An international city like Hong Kong offers an opportunity to understand cultural differences - the underlying attitudes that contrast with your own, the unfamiliar expectations and aspirations. There is delight in that experience alone, of course. But why not make that knowledge work for you by taking things a step further?
Once a certain amount of information has been absorbed, there is a great chance to make explicit decisions about elements of other cultures you would like to learn from or even adopt; attitudes that suit your personal needs and aspirations better than the ones you grew up with. Multiculturalism, in other words, is an incredibly fertile ground for personal growth.
To maximise the multicultural experience, it helps to recognise explicitly the differences in how other people operate and find out why they do what they do. Such knowledge makes it easier to make informed choices about how to get the best of both worlds.
The trouble is that, unless you are a psychologist, your personal 'working theory' about people may not necessarily be obvious to you. Everyone has a set of guiding assumptions, and these attitudes play a huge part not only in how we feel and behave, but also in what we expect from ourselves and from those around us.
Take self-esteem, a frequently misunderstood aspect of the self. Studies show that the typical 'Asian thinker' regards self-esteem as the feeling you get when you are engaged in tasks that stretch your abilities to their fullest extent and which require persistent effort and repeated experiences of overcoming hurdles. By contrast, the average 'American thinker' looks at self-esteem as the result of an accumulation of experiences of success - winning rather than losing.
Broadly speaking, the Asian thinker operates from a set of assumptions that psychologists call incremental theory, while the American thinker is an entity theorist.
So, what can these two perspectives teach us?