Saturday, May 12, 2012

Adapting to Hong Kong part 1

People always ask me what the toughest things are about adapting to living in Hong Kong. I think it’s probably hard to adapt to any culture that’s different from your own. I’ve heard Americans talk about how hard it was to adapt to living in Canada, and Canada isn’t really that different. It was probably hard for them because they weren’t living in their home country anymore. Living in another country is always hard because you’re leaving your home behind. No matter how similar the cultures are, it’s still a different country.

I think Chinese culture might be as far away from American as you can get. I don’t mean they’re far apart geographically, although they are. I think the cultures are just as different as any two cultures can be. The way we talk, eat, sleep, walk, bathe, drive, work, play and think are different.

The languages are different, of course, but they’re very different. I took French in high school. I can barely speak any French. I read it very slowly and I can only understand people if they take their time, but I think French is a million times easier to learn than Chinese. If I lived in France for a year I would be completely fluent simply from being surrounded by it. I’m not bragging. This is what our French teacher always said and I’ve heard other language types say the same thing. I’ve lived in Hong Kong over a year and I barely know anything. I’m surrounded by it every day. It’s not that I haven’t tried. It’s just a very different language.

English and French have things in common. There are similarities in the way we do things and the alphabet is practically the same. English and Chinese are different in every way. Chinese doesn’t do any of the grammar rules English does and they don’t have an alphabet. You have to memorize Chinese characters, and there’s no way to look at them and just know how to pronounce them. The Spanish word biblioteca means bookstore or something about books. I don’t even know what it means, but I know how to pronounce it. Just look at it. There’s really only one way you would pronounce it. How do you pronounce 圖書館? There’s no way to just look at it and know, unless you already know the language.

Chinese food isn’t just different from American food, it’s eaten in different ways. There’s a whole other etiquette and different procedures. If we burped at the dinner table when I was a child, my mother would slap us across the face. Chinese people burp left and right during meals. It’s a compliment to the cook. When Americans go out to eat, everyone’s meal is served at the same time. It’s rude to eat if someone doesn’t have their food. Chinese restaurants bring out the food whenever it’s ready. They eat whatever they get whenever they get it. It doesn’t matter if anyone else has theirs or not.

Chinese people sleep on rock hard beds with tiny thin pillows, and they put towels on their pillows instead of, or over, pillow cases. I’ve also heard that it’s normal for adult siblings to sleep in the same bed. That wouldn’t fly in my family.


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