Culture

First off, I apologize for not blogging for the entire month of April.  It was absolutely insane, and I have no idea where that month went.  Maybe it was the teaching on 2 separate weekends thing and planning and administering midterm exams.  At any rate, I'm back and reflecting on culture.  I return to America in less than 2 months, and that has gotten me thinking about all of the things that are different between these two countries.

As you probably know, life in China is a little different than life in America. I'm pretty accustomed to Chinese cultural rules at this point. I have embraced many of these rules as my own. This means I'm probably a little fuzzy on the American ones. So here's a heads up to my friends back in the U.S.A. Feel free to (gently) reprimand me if you notice me doing these things in a couple months.

1. Standing too close
   Personal bubbles don't exist in China. There's a whole heck of a lot of people here. Sometimes you're on a bus literally crammed full of people and you have to have your body shoved up against a complete stranger with your arm reaching around some man's waist to be able to hold onto a bar to keep from being flung into other people by the jerking of the bus. This is totally okay.
2. Pushing
   This is linked into the “standing too close” thing. Again, China has a lot of people. If you want to get on or off a bus, order food, or enter or exit a building, you have to be pushy. Literally. If you don't push people or jostle for your position, you're not going to get what you need. Sorry in advance.
3. Being unable to stand in line
   And this goes with the “pushing” thing. People don't really stand in lines here. You kind of form small mobs and then push to the front. People will cut in front of you if you're not assertive enough so you've just got to keep pushing forward. This also connects with “standing too close”. In the cases where there is something resembling a line, it is perfectly acceptable to be immediately behind the person in front of you. I understand that this is probably not the case in America unless things have completely changed in the last 10 months.
4. Linking arms or holding hands
   I often link arms or hold hands with my friends (girls, not boys) here. To be fair, I did this before, but after living in a culture where it is the norm, I'll probably be even more likely to forget that it's mostly not okay in America. So if you're not comfortable with me standing really close and holding your hand while I talk to you, just let me know.
5. Table Manners
   This mostly applies to eating out. I'm much more inclined to slurp. I've also become pretty adept at shoveling large amounts of food into my body in short periods of time as our lunch period is limited. So sometimes I might be more focused on the food than the conversation.
   Also, if you eat something with bones here, it is completely expected that you remove said bones from your mouth and pile them up on the table, not on a plate. The same is done with any tissues you use during the meal.
   Finally, at Chinese restaurants, you order a bunch of dishes and everyone shares. I like this a lot. I'm probably going to complain that we don't do this often in America. Please forgive me.
6. Being bad at speaking English
   Okay, this one's not a cultural thing. It's just something that will probably annoy you. I teach English and I try my hardest to maintain my grasp on correct grammar and a wide, intelligent vocabulary. However, I fail at that a lot of the time. A lot of my days are spent communicating with students whose first language does not have any verb tenses and therefore struggle with English and its gazillion verb tenses. I've gotten really good at communicating my ideas in English almost entirely in the present tense, simple future, and simple past since using other tenses often causes my students with a low English level to look at me with glazed-over eyes. Though I do still try out present continuous, present perfect, past perfect, and past continuous first, sometimes I just get myself grammatically confused. Please help me.
   I also apologize if I say things like “have a try”, “have a rest”, “just so-so”, and countless other Chinglish phrases that I probably don't even realize I use.

I hope you find this helpful and informative for the future. I will make cultural mistakes. Let's just laugh at them together and move on.