When Did You Step Into Another Culture?
“For foreigners it’s… different.”
This was the explanation my friends from the summer program and I received from some Japanese first-year university students when we asked why we had been spoken to more casually than our Japanese American friend.
In Japanese, there are different levels of language depending on who one is speaking to: casual language, teineigo (polite language) and keigo (honorific language). The last category is used not just to address one’s superiors or clients at work and also one’s seniors at school. When the first-year Japanese students met my Japanese American friend, they immediately addressed her in keigo and even asked if they could speak more casually to her. Never had the same concern come up with me or any of my other non-Japanese classmates. We were almost always spoken to casually, with the odd teineigo sentence thrown in whenever we had something requested of us.
Why, then, was the language used on us have to be “different”? We never received a thorough explanation.
Perhaps it was because in all respects, the other Japanese we met saw my friend as essentially Japanese. Although she had lived in America her whole life she was ethnically Japanese, spoke fluent Japanese, and had parents who were born in Japan. During a subway ride when we were speaking in English, an old lady had once said to her, “It must be wonderful having foreign friends, your English will improve so much.” My friend explained that she was American, but the old lady simply smiled and repeated herself. I wondered if it seemed inconceivable to her that this young lady should be American given that my friend looked and sounded like a Japanese person.
The quick answer I received from the Japanese students, however, made me think about the Japanese social dynamic known as aimai, often translated to ‘ambivalence’. People might leave things unsaid or their true feelings unspoken to avoid giving offense, or simply with the understanding that the other party would realize their intentions from factors like tone and social context. Aimai meant that one might have to pay more attention to the unspoken to truly understand what was said. There seemed to be an implicit assumption that foreigners were beyond, perhaps even beneath, the Japanese social hierarchy. And it was from this contemplation of my place in an unfamiliar society that I felt I experienced Japanese culture — by indirectly experiencing how Japanese people around me sorted others into social categories.
Many people experience cultural differences when they realize their understanding of something differs from people in a foreign country. Li Yi-Hsuan first experienced it as an unpleasant welcome on her taste buds:
“No spicy” is probably the phrase Munda most frequently used during our stay in Shantivan, a small village near Mumbai, India. The first time she made the guarantee, I did not hesitate and took a mouthful of the vegetable curry. Then I learned the lesson: the definition of “no spicy” in India is definitely different from my understanding.
During summer vacation in 2015, I stayed in an NGO in Shantivan for a month to teach English at a school for economically disadvantaged students. Munda, a short middle-aged Indian woman, took care of almost everything for us, including cooking.
Munda’s cooking was a miracle. She could cook, literally, everything with curry. What’s more, she added chilli into every dish. As someone used to food in Taiwan, green chilli was my biggest enemy — it hid in all kinds of dishes, even in fried potato sandwiches. To check whether the food contained green chilli, my friends and I always took a small bite before diving in. Still, green chilli always managed to mock us when we overlooked. The most devastating moment happened this one evening, when Munda asked “More?” after our first round of food. With an innocent smile, she added more food on our plates. I stared at the green chilli on my plate again and suddenly felt helpless.
The helplessness somehow reminded me of what I saw at the school I taught at, where students dropped out of school because of poverty, and where girls around or under 15 left school to get married. Their lives seemed to be decided for them and education seemed useless to them. No matter how hard the students studied at school, they had no chance of escaping from the future set up by their family, their community, and the social structure.
Towards the end of my time at the NGO, I found myself more and more capable of withstanding spicy dishes. I wondered whether Munda finally gave up on adding chilli or I simply got used to it. Maybe both? On the day before I was to leave Shantivan, some of my students came to bid me farewell. One girl promised me that she would go to college next year. Just like how I was not able to avoid green chilli in Shantivan, it was hard for her to avoid the kind of social structure ingrained everywhere in her society. But even as we live with these ingrained structures, changes still happen.
Li, Yi-Hsuan is from Taipei, Taiwan. She likes reading, listening and writing stories. Having just graduated from National Taiwan University, she now works as a journalist.
Sometimes, one does not even have to leave their home country to experience what feels like a foreign culture, as seen in Chloe Lim’s reflection on the shift in school environments moving into college:
To think of a whole different world three bus stops down from my high school was almost unimaginable. Being 19 and fresh out of junior college, stepping into Yale-NUS College was filled in part with wonder and trepidation. My friends had taken the more practical routes of medicine, law and accountancy (as deemed fit by Asian parenting), while I chose the unorthodox educational path at Singapore’s new liberal arts college? Like it or not, new things were going to happen.
Back at ACS, in retrospect, students were all very homogenous. We spoke in the same way and bonded over our lacking Chinese abilities. In a Methodist school, there was a common religious front that anchored the school community in aims and beliefs. A fair deal of school pride came with the institution as well, which in turn fed into a shared sense of humour and our day-to-day interests (that included sports on the Astroturf, and walking over to Wahchee* for noontime meals). The school and its people advocated a clear “work hard, play hard” mentality, and provided a distinct culture for friendship and learning that most individuals enjoyed and identified with.
Emerging from this ‘bubble’ to Yale-NUS for the first time was hence, difficult. Difficult because it was a completely different school experience to adjust to. I began meeting a scatter of personalities from a multitude of countries — some were places which I never knew existed before. Be it one Nepalese excited about his first time in Singapore, or a firm conservative from Turkmenistan, it was clear that all students found an important identity in their individual cultural practices and beliefs. Exciting, no doubt, it seemed that I could never find anything in common with people so diverse — both in culture and opinions. Truth be told, the whole experience was overwhelming initially.
These days, this diversity is slowly less jarring to me. From late night order-in Amaans to bonding over laundry woes, or keeping up in the host of YNC Facebook groups and evening chatter at the buttery, I do see a common joy that Yale-NUS brings to us. Talking to people (from literally everywhere) has opened my eyes and ears to issues rarely seen or heard before. It reminds me to be more open-minded; that being brought together to give and receive pieces of ourselves and others is a blessing. Stepping into a new culture at Yale-NUS has not always been easy, but it has been worth getting used to.
*Wahchee: A local food haunt at Dover Crescent popular amongst ACS students
Chloe is a rising sophomore at Yale-NUS College. She is especially ecstatic about finally getting her driving license after an undisclosed number of attempts. Her friends, however, are less so, and believe that the roads were safer before.
