The Global Generation Gap

UPDATE: Indeed, it turns out that the Pew Research Center has a study called "A Global Generation Gap" that seems to confirm a lot of the things I'm considering in this post, most notably that young people around the globe have a different perspective of the world around them:

Older Americans and Western Europeans are more likely than their grandchildren to have reservations about growing global interconnectedness, to worry that their way of life is threatened, to feel that their culture is superior to others and to support restrictions on immigration. This generation gap is less pronounced in Eastern Europe and is virtually nonexistent in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Nevertheless, Americans and Western Europeans of all ages are less likely than people in other parts of the world to tout their own cultural superiority and are less wary of foreign influence. These findings are based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project's surveys conducted during 2002 and 2003 among more than 66,000 people in 49 nations plus the Palestinian Authority.

Throughout the world, there is a tension in opinion brought on by the push and pull of globalization. Strong majorities in all regions believe that increased global interconnectedness is a good thing. But globalization is more popular among the youth of the world. Everywhere but Latin America, young people are more likely than their elders to see advantages in increased global trade and communication, and they are more likely to embrace "globalization" per se¹. This hesitation among some older citizens to embrace the movement toward globalization may be due in part to latent nationalism. Trend data from the World Values Survey², in successive surveys over the past 20 years, show that for the last two decades older people in the U.S. and throughout Western Europe have consistently expressed more national pride than a generation of older citizens.

In December, Fanfan and I will be heading to the US for a four month stint with my family. Not only will it be Fanfan's first trip to the US ever — where better to spend it than in South Carolina? — it will also be her first time meeting most of my family (everyone but my parents) and friends (aside from a handful that passed through Paris while she/we were living there).

When I think of our time at home, my mind’s eye is presented with a mosaic of possibilities that range from “Tah-won, oh, dahlin, that's sooo in-turr-restin’. How do ya’ like it hee-yah in Chosston?” to “Don't y’all eat dogs?” to “Were you there when the tsunami hit?” There is also that lingering belief that people will see Fanfan as something of a "yellow fever" sort of fetish I have (which I don't -- before Fanfan, I'd always dreamed of having an Italian woman).

I’ve been thinking about this post for a long time, but finally decided to write it because of a post I read recently at X-Pat Magazine, in which Andrew Crosthwaite talks about being married to a Taiwanese woman and the peculiar curiosity it arouses in others. Fanfan and I aren’t married, but the question is always on the tip of everyone’s tongues.

“Their assumption, that a marriage like ours must have more problems than one between two people from the same country, appears to make sense,” says Crosthwaite.

This idea, though, is based on a blinkered outlook. It fails to take into account that our marriage doesn’t have all the same problems as other married couples precisely because it’s cross-cultural. Take, for example, our relations with each other’s families. I’ve heard many stories from Taiwanese women complaining about their in-laws. Often they live with their husbands’ parents and, due to pressure (coming largely from their mother-in-laws), are unable to live their own lives, or raise their children, as they choose.

My wife doesn’t have that problem—not in the least because we live several thousand miles from my parents. And even if we didn’t, English men who always do what their mothers want are derided as “mummy’s boys”. As for me, I get in-laws who are extremely helpful and supportive, but who also accept that their daughter has left their family and don’t try to interfere too much with how we run our lives. There’s also another very positive side of being married to a woman from a different country. It doesn’t suit everyone, but I enjoy being with a person whose upbringing and experiences give her a very different take on life from my own. Provided you keep an open mind a different opinion will help you to understand the world more fully. To put it simply, a cross-cultural marriage, just like any other marriage, has both good and bad points.

For Fanfan and I — as I presume most multinational couples would agree — we certainly do deal with strains that most couples don’t deal with, but we also have things going for us that most couples don’t have.

As for the hardships, they are plenty. The first one that comes to mind — which might not be so obvious to those who haven’t dealt with it — are governments. This problem is amplified when you’re talking about a couple in which one person is Taiwanese. I’ve heard this isn’t as difficult in the US, because the American government makes a pretty clear distinction between Taiwanese and Chinese, but I wouldn’t say that is true in France, or Europe. I remember sitting red-eyed and tired on the uncomfortable plastic chairs at the Préfecture de Police in Paris, thinking for the first time that I was going to throw up from the anxiety. It was our third time there trying to renew Fanfan’s titre de séjour, each time being sent away for this or that, a specified date here, a paper there. This time was all or nothing, if she didn’t get it, she’d have to go home, and I’d be stuck in Paris (I know, it doesn’t sound so horrible, but life in Paris wasn’t exactly what you see in the movies). Not only did they renew her titre, they gave her three months more than she was asking, just to spite us.

These sort of instances abound. I have an intense disdain for the whole process of getting visas and whatnot. It’s something I never look forward to, especially when it’s Fanfan who's getting one.

As I’ve said, Taiwan’s relations with the US are different from with Europe, as I understand, so it shouldn’t (I’m praying) be as much of a problem when we go for our stay in the states.

The difficulty that probably comes to most people’s minds is the fact that the cultures and heritages that contributed to our personal development are so different, most notably “She speaks Chinese, and you speak English. Don’t you have misunderstandings?” Sure, one thing that helps us though, is that we both speak our second language, French, to each other. This way, we’re more or less on the same lever.

We met studying French together, so it only seems natural for us to speak it together. Many people who don’t speak a second language — which becomes very clear when you compare English teachers in Taiwan that speak another language to those that don’t — don’t realize just how much vocabulary even the best foreign speakers of any language don't know. I hear people on a regular basis using words that are very simple to native speakers, but require a very intimate knowledge of English, for example, to understand.

• We plug headphones into a jack.
• To open a soft drink can, we pull a tab.
• Instead of just saying, "He has bad hand writing,” we might say, “Boy, that’s chicken scratch" or “You just scribbled on the page.”
• We don’t say, “Squeeze the water out of the towel." Rather, we say, “Wring the water out of the rag.”

I doubt any of those words were unfamiliar to any English speakers, even if they’re only about five years old. This is something I’m very self-conscious of when we go home. I can’t stop thinking that people will talk to her like a two year old because she won’t understand something she’s saying.

(This excludes any conversations about forensics or crime scene investigations. She and I watch so much CSI these days that she could probably hold her own when it comes to gun shot residue and blood spatter angulation)

Keep in mind, though, I’m not being critical. Once, I pointed out to Fanfan about how mad a good friend of mine got when some friends said his Argentinian girlfriend was “adorable.” “She’s not a toy,” he said, “She’s an engineering student that just has a different level of English grammar.” When I told Fanfan this, her face changed faster than a scooter running a red light. “What?” I asked, wondering why she seemed urked by my comment. I had been thinking about how much that would annoy me. Knowing that my girlfriend is a highly educated, multilingual, cultured femme du monde, I wasn’t ready to have people telling me how “adorable” she was.

“That’s exactly what you do when I speak English!” — which is completely true. I don’t hear her speak English very much, but when I do, it’s just pure sweetness and innocence.

This just scratches the surface, too. I haven’t even mentioned idioms and slang — the latter changes on a nearly daily basis in the US. Yesterday, Fanfan and I were eating at a restaurant and the Police song “Wrapped Around Your Finger” came on. I asked her if she knew what it meant to be wrapped around someone’s finger. She thought about it for a second, then, pointing to her finger, she said, “Like a wedding ring. It’s for engagement?” I explained to her that that wasn’t the case.

Aside from language, there is the whole idea of culture in general. She grew up in an oppressive one party state, spent all of her formative years in a classroom (I mean sunrise to sunset, for those who aren't familiar with Taiwanese educational practices), celebrates Moon Festivals and Lunar New Years with her family, lived for long periods of time with her grandparents while her father was at sea and her mother was working, a part of Taiwan’s economic development. Down the street from her parent’s house is a Daoist temple. I, on the other hand, grew up in South Carolina, in the “Holy City” nestled in the Bible Belt, in a Presbyterian family, where we celebrate the 4th of July, St. Patrick’s Day, and Christmas. Ostensibly, things couldn’t be any more different, which seems like it should make things difficult.

Yet, as is mentioned in the article from X-Pat, this perspective is neglecting a lot of important details, the most important of which is apparent just by watching the news in the US. So many assume that our different cultures would cause conflicts — “Fanfan, you mean your foreigner boyfriend doesn’t have his own broadsword? He has to borrow one of ours? Next, you're going to tell me he can’t fly either!” This seems to make sense on its face, but what people neglect is the fact that people from the same culture often don’t understand each other at all. Just turn on the news and you see a slew of people who couldn’t be more different from each other living in the same neighborhood, born and raised.

Our different cultures, on the other hand, are what bring us together. We are both travelers at heart, fascinated by foreign places and ideas. We, essentially, have our whole lifetime to learn from each other. It also gives you perspective in looking back on your own culture, seeing it through someone else's eyes.

Just to give you an idea of how trivial are cultural differences are, here are some examples of the "cultural differences" that have caused conflicts (by that, I mean "bickering back and forth"):

• Drinking "cold" things when I'm sick. This doesn't only mean things that have a low kinetic energy, but there are certain things in Eastern philosophy that are "cold," and others that are "hot" -- irrespective of whether or not they are served hot or cold. If I understand correctly, green tea -- served steaming hot or ice cold -- is a "cold" beverage, and "cold" things should never be drunk when you are sick.
• Not taking a shower before you go to bed is seen as disgusting here (which is oft-cited cause of Asian-Western couple disputes). As they look at it, you go around all day collecting filth on your person, you need to wash it off before you smear it all over your bed.
• Wearing shoes in the house is out of the question. There are families back home that don't wear shoes in the house, but here it is the norm.
• Taking medicine, in general, is frowned upon. While most American girls carry a bottle of Advil or Tylenol in their purse, you'll rarely ever find a Taiwanese girl that does the same. I also take a medicine on a daily basis, which took Fanfan a good two years to get used to.
  

All of the hardships listed above are surmountable, while all of the benefits — being intimately involved in another culture, learning one of the most interesting languages in the world, and, of course, being in love — far outweigh the downsides.

There is also something I like to call the “Global Generation Gap.” You see, our generation — Fanfan and mine — is the first in history to be so interconnected. Fanfan and I grew up watching more or less the same television shows (though she also watched Taiwanese, Japanese, and Korean shows), listening to the same music (again, except that I didn’t listen to Japanese or Taiwanese music), and watching the same movies (except, finally, I didn’t watch Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, etc. movies). I’m pretty sure there was even a T.G.I. Fridays in Taipei before we got one back home.

If you didn’t get the point above, most people in the world are quite familiar with American culture — film, music, television, etc. — though, I feel, Americans are only starting to look outward. This is, of course, both good and bad for so many reasons that I’m not going to go into.

One of the first conversations Fanfan and I ever had was about Ben Harper — of whom I’m a big fan, who is a superstar in France, but wasn’t very well known in the US, especially at the time. Here was this Taiwanese girl, though, who had bought the CD in Taiwan, singing the lyrics to “When It’s Good,” I was amazed. But, I’ve run into this all over the world. Traveling alone in Ireland, I learned that The Simpsons and The Big Lebowski were the some of the best conversation starters that exist with any male under the age of thirty (it comes on about fifteen times a day in Ireland, too). I met Israelis, Italians, and Swedes who lit up trying to out quote me.

All over the world, I’ve met people from, well, all over the world, who were supposed, according to FOX News and CNN, to either hate me or want to kill me. Yet, I experienced quite the opposite: People seemed very anxious to talk to me once they knew I was American. Sure, our conversations often got very political, but no ever associated the things they hated about the US with me personally. It was such a nice feeling to have people tell me, “You really changed the way I look at Americans.”

I was equally appreciative to see that things are more complicated, more nuanced, than what you see on the news.

The most rewarding thing to come to understand is that our nationalities tell us nothing — or, at best, very little — of who we are. At any given moment, I could fit a number of American stereotypes — "Look! He’s eating a hamburger! It’s true!" — all of them, from one moment to the next, conflicting with the others:

There’s also the fact that none of these stereotypes or generalizations accurately describes either myself, or my wife. Indeed I doubt they could ever fully describe any real person. Real people (even shallow people), are not one-sided. Rather, their personalities are made up of a range of characteristics and influences. And, more and more in this shrinking world of ours, the influences that help to build our characters come from cultures other than the culture we were born into. In reality there is no such thing as “a foreigner” or “a Taiwanese girl”. These words have little genuine meaning when applied to individuals.

This is also why I have a very optimistic outlook for my generation on the world stage. Sure, there are plenty of examples of extremism in all of its forms, but what I’ve seen with my own eyes has made me believe that those who want to rectify past mistakes will be more powerful than those who want to open old wounds (and I know that the difference between the latter and the former is mostly semantic, seeing as those who want to open old wounds believe they’re rectifying past mistakes).

What it comes down to is that foreign cultures are getting to be a lot less foreign, it seems to me.

Then again, that says nothing of what I'll have to face when people excitedly come over to meet my "Thai" girlfriend. She can't wait, and neither can I.