About

The vision of CCI -- Cross-Cultural Institute has been with us for more than 43 years, since the year 1975, when we conceived a new way and a new structure of communication under the umbrella of Educational Psychology, with a unique counseling system named CD - Communication Dynamics that is also accompanied by CD - Cultural Sphere.

This unique way of using day-to-day counseling programs with the added dimension of culture or the sphere of cultures is unique not only to myself but was based on the cross-cultural environment I was raised in my earlier years.

I was born in Shanghai; my father came from a village named Yuyao, from the province of Zhejiang, which is an hour upriver from Shanghai, nowadays part of the municipality of Ningbo with its unique dialect, which is not Shanghai. I have never heard from my father speaking fluently of any of the major dialects of Shanghai, Cantonese (My mother's side), or Mandarin, the official language of China today, and it is also called Putonghua - or the common language. Yet, over the years, my father's fluency in French and Portuguese was impeccable; he was a Sorbonne, Paris graduate and later, by the family migration to Brazil. Plus, my father's reading skills in English were all part of the contribution to my awareness and also my language development. Mother was a native of Guangdong (then known as Canton) but was raised in the province of Guangxi, west of Guangdong. Where mom was raised also speaking two plus dialects - Her fluency in Cantonese and the local dialect of the city region of Guilin, plus her expressions in then "Guanhua", or the official tongue, which is the regionalized " official language ", the present day Putonghua, that combination of the regional dialects of my mother had granted her also speaking almost fluently of the dialect of Sichuan.

Because I was the youngest sibling of a family of four, brother Yu-ning, Peter was born 14 months before me when my mother did not have enough milk to have me breastfed; then came Ah Ma, the wet nurse who is from nearby Suzhou, another city in the peripherals of Shanghai. I was then exposed to one more dialect from Ah Ma. Thus, the entire audio/visual of sounds and people had a total influence on me searching for many sounds and their meanings and expressions. I was most certain that my fluency in languages was established early on by the exposure to the multiple of sounds and phrases in my early childhood in Shanghai and later on in the Cantonese cities of both Hong Kong and Macau, where my first language, my first dialect had given way to the more used of Cantonese from age five onward. Audioly, the intonation or the sound of speaking Mandarin/Putonghua of today was installed in my "sensor buds" early on. Just like the multi-tonal expression of my mother in three-plus dialects, I have also inherited that mechanism in bridging some close dialects -- Just like the intonation of Mandarin/Putonghua with Sichuan and others.

I arrived in the Hong Kong and Macau region when I was five years old, first to Hong Kong and then later to Macau, in and around 1952, the year my father headed to Brazil. Our family moved from HK to Macau because of its greater tranquility. Macau is a Portuguese enclave and colony. The added exposure by the children of our family was requested by our paternal grandmother in Shanghai to have all grandchildren be educated in gender-separated institutions. There were few options, and by and large, in these two European colonies, much of the excellent education was created by the religious orders—first, the Roman Catholics and then the English.

Our family of four children, along with mother and her two sisters, all were baptized by the Jesuits in Macau, from the orders of Mateo Ricci, the known Italian priest with extensive engagement with China's emperors and who had shared extensive knowledge about history, geography, and astronomy, where Ricci had made much of his contribution to both China and Europe—my mother who had followed the "request" of her mother-in-law. The children were sent to separate Roman Catholic schools; the girls had gone onto the order of Canossa, the sisters from Italy, and the boys were introduced to the school created by Giovanni Bosco, known as Dom Bosco in the Luso/Portuguese ambiance. My first exposure to the sounds of Latin and Greek came through the many of us who were serving our daily mass service at school, as all mass services were conducted in Latin with Greek. Youngsters who were able to catch on early to the tones and diction of Latin would have been selected to learn more about Latin and Greek.

This exposure to the Latin/Romance languages created one of the major influences in my world of communications, with languages that had modified my widening to use languages. It allowed me to express myself better -- and from the verbal, high tone, and high sound of a sonic language, where the other principal value added to the enrichment of languages was the incorporation of the non-verbal where the gesture of the hands and also the added body language with this Latin and Romance language incorporated first with the root languages of Latin and Greek, then came the Portuguese and then the rest of the Romance Languages of Spanish and Italian -- where the common use of the many words and vocabulary had granted me much ease to hear the sounds of this rich "Cultural sphere"of the Latin/Romance with its influence of the Greco roots and words that had impacted and enriched my life many fold.