Clashing Cultures

Formal Photo with Lunch Hosts in their Home after Banquet (the photo shoot lasted an hour)

That first week or so before school started was truly overwhelming. Everywhere we looked, things were much different from home. I guess that even the first evening with its red-carpet welcome underscored just how different Eastern and Western concepts can be. When the Chinese want to show honor, they make things into an event. They invite lots of people, have lots of food, and insist that the guests of honor give speeches, even if no one understands them. They do photo shoots (with or without a professional photographer) of the hosts and honored guests. The Chinese grow up surrounded by people, and they tend to move in crowds. When an honored guest is invited to dinner, many other “accompanying guests” are invited to be sure that the honored guest feels welcome. Color, noise, and pageantry are the watchwords.

After we started classes, one teacher explained that the Chinese society was primitively agrarian even into the mid-twentieth century. Farmers worked from dawn to dusk seven days a week, so they loved any excuse they could have for a holiday. Farm families tended to be large, and working in the fields was often a solitary labor, so gathering the gang with food, noise, color, and a party was always a good thing. If a host failed to provide the festive ambience, it was a slight or a signal that the guest was somehow not in favor. Although Chinese have lots of parties, they do not necessarily like to get close to people easily. The party atmosphere keeps things at arms length while satisfying the need for camaraderie.

As Americans, we valued individual space, quiet, and one-on-one relationships. We wanted to sleep and have quiet time to adjust. It was very wearying for us to always be with people and always be jolly in a group. The first week was fun, and all that activity helped us get over our jet lag, but our overall feeling was one of exhaustion.

I think another great shock was that we did not understand anything. We had expected to see and hear more English. But the reality was we couldn’t even pick things out from an alphabet on signs. We were in our twenties, and we sometimes felt like we were in our terrible twos. We couldn’t do anything for ourselves. We couldn’t understand anything of what was said. After our English-speaking guides from the student center went home, we were left with our non-English-speaking housemates to smile and point and not know what to do. For example, it would have saved us much grief, if just one of our housemates knew how to explain what we should do about our laundry….

Welcome to My Blog

Welcome to My Blog

My friends and family keep telling me I should write a book about my experiences as a white Chinese daughter-in-law. But I have never been sure that there is a market for my story. I mean, does the world really want to hear about a typical middle-class, white American woman who went to Taiwan fresh out of college twenty-five years ago, learned the language, married into a traditional Chinese family, and proceeded to go native? Is there an interest in how she and her husband raised their three daughters to be bilingual and bi-cultural, even after they moved to the United States? Do people really want to know about Chinese culture from the inside out? I guess the only way to find out is to start writing a blog and see if I attract any readers.

I have several goals for this blog; many of them are quite lofty:

• I hope to promote cultural understanding and to encourage Americans to open themselves to new ways of thinking.—Over the past 22 years of our marriage my husband and I have found that we like the Chinese way for some things and the American way for others. I would like to share our results with people of all races to broaden cultural horizons.
• I plan to describe my personal journey from WASP to “other” on the ethnicity scale.
• I want to give a voice to my parents-in-law’s stories of the traditional Chinese life-style that is rapidly disappearing.
• I want to share our experiences parenting and homeschooling our daughters.
• But most of all, I hope to chip away at the walls of prejudice between cultures and races that people of color face. As a white Chinese daughter-in-law, I am treated one way when I am alone or just with my daughters, and when we are with my husband and other Chinese friends, we are treated markedly worse. I believe one of the biggest reasons for prejudice and disrespect is a lack of understanding. I hope that by sharing my insights into Chinese culture, I will promote respect for all cultures.

In the weeks to come, I will discuss the trials and tribulations of learning Chinese, tell the story of how my husband won my heart by rescuing me from a poisonous snake, narrate how my husband was born at home without a midwife, discuss the merits of raising chickens on the roof as opposed to in the bathroom, describe surviving in a household of 9 with 3 generations under one roof, and explain my understanding of “screaming yellow hordes.” I welcome questions and comments, but I ask that you always show respect, even if you disagree with my views. I reserve the right to delete offensive comments.