Chinese graduate student Zhai Tiantian was arrested recently on charges he threatened to burn down the campus of the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. Now, as a fellow graduate student I totally get the whole battling tortured impulses and the importance of NOT listening to those voices in your head…
But according to Luo Gang, the Chinese Consul General in New York, the cause was quite simple. Such cases, said Luo, originate usually out of cultural differences.
What a crock.
I am in no way denying the existence of cultural difference nor am I (totally) minimizing the importance of culture in our daily lives. My students just read the Anthropology classic “Shakespeare in the Bush,” and while there may be more sophisticated and systematic looks at culture and the nature of culture, even four decades later few pieces present the problem in such stark relief or with such a rich helping of humor.
That said, when somebody works or lives in a different culture, this notion of ‘cultural difference’ can become a broad brush to paint over the myriad other complex relationships that bind us together as human beings. If I work in a Chinese office and I