Page 284 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE EDUCATION PROGRAM

THE CLEAN PLATE CLUB
However, it was not all tears for Tacha during her class’s international trips;
her mischievous classmates made certain of that. In State Department brief-
ings and at embassies throughout their travels, the Fellows were warned
that in some countries you are expected to eat whatever you are served, for
to refuse it would be an insult to the host. With those words still fresh in
their ears, the Fellows attended a lavish formal dinner party in South
Vietnam with some of the country’s highest-ranking military and govern-
ment officials. They were seated at tables of eight, with four Fellows and
four Vietnamese officials at each table, and Tacha was the only woman at
her table. “The first course arrived. It was a clear broth soup with what
appeared to be a raw bird’s head, beak and all, as the centerpiece of the
soup. My memory is that even the eyeball of the little bird peered back at
me. I looked at my soup, saw the bird’s head, and began chatting animat-
edly with my Vietnamese neighbors. When I next looked back into my
soup bowl, there were four bird’s heads. Somehow my colleagues had man-
aged to pass their bird’s heads under the table and plunk them into my
soup while I was talking! I do not think I ate my soup that night, but there
was a lot of giggling going on around the table—so much for adapting to
cultural norms!”

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