2026 IJRSE – Volume 15 Issue 22
Available Online: 10 October 2026
Author/s:
Nguyen, Thuy Bao Tran
Gia Dinh University, Vietnam (tiensanho@gmail.com; tranntb@giadinh.edu.vn)
Abstract:
This article is an elucidation of a cross-cultural experience of the author as a foreign student in the Philippines. It is a reflection conceived from the threefold standpoint of cultural psychology, phenomenology, and ethics. Any kind of personal, cross-cultural experience usually takes place within the confines of the existential, ethical, and phenomenological encounter between the self (the human subject) and the other. This exposition considers that encounter against the backdrop of a concrete personal experience (existentialism) and of the Levinasian ethics and phenomenology. The setting of the author’s lived experience is the Filipino way of life (culture) and its indigenous network of moral values. In particular, the subject of this article zeroes in on the Filipino cultural attitudes of hospitality and joyfulness (la joie). This author has concretely experienced this twin-value in the course of her sojourn in the Philippines as a foreigner—or, to use Levinas’s term, as an other. This treatise therefore considers the welcoming and joyful “Face” of the Filipino from the cultural eyes of a foreigner or a stranger. There is a certain measure of paradox in my experience—and encounter—with the Filipino as an other to me. It is a paradox that my own moral self has been enriched, and my own self-knowledge has been deepened, by my encounter with the Filipino other, to whom I myself am an other and a stranger.
Keywords: otherness, self, Filipino hospitality, pakikipag-kapwa, utang-na-loob, Levinasian phenomenology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrse.2026.26422
Cite this article:
Nguyen, T. B. T. (2026). Welcoming the stranger: A foreign student’s cross-cultural experience in the Philippines. International Journal of Research Studies in Education, 15(22), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrse.2026.26422