FIFTY SHADES OF CULTURE SHOCK, PART 1

These just-passed holidays (T-Day & Xmas) prompted anew my life long struggles with one of the ‘blessings of diversity’ that is culture shock. Namely, in this specific regard, to my long-abiding fascination with Asian culture, which a close (honky) friend once perfectly described as being like a moth to a candle.

It’s hard to say exactly how this preoccupation with all things Asian began, since ethnically speaking I am most definitely and unquestionably a card-carrying White Caucasian Anglo-Saxon. That is to say in my instance possessed of Irish paternal roots and German-Huguenot maternal ancestors. Regardless of my acknowledged innate proclivities for (Irish) beer, corned beef & cabbage on the one hand and (German) bier und schnitzel on the other, somehow, some way and doubtless way back in the earlier years of my life I became fixated on Chinese and Japanese (although not necessarily SEA, even though there is a much of the Ethnic Chinese to be found in SEA) culture, history & civilisation.

Sitting here, only a few days after the Christian Christmas holiday, I find myself puzzling over what exactly started me along this intriguing, beguiling and ultimately sorely perplexing trail to the Far East.

I suppose it began as well (as I am able to determine) back in my childhood, when at the age of 7 to 10 years I found myself in school with other kids who were quite different from me. I first discovered this in several small towns in the Great Central Valley of California, where my recently widowed school teacher mum was a sixth grade instructor. This was about 12 years after rampant racist paranoia over the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had prompted America’s government to forcibly sequester all Japanese citizens and American citizens of Japanese-American ancestry in internment camps, a tragically precipitous move that flagrantly violated the rights of many thousands of loyal American citizens (and shamefully cast aspersions on that loyalty that unfairly linger to this day). Later, after mum died in a silver mine (where she had been pursuing her amateur geology pastime), I ended up on Oahu, where I was taken in by relatives…a locale where it seemed as if every other person had distinctively Asian characteristics.

In the Great Central Valley of California, there was actually quite a noticeable Japanese-American (as well as Chinese-American) presence in the community we lived in. Part of the town was unofficially recognized as the ‘Asian District’, an appellation doubtless resulting from still somewhat palpable racist discrimination directed again any and all Asians that began in the mid-1800s. Therein lived & worked quite a few Asian families, although those of Japanese and those of Chinese extraction lived somewhat apart from each other and had little real interaction. In fact these lines of division included certain professions, wherein the Japanese-Americans tended to agricultural work (fruit orchards, strawberries, etc.) and Chinese-Americans were more actively engaged in retail trades involving seafood, fish produce and so forth.

The Chinese-Americans (CA’s, for brevity's sake) in these small valley towns were generally of Cantonese lower-class background and their immediate predecessors had traditionally worked largely at manual labor, having been the primary ‘muscle’ (along with poor Irishmen) behind both the transcontinental railroad (‘Charlie Crocker’s Angels’, as they were disingenuously known in the late 1800s), and the massive drainage projects that had helped turn the Great Central Valley from a swampy mire into one of the most fertile agricultural areas of the entire world.

For their part, the Japanese-Americans (JA’s) had suffered from the same massive discrimination suffered by the Chinese in that most ‘White’ folks still ignorantly thought of all Asians as being somehow identically congruent. They tended to find livelihoods in more specialized agricultural areas, such as persimmon & strawberry fruit cultivation. Both groups, sharing an ancient common Confucian cultural heritage, were imbued with a burning desire to improve the quality of their lives, but most importantly to ensure the future of their children in the new land that was America (Gum Shan, or ‘Gold Mountain’).

As a result, in school I experienced my first glimpse into the traditional Confucian regard for self-improvement…specifically in terms of education. The Asian kids in my classes were stand-outs in their earnest desire to achieve high grades and high academic standing. Contrast that to all the other (non-Asian) kids such as myself, who were far more focused on goofing off, having fun and taking school very casually as an unavoidable & unpleasant chore.

Nevertheless, I found myself making friends with several of the Japanese kids (Terry O. and Calvin N.). After school on occasion we’d get together and play, but I always found it somewhat strange that at certain times they’d disappear, called back home to unknown tasks that were later revealed to be Japanese language lessons or study cram-sessions, while the rest of us honky kids continued to play outside until it was time for The Lone Ranger or Hopalong Cassady TV shows (at least for those who had TVs…we didn’t have a TV until I graduated from high school and I always felt slighted when the other kids who did went home to watch their favorite kiddie shows without me; this later paid off dividends, of course, since I had been forced to read books instead of watch the tube for my entertainment!).

Another aspect of the Asian members of the community that struck me was their insularity and tendency to adhere to their own cultural affairs, despite being in the midst of a predominantly White middle class community. Much later it all made sense, of course, but that awareness didn’t come into full focus until I actually began to study Asian subject matter in college. At the time they were just…well, ‘different’ to me, a regard that struck me almost equally with their impressive regard for school.

Some years later, after I had been ‘hanai’d’ (adopted) into my Hawaiian family on Oahu, I discovered that there were many thousands of both Chinese and Japanese ethnicity on the islands and this deepened my interest in these unique and distinctive appearing racial groups, with their seemingly very exotic outlook on life and all things.

As for my own ancestry, the father’s side of the family was almost unknown to me, since my da was the youngest of 11 brothers (& a sister), all of whom had passed on before him (all that I know of his ancestral roots is that the family was from County Meath, in Upper Navon, wherever that is, to the east of Dublin). Of mum, much more was known, since she was a highly educated woman (possessed of a graduate degree long before women even went to college) and also an avid amateur genealogist who had traced her family way back to about 1300! Mum’s family included a Magna Carta signer, a branch that ended up in that part of the Habsburg Monarchical marches lying just south of Carinthia (formerly Krain, now Slovenia), and a number of famous Revolutionary War personalities (even the famed Salem Witch Trials persecutor Cotton Mather, to whom we are directly related through her lineage).

Thus it was that as a very well documented White Anglo-Saxon’ honky, people from Asia seemed to me to have a distinctively unique flavor about them and their culture that I suppose drew me further towards the Far East, even at that early stage in my life. They were, quite simply, extraordinarily different from me in almost every way. But in ways that struck me not as strange, weird or undesirable, but exactly the opposite: unique, positive, exemplary and worthy of further study.

Even later, when I began college and living in Berkeley (CA) of the late 60s, the high proportion of Asian-Americans found in the whole San Francisco Bay Area constituted an exotic and highly fascinating enigma I determined to further explore. At that time I had also developed an interest in the ancient arts & traditions of both Japan and China and found myself drawn to the post-war American fixation many Americans had with Bohemianism, more specifically with the role played in that subculture by esoteric philosophies of Buddhism, but also with the cultural precepts of the Taoist teachings of Lao Tzu. Before long I was taking lessons in some of the traditional Japanese Bushi-do arts (such as Iai-do, the art of the sword draw) and Ken-do, a form of sword practice. I also became drawn more and more into ancient Asian literature, specifically classical Chinese Tang Dynasty Ch’an poetry and that of Japanese Zen.

Meanwhile, although originally a political science & sociology major, I had enrolled in various Japanese & Chinese cultural courses (art, literature, history, etc.) and even began to emulate what I conceived of (perhaps pathetically) as an aesthetic lifestyle more attuned to what I was learning about traditional Eastern thought and lifestyle. After work & courses had ended for the day, I’d heat up my rice-cooker, toss a steak onto the hibachi in my rear-facing Berkeley 2nd floor flat, and settle down to a large cup of steaming hot (Japanese style) green tea. The creative muse must have accompanied all these elements that were gradually creeping into my life, since I began to give vent to inherent poetic and prosaic urges in some quantity. A parallel interest in mountaineering, peaks and the delights of the Bay Area’s Mt. Tamalpais & Point Reyes all conspired to enable me to cobble together quite a mass of writing reflecting all these interests.

All of this was occurring at a particularly rich period in Berkeley’s social matrix, since it was a time of war protest, intense social activism and also the ‘re-opening of China’ (thanks to President Richard Nixon), which resulted in a good number of students from the People’s Republic of China enrolling in UC Berkeley academic programs. Before long I had made several friends among these students, since I routinely hung out in Asian affairs related venues, one of whom (Zhang Zi-Man) taught me how to prepare Fuzien style fishballs (delicious). They were all, at that time however, still closely ‘shepherded’ by PRC ‘minders’ whose instructions were to keep a close and watchful eye on all their charges lest they somehow become contaminated by still suspiciously regarded ‘Western ways’. My friend Zhang and I quickly found ways to escape from the ever-watchful minder’s eye and I’d venture to say that we learned as much about each other’s culture as could be hoped, given the decades of isolation China had endured under Mao.

The Asian-Americans (as distinct from PRC Asians) enrolled at UC Berkeley had their own unique cultural enclaves and there were several Asian-American clubs, most of whom lumped everyone of Asian descent into one single category for convenience; of course Berkeley (along with San Francisco, to a slightly lesser degree) was the primary epicenter of all West Coast Asian activism. This was also the time of Chancellor S.I. Hayakawa, who set a personal style totally unlike what might have been expected of a Japanese-American in the University adminstration.

As for me, I was absorbed, captivated perhaps, by the richness and depth of Asian culture and tried in my own inept manner to emulate much of its precepts. This meant a diet of rice and steaks (the steaks being easy to braise on the small hibachi that was perched on my 2nd floor rear stoop, in an old brown shingle located at 1309 Spruce Street). The rice was easily prepared, using a small rice cooker and the steaks, while not heart-healthy, provided plenty of quick & (very) dirty protein. At that time the thought that a rice diet was a surfeit of pure carbs didn’t register on me, since it seemed the quintessential Asian thing to do. Further, since I ate so much of it, this gave me a chance to go down to my favorite hole-in-the-wall Chinese grocery store on San Pablo Avenue when I needed a new sack of the stuff. The woman who ran that store had a VERY cute daughter, appearing to be a college student in her first few years, and I thought being a regular customer would give me an edge on ‘encountering’ this pretty young ‘shiao jie’ (literally ‘small sister’, but in slang terms any cute, shy, younger single woman).

The brown shingle in reference was, by the way, owned by a widowed older Jewish woman. I had found the flat in her home listed ‘for rent’ down at the Student Union, the listing for which explicitly stated she wanted someone who was aged 25 or older (she was obviously aiming for a more ‘stable’ & mature grad student renter). Since I was only 24, I successfully fudged my age a bit to get the place. When my landlady later began to suspect I wasn’t yet 25, she threw a hissy fit that really takes the prize…even though I was only shy by a few months! Still hard for me to believe, even today.

But, perhaps it was the fact that when I thought she was out one day, I rigged up my climbing ropes, put on a ‘swami belt’ and rappelled out of my 2nd floor window to the ground a couple of times in time-honored Sierra Club style. At any rate, she had come home just in time to catch me in mid-abseil, half-way down the worn old brown shingle siding of her home. Wow! Talk about fireworks…and bad timing!

But I digress. Try as I might to corner the Asian grocery store’s resident daughter for a few innocent words of harmless conversation, her Mama would quickly round the corner and steer her daughter to the back of the store and away from this tall, pale ‘Guai Loh’ (foreign devil) with the big nose who kept returning to buy 30 pound sacks of rice. No honky for her upward-aspiring daughter! Naturally, this was a big disappointment for me, since I was about as handsome as the aft end of a donkey and VERY much in need of girlfriend at that time!

At one point I resorted to taking a few introductory AikiDo lessons and succeeded in actually making a few points with a young yonsei (3rd gen) Japanese-American UC student who also studied at that center. Of course I had to screw it all up by inviting her over to my flat, where I met her at the door of my ‘curiously’ Asian-decorated flat dressed in my Haori and brought her in to have some Zen-style green tea (in a parody of the actual Japanese tea ceremony). Horrors! She must have thought I was daft, being herself well acculturated into honky society, and couldn’t seem to get away fast enough.

But how could I know, at that early stage of life, of the traditional Japanese disregard for Gaijin who evidenced more than a little knowledge of Japanese customs & culture, viewing them as inexplicable freaks? I would have been merely a bizarre anomaly to a Japanese-Japanese person, but to this 3rd gen JA girl it must have been even more freakish. I likely would have fared better posing as Yakuza than a bookishly eccentric honky fascinated by Asians.

Of course the activities I was involved with left little room for mutual interactions, since I was at that time very big on mountaineering with the Sierra Club, the American Youth Hostel Association and the UC Hiking Club (although titled a ‘hiking club’, the UCHC encompassed a wide range of outdoor activities ranging from Alaskan expedition climbing, e.g. Denali, to spring flower hikes). There just weren’t that many Asian-Americans in those groups, much to my everlasting regret and my other love (running) was chiefly a solitary activity performed against the clock (that was back before Dr. Ken Cooper helped broadly popularize running as a primary cardiovascular form of exercise).

Meanwhile, I was regularly attending such venues as East Wind Books in San Francisco, shops in that city’s Chinatown and Japantown, adding Asian books to my collection, writing Zen inspired prose & poetry and searching desperately for some Asian female friends. Since I was also living in counter-culture Berkeley, my very left-of-center sociopolitical views also found me buying PRC literature and hanging out at venues like ‘Juan’s Place’ (a UFW Chicano restaurant located in the Berkeley waterfront factory district…this was long before that rundown old part of the city was gentrified as an up-scale Yuppie shopping center) and the radical Irish Republican pub known as the ‘Starry Plough’ (on old Grove Street…now called Martin Luther King Blvd). No Asians there (…named Mei Ling O’Sullivan, perhaps?). Sigh.

All of this simply reiterated my life-long feeling that by some capricious twist of fate I had somehow been intended to be born in another, culture in another era (perhaps even in different cosmos!). Naturally, lacking the requisite external Asian ethnicity, I seemed to be completely out of luck in terms of finding that Asian woman that all my cultural studies had informed me would be the ideal choice for a dedicated mother of my children!

Meanwhile, I had left Providence Hospital on what is now ‘Summit Medical Center’ and had accepted a position as the Cardiopulmonary Program Coordinator at Highland General Hospital, the large county facility serving all of Alameda County (and known as the ‘Cook County of the West’, due to the extremely eclectic range of medical patients seen and treated there).

Highland had, as a large West Coast teaching hospital that offered internships and residencies in cooperation with Bay Area hospitals & colleges (principally in conjunction with UC Medical Center in San Francisco and SF’s Children’s Hospital), therefore an appreciable number of ‘almost-a-doctors’ (to use Bill Cosby’s excellent and vastly amusing term) from many origins. Several of them were Asian-American, one in particular catching my eye from day one.

Obviously Chinese, ‘X’ was quite an attractive woman, although painfully serious about her studies and internship. We met quite by accident in the course of an order she had written for one of her patients, requesting pulmonary studies. Since I ran the pulmonary lab, X came down with her patient and I recall being quite bowled over by her appearance. Willow thin, with full, long dark hair and a delightful snub of a nose, I was a goner in an instant, unknown to her.

A few days later, I overcame my natural reticence and asked her out for some coffee at a Berkeley hangout I frequented (Walnut Square, location of Mr. Peet’s original ‘Peet’s Coffee, Tea & Spices’). To my surprise, she accepted without apparent qualm and that was the beginning of a relationship that endured for several years. At the time she was living in San Francisco with a Japanese-American female intern named ‘Y’, using a battered old Volvo picked up used from somewhere to make the daily commute to Highland Hospital.

Y was quite different from X, being JA instead of CA, and was going with a fellow intern (Caucasian) whose hobby (during what little time interns had for such purely pleasurable things) was computers. I recall that he was constructing his own PC at this time, something that apparently quite impressed Y, who strangely didn’t seem to feel that I was up to X’s standards in some intangible way (at least that was the vibe I received from her).

I was amazed to learn that X, my new girlfriend, had been a young Maoist, back in New York (where she had done her medical school training, paying for her education entirely on her own), and also to find that she was what is called a ‘paper daughter’ (or a Chinese person whose entry into the US had been permitted by virtue of a claim that she was a direct relative by an totally unrelated Chinese individual…a ruse that was frequently resorted to during the years in which the racist Chinese Exclusion Acts had been fully enforced). From what she told me, back in New York she had been going with a young male Maoist at that time, but obviously a future career in conventional US medicine stood to sorely conflict with prior leftist Communist leanings, so her Maoist sentiments soon dissipated into nothingness.

Meanwhile, fancying myself an ardent (if admittedly naive) believer in what Chairman Mao had done with China (since this was long before the true inner details of the corruption during his reign came to ligh), I was perplexed by X’s total abnegation of her previous political attitudes. This became painfully apparent one day when I gifted X with a profusely illustrated book of color plates depicting the colorful propaganda art of the PRC’s Maoist regime. Her markedly neutral response was (to me) quite unexpected and somewhat later the book, which I had picked up at East Wind Books in the City, became my property. To say I was quite crestfallen is understating things.

Understandably, as X continued her internship into an internal medicine residency, she became quite drawn into the erstwhile Highland residency social milieu. Given my own rather humble pecking order status as a mere ‘high grade chimpanzee’ (a non-MD technologist), I began to feel a certain sense of being regarded as an outsider by her peers. This did not seem to keep us from developing our relationship appreciably, with several trips to the mountains (Yosemite, etc.) that she genuinely seemed to enjoy.

For my part, I was starting to feel that we had something quite substantial in our relationship, but as an inherently very cautious individual who doesn’t believe in tackling the concept of marriage too hastily, I was taking my own time coming to that conclusion. My family had always drummed into me the importance of REALLY getting to know someone before ever considering an institution that involved a life-long commitment; the impact of that particular socializing influence meant that I was naturally going to take it slow and easy until I was quite sure that we were perfectly suited for each other.

To her credit, she had told me that regardless of my ‘not being an MD’ myself, this was relatively unimportant to her. It was an amazing statement, coming from a future member of the professional food chain’s highest rung by my reckoning, but I accepted that in good faith and found myself quite hooked on lovely, intelligent X.

Not long after that, X bought a home in a neighboring area next to Highland Hospital, since her residency would continue for at least two additional years. Thus, we moved in together, taking another logical step towards achieving solid commitment (at least in my considered regard).

Next door to us, we were both bemused to find a couple living that consisted of a Jewish-American man and his Chinese-American wife. Pure coincidence, but they also had a very young (6-7 years old) daughter named ‘S’, and it wasn’t long before both they and the daughter became dear friends. Unfortunately, S’s father, although highly educated, had a tendency towards alcoholism, a problem I highly suspect was largely due to the extreme cultural differences between his own ethnicity and his wife’s. Culture shock very clearly played a part in all this, but we all dearly loved terminally cute, very bright and charming young S.

Every once in a while X and I take her and her little friend, a girl named (unusually) ‘Wheat’, up into the Berkeley Hills with some kites and to see X helping SW & Wheat fly the kites provoked in me an intensely tender, protective feeling that is hard to describe. The Chinese traditions of mothering and family came to the fore (as I had hoped) at such moments and it was easy to visualize X as a doting, motivated and very loving future mother in her own right. It looked as if I had found my ideal mate.

Shortly thereafter, X revealed that her personal OB/GYN specialist had informed her that she was in the early stages of pregnancy. It was, as might be imagined, somewhat of a shock to both of us, but after some thoughtful soul-searching, I accepted the idea that we had together created a new life and that, given that it was a reflection of the solid love that we appeared to share, wanted to keep it. X regrettably had other ideas, given that her residency would not permit the complications of childbirth and care for an infant, so she came home sometime thereafter and told me (informed me) that she had had it terminated.

To this day, the thought of this event is still a major personal tragedy that has remained alive deep within me, all my life. That little spark of life was the only one I ever personally created, knowingly or unknowingly, and although I am reasonably certain the foetus was a boy (I would have preferred a girl like her mother, X), that was my only procreative act in my entire life.

Given that for philosophic beliefs, largely aligned with those of Artur Schopenhauer (one of my primary formative mentors), I had hitherto been completely opposed to the creation of new human life to further complicate affairs on this planet, but the intoxicating beauty of this lovely, intelligent woman X had managed to overcome all that reticence within me and I was ready to compromise all my illustrious and high-minded principles that had in a stroke been wonderfully frustrated by ineluctable reality.

I can certainly understand the motivation for her decision, but for me it was a spiritual tragedy of the most profound sort. Knowing myself as I do, with my unshakable regard for the sanctity of family and the concentricity of ‘personal community’, it almost felt like a violation of everything that meant anything to me at that time. A paradox, that was, of course, many years ago and it is now relegated, as are all things inevitably, to the dustbin of the inalterable past.

It wasn’t long after that, sadly, while we were living together, that our time together came to an end. By circumstances unknown to me, a certain law student at UC started providing ‘handy-man’ services around the house. He built a deck, took care of the landscaping and I really didn’t give it much thought until one weekend when X said she was going to spend the several days with her friends in Carmel. That was fine with me, of course, since I considered myself a ‘liberated’ male and was consequently cognizant of her right to do as she wanted in her hours away from the hospital (since there were so few of them, anyway).

The way it all came to a denouement had to do with a stunning jade green tank-suit I had gifted her with, since, as a modest individual she typically wore a terribly old fashioned & ultra-modest bathing suit that looked more like a wartime cut-off trenchcoat than bathing attire. The jade racing suit looked superb on her lovely, lithe frame, but it typically spent all its time relegated to the bureau of drawers we shared.

Then suddenly, after she had left for the ‘trip with her friends’, I discovered that that suit was missing from the drawer. A small enough and perhaps totally inconsequential matter, but knowing how she always hesitated to wear it around others, this seemed to be something of more than usual significance.

When she returned several days later, the suit reappeared once again in the drawer and that’s when the truth came painfully to light that she had been in Carmel with the young law-student, instead of her resident friends.

I could have died on the spot, so terribly hurt was I by this gross betrayal (as I saw it, anyway). And yet the facts were hard to ignore, even after years of retroactive second-guessing. To this day I still am unclear on her reasons for this behavior, although I vaguely recall a perfunctory explanation somewhat later about the need to ‘be serious’ about relationships. Whether this means that the biological clock had ticked along up to the point where something extreme of this sort was inevitable, or whether the chap had simply captured her heart in a way inexplicable to my reasoning, the final result was that I soon moved out and our wonderfully promising (again, to my way of seeing things) relationship came to a dysfunctional end.

My final determination of what happened boiled down to a perception that she didn’t seem to think I was serious about us and that she needed someone who was willing to commit far more readily and unreservedly. Whatever the reason, I suspect that a ‘lawyer/doctor’ pairing carries far more symbolic horsepower than a ‘technologist/doctor’ marital association and her actions were probably supported by her peers in the hospital…at least by the few she probably confided in. A doctor/lawyer pairing certainly would make for a greatly enhanced sense of future economic security for children.

After our time together ended, X married the law-student who went on to establish a practice of his own, and they have two children of their own…a natural daughter, and an adopted daughter from China…who are now grown up and living successful lives of their own.

Ironically enough, that wonderful little neighbor child S (along with her father & mother, who lived next to us at Highland) moved to the area close to where I now live and went on into a doctoral program that she is about to graduate from (albeit after a long and tortuous adolescence). Amazing how life evolves, isn’t it! Further proof of the genetic benefits of extremely diverse gene pools, I suppose.

As the year of 2016 abruptly and disinterestedly transitions from 2016 to 2017, and as I enter my early 70s, the thought of life’s termination being not far away has prompted me to finally dredge up this up-to-now intensely personal and deeply sad experience and release it from the locked chest where it has remained for so very, very long. After all, it’s been 36 years now!

Do these details mark me out as an needlessly passionate male individual? Is there a highly emotional side of me that I normally try very hard to keep carefully hidden (since it isn’t allowed by the ‘Official Guy Manual’ to admit such things in clear violation of traditional masculine traditions of stolid stoicism)? Do other men ever have these very deeply held feelings, paralleling what I have shared here? I can only wonder about that, but I do know that this relationship with X was the absolute peak romantic attachment of my entire life. Nothing either before or after has ever come close…and that in light of the fact I have now been married to another Chinese woman for almost 29 years!

‘Culture shock’ ties into all of this and certainly the not-occasional miscommunications that have arisen throughout my own marriage across cultural lines are directly relatable to much of which has been described in the above circumstances, and it very likely contains lessons on the challenges of living ordinary life that may or may not be applicable to others.

I guess, after all the personal recriminations are gone through, I’m just a hopeless romantic, but one who will not be passing along echoed genetic tendencies towards that particular affliction of the spirit I am afflicted with since we have no children (except our wonderful dogs, who are almost as important for so many reasons). Perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing, though.

In closing, let me wish all out there a hopefully less chaotic, less convoluted and FAR less tragic year as 2017 heaves into sight.

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[NOTE: This is Part 1 of two or three takes on ‘culture shock’…a nuance of human experience that no matter how well prepared each of us is for such an encounter with a radically different culture’s take on life, the effects of which none of us can ever hope to be fully ready for. In my case, despite a life-long interest in and study of Asian and Asian-American affairs, as well as actual time spent living and working in China, I have often been as absolutely flummoxed by the unrecognized emotional dynamics implicit in such matters as the least prepared among you. Take whatever comfort you may from that!]

PS: I'd like to recommend a certain set of small books that deal with other major cultural groups. These are the 'Xenophobe's Guide' series, each detailing the salient cultural nuances and peculiarities of groups like the Chinese, the Japanese, the Austrians, German, Finns, etc and et al. They are each delightfully written, with a vastly entertaining sense of humor. In particular, the works focused on the Chinese, the Japanese and Americans are particularly incisive and insightful in a well-intended and amusing way. You may find them all here: www.xenophobes.com .