Introduction to Interview:

This interview examines social change not only between countries but social change over time as well. Tracey has lived and worked in many countries and provides a very valuable insight into how gender roles differ and change between both countries and over time, going into detail on her thoughts and experiences on these changes. The interview itself also covers her experience of moving and integrating into a foreign culture and examining exactly why it might have been difficult. It is important to examine these ideas because it better gives us an idea of what others might be struggling through.

Biography:

Tracey was born in California, in 1974. She lived in California until she was 10 years old, when she moved to Hong Kong. Because Hong Kong was a British territory, so Tracey attended both a British school and an American school while there. After graduating high school, Tracey returned to California to attend college at CalPoly, while her parents stayed in Hong Kong. Originally studying to be an Architect, she later decided to become an accountant. After college, she worked as an auditor in San Jose, CA for two years. Tracey decided she wanted to travel abroad so she applied for her firm’s transfer program and was accepted. She found a job in London helping European companies properly format their shares for the US stock market, where she worked for 2 years, after which she moved to Singapore for 3, Hong Kong for 3, and back to Singapore for 6 years as an accounting director for a different company. Tracey has worked in many different countries since then, and has experienced many different work environments. She moved back to the US in 2012, where she began working as the CFO of a school, a job in which she had initially all the way in Singapore, as she was working through her MBA.

 

Interview:

TH 0:01

Hi, Tracey, are you ready to begin?

Tracey 0:04

Yes, I am.

TH 0:06

Alright, so do you think you could introduce yourself?

Tracey 0:10

Yes. Hello, I am a Chief Financial Officer at a private school in New York. I live in Connecticut.

TH 0:22

Alright, thanks. So we’re just gonna get right into the questioning. So, can I get like a quick background on your life really quick?

Tracey 0:34

Yes, I was born in California. And my parents were both teachers. I lived there when I was young with my two younger brothers until I was age 10. Then we moved to Hong Kong, where I lived through age 18. And then I went to college in California. And after that, lived overseas for a number of years, and moved back to the US in 2012. And I’ve been back here in Connecticut ever since.

TH 1:05

Alright, so my first question is, what were some major differences you’ve noticed between your life in California and your initial life in Hong Kong?

Tracey 1:14

Well, it was very different. When we moved to Hong Kong and California, we had a three bedroom house with a yard, a typical house, we had had a car. And when we moved to Hong Kong, we had a small apartment. And I had a very tiny bedroom, and we had no car. So we had to get around using public transportation buses and trains. So that was very different for me. And at the time, it was a British colony. So some people spoke English, but most didn’t. So we had to learn some Cantonese to be able to get around and buy things at the market. Right, and taxis and so on. And my parents actually studied Cantonese full time for a while, we also had to learn British terms for a lot of things that we were not familiar with, such as trainers for tennis shoes, or been for garbage can. There were only two television channels, that was also a big change, they ran in the afternoon to the evening only. So there was not much to watch on television. And of course, we didn’t have the internet, then either. And we even had to do things like walk to the outdoor markets and carry all of our food back versus going to the store and bringing it back in the car that we did in America. So it was a big adjustment. And it was also very hot and humid. And since it’s a huge crowded city, even more credit than New York that took a lot of getting used to

TH 2:34

Do you think after your adjustment, your life in Hong Kong was harder or easier than your previous life in California?

Tracey 2:42

I would say it was probably just as easy as it was in California once I got used to it and knew how to do things. And one thing I really appreciated was as a teenager, I had a lot of freedom, because I could travel by myself on this trains and subways and buses, and I didn’t have to rely on my parents to drive me around. So later on, I really appreciated that.

TH 3:08

So, you mentioned that you went to different schools in Hong Kong, as well as attending college in the United States after he moved back. How do you think? How would you say that school in Hong Kong was different from school while you were younger, in California, in college?

Tracey 3:26

Well, when I was young, and I moved to Hong Kong, I went to a British school first, which was a very big change because I had not had any exposure, really, to people who weren’t from America. Before that. All the teachers were British, and they had British accents. We had to wear traditional uniforms. And there were many different things. For example, we had just learned cursive in school. But there they used a different style of cursive, which we were expected to write in. And it was hard to pick that up. We also had to use old style fountain pens that you would dip in an ink pot. They use different spellings of words. And they also even did long division differently. And even the sports were different. We played basketball and baseball and America. And over there, we had to learn netball and rounders, which are similar versions but slightly different. So initially, I really didn’t enjoy it. It was very hard to move to a place where have you were so many things are different, and you have to adjust. But I did appreciate that years later. And then after a couple of years, I transferred to the  American School, which was an international school. And that was interesting because it was very diverse. And there were kids from countries all over the world. So some of my friends were from countries like Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Australia, Korea, and more. And that was really interesting. And I learned a lot from that. But other than that it was probably very similar to an American High School.

TH 4:58

Did you notice any difference In the way that kids interacted with each other in these schools before you went to college?

Tracey 5:06

I did notice that kids there, in Asia, at least at the International School, were very welcoming of anybody who was new. Because a lot of them had moved around a lot. So the minute anybody new arrived, they were just overwhelmed by people wanting to meet them and learn about them. And that was very different than what I experienced in America, where people were not so welcoming of new people, they were very used to, they’re having their own groups of friends. And that was a lot harder when I got to college versus you know how things were in high school.

TH 5:40

Oh, Bali was a pretty isolated college, relatively speaking, most of the people who attended were locals. So I assume that was much more difficult than your initial move to Hong Kong.

Tracey 5:50

Yes, it was different people were friendly, because it was the first year of college, but they were very different from me, I would say, because a lot of those people had grown up with California, just in California, it was a very California based school. So they didn’t know much about Hong Kong or China or anything like that.

TH 6:11

Were some of the other cultural differences you noticed between Asia and the United States,

Tracey 6:18

There were a lot of things growing up that, that we would observe or, or learn, you know, just by being there. Some of them I still did today, for example, one is over there, you never open a gift in front of someone. That way, if you don’t like it, it’s not awkward. And that’s still something that I do today, I actually feel very uncomfortable, if I have to open a gift in front of someone. You know, here, it’s the tradition at parties, kids parties to open all the gifts right away. And it’s not like that there, it’s very different. There are also different traditions in terms of being on time to events, when we used to invite people over, they would always much arrive a lot later than when we asked them to, and that took some getting used to. And they have a very big focus on education over there. The parents are very serious about the students studying. My father was a teacher, and he worked in a study center, which was in the bottom of a big block of housing, apartment units, and students would go down there from their tiny apartments to study every night of the week, you know, trying to get ahead. So that was a very big priority for them. much different than a lot of kids here. Because the parents are so involved in there’s a lot of pressure to study. And later on, when I lived in Singapore, I actually had colleagues who were parents who would take time off, work before their kid’s exams just so they can help them study. And then one other thing I noticed there was there was a lot more respect for elders in Asia versus in America.

TH 7:53

Do you think their respect was more out of tradition? Or do you think that respect was more of just a societal norm?

Tracey 8:01

I think that was the norm there. And it was expected. And people did not really challenge what was expected there. Which is different than how it is in America.

TH 8:13

Would you say you preferred that way of treating elders?

Tracey 8:17

I did. I thought it was it was nice.

TH 8:23

So then, after your attendance of through high school in Hong Kong, you moved to the United States to attend college, and you had to go along, right?

Tracey 8:35

Yes, my parents were staying in Hong Kong, and my relatives all lived in the Midwest, and I went to California. So my mother flew over with me and dropped me off. But then I was on my own. After that, we didn’t have the money for me to be able to travel back for holidays, typically, so it was challenging for me. And initially, I was very excited to go and I didn’t think about how hard that would be. But at that time, it was very hard to communicate was expensive to call. So we couldn’t have many phone calls. I mostly wrote letters, because there was no email. So I had to make a lot of decisions on my own. And I didn’t I couldn’t really call my parents whenever I wanted to ask them questions. It was also challenging because I didn’t have relatives around. I had to find friends houses to go to on the holidays when the doors were closed. So that was a little bit stressful too, because I always had to find a place to go. But luckily, I always did and, and people were very nice about taking me in and inviting me to their house. But it’s not quite the same as spending holidays with your family. So I did enjoy it overall. And eventually I settled in and really liked it. And I think it made me more independent because I did have to figure out a lot of these things on my own with no support system.

TH 9:54

Did you have to go through any kind of special process when you went to college or did they just let you in Since you were born in the United States initially,

Tracey 10:03

No, I was able to come in easily because I was an American citizen. But I did have to appeal my residency with the school, because I wanted to pay in state tuition. And I successfully eventually argued that I had to be from some state and couldn’t be from no state. So my family had the most ties to California, they did ultimately give me the tuition.

TH 10:30

Yeah, I know you had a lot of job experiences, different countries as well, what do you think your favorite experience would be?

Tracey 10:36

My favorite experience was two years that I spent living in London with a big accounting firm. That was because I was signed, assigned to a lot of interesting small projects, some were a month long, and some were up to six months long, all over Europe. So, I worked in England, Switzerland, and Germany while I was there. And the great part about this job, besides working in different locations, was that rather than going back home to London, on the weekends, that company would let us travel and stay for free fly and stay for free, anywhere else in Europe, if it costs less than going back to London. So over those two years, I got to visit many, many countries all for free. So, it was a really terrific opportunity. And even in terms of the work, every project was with a different team and on a different topic. So there was a lot of variety.

TH 11:29

Did you notice any differences between different European nations, as far as gender interactions with coworkers, etc., changed? Or was it similar among all the countries? Considering they’re in the same regional area?

Tracey 11:44

It seems pretty similar to me; I didn’t notice too many differences.

TH 11:50

What would you say your least favorite job experience was then?

 

Tracey 11:55

My least favorite job experience was a job that I did in the job that I did in Germany, because I worked with someone who the person who was in charge of the job would keep us at the clients office till one in the morning most nights. And then we go back to the hotel sleep, and he wanted us back in the lobby at 7am. ready to head out again. And to make things worse, there were only two restaurants that we could get delivery from what we were stuck all those hours at the client. So we had to eat pizza and Thai food every single day for six months. And it was just a choice of which one was for lunch and which one was for dinner. And I did not enjoy that job at all. But it was still a good experience to be in Germany. And I did learn a lot from it. In the end.

TH 12:41

It does sound pretty awful. Would you say that something that most companies or different offices would be doing is sending people to a hotel for more area-based kind of project or was that an oddity

Tracey 12:55

That was no for the group that I worked in, that was very common. They would do projects for clients in different locations. So, they would find teams of people to go out and do the project. So normally, the team would go out there and, and stay together in a hotel and go back and forth to the client for as many weeks as it took to finish the project. So, in most cases, it was very interesting, because you got to know a group of people well, and you got to spend a decent amount of time in another country and kind of get to know what it was like.

TH 13:30

Did you notice that because you’ve worked more than just Europe in the United States, you’ve also worked in Asia a lot would you say certain Asian countries had vastly different norms or interactions regarding gender compared to Western countries?

Tracey 13:45

I would say that Japan was the most different, that I noticed I did a shorter project there. But in terms of men and women, the men were definitely as dominant in that office environment. And it was very different from America because for example, after work in the US colleagues would go out for drinks together or dinner together. And that didn’t happen, there would just be the men that went out together. And they did invite me out when I was there. But I was the only woman there that went with them. And I think they invited me because I was a foreigner and they were trying to be good hosts. But it didn’t seem to be something that would have happened on a normal basis. So that kind of made me uncomfortable that that’s what the environment was. And I always said I never would have wanted to transfer to that office, you know, as as one of my jobs. So I preferred staying in the other parts of Asia, where it was much more progressive.

 

TH 14:46

What would you say the most progressive Asian country would be? In terms of like, closer to being more like the United States where everything’s a lot more diverse.

 

Tracey 14:59

Now, Singapore It’s pretty diverse, because it has a lot of people from different countries in it, I mean, that it’s kind of a mix of Indian and Malaysia and Singaporean, which are, you know, Chinese Singaporean. So they try, they try actually very hard to balance the diversity, and to get everyone to live and work together, which is very interesting. They even in their housing, like public housing estates, they kind of have certain allocations. So it doesn’t become, say, in all Chinese housing estate, or an all Indian one, they really want people to mix together and be comfortable knowing each other and getting along together. So they do it in a different way. But it seems to have been pretty successful there.

TH 15:45

Can you think of any instances where I guess gender might have, or gender norms in a certain country might have affected your work? Or was it all outside of work?

Tracey 16:00

Um, I can’t think of a specific, specific example. But sometimes being a female over there, they may take, you might get the impression that they take your opinion less seriously than somebody else’s. So that would probably be the only thing I can think of.

 

TH 16:19

Did you notice other women that took issue with it? Or did they accept it as the norm in that country,

 

Tracey 16:26

I would say people just accepted it as the norm.

 

TH 16:30

It’s interesting, because most Americans, I find they don’t like those kinds of norms, and they often fight to change them. But it’s interesting to explore how other cultures actually feel about the norms. Because while it may seem bizarre, on just one, it might be just completely normal for the other.

Tracey 16:49

Yeah, I would say in some of a lot of the Asian countries, people are much less likely to challenge the norms or the expectations, it takes probably a lot longer for them to get things changed. And it might take in America, where people are pretty quick to challenge.

TH 17:06

And sometimes it’s there might be a case of them not even wanting change. Some people might be content with a certain way. Or perhaps it’s being forced, and they don’t have the opportunity to make such changes.

 

Tracey 17:18

That could also be true.

 

TH 17:20

You were also living outside the US between 1998 and 2012, which is a humungous amount. There’s a lot that happened in that time in the United States, we’re able to keep up with it at all,

Tracey 17:32

Somewhat, because we had CNN and, and some of the news channels. So, we heard about the things that happened. But I did notice when we came back that the culture, it seemed like the culture had changed a lot, seemed a lot more liberal. And there were a lot of difference. I noticed, like ads, that knots of medical ads on TV, people taking lots of medication, which was not a big thing in other parts of the world, you’d never would see an ad like that. And you would talk to people and everybody you would talk to sounded like they were taking some medication for this and that. So I thought that was very interesting and different. And there seem to be also a lot more visible violence since we have left, such as school shootings, and gun violence and other things. It was actually talked about a lot. When I lived in Asia, people said, you know, aren’t you scared to go to the US there are guns everywhere. And people are getting shot all the time. So that was what we heard about. And I don’t remember being afraid of that when I was living in America. But when you hear about it all the time, the way it’s presented on the news, you do think about it and then realize that it’s a lot different there than it is in other countries. That kind of violence was not really present in the places where I had lived before. In terms of work, when I was in America, originally it was much more formal. When I started work, for example, we had to wear suits every day, and women had to wear skirts even. And by the time I got back, it was much more relaxed, and people were wearing business casual clothes and women could wear pants. And so it was a lot more. There was a lot more equality, I would say, when I got back, compared to when I had left. There was also a lot more focus on diversity in companies and having a diverse workforce, which wasn’t discussed that much when I was first starting out in work, but it was a big focus later on.

 

TH 19:32

Do you say working got easier over time? Or do you think it got harder in terms of like hours or maybe just the general difficulty of work or the way that work culture was approached?

 

Tracey 19:46

I would say that it got easier over time. Initially. Well, when I was first starting out we had to work very long hours. Kind of to prove yourself and to be successful on the job. The tasks were not always that interesting. So as I got older, and also, after I did my MBA, my jobs changed. And they became more interesting. I took jobs that were had different components that I really enjoyed. And so now I really like what I do. And I hours are also more reasonable than they were. So overall, it has gotten better over time.

 

TH 20:25

In terms of your general experience with work, do you think, especially when you were starting out? Because you originally wanted to be an architecture? Were there any roadblocks at all that you noticed, relating even to gender or not at all in the States? And then, if you knew women in Asia, who had a similar kind of upbringing, did they face any roadblocks?

 

Tracey 20:48

Um, well, I didn’t really because my the job that I took that ended up taking, which was accounting, it was very evenly split between men and women. And I would say everybody was fairly equal. Although, I think there was still some actually some pay inequity, when we started between some of the men, some of the women when we compared salaries, not to a large degree, maybe $1,000 a year difference, but something that we noticed. But I think it depends on the industry, because I did meet someone recently, who actually who is an architect, and she said, sometimes she has trouble because she’s working with a lot of contractors. And sometimes they don’t want to be dealing with a woman or they challenge her more than they might otherwise. So it could have been more challenging if I had picked a different path.

 

TH 21:42

And so even back then you think it’s more related, just as different industries than it is a general rule across the board for all industries.

 

Tracey 21:51

I think I think it could vary a little bit depending on the industry or the type of company you join. And a lot of it could be also be company culture, because some companies are much more traditional than others, and some are much more progressive. So that could have a big impact on how you feel about the environment as well.

 

TH 22:13

All right. Well, that’s about all the questions I have. So, thanks for letting me interview.

 

Tracey 22:18

Welcome. Thank you.

 

TH 22:20

Goodbye.

 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

 

Follow Up:

It was a pretty interesting interview, and I learned a lot more about my mother. Something that wasn’t brought up during the interview was about her time at college after moving; she had a presentation on Tiananmen Square and she got a bad grade on it because the professor deemed it wasn’t relevant to Americans. I think it was actually quite interesting that people were dismissive of it over here, not realizing the implications of the event. For this interview I used Otter.ai, whilst recording over Zoom. The interviewee enjoyed the interview, and did not request any changes to be made.