Cultural Distinctives

Two things emphasizing cultural differences have struck me in the few days that we have been back. One was yesterday.  We keep a phone with a Chinese SIM card in China and a different phone with a US SIM card in the States. Just keeps the frustration down. However, because I was biking so much this summer and needed to be able to call someone, so we purchased two phones (for the very first time in our lives that each of us had a phone). I wanted to download my Noom diet program onto the smaller US phone here in China and tried to put in a Chinese SIM card into the trac phone. It did not work. At one point the person helping me, laughed and said this phone, which was not compatible, said, “Made in China”.  The cultural jar was that before I could even talk to someone about purchasing a new SIM card I needed to review the huge board where 50+ numbers were listed. I tried to bypass this step, but they were very, very insistent. Numbers are important to Chinese. Like one does not want 4’s in the number because “4” sounds like the word for “death”, etc. It just was so so different in emphasis than buying a phone in the US.

The second incident happened during a discussion with a group of friends. I have often mentioned that the responsibilities between parents and children is different between the US and China. They nod their heads but we never get into specifics. This time we did. These young students and workers in their mid 20’s pay their parents’ rent!! One of them said she kind of thought her mom would say “thank you” when she started, but the mom did not even thank her, but just accepted it as her due. The young people felt this was completely what they owed their parents for the sacrifices made for them while they were growing up. They will support their parents for as long as their parents live. I told them that we would never expect our kids to do this, unless we were completely destitute. That we discuss what our plans are as we get older, but that the kids have little to do with that. That we also most often give our kids money, not the other way around. Their eyes got huge and their mouths fell open. They were not at all impressed with our customs, and we found their sense of responsibility a bit confounding.