversity allows for more patterns of cultural mingling than the four orientations outlined in the theoretical framework.This highlights the necessity to take specific contexts into consideration in acculturation research.Finally, cultural homophily and proximity effects are more observable in close friendship than socialization relation, which indicates a strong existence of intuitive preference that overrides ideological intention.

The use of social network analysis is a key feature of the study both theoretically and methodologically.The maj or finding is illustrated by the community network colored by structurally-identified groups and numbered by countries.It is argued that the bi-dimensional representation of intercultural relations formed in an acculturation context is parsimonious and instrumental for developing models and hypotheses in a standard way comparable across cultures.However, there are more varieties of cultural mixing observed in real-life situations that are interesting to notice and explore.For researchers and practitioners, realizing this gap has implications for their academic, methodological, educational, and institutional endeavors. For example, although it is commonly understood and promoted by academia that integration is the optimal option to take in acculturation, there is little known about how it is manifested in intercultural relations.Statements in acculturation scales tend to leave an impression to respondents that it is only related to host or heritage cultures.Yet, the network illustrations from this case study suggest that integration is not simply an equal-split choice.In addition, its manifestations may be different at individual and group levels.

A point that is made in this book is that when we work hard to promote cultural diversity, it could become paradoxical if we do not allow for multiple but equally eligible interpretations of integration in a multicultural context.We may fail to recognize basic human nature and its natural consequences on social relations if our research does not shine into the reality we are studying about.

I hope that the network representation of real-world intercultural relations formed in a well-integrated multicultural community brings this point home.To the readers, if there is one take-home message from this book, it would be that multicultural ideology should not override reality no matter how much we would like to promote it.Integration can manifest itself in a variety of ways in a multicultural community and recognizing the legitimacy of these variations is the first step to divert from the typological view and move towards network thinking.

Finally, I would like to say that the journey of writing and editing the book is reminiscent.The text is full of technical terms, mathematical signs, and constructed networks.But, to me, there is a familiar and smiling face hiding beneath each data point.The precious memories about those EWC participants who took interest and part in the research have motivated me to write and publish it so that their unique way of cultivating intercultural understanding is noticed and learned.