Cultural self-consciousness

My father was in the Pakistan air force. And so we came here for two years. He had a project with Hughes aircraft company in Southern California. So he was here for two years with a team of Air Force officers, and I was in elementary school. And in my early days in the elementary school, I felt overwhelmed. I mean, the learning was different. The whole cultural climate of learning was different, not just the content. And I felt I could keep up content wise, but culturally, I always felt like I was doing something wrong and what others were doing were better.

So I've tried to emulate them and there was an exercise we had where they taught us how to look up things in the library, and then we had a little test. So I filled in the answers as I thought was required. And then I looked over at some local white boys from Southern California and they had different answers. And so I changed mine because I obviously thought I didn't know how to think about this. And then when we got the result, I originally had it all right. They had it wrong.

It was a big lesson for me. I still remember it. It was from the early 1980s. But you know, that, that's the kind of that kind of inferiority complex is, is something that you do grow up with.