Half a life half way around the world

When I am with my Chinese friends, I experience the other side of Shandong culture: warmth, friendliness, social bonding. My friends do not see me as a fresh-off-the-boat foreigner. They do not bombard me with questions about how much things cost in America the way new acquaintances do.

We sit around a large, round table in a restaurant, eating, drinking, and drinking. The person hosting has a designated position at the table; the secondary host has his position; the primary and secondary guests of honor have their places. Everyone has their location at the table based on their relationship to everyone else within that group's social hierarchy.

The ensuing game of toasting each other is a fascinating experiment in social interaction.

Within the confines of the game, the diners can recite poetry, express their respect, gratitude, and love for others, display their personality, reveal their feelings and values, and even exert their dominance.

When I first played this game I hated it. It felt too confining, too artificial. Now that I have learned the rules a little better (and have a good group of friends to play with), I love it. It is a social glue that needs to be reapplied every once in a while to reinforce the social bonds of family and friendship.

Living my adult life in a foreign country has become a lifelong learning process. As an outsider, there are always more subtleties and trivia to learn about this culture.

But I have concluded from decades of observation that there is a mistake common to almost all who are trying to understand people of another culture.

Whether it is Easterners wanting to understand the West or Westerners wanting to understand the East, people spend too much time asking how we are different instead of asking how we are the same.

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