The Swimming Pool as Cross-Cultural Training

It happens every time we go swimming. We show up to the pool, pay to get in, and prepare to jump in to the water when inevitably a lifeguard will stop us and show us where the locker room is where we can put on our swim clothes. Before I had the language skills necessary to navigate this conversation it was an extremely confusing and awkward situation. Now that we can say what we want to say (and have them understand us), we simply tell them that in America these are our swimming clothes. Yes, Michael Phelps' swimming clothes do look different than mine, but then again I am not here at the pool to set any world records. I have been tempted to go speedo (when in Rome...), but my more-easily-embarrassed-than-me-wife has quickly nipped that temptation in the bud.

Actually, it is a neat and tidy lesson in cross-cultural work. We are not Chinese. No matter how hard we try, we will never be Chinese - and truthfully, they don't expect us to be Chinese. Chinese are different than us - in many ways - and we can never expect them to behave like us (or like we think they should). There are 1.3 billion of them, and we will never change their culture. Us foreigners need to learn where we need to act like them and assimilate to their culture (using chopsticks, walking everywhere, cutting in line, not tipping the waitress, taking off our shoes when we enter someone's house, etc.), because after all, it is their culture. On the other hand, we also need to decide where we are not going change (swimming trunks, air conditioning, eating dog meat, split pants on babies, littering, drinking cold drinks in the winter, public urination, etc). We do this for our own sanity, and because in these instances of us retaining our American culture we are not offending theirs.