What's the greatest cultural experience you've had? Why?
So as part of my continued self-improvement, I believe I mentioned out casually filling in the application for KAOS Pilots, which I am not interested in applying for but have decided it would be a good idea to do their little test on "who are you - what are your interests", mostly to see if I can even work out what those things are.
The title of this post is one of the questions, and while I thought it would be one of the easiest questions to answer, I found it incredibly difficult. My whole life seems to have been comprised of cultural experiences, perhaps because I've come to define "cultural experience" rather broadly. The first time I remember being exposed to a culture different to my own was when I was about eight, I suppose. My family went to Fiji and Western Samoa, and we were exposed to some amazing things: men skilfully climbing trees to retrieve coconuts, people sitting on each other's laps on crowded buses, eating at a tiny little home-run restaurant in back streets, 750ml bottles of soda, getting caught at a beach during prayer time, flame-throwing and traditional dance, the drag queens of Pango Pango, and even having lunch at the famous expat hotel Maggie Gray's. They're strong, early memories of exposure to different cultures, and from then on it never seemed to stop.
It's funny, though, that those experiences I just mentioned didn't even make it onto my list. I recounted so many things from my time in America, because let's face it, going trick-or-treating or going to a ball game at Fenway might seem mundane but it was special and interesting to me, and things never stopped being interesting even through seven years of being there. American traditions - like cultural traditions anywhere - are perplexing, hilarious, and wonderful. They don't make any sense, there's no reason for them, and yet they're fascinating. Our first Christmas in America was in Wichita, Kansas, with the family of a friend my mum had known online for years; it was a bizarre mixture of same-but-different. Every Fourth of July was different, and even though I'm not American I remember being moved by the Boston Pops and the fireworks out on the Esplanade on the Charles. And I still believe that one of the biggest American cultural moments I was a part of was being in Boston for 9/11. People in Australia, and anywhere else in the world, don't really understand what that first hour, day, week, month was like, and they never will. I wasn't in New York and didn't have friends or family there, but it hurt just as much for me. I will never forget my year at an American college, which was bizarre and typical and atypical and lame and awesome all at once. And I credit my years in Boston to my understanding of Judaism, and especially American Jews and Russian Jews, because of my middle school experience.
And while I was in America, I became interested in Chinese culture. I have so many memories of China that it's impossible to list them, much like my seven years in America, but I can try. I have visited rural Shaanxi and talked to farmers about Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and seen how people live out there. I have spent three Chinese New Years' in China, one with a family in rural Guangdong, one with a family in Beijing, and one with other expats in Beijing, and each has taught me something new about China. I have spent a full 24 hours on a train from Hong Kong to Beijing speaking with overseas Chinese as well as a young man from Tianjin with serious issues with Japanese people. I have climbed mountains and stayed overnight in temples and seen many sights and taken Chinese-only tours and there's so much still left to do here. China has brought me so many valuable people to my life, including music shop boy who I had a painful crush on and was taught my first lessons in being friends and more-than-friends with Chinese people. In university, I came to China and met two Germans from different sides of the wall and asked them one day about their lives. They were incredibly influential on my life.
And then, amongst all of that, especially after so long in America, I count much of my experiences in Australia as cultural ones, too. Australian culture is confusing enough to define as it is, but imagine spending seven years so tied to it and then coming to realize you don't know what it means. Spending Australia Days in Sydney, taking a course on whether Australia is part of Asia or not, being there for and studying the Cronulla riots - I'm still not sure I will ever make sense of Australian culture, but every day and every new Australian I meet no matter where they are in the world teaches me something new about the culture I've called my own for so long.
Then, of course, there's the miscellany: learning Japanese culture through television, finding myself feeling as though I was at home in Holland though I'd never been there before, the relaxed pace of rural Quebec over a few summers at the lake house, and meeting multicultural people like Lydia, who sometimes seems as culturally confused as myself, or Pride who has come from Zimbabwe via the UK and the US and is constantly interested in everything of all cultures.
Taking stock of all of these experiences, I'm not sure I could pick "the greatest". All of them have had an effect on me, and all of them have made me who I am as a person today. Even if I generalized to say that "moving to America" or "my time in China" were cultural experiences, I couldn't tell you which is greater, in any sense of the word.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth.
The title of this post is one of the questions, and while I thought it would be one of the easiest questions to answer, I found it incredibly difficult. My whole life seems to have been comprised of cultural experiences, perhaps because I've come to define "cultural experience" rather broadly. The first time I remember being exposed to a culture different to my own was when I was about eight, I suppose. My family went to Fiji and Western Samoa, and we were exposed to some amazing things: men skilfully climbing trees to retrieve coconuts, people sitting on each other's laps on crowded buses, eating at a tiny little home-run restaurant in back streets, 750ml bottles of soda, getting caught at a beach during prayer time, flame-throwing and traditional dance, the drag queens of Pango Pango, and even having lunch at the famous expat hotel Maggie Gray's. They're strong, early memories of exposure to different cultures, and from then on it never seemed to stop.
It's funny, though, that those experiences I just mentioned didn't even make it onto my list. I recounted so many things from my time in America, because let's face it, going trick-or-treating or going to a ball game at Fenway might seem mundane but it was special and interesting to me, and things never stopped being interesting even through seven years of being there. American traditions - like cultural traditions anywhere - are perplexing, hilarious, and wonderful. They don't make any sense, there's no reason for them, and yet they're fascinating. Our first Christmas in America was in Wichita, Kansas, with the family of a friend my mum had known online for years; it was a bizarre mixture of same-but-different. Every Fourth of July was different, and even though I'm not American I remember being moved by the Boston Pops and the fireworks out on the Esplanade on the Charles. And I still believe that one of the biggest American cultural moments I was a part of was being in Boston for 9/11. People in Australia, and anywhere else in the world, don't really understand what that first hour, day, week, month was like, and they never will. I wasn't in New York and didn't have friends or family there, but it hurt just as much for me. I will never forget my year at an American college, which was bizarre and typical and atypical and lame and awesome all at once. And I credit my years in Boston to my understanding of Judaism, and especially American Jews and Russian Jews, because of my middle school experience.
And while I was in America, I became interested in Chinese culture. I have so many memories of China that it's impossible to list them, much like my seven years in America, but I can try. I have visited rural Shaanxi and talked to farmers about Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and seen how people live out there. I have spent three Chinese New Years' in China, one with a family in rural Guangdong, one with a family in Beijing, and one with other expats in Beijing, and each has taught me something new about China. I have spent a full 24 hours on a train from Hong Kong to Beijing speaking with overseas Chinese as well as a young man from Tianjin with serious issues with Japanese people. I have climbed mountains and stayed overnight in temples and seen many sights and taken Chinese-only tours and there's so much still left to do here. China has brought me so many valuable people to my life, including music shop boy who I had a painful crush on and was taught my first lessons in being friends and more-than-friends with Chinese people. In university, I came to China and met two Germans from different sides of the wall and asked them one day about their lives. They were incredibly influential on my life.
And then, amongst all of that, especially after so long in America, I count much of my experiences in Australia as cultural ones, too. Australian culture is confusing enough to define as it is, but imagine spending seven years so tied to it and then coming to realize you don't know what it means. Spending Australia Days in Sydney, taking a course on whether Australia is part of Asia or not, being there for and studying the Cronulla riots - I'm still not sure I will ever make sense of Australian culture, but every day and every new Australian I meet no matter where they are in the world teaches me something new about the culture I've called my own for so long.
Then, of course, there's the miscellany: learning Japanese culture through television, finding myself feeling as though I was at home in Holland though I'd never been there before, the relaxed pace of rural Quebec over a few summers at the lake house, and meeting multicultural people like Lydia, who sometimes seems as culturally confused as myself, or Pride who has come from Zimbabwe via the UK and the US and is constantly interested in everything of all cultures.
Taking stock of all of these experiences, I'm not sure I could pick "the greatest". All of them have had an effect on me, and all of them have made me who I am as a person today. Even if I generalized to say that "moving to America" or "my time in China" were cultural experiences, I couldn't tell you which is greater, in any sense of the word.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth.