I can speak to my own experience: 

I’m a diaspora Puerto Rican that lived on the island as a kid but then moved stateside and mainly grew up moving around different places and states due to parents being in the military. I was exposed to a lot of different cultures on military bases — my family jokes about my baby self running away from my first “white person” when I was a toddler bc I was only ever around our black, Latino, and Asian friends and family in my very early years (the military tends to be very multicultural for a variety of reasons). 

Then we move to Minnesota. Very US white, but Nordic immigrant influenced in culture. Dakota and Ojibwe indigenous cultures are small but visible. Not as many black people and Latinos, and virtually no Puerto Ricans, but lots of Hmong, Somali, Vietnamese, Chinese, and of course, Norwegian and Swedish immigrant communities and heritage. Got used to seeing lefse and krumkaka at churches on holidays, sometimes lutefisk.

At some point my parents divorce amicably. My eventual step-father is Pakistani. One of my mom’s sisters marries a Nigerian man. I eat a lot of Pakistani and Nigerian food at family gatherings, while I bring the arroz con pollo. My family is extremely blended. 

I grow up as an online millenial, finding nerd spaces for anime and video games, and make like-minded friends from Guatemala, Germany, Portugal, Poland, UK and other countries. I find opportunities to visit them. 

I learned Arabic and was immersed in Arab culture for 3 years in the school I attended 2013-2016. I learned a lot about the Arab world and Islamic cultures even more. As well as the non-Islamic groups like Assyrian Christians or Coptic Egyptians (what some of my teachers were). We had potlucks and I learned to dance debka. 

I also lived in South Korea for a year from 2021-2022. One of my Korean friends told me that even though I didn’t speak the language basic survival phrases, I was “culturally fluent” because I picked up on mannerisms and nuances and why people do things quickly. Maybe it’s because I could make connections to my own culture, other cultures, or things I read or watched before. Or just the experience of interacting with different people from all over the world since childhood. 

When I moved back to the states, it took a bit to stop certain small habits like bowing and passing a card over with both hands. 

I have always loved other cultures, other languages, and other people. I love traveling, and I love history. In Korea, when I felt homesick for Puerto Rican-like food and culture, I would go to the Nigerian restaurant or the Filipino restaurant nearby where I lived, and talk to the owners about the similarities all our foods had with each other (due to colonization but that’s history for you). Restaurants and people from food from opposites sides of the world, but they made me feel like I was home. 

That’s kinda my biggest take away from my experiences, I learned how to find the similarities between everything and just leaned into it a lot.