I knew my nap from my siesta, my Irish stew from my cocido and my Céili dancing from my flamenco. I thought I was solid on all fronts.
And then, Nanjing.
Nothing and no-one could have prepared me for the deep dive into multi-culturalism that awaited.
This year marks the beginning of our 2nd decade in Middle Kingdom. This, in itself is quite shocking for me; a decade learning the rules of the road, the correct volume in which to communicate in my pigeon Mandarin, the only temperature at which water should be drank, ever.
More shocking still is the metamorphic evolution of intercultural competence that is simply inevitable when living in a city teaming with cultural flora and fauna. And to be clear, I had considered myself pretty savvy in terms of cultural know-how upon arrival at Lukou way back when.
But then…
Friends invited us for dinner when we were waking from siesta; our dinner invitations at 19:00 were only accepted by other vampirical culture vultures.
Other folx celebrated Thanksgiving, Hannukah, Diwali, Hogmanay, Ramadan… A period of bombastic side eye occurred. Halloween, a holiday filled with lore, bonfires and the Celtic tradition of dressing up in ghoulish costumes to ward off spirits wandering the waking world on 31 October, was now filled with muscular-superhero and less-muscular princess attire.
Some things felt right, others less right and others downright disconcerting, if not to say wrong. From my cultural high horse, it was disrespectful and dangerous to warp Halloween or Sámhain in such a way. A part of me took some comfort in the fact that revellers who were not kitted out in defence of dark spectres would be spirited away.
Of course, none were. My cultural beliefs and biases did not translate in to my new international community, no more than Friday the 13th made sense in Spain, where everyone knows that the day of Bad Luck is Tuesday the 13th.
There was more; the number 4 was bad luck also, the number 8 good. The number 7? No one cared a fig about it here. Chopsticks standing up in a bowl was bad luck, a knife falling on the floor didn’t mean a man was going to visit.
What did a chopstick falling on the floor mean? It was polite to burp after a meal; was stretching at the table still impolite? What about “Please” and “Thank you”?
A cultural staple of the Irish discourse, these had already become complicated after a decade in Spain, where “they are implied in the question”.
Here, thanking my ayi incessantly made her roll her eyes and eventually explain that thanking her for performing her duty was not cool. It’s an ongoing struggle, often ending in a “Xie….” and an apologetic shrug on my behalf.
UNESCO previewed its Intercultural Competencies report with the following food for thought in 2013, the year we moved to Nanjing; “All living cultures are outcomes of intercultural communication. Human history is the tale of such journeys.”
As an Irish person, I can testify to this. Since the initial explosion of homo-sapiens from East Africa 300,000 years ago, humans have been gathering in communities, hunting and gathering, diverging, exploring, intermingling, revolutionising agriculture, diverging once again, and so on and so forth.
By the time The Celts, or whoever they were, reached The Emerald Isle, melanin free and pasty as could be, traders and journey people from the North of Europe jumped on the intercultural bus. Viking and Norman and Anglo-Saxon homo-sapiens joined each other’s gangs, before sling-shotting off again across the seas to intermingle with other communities and build even more diverse populations of homo-sapiens.
With estimates reaching 70 million, the Irish Diaspora is certainly a case in point for intercultural communication. Whether or not that creates intercultural competence or integrated communities is a different matter entirely.
The Irish have not always been at the vanguard of intermingling, despite our massive migration to the global community at large. Not to minimise the historical marginalisation of Irish immigrants, comedian Des Bishop explores this tension in his documentary, “Under The Influence” (2013), regaling audiences with his observations of Irish press reports on the recent wave of migration to Australia; “The Irish Have Lost The Run of Themselves in Australia”.
Bishop helpfully (and contentiously) clarifies, “The reality is, the Irish are doing exactly the same as they do at home, but to another culture”.
There is some truth in this, in terms of our international and intercultural melting pot here in The Southern Capital. Although we are by no means losing the run of ourselves, we are all sometimes happily engaged in doing what we do at home to another culture, another community.
And that’s hard. No one explains the rules. There aren’t any rules to explain.
Culture is a nebulous ephemera of assumptions, norms, unwritten rules and quirky, weirdly wonderfulness. Even beginning to try to unpack our community culture here leads to, “Yes buts”, and, “What ifs”, and, “Absolutely nots”.
Not to mention the fact that the rules keep changing, paradigms continue to shift, cultural understandings morph. How is a person ever expected to keep apace?
In 10 years here and 10 years before that in Iberia, I am no more the wiser. I still say, “Thank you”, when I shouldn’t. My Halloween costumes are not for the faint of heart (though too it is true that I shall not be on the radar of any errant spirits on All Hallow’s Eve). I reason with myself that this is ok. It is an enculturated response.
But lately, I’ve begun to think of ayi, and how utterly exasperating it must be for her to have expressed clearly the reasoning behind her discomfort, and my pitiful attempts to curb my own cultural propensity for thanking anything and anyone that moves.
I think of the times where I top up glasses, or pop another cork because in my heart culture, this is the polite and expected way to express care and kindness.
Of the relentless over-cooking to show appreciation for friends when perhaps, just maybe, it might be too much? My famine mind screams “Too much food? NEVER!!!”
And yet. And just yet. Maybe the best way to show this care and kindness is not to stuff my guests as though the next Great Hunger was imminent. Give the Reece’s Pieces and full-size Snickers bars to the Justice League kids Trick or Treating. Try not to poison your gluten free friends, a crime of which I am hopelessly guilty. Eat at weird times and embrace the flow when it comes to the “rules” of the road. Be careful with “Thank yous”. Shout it all out, the louder the better. Boil that water; you know it will cure all ills. But do all these things with positive intent.
At the end of the day, it is this care and kindness that will see us right whenever faced with intercultural clashes. And for that pearl of wisdom, I am grateful for our last decade in The Great Southern Capital Community!
