Vietnamese Cultural Norms Essay

The norms about a successful person in Vietnam typically comprise of: taking good care of family and parents, children performing well at schools and being somewhat affluent. All these three norms manifest in my aforementioned examples: children have to take care of their parents, perform well at schools under pressure to secure t a good job in the future.
Furthermore, the roles of men and women are also different, with women still facing inequality, as a result of more than 1000 years colonized by China under the Confucianism ideology. For example, my high school teacher, who is educated and kindhearted to her students, advised that female students choose an easy job to have more time for their families. Some people even publicly say that females’ role is to be a good mother, so they must accept an inferior role to men’s at workplace.
Vietnamese people are often polychromic. We are not very punctual; for example, guests should come two hours later than the time in the invitation in a wedding party. Even in foreign subsidiaries in Vietnam, employees are often late, but they also stay at the companies late. I personally found this work-life unbalance

This was the first time I had gone overseas and lived away from my family. Everything was novel and I experienced culture shock, tried to adapt and finally appreciated the Korean culture. I realized that Korean culture is pretty similar to the Vietnamese one, in which we are both Asian cultures, with influence from China, we value our families, with insane pressure from study, work and society. However, I felt Korean society is slightly more extreme, the pressure is so high that South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. I also felt South Korea is a prime example of the integration between modern Western culture and traditional Asian culture that requires a greater level of cultural balancing skill from individuals in order not to get lost in