I’ve asked my students to submit culture questions so that my presentations will be of interest to them. One of the best so far is, “What is the biggest difference between Chinese and American culture?”
Anyone who has lived in and/or visited both countries. please leave a comment. Thanks
Talking With Julia
Amo, Vivo, Credo, Spero
While living in the Republic of Korea in 1988, I decided to take a two week vacation to China and visit the big cities and the Great Wall. I found two distinct differences: first was one of formality. The Chinese are very formal and polite to those they do not know in greeting one another, saying good-bye or just conversation in general. Americans are very informal in nearly every setting. The second is the non-orderly fashion of doing things. In America, one stands in a line never thinking to rush in front of another person to improve their way to the front. In China I found people shoving each other to be first; I often thought this was due to the sheer number of people – if you didn’t elbow your way through the mass of people, whatever it was you were looking for wouldn’t be available by the time you did get to the front.
I apologize for not checking into your blog until now. Perhaps it is too late to respond to your culture question, but I do have a comment made to me by a Chinese educator who traveled to the US.
She was surprised about the lack of people in the US who use the sidewalks…they are often empty.
Secondly, she did not like the tradition we have of each ordering our own meals in restaurants. It was hard for her to decide on just one dish while she wanted to try all of the dishes on the table!
Another observation made by my nephew who met Chinese people as a part of his business. He said that when a law is made in China, it seemed to him that everyone thought about how they could obey the law. “When a law is made in the US”, my nephew said, “everyone thinks about how to avoid obeying it.”
And, finally, my own observation of cultural differences involves competition. I am quite competitive , and at the time I visited Changchun as a team leader, I was eager to bring along a Scrabble board to help my students improve their English. Of course, I also wanted to teach them to keep score. “After all”, I thought, “what’s the point of playing a game if you don’t know how to keep score.” In the first game, we teamed up: I had one student on my side (Team 1)and there were two students teamed together as our opponents (Team 2).
As we played I showed the students the rudiments of the scoring system and how to look for the “hot spots” to double or even triple their score. To my great surprise, when a member of Team 2 caught on, she was very excited to share this information with my partner. She would say to us on Team 1, “Oh, look, you can get a good score here.”
I was my observation that while I thought of competing against Team 2, the Chinese students thought of competing against the board. “How can we get a good score using the board”, not “How can we get a better score than our opponents.”
It was a lesson for me. In my way, there were losers. In their way, we all were winners.