I learn a lot about
Chinese culture just by talking with the students. There are times when we have starkly
different ideas about how things should be done, and most of the time we have
to agree to disagree. It’s a good
experience for me to talk to students because I learn about their culture, and I
think it’s the first time some of them have had their beliefs questioned, and
so they can see that there are other ways of doing things- even if they will
continue to do things the way they always have.
Here are some tidbits from the past few days.
1) Mary,
Katie (a China 17 living near Chengdu), a student named Sunflower (that’s her
English name), and I went to some caves on Friday (more on that later).
Sunflower was very concerned about the quantity of fruit that Mary had brought with
her for us to share that day, which was 6 pieces of fruit: a banana, 2 apples,
a pear, and 2 oranges. Sunflower thought
that it’s only fair if you bring one of each fruit per person, so we should
have had 4 bananas, 4 apples, 4 pears, and 4 oranges. We explained to her that in our culture, if
you were sharing food but didn’t have enough for each person to have one of
everything you would just let people choose what they wanted, and if there were
more than one person who wanted one thing, they would find a diplomatic way of
deciding who gets it (like rock-paper-scissors) or split the one item. Plus, four pieces of fruit is a lot for one
person to eat all at once, and so you would just end up with a lot of extra
things to carry. I guess if it had been
up to Sunflower, she would have gone to each person and asked which fruit they
like and got a custom selection of fruits to please each person.
2) Saturday
we went to Chengdu, and after our visit we were trying to get to the train
station on time to catch our train back to Jiangyou. Sunflower’s coworker wanted to meet Mary and I,
so he met us at the train station. He
had brought a bag of apples and bananas to give to us, and because we didn’t
have a lot of time, Mary took the bag when he offered it and we said a few
things to the boy and then we said goodbye.
There was only fifteen minutes until our train would depart, and we
still had to go through the train station and walk to the platform and then
find our seats. After we said goodbye to
the boy and were moving through the station to the platform, Sunflower seemed
upset and she said it was because she didn’t say yes to the fruit. In Chinese culture, if someone offers you something,
you’re supposed to refuse it a few times before accepting it- if you take it
right away, you appear greedy. Whereas
in America, if someone offers you something, especially something trivial like
apples and bananas, you will most likely accept. There might be reluctance if an acquaintance
tries to give you something big like a car or a diamond necklace. Mary said to her, “If we had had an hour
before our train, I would have let you play your ‘yes-no-yes-no’ game.” We got on our train with only five minutes to
spare- if we had stayed and followed the norms of Chinese culture, we
definitely would have missed our train.
Accepting
the fruit right away was the logical thing to do, according to us Americans. But Sunflower was visibly upset for almost
the entire two-and-a-half hour train ride back home- she was really quiet and
she seemed rather sad. I respect Chinese
culture, and I like the idea of not accepting things so readily. But there are times when everyone has to
compromise their beliefs. Mary and I
both would have been rather upset if we had missed our train and had to buy new
tickets. First of all, it was the
holiday so we might not have gotten a train ride back until late at night and
we might have had to stand. The tickets
we had bought earlier that day got us seats on the train. Second, it would have
been a waste of money, which is something to be careful about when we’re living
on a small, volunteer allowance- I can’t afford to be buying train tickets that
don’t get used. Plus it would be a cruel
irony to miss a train while at the train station.
3) Another
conversation we had with this same girl revolved around the topic of love,
dating, and marriage. Katie mentioned
that she like a guy, and Sunflower said she should have told him that she loved
him. She seemed to think that if you like
someone, you should right away say the words “I love you” and then you can
spend time together and talk on QQ to get to know each other better. We explained to her that usually you get to
know someone first, and then maybe you will say I love you, if you really feel
that way. We realize that a lot of her
ideas come from movies, and we had to explain to her that if someone makes a
drastic move upon first meeting someone, it’s probably because they want a
physical relationship but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re looking for
anything long term. If someone said “I
love you” right after meeting you, you would probably run away from that
person!
It
seems also that lust is a foreign concept to some of the Chinese people I have talked
to- a person can sleep with someone and not love that person, but in Chinese culture,
you only sleep with someone you’re married to.
This conversation (and others like it) make me realize two things: a)
maybe Americans are easy like Chinese people think, and there is something to
be learned from their culture, b) although it’s good to not be easy, it’s also
equally important to be educated about love and relationships. I was a little concerned with Sunflower’s naïve
ideas. I think a lot of it stems from the fact that it’s taboo to talk about
sex in China, to the point that the students do not even have sex education at
school. Which to me seems like a mistake, and it’s especially contradicting considering the no-child policy
that’s in place. If a country wants to
control the population growth, they should educate their people on how babies
are created. Mary has told me of how
students don’t even understand basic sex facts or why they have their
period. I understand the desire to be
conservative, but this all seems a little extreme to me.
I would love to hear your thoughts on any of these points.
No comments:
Post a Comment