Show notes
Points In Between: Episode 8Here and There[Intro sounds: kids yelling, door opening, footsteps in hallway, classroom voices, bell ringing to start class.]You’re listening to Points In Between.This is Episode 8: Here And ThereLet’s begin with this: XuHui: I've… surprisingly find that the people here seems to be more happy about their job. I mean, yeah even the bus driver are happy about their jobs. I mean, I don't think that's the situation in China. In… basically in China we never say thank you [laughs] after we get off the bus, but here I heard some other people say that. And…yeah, it's really a good way to show appreciation and show respect to everyone who has served you. No matter what you are, who you are, and no matter who he is. This kind of a relationship shows a spirit of equal[ity]. That was XuHui, an exchange student from China. I asked the people I spoke with about cultural differences they saw when they came here and also what they missed from home. In this episode of Points In Between you’ll hear about the little, and sometimes, big things people notice as they settle into a new place. They’ll talk about what they learned and what they adapted to. You’ll also hear about nostalgia – for their previous home, or at least some of the ways things used to be. These accounts are interesting for more than their sentimental value, though of course that does matter. The people who spoke with me are also members of a unique global community that stretches back far into human history.In the year 1271, two men and a boy set off from Venice en route to China. Or maybe boy isn’t quite the right word. By modern US standards, he was the right age to be a junior or a senior in high school – 17. So, how about I say: the young man, with his father and his uncle, sailed across the Mediterranean. They made landfall at a city that’s on the border between modern-day Israel and Lebanon. The trio then walked across all of Asia to the coast of China, which was then under the rule of Khubilai Khan. They stayed in China for the next 17 years.You’ve probably heard of the young man. It’s Marco Polo.Polo is always referred to as a Venetian and it’s true that by the end of his life he had lived somewhere between 35 and 45 of his 70 years in Venice – we don’t know how much of his childhood was spent in Constantinople.But it’s also true that in 1292, when Polo was 38, he had lived more of his life in China than in any other single place. He was “not from” China, but he knew things about it. And his account of his time in another culture, for whatever inaccuracies it contained, significantly changed European ideas about the non-European world.The practice of bringing, or sending, young people into other cultures is old. Millions of young people have moved for economic opportunity, or been forced to moved as slaves. There is also a long history of intentionally, or unintentionally, turning young people into a sort of cultural translator by sending them abroad. The podcast 15-Minute History has a really interesting episode about 17th and 18th century French kids sent off to the Ottoman Empire, India, and Southeast Asia for this purpose. But there are lots of examples: children of West African leaders sent to Europe in the 18th century, Chinese and Japanese students sent to Europe and the US in the 19th and 20th centuries, and let’s not forget: young women throughout all of history, married off to leaders or merchants in different lands. It’s fascinating, in part, because the accounts sound so modern. The experiences are immediately recognizable. Child-emissaries faced conflict with the people who sent them – who sometimes objected to the ways they changed to fit in, and also with their hosts, against whom they had to defend their original identities. They made comparative observations about both where they came from and where they went to. In the process, they were transformed into people who could no longer really existed in the context of a single society. They occupied that sliver of a Venn diagram where two circles overlap. They became, as the title of this show says, Points In Between.So as you listen, pay attention to how it feels to learn and adjust to a new community, but also think about the speakers as part of the special community of people who knit human societies together throughout all of history.That’s a lot, but we’ll begin with something light. I asked Juliana, from Brazil, about spending time with American friends during her college exchange.Juliana: They had like these planners, you know? [laughs] And I was like, “What?!” [laughs] You know you have… of course, in Brazil if you're like a professor you also have a planner. But we don't …we're not very used to doing this, you know having our lives like every single hour we have planned. At least, at least not me. I don't usually do that so when people tell me, “Oh, okay so you want to go on Saturday at 7:00 and I'm going to put my planner!” I was like, “OK, good for you [laughs] All right.” And then people would ask me, “Oh, don't you have a planner? Don't you use google calendar?” I was like, “Why would I need that? I can just have it in my head.” Of course for midterms, finals, I would definitely put some type of calendar or something like that, but not you know to hang out with friends. I don't know. [laughs] It's just …just weird for me.” It’s not that Juliana refuses to plan, it’s that in her experience in Brazil, calendars are for work. It’s just unsettling, from that point of view, to see your invitation to a friend treated the way you would treat an exam. It doesn’t stop her from having friends. And, you can tell from her voice, she’s bemused, not upset. But still, it’s a little thing to adjust to.If you listened to the introductory episode, you’ll recognize a part of this clip. Selena, moved from Bosnia to the US when she was 12.Selena: The first thing that I thought was weird is the desks, because the desks are connected to the chair and you have to get into it. I thought, “This is this doesn't seem right” because, I was like “Aren't some people larger and some are smaller?” And then the other thing was like seeing like presentations on a projector overhead. Super weird. I was like, “What is this magic?” I was like, “There’s like a TV, on the ceiling.” [laughs] I didn't even know, like, what a water fountain was or how to use one and no one told me. I just kind of like hung out in the hallway when I was thirsty and tried to like watch other kids and which button they pushed…Even just the seating arrangements and the way that some people would run their classrooms. You know, we would have like group activities and we were really encouraged to participate and expose our individuality. But in Bosnia it's not like that. It's kind of like, “I'm teaching you this material. This is what you need to know.” Like there was no like, “You talk to your partner about this” or “You're going to work in a group.” You know, have an activity. Plus we weren't really like - we were so poor that the resources were low. I don't think they even had the resources to do that if they wanted to…And then the other thing was like reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before, yeah, in the morning before everything started. I didn't know it and my first teacher kind of like looked down on me because he didn't realize that like I didn't know what the heck was going on. So his whole impression of me that I was like rebellious [laughs] and I didn't want to do this and I was sitting through the Pledge of Allegiance. Because I don't know what it is.Arguably, many of the things Selena describes were good. Certainly water fountains and projectors were an improvement over the material conditions of her school in Bosnia. But they were still puzzles to be solved. The other things - understanding why her teacher was upset with her or how to negotiate group work - were bigger tasks that involved hundreds of invisible rules about social interactions.Ruth, who moved to California from Mexico when she was 16, had to learn new ways to interact with people, too:Ruth: That was a big difference between my life in Mexico in a small town and my life in the US was that we could stay out for - walking or, you know, stay out till late and… Here in the USA was like either you had a car and you depended on somebody or, you know, you didn't really go out that much. That was very depressing for me. It's not as school related but it is very related to how you socialize and there was a lot of intergenerational socializing in Mexico partly because you could just either take a pesero [mini-bus] into town or walk into town and people were hanging out. And it wasn't…there was a place to gather that wasn't necessarily someone's house. It was a public space. Ruth’s description of a cultural difference, you can hear, also contains a touch of nostalgia. It wasn’t just a difference she noted. It was something she missed about Mexico.Let’s move into deeper waters. Here’s Roya, who came from Afghanistan when she was 14. Keep in mind: she had been taught to treat her teachers with extraordinary respect. Roya: One thing that I found really was difficult in high school coming from an Asian culture and Afghanistan and stuff…So when you talk to the teachers over there, out of respect you put your head down, you look down and then you listen to teachers. So at one point it's class and something happened, the teacher was trying to talk to me. So out of respect, not looking her eye-in-eye directly, I put my head down. And she was getting more fierce and stressed out and she was thinking I was disrespecting her. So every time I would try to look [at] her back and put [my head] down, but then she would get more furious, she got so upset that she actually wrote a letter [laughs] a note to my family that I disrespected her. [laughs] I was like...”What is she talking about?” It was just, I had to get adjusted because it was… in the beginning it was so hard because every teacher was like, “Look at me!" and I'd be like....”Okay [laughs].” So I thought that was like interesting. It’s the culture differences when you communicate with your teachers and they don't know your background and how you react. And then they get… they don't understand why you're not looking them in the eye. [laughs]That moment of realization is disconcerting, when you learn that the way you’re supposed to act in one place is mystifyingly, arbitrarily, wrong in another. Thousands of moments like this one between Roya and her teacher teach a person how to code-switch, to shift back and forth between behaviors that fit two cultures. It’s a long process that involves a lot of mis-steps.Ra’ouf’s experience transformed, not just his behaviors, but his beliefs.Ra’ouf: You know when I came to college I was closed-minded. And you know when I go back and recall those memories, I just feel so ashamed.At 16 Ra’ouf was living on a farm in rural Yemen. Two and a half years later he lived in a college dorm with roommates, in California. And per usual, rooming together involved a lot of conversations.Ra’ouf: And one of the debates that we had is about drawing the Prophet Muhammad…the three roommates were arguing against me. What I was saying is that people should be aware of the consequences and therefore, you know, with freedom comes responsibility. But they were just saying, “No. Why is it only for Islam? Like why is Islam so special and exceptional?” I mean I can go today and draw Jesus, you know, and no one would be offended, but the moment you draw Mohammed the whole Muslim world go crazy and outraged. And I honestly I was just arguing emotionally at that time. I was thinking that they were attacking my identity. Those discussions and debates led to serious introspection about what it meant to be both Yemeni and Muslim. The Ra’ouf who emerged from this experience had – at the same time - a deeper understanding of Yemeni culture, but also a greater distance from it.Lingerr had two entirely separate experiences of navigating new cultures – first when she moved from the Gambia to England for high school and then when she came to the Midwestern US for college. Her English classmates asked questions about where she was from. At times, Lingerr felt unequipped to respond.Lingerr: And then we move into the territory of stupid. So, “Do you see lions every day?” was like a classic when I was around 15 and I was …I mean I didn't even really know what to say. I was like, “No, I do not.” I was asked if my family lived in trees which, now I look back I’m like, “Wow, that's also extraordinarily racist, not just ignorant.” But at the time, I mean, you're 15 and you want to fit in so you don't really put up that much of a fuss especially because I was so culturally different.There’s a weird mental dislocation that happens when your own understanding of your self bumps up against who you are in other people’s imaginations.One time, for work, I went to a fundraiser. I was looking for a particular person in the room, to pass along a message. The hostess brought me to where she was standing and at a break in the conversation began to introduce me. I held out my hand to say hello and the woman I was hoping to meet handed me her plate. I wasn’t wearing any sort of uniform, but I’m black and I was in a room full of mostly wealthy, white people in the United States. We stood there awkwardly, me holding the plate between us. Suddenly, in that moment, I was seeing myself from the outside, as if through her eyes, but the me I saw wasn’t me. It was a flat, distorted image, lacking all the nuance and history I feel on the inside. It’s jarring.I didn’t like it, obviously, but for me as an adult the situation fit clearly into a set of racial stereotypes with which I was already familiar. But Lingerr was young and new to the country. It was not immediately apparent to her why anyone would look at her and think she had grown up in a tree. And if they got the idea from all those pop culture depiction of Africans as, basically, animals – what else might they believe? It’s really not easy to figure out the contours of someone else’s fantasy about you.Then immediately on the heels of this surreal moment comes the question: Is this person trying to insult me? I had a split second of wondering if the plate was an intentional comment about my appropriate place in the room.Lingerr, 15, in a new school, had to figure out where on the continuum the question fell. Was it completely ignorant? Or was it someone’s idea of good-natured teasing? Was it meant to be cruel? And even if it was meant to be cruel, how did people in this new culture respond to direct insults?Lingerr also noticed differences in the benign day-to-day interactions between people in the Gambia, England, and different part of the US. Lingerr: So in Gambia, which is actually called the smiling coast of West Africa, everyone is so friendly… so friendly in a real way, like they want to get to know you, they want to, you know, have you over the house, this is all amazing! And then I move to England where everyone treats you exactly the way it is appropriate to treat you, given your relationship. So your friends are friendly to you and no one else is. Your acquaintances are very… I mean, it feels cold but they’re just very like straightforward… they are not acting like you're their friend because you are not their friend. And strangers are just, like… will not engage at all. And I was raised me really respect especially to my elders. So I remember very vividly walking down streets in England when I first got there and like seeing like an older person and being like, “Good afternoon!” [laughs] They would give me a very strange face and look m…
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