Examples Of Cultural Differences In America

The person I interviewed is my grandfather, who lived in the Republic of China and Singapore for 16 years before he moved back to the United States in 1984. The reason he moved over there in the first place was because he and his wife were missionaries. One of the questions I asked him was what cultural differences he noticed immediately upon moving there. The first thing he told me was that the time was so much more relative. Everyone worked really hard in the mornings and took the afternoons off since it was so hot and humid; known in Spanish speaking countries as a “siesta”. He also noted that traffic was extremely hectic, “The biggest vehicle gets the right of way and if you don’t move out of the way, they’ll push you with their car.”
The next thing we talked about were the family dynamics. He told me that in every church that he preached in, women sat on one side of the church and men sat on the other side. Couples also very rarely showed affection in public. In addition, he explained the idea that extended families all lived in a single house or compound, whereas in America, families are mostly nuclear, with only the parents and children living in a single house.

To explain this concept further, he told me about a girl who worked for the mission field.

She lived on a compound with her parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. Despite having so many people in one area, the family dynamics were incredibly strong. They value family so much, that poorer families even get involved in criminal activity to support them. However, he mentioned that during the time that he was over there, parents often didn’t let their children marry for love. They wanted their children married off to higher positions in society or to wealthy families so the parents would be taken care of in old

age.
Another topic was the language over there. He was fluent in Mandarin, but had a couple of things to say about the process of learning it. The first weekend he was in the Republic of China, he almost gave up on it altogether. He said that Mandarin is a five tone language and you have to make sure that you say words the right way or risk saying something completely different than you intended. There are also over fifty-five thousand characters in the Chinese language and college students have only learned about seven thousand of them.
On the topic of college, my grandfather expressed how important schooling is to the people there. “They go to school 5 ½ days a week, making it hard for Seventh-day Adventists (his religion) to meet all the requirements. They often get punished by their teachers for missing school on Saturdays.” He also mentioned that suicide rates are extremely high over there because of the pressure parents put on their kids. He had seen a couple of students publicly shamed for not doing well, including one incident where the parents dragged their college-age child down the street by chains on his ankles. This is a concept the textbook talks about called “saving face.” On page 99 of the textbook, it talks about how children are raised to respect elders and make sure there is harmony at all cost. When a child fails, it reflects poorly on the parents and they’re often outraged and embarrassed for their family.
On a lighter topic, we discussed the cuisine. He told me he much preferred the authentic Chinese food rather than the Americanized kind you can buy at Safeway. He also really enjoyed eating Chodofu, which is basically really stinky tofu, puffed rice, durian, star fruit, and Guava. I asked him if he found it was difficult to use chopsticks for everything he ate and he said that it was fairly easy. Every meal, you get a bowl of rice and then some sort of vegetables or other topping. You use the chopsticks to scoop up the food rather than pick each grain out, piece by piece.
We very briefly talked about the government over there and all he had to say was that people fear the government. The Republic of China isn’t a communist country, but is run mostly by the military and police. Once he had a friend that just up and disappeared. He later found out that he had been taken by the secret police and placed in a prison on an island.
The final thing I asked my grandpa, was what he missed the most about living in a different country. He replied that he really missed the people. He had made quite a few good friends that he hasn’t gotten to see again. He also missed the culture and being able to experience things that you couldn’t in America. Finally, he missed being able to speak the language fluently, since not many people speak Mandarin in the part of California he now resides in.