In this conversation with Bookbed, I discuss the cultural foundations of Southeast Asian storytelling, the practical role of Cultural Intelligence, and why stories often travel farther when they remain rooted in the values that shaped them.
On February 19, 2026, Bookbed published “Rooted, Not Rewritten: An Interview with Storytelling Advocate Ned Legaspi,” a conversation with writer Nitoy Gonzales about Cultural Intelligence, Southeast Asian storytelling, and the ideas behind Culturally Intelligent Storytelling for Southeast Asian Creators.
Unlike event coverage, this interview focused directly on the argument at the heart of the book: stories do not need to abandon their cultural logic in order to connect with people from other backgrounds.
The Question Behind the Work
One question followed me through thirty years of work in global media: can Filipino and Southeast Asian stories resonate across cultures without being reshaped to sound Western?
That question became more urgent as I moved between professional storytelling, academic work in Philippine Studies, teaching, and the Cultural Intelligence Fellows program. Each field gave me a different language for understanding how stories are created, interpreted, and carried across cultural boundaries.
The CIS Bamboo Framework emerged from the attempt to bring those languages together in a form that creators, educators, and communicators could actually use.
Our stories do not need to sound Western to be powerful. When they remain rooted in who we are, they gain the depth and clarity needed to travel.
What Culturally Intelligent Storytelling Means
Stories are never culturally neutral. They are shaped by assumptions about identity, relationships, authority, conflict, emotion, time, and what a satisfying ending should look like.
Cultural Intelligence helps creators recognize those assumptions and make more deliberate choices. The interview connected storytelling practice with the four capabilities of Cultural Intelligence:
- CQ Drive: the willingness and motivation to engage across cultural difference.
- CQ Knowledge: understanding how cultures may shape expectations, communication, and interpretation.
- CQ Strategy: planning how meaning can travel between the cultural world of the story and the cultural world of the audience.
- CQ Action: adapting the presentation of the story without erasing its cultural identity.
This is not a formula for making every story universally acceptable. It is a way to become more conscious of cultural context, audience interpretation, and the creative decisions required to build bridges.
What Makes Southeast Asian Storytelling Distinct
Southeast Asia contains many cultures, languages, religions, and storytelling traditions. No single description can represent all of them. Still, certain recurring tendencies help explain why stories from the region can feel different from dominant Western narrative models.
Many Southeast Asian stories are relational and community-centered. They may give greater weight to family, duty, harmony, care for elders, social obligation, and emotional restraint. Conflict may unfold internally or through relationships rather than through open confrontation.
By contrast, popular Western narrative traditions often foreground the individual goal, direct conflict, personal transformation, and visible victory. Neither orientation is inherently better. The problem begins when one is treated as the universal standard against which all stories must be measured.
A Story Can Be Quiet and Still Carry Great Stakes
The interview discussed the Thai film How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies as an example of a story whose emotional force grows from family obligation, care for elders, inheritance, everyday intimacy, and moral tension.
Its power does not depend on transforming the characters into Western individualists or increasing the volume of the conflict. The cultural meaning is carried through relationships, gestures, silences, and choices that may be immediately recognizable to many Southeast Asian viewers.
For audiences from other backgrounds, culturally intelligent storytelling does not require rewriting those elements. It requires providing enough narrative context for viewers to understand why they matter.
Rooted, Not Rewritten
The title of the interview captures the distinction at the center of the work.
Being rooted does not mean rejecting Western influence or refusing to adapt. Southeast Asian storytelling has always been shaped by exchange, migration, colonization, trade, religion, and media flows. Cultural traditions are not sealed containers.
The goal is intentionality. Creators should understand which choices come from their own cultural grounding and which have been inherited as supposedly universal rules.
A story can be explained, expanded, or adapted for another audience without flattening the values, relationships, and cultural logic that give it meaning.
Storytelling Beyond Professional Creators
The interview also moved beyond filmmakers, writers, and media professionals. Storytelling is one of the everyday ways people pass on culture.
Parents tell children stories that explain why pakikisama, gratitude, respect, obligation, care, and belonging matter. Families retell memories that define who they are. Communities preserve identity through stories about sacrifice, migration, resilience, and shared responsibility.
In that sense, culturally intelligent storytelling is not only a professional skill. It is also a way of understanding how people teach one another what relationships and values mean.
Why This Interview Matters
This conversation brought the framework back to its most essential argument.
Cultural Intelligence is not about removing difference so everyone understands a story in exactly the same way. It is about recognizing where meaning comes from, anticipating where interpretation may differ, and building thoughtful bridges without erasing the story’s identity.
Stories travel farther not when they are rewritten into cultural neutrality, but when they are rooted clearly enough for others to meet them with understanding.
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