Don’t Touch Me!

Culture, defined as the full range of learned human behaviors, is one of the deterministic factors of efficiency in interpersonal communication. Inter-cultural communication occurs everywhere in our daily life. Communication pattern deviates enormously between different cultural and sub-cultural groups. Therefore dealing with inter-cultural communication properly and efficiently is a great challenge for all of us. Understanding and therefore resolving intercultural communication conflicts is peculiarly crucial.

This June, when I was traveling in Xinjiang (part of the silk road where I traveled all the way along), there was a typical group of people from different countries: two from China, one German, one from the Netherlands, one Swedish, and one from Switzerland. The Swiss lady, who was a banker back in Switzerland, had this special joy of exploring, sharing and most importantly, criticizing, in a ironic manner, with all travelers in the hostel, the funny stories and conventions she found on the streets of a foreign land everyday.

One night, the group of us went out to the streets for dinner. As we were to cross the streets (horrible streets with non-stopping cars where foreigners would never dare to cross at first), a car suddenly came out of nowhere. And then suddenly I heard a desperate scream behind. Oops! Somebody got hit? It turned out to be that Swiss lady. It was not because of the car that suddenly ran towards us, but because a Chinese girl grab her arm to avoid the car while crossing the street. The Chinese girl was just doing what was normal in Chinese culture: to help each other while needed in the case, because the Swiss lady was a foreigner. However, the Swiss lady got so terrified and angry, because in her perception, intimate touching between people might be a taboo, or at least very rarely used. As a result, the two ended up misunderstanding each other. The Chinese girl thought that the Swiss lady was very picky. What seemed to be weird to her might just be very normal in other culture. At the same time, the Swiss lady blamed the Chinese girl for not respecting her way of “no touching”.

Obviously, an inter-cultural conflict had risen in this case. People from different cultural background behaved differently and reacted differently to different seigniors. A deep understanding of cultural differences is needed for both the two involved in the above case.

(This is a side thought which is beyond the topic of this post:
This reminds me of an interesting tentative, that the more developed and urbanized a culture is, the less intimating touching such as holding hands between its members there will be. From my perception, industrialized westerners are generally believed have less body contact than the rest, i.e. Asians, Africans and South Americans. Even in a single culture, city citizens are more protective than people from the country side.)