Cup of Cha
This is China

When you first arrive in China the challenge is always figuring out what you can and cannot do in mixed company. But after a long enough time in the country the difficulty slowly becomes what is appropriate for American, not Chinese, society.

In the beginning I found it bizarre that many Chinese spit bones onto the thin plastic sheet covering tables, both in restaurants and at people’s dinner tables. I still find it somewhat unpleasant to see a giant chicken bone sailing towards the bottle of beer, but now I find it equally strange not to be allowed to dump fish bones discreetly under the edge of my plate. Yet deep down I know when hanging out with Westerners it’s impolite to do so. But sometimes I find myself trying to remember which things are okay and which aren’t in the States.

I still go to great lengths to avoid answering people when they ask about my income. And yet I don’t even hesitate asking cab drivers or even construction workers in China. Can you imagine walking up to a hard hat in midtown NYC and asking what kind of money he banks?

Last month someone was out visiting in Beijing and mentioned the craziness of how Chinese slowly wander through lanes of traffic, standing still as cars whiz by to the front and rear, until an opening emerges and they can inch forward. When he said that it occurred to me that I do that. But surely I always did that, right? The problem was that I couldn’t member if that was normal etiquette in New York. Had the habit formed in China, or was it my own lack of sense that started me on the path years earlier?

It’s a strange feeling when I started to realize that, while I still sometimes making gaffes in Chinese social settings, I can’t remember any more what I’m supposed to do in my own culture. I know that in a Western restaurant it would be unseemly to use your own chopsticks in a communal plate of food, but surely you can do that in a Chinese restaurant with other Westerners. Right? I mean, they must know that those circumstance are different.

Coming home after so long in China is like remembering and re-learning my own culture. Of course there are always the sights back home that are just as appalling as they would have been ten years ago. It doesn’t matter how many times I see Chinese people do it, when Alex Rodriguez stepped out of the batter’s box today, pressed two fingers against his right nostril and launched a wad of phlegm toward the ground, then repeated on the other side, it still horrified me. Thank goodness I still have some sense of cultural center.

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