NOTE: This is Part IV of a series of blog posts related to cross-cultural fluency and the family business.

I recall a particular fellow who was working in our company when I was living in Hong Kong. He was born and raised in Hong Kong, but he went to Edmonton, AB for his high school and university education. He stayed for a couple of years thereafter, finding a job and building a life for himself in Canada. Then his older brother summoned him to the family business. He returned to Hong Kong straight away. Why?

Within Chinese culture, there are Confucian values embedded deep within the societal infrastructure, creating reciprocal obligations, including those within a family. It is rare for family members to go against established relationships, such as father to children and among siblings. The family does not typically go against the patriarch’s wishes. Likewise, if an older brother asks something of his younger brother, it is expected that he will heed the call. The family prizes loyalty above many other qualities.

This understanding of family interests trumping individual aspirations exists to differing degrees among the dispersed Chinese community, including in Canada. This particular “subculture” is different than views within the mainstream Western culture (the “Dominant Culture”) This unique view of family in Chinese culture, shared by many other subcultures, is a second important way to understand immigrants generally, from varied backgrounds, in contrast to the Dominant Culture in Canada. This is the second of six factors in what I term the “cross-cultural fluency model,” a way of seeing and understanding commonalities among different ethnic groups, or Subcultures, within the Canadian mosaic.

Subcultures seem to be instinctively bound together by family networks. They form a society in miniature and replace the need to be part of the Dominant Culture. This may be manifested in simple things like frequent and extensive family gatherings. Immigrants often have more cohesive extended families—whether Italian, Chinese or Dutch—and they seem to be constantly getting together! The family serves as a web of self-reinforcing, interwoven, networks of relationships that form a community of care and concern. Family members can be relied upon. This is particularly important as often members of the Subculture need to act independently of the Dominant Culture. The family often is a means of perpetuating the culture and in an extreme manner a survival mechanism against the mainstream.

In some subcultures, family cohesiveness also facilitates reciprocal obligations within the family structure. The micro family attentively looks after aged parents, parents help kids with their post-secondary education and aunts and uncle look for jobs for their nieces and nephews. Nowhere is this cultural difference so clear as when an individual is hospitalized. People from Subcultures often have hordes of visitors, as everyone from their immediate family to the edges of their greater community, through church and extended family, floods their hospital rooms. Then there are others, usually hailing from more assimilated Dominant Culture backgrounds, who seem to have virtually no one who is concerned for them due to a dispersed or disconnected family. Not all individuals from the Dominant Culture are isolated in this way, but it is far less likely for those belonging to tight-knit Subcultures.

The Dominant or Western culture is fundamentally different than the Subcultures with respect to the view of family. Western culture includes basic tenets such as the importance of individual rights and defying tradition to pursue individual aspirations. People focus on their individual rather than collective rights. Western films are often based on a single individual, going against the grain, defying expectations, pursuing their dreams. The notion of going against family wishes is inextricably embedded in Western culture. A famous example goes back to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, first published in 1597. The star-crossed lovers defy their families—the Montagues and Capulets—to pursue the greater value of true love! The individuals’ self-actualization trumps family obligations.

The individual pursuit is also reflected in the world of business. Western media picks up the tales—aberrations though they may be—of entrepreneurs making it on their own, succeeding against the odds. These entrepreneurs are lionized, and they become role models and are held to be representative of a class of people. Western culture glorifies making it on one’s own, to the point of dismissing family-based wealth. We hear the expression a “self-made millionaire.” There is far more respect accorded to someone who made their money through their own initiative than there would be if they received their millions from family or elsewhere.

In Western culture, there is generally no concept of reciprocal obligation. The concept of summoning a sibling back from overseas to help out the family would be preposterous. Family members are left to pursue their own path, wherever that takes them. The person is identified as an individual and not as part of the family unit. In contrast in many subcultures, there is a concept of family success and doing well within the context of a family and community and advancing the group effort.  

In sum, to understand newcomers to Canada it is important to recognize the difference between Subcultures—of different ethnic backgrounds—and the Dominant Culture. In Subcultures, the approach is towards “family over individual” as contrasted with “individual over family” in the Dominant Culture. The importance of understanding the contrasting views of family is one more pillar of the cross-cultural fluency model which helps in understanding newcomers from various cultural backgrounds as they fit into Canada. At Nicola Wealth, the firm where I work, cross-cultural fluency is an asset in understanding and relating to newcomers who have started family businesses and who have prospered, generally, by playing the long game.