Cross cultural interaction; or, How many rules will I break in a day?
I have been reflecting on the cross-cultural experience I had on the weekend, and trying to work out how to tell you about it. So much happened, and yet not much happened!
A friend of mine was involved in running a cross-cultural experience for some Chinese background people, some of whom were Mandarin speakers, but most of whom were English speakers. Another friend had arranged for some Persian speakers to come, and I was brought in to help transport the Persian speakers to and from the location. For most of the time there, I was more an observer than anything else. I did spend quite a bit of time with two children from a Persian speaking family who felt rather overwhelmed by the crowds involved in the event.
One of the saddest moments from the afternoon was hearing this little girl say she hates school, because it is all in English and she doesn't understand. She is not alone - there are many children here whose families are from other countries and speak other languages, and there is very little support for them at school as they transition into a majority English speaking context.
One of the more amusing moments was realising that many of the Chinese-background group assumed I could speak Persian because I was helping that group! I had only learned a few phrases by that point!
I had borrowed a friend's four wheel drive - a massive vehicle I had never driven before. It turns out that driving a 4WD is like wearing high heels - gives you a different perspective, and makes you that much taller than you normally are! So I was able to drive one family of 6 home: husband and wife, their three sons, and their married daughter's brother-in-law. When we reached their home, they invited me in for a cup of tea or coffee. (No guesses which one I was interested in!)
For the next hour or so I was in a very unfamiliar situation. While I have had afternoon tea with many people in many homes, they have almost always been English speaking families with similar cultural backgrounds to my own. There can be so many social conventions and cultural assumptions in such a simple activity, and I suddenly felt very unsure of myself, desperate to try to avoid offending them or doing the wrong thing! But I was almost guaranteed to make mistakes, because I have very little understanding of their culture or language.
Here are some of the decisions I had to make:
These are all relatively minor decisions, and in a familiar context I would have felt much more confident to make the 'right' choices - or at least felt I could communicate clearly about them with my host/s!
The hardest part was the language barrier. The wife had the least English out of the whole family, and I had little to no Persian! The one who had the best English was the daughter's brother-in-law, who seems to have been in the country only a few days. For most of the time, they spoke to each other in Persian, using their English to learn more English from me and to include me in what was going on - I think English was in use about 10% of the time that I was there.
And I was quite okay with that. I enjoyed listening to their music (in Persian, I think - definitely not English!), especially when the husband broke out into song accompanied by his own percussion on a plastic container.
In the end, I seem to not have offended them - at least, not enough for them to look upset with me! But I still wonder what they think of how I acted.
Have you ever been in a situation where you have been unsure of how to act or react? How did you go about deciding what to do?
A friend of mine was involved in running a cross-cultural experience for some Chinese background people, some of whom were Mandarin speakers, but most of whom were English speakers. Another friend had arranged for some Persian speakers to come, and I was brought in to help transport the Persian speakers to and from the location. For most of the time there, I was more an observer than anything else. I did spend quite a bit of time with two children from a Persian speaking family who felt rather overwhelmed by the crowds involved in the event.
One of the saddest moments from the afternoon was hearing this little girl say she hates school, because it is all in English and she doesn't understand. She is not alone - there are many children here whose families are from other countries and speak other languages, and there is very little support for them at school as they transition into a majority English speaking context.
One of the more amusing moments was realising that many of the Chinese-background group assumed I could speak Persian because I was helping that group! I had only learned a few phrases by that point!
I had borrowed a friend's four wheel drive - a massive vehicle I had never driven before. It turns out that driving a 4WD is like wearing high heels - gives you a different perspective, and makes you that much taller than you normally are! So I was able to drive one family of 6 home: husband and wife, their three sons, and their married daughter's brother-in-law. When we reached their home, they invited me in for a cup of tea or coffee. (No guesses which one I was interested in!)
For the next hour or so I was in a very unfamiliar situation. While I have had afternoon tea with many people in many homes, they have almost always been English speaking families with similar cultural backgrounds to my own. There can be so many social conventions and cultural assumptions in such a simple activity, and I suddenly felt very unsure of myself, desperate to try to avoid offending them or doing the wrong thing! But I was almost guaranteed to make mistakes, because I have very little understanding of their culture or language.
Here are some of the decisions I had to make:
- to leave my shoes on or take them off (when I realised the men were taking their shoes off at the door behind me)
- where to sit (an armchair or a couch)
- whether to wait for the wife to make tea, or to add sugar and milk to a cup myself (when the coffee table loaded with tea things and food was placed within reach of where I sat)
- what to eat, and how much (with a large bowl of fruit, a bowl of chocolate coated biscuits, and other nibbles on the table in front of me, especially when the wife put a pear, an orange and a mandarin on a plate near me and encouraged me to eat)
- whether to give my mobile number to the wife
- whether to commit to coming over to their home again on a specific day (when I was invited to come over every day to teach the wife English, or to come over on the weekend)
- when to leave
- how to express that I was going to leave
- whether to shake hands, or hug, or just wave goodbye
These are all relatively minor decisions, and in a familiar context I would have felt much more confident to make the 'right' choices - or at least felt I could communicate clearly about them with my host/s!
The hardest part was the language barrier. The wife had the least English out of the whole family, and I had little to no Persian! The one who had the best English was the daughter's brother-in-law, who seems to have been in the country only a few days. For most of the time, they spoke to each other in Persian, using their English to learn more English from me and to include me in what was going on - I think English was in use about 10% of the time that I was there.
And I was quite okay with that. I enjoyed listening to their music (in Persian, I think - definitely not English!), especially when the husband broke out into song accompanied by his own percussion on a plastic container.
In the end, I seem to not have offended them - at least, not enough for them to look upset with me! But I still wonder what they think of how I acted.
Have you ever been in a situation where you have been unsure of how to act or react? How did you go about deciding what to do?
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