At the young age of twelve, my parents sent me from my home city of Hong Kong to a school in Vancouver Island. On my first day, I stumbled through the airport talking to a friend in Chinese, when a woman walking pass glared at me, irritated, and said:
"When in Canada, you speak English." Ironically enough, I am completely fluent in English, and have been all my life, for my parents had chosen to send me to English schools ever since I was born. And yet, I could only stare at her as she threw an apple core into the bin and walked away. I consider that my first "culture differences" experience.
The culture differences between the East and West are so complex that the lines waver and smudge, and sometimes the more I think about it, the more I confuse myself. The first year on my own in the West, I stumbled through a fog of new cultures, new mannerisms, new colloquialisms, new attitudes and new people -- and even now, I still cannot say for sure whether I have reached the other side yet.
Most of my friends on both sides of the globe have said that I'm one of the lucky few who are stuck in the middle - caught in the rift of East and West. And, to be honest, while I get the fortune of being part of both worlds, after a while, it gets tiring. Every time I come back from Canada, I find that the culture gap between my friends and my family has grown larger and larger.
Just to really hit this point home, I'm going to use the celebration of holidays as an example. I went to my roommate's house in October for Halloween, and watched not only her family, but her entire neighborhood, throw themselves into the festivities. Her father spent an hour and a half in the drizzling rain on a ladder, putting a ghost on the long string suspended in the air and created some sort of invention so that he could maneuver the ghost to flap around from left to right. Her mother nailed crosses into the soil, and we made pumpkins. In the midst of pulling out pumpkin seeds, I tried to imagine my strict and traditional father wobbling around on a ladder just to string a ghost for Halloween to impress the kids -- and I couldn't. Back in Hong Kong, Halloween was nothing special. My parents didn't bother with candies, and hardly anyone I knew dressed up and went trick-or-treating anymore. Holidays, such as Halloween and Christmas, are considered childish things, and when my sister and I reached a certain age, my family stopped their pretenses. Today was Christmas, and to the horror of my non-Asian friends, the typical Chinese child does not receive presents. My father threw away the Christmas tree when I was ten. Ever since then, Christmas has been a mediocre affair -- a totally different story to the houses covered in lights, tinsel, and decorations in the West.
When I mentioned my discontent at the lack of excitement and enthusiasm for holidays, my father rolled his eyes, and like that old saying, he told me to "put away my childish things". Yet, when I expressed the same content to a western friend, she told me that she was shocked and appalled at the lack of...happiness Chinese families seemed to have. I had a friend who was also caught in this culture rift, and was talking out her frustration with me, and asked a very interesting question: Is it possible to follow both when they are so different?
What do you think of the culture differences? Which one to do you accept more? And, do you think it's possible to hold both cultures from the East and the West, together?
