foreigners in shenzhen devote hours to discussing “the chinese” and what makes them tick. more often than not, the conversion circles around the very practical questions of how to make friends, how to work together, and how to feel more part of the urban scene in the face of experienced and actual failures to make friends, to cooperate, and to integrate oneself into shenzhen.

euro-american foreigners often refer to “the fact that chinese people are more group oriented than we are” to explain their discomfort in establishing, cultivating, and maintaining relationships with chinese friends and colleagues. on the face of it, one would think that it would be easier to enter relationships with people who use interaction as a chance to demonstrate their commitment to a relationship than it is to make friends with people who use the relationship as an opportunity to express their individuality. but apparently not. many euro-american foreigners experience chinese commitment to the relationship as a kind of duplicity. true friends, they say, are themselves, rather than pretending to be someone just so you’ll like them.

an american friend told the following story to illustrate her discomfort in relationships with chinese people. although she eats chinese food, she can’t eat it every meal, and often likes to have western food, especially pizza. one of her chinese friends invited her out for pizza. while enjoying her second slice, the american suddenly realized that her friend wasn’t eating. when she asked why not, her friend said she wasn’t hungry. however, my friend persisted: you don’t really like pizza, do you? she asked. her friend admitted that she would have something else to eat once she went home. this exchange ruined the happy feeling my friend had felt just a few seconds before.

“why didn’t she tell me she didn’t like pizza?” my friend asked, truly confused.

“but you like pizza,” i said. “you’re the guest. why wouldn’t she take you out for food that you like?”

i admitted that i not only realize my chinese friends cater to my tastes, but also (when asked) state unequivocally what i like to eat.

“it gives me a childlike charm,” i joked.

my friend glared and then said, “anyway, i can’t go out for pizza with her anymore. i can’t force people to do what they don’t like to do just because i like it.”

“i don’t force anyone,” i clarified, “if asked, i don’t equivocate.”

my friend laughed, but repeated that she couldn’t eat pizza with people who didn’t like it, especially if they were paying for it. i gulped and held my tongue. when broke and hungry, i frequently show up on a friend’s doorstep and have them feed me. just last night, for example, i had a friend take me out for spaghetti at my favorite italian restaurant. now my friend prefers chinese food, but it wasn’t that difficult to order dishes that all of us could enjoy, and after ordering a range of meats, vegetables, risottos and spaghettis, we organized all the entries in the center of the table, and ate family style–little of this, little of that, a little more of that and that and that…

…but to return to the question of negotiating cultural difference. my friend and her chinese friend had gone to dinner with the same intention–to deepen their connection. however, for my american friend, the pizza dinner was an expression of individual taste; she was looking to see if she and her chinese friend had something in common. however, her chinese friend was offering her something she thought she would like to show her commitment to the relationship. thus, as neither approached the dinner in the same way, they ended up in an impasse, which has come to define their relationship. on the one hand, they both like each other and want a better relationship. on the other hand, neither has figured out what the next step should be, so they sometimes meet for coffee, each feeling a slight regret that they haven’t yet brought the relationship to where they once hoped it would go.

any euro-american living in china has similar stories; suddenly, we find ourselves unable to interpret what is happening and thus incapable of acting in ways that will help us realize our intentions, which are often unhelpfully vague. this experience, especially when repeated, can be discouraging, frustrating, and often alienating. more often than not, we gloss these moments as examples of culture shock or difference, and leave it at that, moving on to the next awkward dinner and inevitable conversation with compatriots about “what makes the chinese tick?”

at times like this, i think the concept of “culture” does more harm than good; if our intention is to improve the quality of dinner with friends, we don’t need to imagine that the great monolith of chinese culture looms overhead, casting a deep and impenetrable shadow. we need neither to read ethnography, nor to memorize lists of cultural traits. we don’t even have to read the introduction to chinese culture, which prefaces the guidebooks many of us keep on our bookshelves. we can definitely do without comparing stories of cultural misunderstanding, duplicity, and heartbreak. in short, we need to stop playing the intellectual equivalent of collecting and trading baseball cards, and get on with the serious work of figuring out why we are here, despite all our moaning about cultural difference.

making culture an abstract concept that we apprehend intellectually hinders more than it helps the cultivation of specific friendships because it focuses on general types, rather than the person sitting with us. instead, i believe that it is more useful to approach these moments of disorientation as opportunities to examine our own assumptions about what we are doing, and modify them so that we can achieve our goals with less friction and more joy. if necessary, we may also have to look at what it is we intend to achieve through a specific interaction, in which case, it is our goals that need to be reevaluated.

once we take take cultural disorientation as a chance to clarify our actions and motives, there are suddenly all kinds of opportunities to grow friendships, improve cooperation, and integrate oneself into new communities, both at home and across the so-called east-west divide. reframed as self-examination or cultural critique, the intellectual study of cultural suddenly provides all sorts of benefits. indeed, one of the great benefits of living abroad is that more often than at home, daily life disrupts our taken-for-granted assumptions, inviting us first to rethink the world as we know it and then, by cultivating more skillful practices, to transform it.