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 don’t get along with my colleague Wang Jianguo is it because of ‘culture’ or because he’s just dickish?
Similarly, people never tire of asking my wife YJ or me about how we deal with the “cultural differences” in our relationship.
They seem shocked when either one of us respond that it really doesn’t matter at all. Of our various disagreements over the past six or so years, not one has been about “cultural difference” while about 153.5% were related to some variation of “Jeremiah’s an idiot.”
The problem is that “cultural difference” is too often employed with a whiff of fatalistic finality, a sense that because the problem involves “culture” (and, equally often, a notion of culture essentialized and wrapped up nonsensically with a highly unstable signifier like ethnicity) that the situation is hopelessly insoluble.
A recent study showed that no matter whether the subject was from China or the United States, feelings of love and emotions of romance cause the same reactions in our brain, despite the different cultural connections associated with this feeling.
Anger. Love. Empathy. Dickishness.
These emotions are human ones, not the particular preserve of any one group. It doesn’t mean that culture is unimportant, but it’s not everything or the only thing. If we truly want to develop the kind of understanding and empathy which unblocks channels of communication and understanding, it’s time we let our ‘essentialized selves’ take a back seat to our common humanity.
I am also tired of the excuse, because that is all it is. I’ve seen it used CONSTANTLY here in China, when speaking of anything that happens between China/Chinese and “outsiders”.
I’ll put the whole argument to rest. If I had a child attending a Beijing primary school, and I got pissed at the headmaster and brought up the idea of coming back to the school and doing something… believe me, after the recent attacks on primary schools in China, they would toss me in one of their black jails and forget about me.
There is no “cultural differences” when it comes to this. None whatsoever.
As the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan liked to say, “We are all more human than otherwise.”
Great post, Jeremiah. I couldn’t agree with you more, having been the American half of a Chinese-American marriage for going on 19 years now.
I feel that, in any society, each person develops his or her own micro-culture of beliefs, attitudes & behaviors based on the circumstances under which he grows up, and the influences of the people around him. The cultural gap between two individuals who grew up in the same macro-culture, e.g. Chinese, can be very wide. And it seems to me that the micro-cultural differences between two people can bear more heavily on the success or failure of a relationship than the macro-cultural differences. Perhaps is has something to do with expectations: my wife & I know we grew up under the influence of very different sets of people and environments, so we expect to need to talk about & confirm many macro-cultural issues. Like you and your wife, when my wife & I have disagreements, they always center around aspects of our beliefs and personalities that are very individual to each of us (our micro-cultures), and that would seem “foreign” to most Chinese people, in the case of my wife, or Americans in my case.
Thanks for this post. If anything, these so-called “cultural differences” serve to obscure the core of any subject that people want to avoid addressing. It’s a comfortable way out and an easy cliché that guarantees you’ll never be interested in the person beyond the cultural stereotype.
I totally agree with you! Great post!
I agree with you that “culture difference” is so often employed as an excuse as to make the problem seemingly insoluble.
But maybe this article in the blog of Zhai Hua explained in detail what Mr Luo Guang didn’t say behind “culture difference”.
中国人虽有”刀子嘴”，但往往”豆腐心”
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_48670cb20100iiz3.html
hmm, but i do find Chinese people more easily to say stuff like “大不了，拼了” “血债血还“ without much thinking…
My very Chinese wife and my very American self agree with you. She says, “If people are crazy, or stupid, or dicks, it’s got nothing to do with the color of your skin or your race…wait, no, I should say ethnicity, because the term race is totally inaccurate.” She’s never left China, couldn’t speak enough English to read a stop sign, and that’s what she says.
Now I myself might agree, but I’m from Minnesota, and in Minnesota we do things very differently. We have this Minnesota Nice thing we do, where we’re polite but taciturn.
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I agree–this case seems to have evoked a self-parody of the usual “cultural differences” canard. Here’s the opening of a China Daily article on the subject:
“When Chinese student Du Juan brought her American boyfriend home two years ago to use the toilet, her Japanese roommate became so upset that she shouted in English: “I hate you.”
Du, then 21 and an undergraduate at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, was shocked. So was her boyfriend.
“I did not think the presence of a male visitor could be cause for hatred,” she said.
The Japanese student complained to the campus supervisor, but school authorities sided with Du and said they were also puzzled why the situation warranted hatred.
“Later I realized that she didn’t literally mean what she said and that she was not aware of the full meaning of the word ‘hate’ in English,” said Du.
“It was more a problem with translation,” she added.
Cultural differences can cause confusion about what words or even actions mean, an issue that has come to the forefront recently following the arrest of a Chinese doctoral degree student in New Jersey….”
Ummm, this is ridiculous! By the time you’re studying in an American school you ought to have a pretty accurate idea of what the word “hate” means. And why was that Japanese roommate so upset anyway? Whatever was going on there, it certainly isn’t a good example of miscommunication–she was upset, after all.
In the case at hand, the guy is accused of threatening to burn down the school. Either he did it or he didn’t; either he did it seriously or in jest; I don’t think when you’re in a PhD program in technology you can get away with saying that your English was not good enough to express what you wanted it to. Or that maybe in your country saying “I’m going to burn down this school” is culturally acceptable?