Hello everyone! I am proud to say Virginia Shrader is going to be able to join us in this post today, where she is going to talk about her personal experience of living abroad. Virginia is a school psychologist who has worked in many countries around the world, including but not limited to China, Vietnam, and Bahrain. Because of this, she has encountered a lot of cultures, and today, she is going to talk about the shocks that she has found from dealing with people from different countries. Because what she has to say is rather long, I have decided to split it into two separate posts. I hope that through this post, for any teenagers out there who often have to move around and find it hard to cope with different cultures, I hope that you can learn to accept these differences, even if they may seem inappropriate in your culture’s viewpoint.
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In every culture I've ever been in, I went into the culture with a stereotype, you know, that all Vietnamese are, all Chinese are, all Latin Americans are, and in every single culture I found that there are sinners, saints, heroes, wonderful good people, evil, criminals, hypocrites. It didn't matter the what culture it was, it was like a Shakespeare play there was every character that you could ever see in a play - a villain, a good guy, corrupt politicians, heroes, people like you, who take it by the horns and build something and make something out of an idea, and people who don't listen. And I have seen that in every single culture, that if you meet a human from another culture and the first one you meet is an idiot, rude, hostile, aggressive, criminal. dishonest that if you don't know better you're going to think everybody from that culture is like that. So I have a good warning for people, which is to learn about stereotyping and making distinctions. I love that word “distinction” - you have to distinguish between the individual personality and the culture.
Another really important thing to remind people about is that, I mean, there's a lot - look up Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions. There are some things about cultures that make you uncomfortable that aren't anybody's fault, and you just have to roll with it and understand that it's different. Body space, for example: French people used to talk right in my mouth so that I could smell their breath, and Americans like to have two or three feet around them. I will unfailingly sit the furthest away from everybody else at a restaurant I can possibly get, and I hate sitting beside people on both sides of me where I have to scrunch up not to touch them. That is a cultural norm that we learn and it's really unconscious and invisible. For example, I know men who married Vietnamese women and they inherited the whole family, and it was overwhelming. The entire family: the aunties, the cousins, the aunts, the children, and in the United States, for whatever reason we like to have our space. And so it's very overwhelming to inherit an entire family, you know, like hundreds of people when you marry one person.
There are some cute cultural differences - they make you uncomfortable but they're kind of funny. I went to Sweden and the men and women shower and change clothes together for going scuba diving, and they don't think a thing about being naked. And Americans just about fall on the floor with that, but that doesn't mean anything - it's not bad or good, it's just different. And I just remember it was good for me to learn that very different and that those habits are learned and you don't even think twice about them until you encounter a different habit that is kind of like “what?”
Latin Americans greet each other with either one or two kisses on the cheek. The Arab people, definitely not a woman to man, with two kisses on the cheek. And the French sometimes go all the way with four kisses, but I never could figure out if they were going to do three or four - they are just air kisses like cheek kisses. There is a lot of literature out there about that stuff, and it's informative to read about it, but experiencing it in real life - it's a growth experience. And it's really important to distinguish the difference between creepy behavior that exists in all cultures and cultural norms that aren’t creepy. For example, in an elevator in Bahrain an Arab man touched my arm and I don't know what he was up to. He was with a younger boy and he was an older guy. And the younger guy just freaked out - that is way not appropriate in that culture, like over the top, really bad. And nothing happened: I just got out of the elevator. You have to make distinctions and understand and sometimes you have to experience it to get it.
(to be continued)
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