Reflections on an intercultural experience
While waiting for my driver in Ho Chi Minh City to take me to the airport, I thought about intercultural differences and how I was seeing and experiencing them. I wondered about the ways in which these differences were or were not engaging me. I noticed the tendency to seek the comfort of the similar, as with our desire to stay in a part of town that was “nicer” and had more things to do. I read that to mean that we were desiring to be in a place more like we were used to. The language difference is a barrier but enough people here speak enough English so that it doesn’t seem to difficult getting by.
Just now I had an exchange with a young man behind the cashier’s desk. I was trying to see if I could check out early so I didn’t have to do it in the morning but, after a fashion I gave up because I wasn’t understanding him and it seemed clear he wasn’t understanding me, even though he did seem to speak some English. In moments like this, I experience a gulf between myself and the person with whom I am trying to communicate. Something odd happens or feels like it is happening. It is almost as if I am trying to talk to a machine and eliciting about as much understanding. I can’t reach the person at some level and it doesn’t feel like he or she reaches me at that level. That is a frustrating feeling.
So are my senses dulled by prior intercultural experiences? What is my experience of difference here? Of the “other”? I seem to construct a sense of the “other” from past prior experiences of my own. In doing so, I may very well simply be encountering little more than some reflection of my self. How well do I really know the people who I met? To what extent can I say I met them on a level that was deeply meaningful and engaging? I don’t thing I can. Using language and the work, I suppose, I think I kept them at a distance most of the time. Maybe this is what the intercultural experience can do – help us realize how we so often create the “other” in some image of our own making and rarely meet them within their own humanity, their own real, authentic selves. Is that possible? We have trouble doing that with our family members and friends. Perhaps it is much too much to ask of casual relationships that we develop in foreign lands.
Just now I had an exchange with a young man behind the cashier’s desk. I was trying to see if I could check out early so I didn’t have to do it in the morning but, after a fashion I gave up because I wasn’t understanding him and it seemed clear he wasn’t understanding me, even though he did seem to speak some English. In moments like this, I experience a gulf between myself and the person with whom I am trying to communicate. Something odd happens or feels like it is happening. It is almost as if I am trying to talk to a machine and eliciting about as much understanding. I can’t reach the person at some level and it doesn’t feel like he or she reaches me at that level. That is a frustrating feeling.
So are my senses dulled by prior intercultural experiences? What is my experience of difference here? Of the “other”? I seem to construct a sense of the “other” from past prior experiences of my own. In doing so, I may very well simply be encountering little more than some reflection of my self. How well do I really know the people who I met? To what extent can I say I met them on a level that was deeply meaningful and engaging? I don’t thing I can. Using language and the work, I suppose, I think I kept them at a distance most of the time. Maybe this is what the intercultural experience can do – help us realize how we so often create the “other” in some image of our own making and rarely meet them within their own humanity, their own real, authentic selves. Is that possible? We have trouble doing that with our family members and friends. Perhaps it is much too much to ask of casual relationships that we develop in foreign lands.
posted by John at 2:49 PM
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