If one tendency of some students studying in other countries is to romanticize the cultural differences they encounter, another tendency is to rush to a negative judgment about the people involved in the cross-cultural encounter and the culture more generally. These turns towards negative judgments have three roots: a traveler’s subjective perspective, the misreading of cultural cues, and predisposed expectations of “the way things should be.”
Several examples illustrate this. As a part of my daily routine, I visited an Internet cafe to view publisher site, read Western newspapers and communicate with colleagues, friends, and family. The high- speed Internet connection that enabled me to connect to the outside world for 25 an hour kept me coming back to the dark, dirty, smoky cyber-cave. My fellow Internet users were mostly university-aged young men who surrounded their keyboards with some subset of the following accessories: Coke can, cell phone, bowl of noodles, cigarette lighter, and pack of cigarettes. The most memorable aspect of life inside the Internet cafe was the incredibly high percentage of young men that were chain-smokers. “How dumb,” I thought, “they’re killing themselves.” “What’s wrong with these people?” I wondered, “This is a lung cancer pandemic in the making.” In asking what was wrong with these people, I intimated that the male smokers surrounding me weren’t very smart. In turn, that thought process contributed to negative judgments about Chinese citizens more generally. “Why aren’t the Chinese more health conscious?” I wondered. And one afternoon, after sitting next to a chain-smoker, I thought, “It’s one thing if he wants to endanger himself, but it’s the height of rudeness to subject me to the same pollution.” Again, I wondered, “What’s wrong with these people?” |