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Caught up in the middle

Wednesday, 06 September, 2006

Last year, after Doctrine 1, my favourite B&M subject was Cross-Cultural Communication with Mike Raiter. I'm sure that sounds a bit odd so let me explain. Cross-Cultural Communication was really aimed at those thinking about mission work—particularly overseas mission work. (That's not why I liked it though because I had very little intention of heading into mission work.) The subject dealt with some of the issues that might come in foreign contexts. For example, what if one of the families in the church you've just planted had a little boy who was very sick but the doctors at the hospital won't take him because they say they have no space. But you know because you've been living in that culture for a while that if you give the doctors a bribe, they'll treat him because they're corrupt and will do anything to make a buck. The Bible is against bribery so what do you do?

Ethical dilemmas aside, Cross-Cultural Communication was a fascinating subject because it dealt with that aspect of our human identity derived from the milieux in which we were raised. There were two snippets that stood out for me:

Culture stress

Mike described the reaction to entering a foreign culture as being “culture stress”, not “culture shock”. “Stress” was a more appropriate word than “shock” because it's ongoing, whereas you usually just get shocked once and then you get over it. Culture stress is that feeling of helplessness you get when confronted with an alien situation. Mike's example was coming back to Australia on sabbatical from being a missionary in Pakistan for the past three years and suddenly being asked if he wanted to buy a Travel Ten for the bus. Of course he didn't know what a Travel Ten was but it seemed like everyone around him expected him to know what it was and what you do with it. At that moment he experienced culture stress.

I feel like that all the time. It usually occurs when I collide with Chinese culture but sometimes it happens when I collide with western culture. I remember one time going out to dinner with friends and we went to a Chinese restaurant. Mind you, it wasn't a real Chinese restaurant likes the ones where half the tablecloths are covered with tea stains and the crockery is chipped, and there are live lobsters and abalone floating in the tanks and you'd never ever sit on the floor, and they serve things like chicken's feet and shark's fin soup (mmm, my favourite!). We were in a westernised Chinese restaurant (the kind that serves beef in blackbean sauce and sweet and sour pork and, of course, fried rice). There was a lazy susan in the middle of the table but because I was eating with westerners, they picked up all the dishes and passed them around instead of reaching out and grabbing with chopsticks. (I got the feeling that if I had done just that, they would have thought that I was rude.)

Just last year my B&M class celebrated the end of semester by going out for yum cha as a group. When one of the girls (who was from Singapore) poured me tea, I tapped the table the way you do at yum cha. But one of the other girls (an Australian, from Tasmania) thought I was being rude in tapping the table because it looked like I was saying, “Hurry up with the tea!”

MK's (Missionary kids)

The children of missionaries are often born in one country but grow up in another. Sometimes they're even sent to yet another country to do their schooling. They end up growing up between worlds and feeling like they don't belong to either. I pray for these missionaries in France and their eldest son is currently going through all this stuff at the moment. The last time those missionaries were out here on Sabbatical, the father acknowledged to us that if they one day decided to come back to Australia permanently, their son would probably stay behind in France because that's where he feels the most “at home”.

When Mike was talking about the MK's (and his wife in particular who had grown up in Pakistan but attended high school and college in America, and then returned to Pakistan as an adult which was a very different experience to Pakistan as a child in that she had to don the burkha and forego a lot of her freedom), I found myself empathising with them. I know what it's like to grow up between two worlds but it's a little more complicated for me because it's really three—Chinese, Australian and Canadian. I've lost track of the number of times people have corrected my pronunciation (e.g. “tomato”) but part of me thinks, “Well, it was correct when I learned it. Why should I change it for you? Why does it have to be ‘When in Rome’?” At work, I'm the first one in the room at Thursday staff meeting when Warren rings the bell and it's not because I'm over-eager; it's just that North Americans are punctual (or at least Philip Kern is). The North American side of me also does not like the Australian use of humour to dispel tension, and does not understand the Australian penchant for paying people out. The North American side of me respects authority while the Australian side of me tears the tall poppies down. The Australian side of me is cynical about patriotism but the North American side of me desperately wants to believe in somebody like Jed Bartlet to run the country. The North American side of me thinks it's naturally for men and women to mix socially, but the Australian side of me conforms to what everyone else around me is doing and so at college last year I ate with the girls and sat mostly with the girls and rarely talked to the guys because it just seemed weird to do so. (Now, of course, I work in an office where 70% of the staff are male.) And so on, spouting more and more generalities about nationalities and cultures.

Today over lunch I started re-reading Looking for Alibrandi and stumbled across this passage which captures it rather well:

I felt disadvantaged from the beginning. Maybe because I hadn't gone to the same primary school as them. Or maybe because I received the six-year English scholarship. I don't know why I tried so hard to win it. But it back-fired on me because I ended up going to a school I didn't like. I wanted to go to a school in the inner west where all my friends had gone. They were Italian and Greek and we ruled primary school. They were on my level. I related to them. They knew what it meant not to be allowed to do something. They knew what it meant to have a grandmother dressed in black for forty years. I looked like them. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin. We sounded alike as well. It felt good being with other confused beings. We were all caught up in the middle of two societies.

I think I had it worst. My mother was born here so as far as the Italians were concerned we weren't completely one of them. Yet because my grandparents were born in Italy we weren't completely Australian. Despite that, primary school was the only time I was with people I could compare notes with and find a comfortable place alongside. We're slip our Italian and Greek into our English and swap salami and prosciutto sandwiches at lunch-time and life was good in the school-yard.

Melina Marchetta, Looking for Alibrandi, Penguin, Ringwood, 1992, p.7

Of course, it gets a little bit more complicated for me as culture strikes right at the heart of family, but I'll talk about that another time.

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