From an ice breaker to the lasting spark maker
Why immigrants think Small Talk is one big untapped potential
Much has been written on small talk. How it sucks us dry of energy and denies us the upgrade to the big talk. How the dread of its omnipresence and inevitability can even make us feel ok with not meeting another soul if the price is engaging in its torturous ways.
Others defend and praise small talk for its important role in the society as a social lubricant or the requisite first layer of peeling the personality onion on the way to a deeper connection.
While small talk appears to be universally human, there are varied amounts and applications of it in various cultures. However, according to the immigrants from over 30 countries I’ve chatted with as a part of my research on the immigrant experience in the US, it appears that the US is where small talk has been perfected to an art form.
For many, this quintessential staple of American culture was a novel social construct and mostly a pleasant discovery, a kindness paved way to ease everyone into a comfy unthreatening chatter.
Most immigrants welcomed small talk as a miraculous culturally conditioned and suddenly obvious entry point to progress from trite repartes into deeper idea exchanges. Its genius simplicity made small talk seem like one of those inventions that make us beat ourselves up for not coming up with it first (hello closet organizer turned hanging garden, duh.).
But then it becomes tricky. Soon after reveling in its catalyst brilliance, immigrants discover that small talk is not merely a pesky yet necessary gradient on the way to the good stuff, but rather its own independent entity. Not the start of the communication, not what could be the beggining of a beautiful friendship, but disappointingly and confusingly, its end:
People here are very friendly, very pleasant and I like that a lot. When you walk on the street or go for a run people say hi! I don’t experience that in Malaysia or other places.
But interactions seem very surface level. There is a lot of small talk and it doesn’t go that step further. I don’t know if it’s a lack of interest or fear of looking stupid about not knowing something that people would rather talk about the superficial.
Fear of looking stupid or looking like anything discernibly authentic really. Instead of being a stepping stone to something more meaningful, small talk ends up masking every bit of our nuance lest we be seen as we really are. Nothing wrong with starting off easy and light, it’s just that small talk rarely goes past it:
It’s part of the culture here to start off with small talk. I mean, no-one starts off with what are your deepest fears with a stranger. But generally in the US it is much harder to get over the small talk and the superficial way of being friendly and get to the deeper relationship. I do appreciate the general level of friendliness, it’s super pleasant. But trying to make a real connection takes much more effort.
Immigrants are in awe of the American ingenuity for finding a solution to what is in many cultures a seemingly insurmountable challenge: breaking the intial, ice covered layer of interaction. After supplying the only missing and most difficult piece of initiating communication, they feel the rest should be easy.
Instead, they find themselves perplexed in realizing that this seemingly intuitive icebreaker role of small talk is not what its champions had in mind when painstakingly polishing it up to an admirable level of mastery.
With all its immense potential for efficiently weeding through the pleasantries on the way to the real human connection, small talk rarely goes further and immigrants can’t help but deem the whole concept a letdown:
There is something about the inner and the outer circle. Here it’s very easy to get in the outer circle and just talk to everyone on the very superficial level. Everyone is polite, friendly, so that’s so much easier than in Germany. But then, it’s really hard to get into the inner circle.
And in Germany, it’s the outer circle that’s the hard part to get in. You don’t really talk friendly to a lot of people. But once you’re in, you’re in. You can easily get into the inner circle and skip all that small talk.
People are a little bit more guarded here. It’s much easier to initiate a conversation but you don’t get to that inner circle.
Observing American kids, outgoing or shy, and the unquestioning acceptance with which most of them go through the motions of small talk, reveals it as a skill practiced from an early age and integral to the collective cultural subconscious.
Because small talk is not really taught but soaked up alongside cheerios with milk growing up, it soon becomes second nature, and sophistication of its rules imperceptible to those being born into it.
But to those coming from the outside cultures, that often for better or worse, are not accustomed to couching in their discourse in plushy niceness small talk becomes yet another thing to wrestle with on the path of acculturation.
Like it or not, once in the social context in the US, altogether abandoning small talk is not an option. Yet, after 17 years of learning the ropes and getting a smidgen better, I still mostly suck at it.
What makes small talk additionally challenging is that its words are often not to be taken literally.
It’s like small talk opens the connection door and just as you take a step to cross the threshold, it swiftly shuts it in your face making you take a step back. Then another well established line opens the door again as if taunting the novices in some confusing game of mixed signals.
While none of this is purposeful or ill-intentioned, to many immigrants it seems as if each small talk line is a code, a prompt to what one is supposed to say next not really an invitation to answer what is really being asked:
Here when someone says How are you? do they really care? No they don’t. It’s just a longer version of saying “Hi.” When Russians say How are you? it’s a start of a conversation, that’s when people share.
We have a saying that if you have a true friend they’ll give you a shirt off their back and that is the soul of the Russian mentality as crazy and unpredictable as we may seem. It may be harder to make friends initially, but once you do, it leads to a much deeper friendship. Here, the conversation is stuck at weather.
It seems as though there are scripts or templates of pleasantries in place. Looking at it from an outside as a person learning the culture, and becoming more proficient at it, one can almost predict how each conversation is going to go.
Going rogue into the uncharted territory of saying something out of the small talk script can stall the flow of the conversation and make it awkward:
Venturing out of the script is something that’s either deeper or more personal and not this easy peasy small talk. Small talk is in the way of getting to a deeper relationship.
It feels like you can do the small talk level forever and not get any closer. I’m always puzzled with someone I’ve known for 5 years, we get along, why does it not go beyond small talk?! Makes me feel a bit confused.
In Germany everything is very direct and a bit more blunt and that’s just not as appreciated here. Sometimes this is why I don’t feel homey and comfy here.
On the other hand, refraining from going into a heart-to-heart right off the bet also teaches valuable lessons in social awareness. The directness so commonly pracitced in many cultures fails to recognize that the efficiency and transparency it often prides itself for, may be more than the recipient is willing or able to handle at any given moment.
Through adapting to small talk in America, many immigrants have come to appreciate it as a welcome buffer before fully investing oneself and others emotionally. While small talk, just like the overabundance of smiling may at times seem disingenuous, practicing emotional restraint is a welcome learning on how to curb impulses and leave the appropriate response for a later time when the blood is on simmer, not boil:
In Peru if people are angry, they will let you know. So we end up fighting more and it’s annoying. Here people feel they should always be nice, at least externally. Maybe internally they accumulate all the bad feelings which can have negative consequences, but I don’t know.
Not being able to express my emotions the way I’m used to is a little frustrating, but overall it’s better. Living here I learned that back home so many times people create conflict that makes no sense. It brings unnecessary stress into something that could be just let go.
The benefits of restraint are in many ways revelatory and immigrants embrace the patience required to get to the core of knowing someone and respect that their readiness to open up be at their own pace. If only that pace wouldn’t seem so glacial:
My American neighbor is a very nice person, we are at the point where she can leave her kids with me and I can leave mine with her but we’re still kind of formal with each other.
I would never expect her to be Sudanese but I’m still expecting more in terms of closeness. Perhaps that’ll change in the future when I understand where she comes from more, better.
Perhaps baby steps is what it takes. If the communication door sopened by small talk could stay ajar for just a bit longer we would likely get a clearer view untainted by stereotypes and baseless fears.
Instead of being stuck in the hamster wheel of small talk’s surface we can let it take us into the foyer of who we are and each next time on a bit more of the house tour that is our inner person.
The place from which the immigrants’ observations of American cultural quirks come from are not that of criticism but that of the genuine yearning for a deeper, more meaningful human connection:
When I meet people I love their ironies and subtleties, not the perfect stories with beautiful hopes. I love cutting through the superficial, I love seeing the pain and the realism instead of their rehearsed BS. (South Africa)
Small talk will always keep its basic role of keeping conversations with strangers light and pleasantly meaningless. After all, we don’t want to be close friends with everyone we meet.
However, small talk doesn’t have to be a closed loop. There is a treasure of potential hidden within it. We only need to know that if and when we want, we can give it permission to evolve, allow it to become a liaison between a hollow chit chat and the next layer of depth, a springboard to the gradual addition of intimacy.
Keeping small talk a silence filler in the zone of comfort and inertia, may be denying it the role of a powerful catalyst it can be, and ourselves a path to something bigger.
If you liked this piece let me and others on Medium know by hearting it 💚. And, what is your take on small talk? I’m dying to know :) Thanks for reading!
This post is a glimpse into the insights that emerged from my research on the immigrant experience in the US. I spoke to women and men who immigrated to the US from 33 European, African, South American and Asian countries. My one-on-one hour long exploratory interviews dove deep into how the immigrant experience impacts one’s beliefs, value system, worldview, patriotism, sense of identity and belonging.
If you are interested in a complete study report drop me a note at bergitabugarija@gmail.com
If you are curious about what else I uncovered, here are some related posts:
