Intercultural Communication
The Chinese greet each other with the question, "Have you eaten yet?" You should never reply, "No," even if you are on your way to the restaurant, because this would oblige the other person to invite you. Chinese politeness requires one to take action right away whenever someone else's physical well-being doesn't seem perfect. Always answer: "Yes, I already have," even if you're hungry as a hunter.
"Have you eaten yet?" is no real question but rather a polite phrase similar to the English "How do you do?" In Britain nobody would answer by describing how they feel. The appropriate answer to "How do you do?" is of course: "How do you do?"
Being able to react to greetings in an appropriate way is part of the basics of intercultural communication. Such rules are learned early into somebody's stay in a different culture. Communicating is more difficult, however, if you aren't aware of cultural differences - in the routine of everyday life.
When we arrived in the small Chinese university town of Tai An in 2004, where we were to teach English at Taishan College for the Amity Foundation, we felt we had prepared well for intercultural communication: we had taken a preparatory course offered by our sending agency, had read a lot about living in a different culture and, most importantly, had studied the Chinese language. Moreoever, we had signed up with Amity not just in order to teach English, but above all because we wanted to raise our students' understanding of intercultural communication. Yet everything seemed forgotten when, one evening a couple of days into our stay, the phone rang.
The caller was the dean of the English Department, Ms Liu. She invited us to a big banquet with teachers and administrators from the department. While I looked for my calendar in order to check the appointments for the next few days, I heard her say: "In five minutes at the gate of your compound. Are you free?" The latter was a purely rhetorical question - our being free was seen as a matter of course.
What was to be done? We had already made plans for this evening. Was I to tell her that she should have asked us in advance? Did our colleagues think we had nothing to do, or that they could freely dispose of our time, even after a long day's work?
It took us some twenty minutes to reach the restaurant and all the time, the dean would ask us to hurry up: "Be quick! We're late!" However, upon our arrival we were made to wait for half an hour before our host turned up, a high-ranking figure in the college administration. We were rather upset. We didn't realise then that we were in a classical situation of intercultural communication. We just felt that these people were being rather rude.
In fact, however, our Chinese colleagues were being really polite. In China people do not make any long-term plans for social events such as banquets, trips or conferences. If necessary even the Christmas party will be put off until New Year's Eve.
Calendars are virtually unknown in China. Why? Because somebody who is higher up the social ladder may dispose of the time of his (or her) underlings quite freely. This is probably part of China's Confucian tradition, which has a strong authoritarian streak. We learned to be ready at a few minutes' notice whenever some bigwig felt like asking us out - and to be left waiting.
Intercultural learning isn't a single-sided affair though. Ms Liu, the dean, told us later that she had learned over time to take foreign teachers' habits into account as well. Originally she hadn't seen anything unusual in expecting foreign teachers to prepare a lecture within two hours. Today, she said, she often managed to give them half a day's or even several days' notice.
In today's China it is quite important for people to demonstrate their intercultural competence. Few topics are of greater interest to Chinese students than appropriate behaviour in a different culture. There are several reasons for this. Chinese children are taught early on that foreigners' behaviour is a really complex matter which has to be studied at length before any communication between Chinese people and foreigners can take place. Even then there is always the risk of someone "losing face" - something which a lot of Chinese are very much afraid of. Moreoever, Chinese culture is often regarded in China as a closed system of rules and traditions entirely different from those of all other cultures. A lot of Chinese seem to find it extremely difficult to communicate with foreigners in the way they would communicate with normal human beings. No wonder, then, that for some of them intercultural communication is a veritable nightmare.
Zheng Yu, a college student in his early 20s, was very nervous and frightened by the idea of going to a party at an American friend's place. Although the party took place in China, in Zheng Yu's own culture, he was afraid of losing his face in the presence of foreigners if he didn't behave exactly like an American.
Beads of sweat stood on his forehead when he asked us, his foreign teachers: "How wide should the distance be between two people when they talk? - Am I supposed to shake hands when I come in? - Is it impolite if I put out my hand first when I greet a woman?" For Zheng Yu a harmless party felt more like an exam where his intercultural competence was tested. Pass or fail? Even when we pointed out to him that he was in his own country, so if anybody had to adapt it was the foreigners, we didn't really manage to reassure him.
Zheng Yu was happy and proud to have been invited by an American; yet in his own view, his being different was clearly a liability rather than an asset for the party. We thought this was a pity because being different, not being part of a community with a relatively uniform culture, can be a great opportunity.
Our students often visited us at our office, not only in order to practice their oral English. Many came to us with their small problems of daily life, and also with fundamental questions. They had questions about religion and faith, about politics, about people's lives in other countries, and they told us about poverty, illness, stress, their parents' high expectations, misunderstandings at home and the "generation gap" ... just in order to talk about these things. They spoke about lovesickness even though they knew that relationships between boys and girls were officially forbidden at the college.
"Why," our young colleague Xu asked me some day, "do the students have confidence in you? How come they're happy to tell you so many things?" She had spent a lot of time trying to build good rapport with the students herself. She was open, friendly, someone who respected and liked the students. In fact she had lost her former job at another college because she had sided with the students in a conflict with the administration. Ms Xu was a teacher who bent over backwards in order to help the students. So why did they trust us, the foreign teachers, more than her? The answer is simple: she was part of the system and we were not! The students had good reason to suspect Ms Xu to pass on confidential information to her superiors, and to censure them for what they did, when her position as a Chinese teacher required her to do so.
When people communicate with others across cultural borders, they have a chance to push aside, at least for some time, the rigid system of expectations and rules imposed on them by their own culture, and to see themselves and others in a new light. Especially when cultural norms of acting and thinking are a burden on people and restrict them to certain social roles, being with people with a different cultural background can be liberating.
A Chinese pastor is surprised to see that participants of an international conference can be informal - they will embrace each other while people are looking on, they will even dance - and nobody loses face. This makes such a strong impression on him that, for the first time in his life, the 50-year-old man musters the courage to sing a song in front of strangers (who suddenly aren't strangers anymore). For a Chinese woman in her early 20s it is liberating to find that it is possible to respect and love one's parents without feeling a need to repay what one has taken from them, above all the money they have spent on one's education. European teachers experience friendships in China which are stronger and deeper than any friendship at home.
Liberation is, of course, a central idea for us Christians. Intercultural communication is obviously not about the (as it were) "great" liberation - liberation from our sins, liberation to eternal life, liberation of people imprisoned for no good reason. But if in intercultural communication we are free from social and cultural bonds, this, too, can be a small part of God's great work of liberation. Which is why intercultural communication has a central role in Christian mission.
(19 March 2007)
