The inspiration came from a South Asian girl who I regularly operated a wheelchair-lift for. I never know her nationality - although I do know there is a Pakistani community around my workplace - but she was probably born here. Each day, she crossed the bridge in the picture to a nearby college. She's the only person of her community who I knew to attend college, the only one to actively communicate in my tongue (and surprisingly good too), and one of the few persons who greeted and thanked me for the service at all.
Very few lift-users are as polite or as smiley, not even other students. They usually dead-eye somewhere as I do my thing, and those who can walk are only slightly less cold. My culture was not known for warm human interaction, and us security guards are in the lower rung of society, so it's certainly not a bad thing that she was not fully assimilated. But perhaps it's less about the culture than that the others are new to the wheelchairs.
I wonder what does she made of this cold, apathetic society; how was it like living as an cultural "other" on top of having special needs. My failure to ask her about that before I quit the job was a big regret.