Cross Culture is back and this will serve as a reboot to our weekly Cross Culture Prompts. To avoid the prompt post titles being too long and ugly, let’s call them…

CultureQ

The new format is simple:

• I present a question or prompt through my personal account, and give my submission in the same post.

• You are free to read both the prompt and my response or just the prompt.

• You post a response in the cross culture community.

• We vote submissions at a % based on their quality and try to support all decent submissions to some extent.

• No curation posts, no community account, no bureaucracy, no complex reward distribution, just a prompt with some support around it.

• No rules other than use common sense

• Answers we suspect of being generated by AI will be ignored. If you use AI to translate to English, please leave your original text in your language at the bottom.

• Honesty, passion, effort and interaction are what we look for. Be yourself.

——

Here is this weeks question:

What are some of your earliest memories of being exposured to a foreign culture?

• Feel free to give multiple examples
• what cultural differences did you notice?
• Tell us how you felt about it
• what have you learned since then, how did that exposure paint your understanding of the world?

These are just some points to help if you need them.

I recognize many people have experiences very different from mine, and I’d like to influence your answer as little as possible so I encourage you to think for a minute or two about what you could write about before you read my submission below. I don’t think my story would give many ideas to someone in a very different setting anyway.

It could be second or third hand information…What people around you said about another country…something you saw on the news or in a movie. It could be a friend who studied abroad and came back with stories or experiences you or your family had with tourists, or a family trip to the next country over if you felt a distinct cultural difference.

———
Ready?
———

The concept of foreign cultures was a bit of a strange paradox to me growing up. Being in a palce without a clear concept of a majority is the most natural thing in the world to me.

I grew up in a multicultural environment in the US. Other cultures were ever present and never treated as a big deal, except the rare times when they were.

Once in a while kids would tease each other because of something regarding their parents accents. Sometimes something about race from a stand up comedian was parroted and it got awkward for a moment because none of us were as talented as Dave Chappelle and we didn’t understand the full context of the joke.

I can’t say there was no racism or discrimination, but in general, race, religion or country of origin was just some extra information we generally didn’t talk about, like someones astrology sign, most people weren’t that interested either way.

My best friends came from various backgrounds, Russian, Korean, Indian, Polish, and Italian to name a few.

America was called the melting pot so we somehow felt as if every culture belonged to us and we could easily belong to every culture.

That was what we all seemed to live by, but as I observed more I started to notice just how many worlds existed behind closed doors.

One day, it might have been in 4th grade, I went to a Korean friend’s house to play Street Fighter 2 and I couldn’t get over how different his house smelled from mine. It wasn’t bad, it was just a complete mystery. I wondered why he never invited me to stay for dinner. Now I realize it may have been the same reason his house smelled so different, kimchi, lots of garlic and dishes I couldn’t have imagined at the time.

Street Fighter 2 is obviously from Japan and I got Korea and Japan mixed up at times, annoying my friend, though I don’t think he personally had anything against Japanese people (perhaps his parents did).

I remember him explaining where each of the characters came from and me not taking any interest because obviously Brazillians weren’t green monsters so how accurate could the game be?

I recognized even back then that stereotypes contained both truths and utter fictions and that some discernment was needed, and that individuals were individuals. Still I couldn’t see much of a difference between the countries of East Asia, as I likely would not have seen the difference between Scandanavian countries if I had been exposed to them at the time.

Next time I invited the same friend to ride bicycles together, but he told me he was grounded for getting a B. I felt shocked because I got B’a too and my parents basicaly said “Not bad, but we know you can do better”. In my world a B was alright.

We never hung out again. I don’t know why exactly but I am almost certain it was his parents decision and not his own. At the time I took it personally and made some distance from him.

I had a similar experience with Korean neighbors. The kids were a year or two older and used to play ball with us on the street but suddenly disappeared, and whenever we inquired, the father slammes the door on us saying his kids have no time to play.

So my first experience with foreign cultures was that Korean parents are scary and they eat some mysterious food which at the time was not readily available (Korean food only became popular later).

My best friend in middle school was a a 3rd generation Italian kid and while he was very much an individual, his father was the most stereotypical Italian you could image, despite being born in America. Sports Cars, Soccer and Italian food were all he cared about. I remember asking my friend why his TV was broken. “My dad’s team lost…”. His family was really sweet though and took me in like family.

It makes me sad to realize I probably could have had just as friendly a relationship with the Korean classmate if his parents hadn’t tried to control him so much.

In high school I became friends with two 2nd generation Russians who still spoke Russian at home. The cultural difference was less pronounced because my ancestors come from the same part of the world and some of the culture lingers in small ways, but I remember being scared of their fathers. They never smiled, although they were sweet in a stoic macho kind of way. Their mothers tried to befriend us, but they didn’t have much of a sense of humor so we would all tease them by making jokes that would go over their heads.

This group was into underground music and eventually merged with a larger group through punk rock, hardcore, ska, industrial and other music. The larger group included two Indians. I went to one friend’s house and his mother was dressed in traditional Indian garments. I thought she was a priestess at first. There were statues and images of Indian gods around too which seemed to support my theory.

When I asked my friend he cracked up and said “Yes, that’s why I’m always in the basement, because she is busy praying upstairs all day. Sometimes she floats when she prays. I heard she teleported once”.

It was like when he tried to convince everyone the scar on his hand had come from a shark bite (in New a York city….) when in reality he was swinging his arms to hardcore music and jumping on the bed in his room and accidentally punched a ceiling fan.

That group of friends was also into anime and Japanese horror. We watched Naruto and Ichi the Killer and Battle Royale and Cowboy Bebop.

I realized I didn’t know any Japanese people and that confused me. My town was full of all kinds of people, with absolutely no shortage of Korean, Chinese or Vietnamese kids, but not a single Japanese kid, and yet I was starting to realize that Japanese media was everywhere.

A few years later I would slowly come to see that most people who emigrated to America had done so because their situation back home was less than ideal. All my friends parents or grandparents, as my own, had been running from poverty, war and persecution.

Now I see that this is why so many friends hid their cultural differences and wanted to be seen as American. The fact that so many immigrants in America had been running from something and anything was better than back home fueled the patriotism of those who had been there for many generations and had lost their roots. It reinforced the idea of American Exceptionalism. To what extent this was earned and to what extent it was imagined is a complex topic for another day.

These little peaks into other cultures must have shaped a lot of my curiosity about the world. It was only magnified once I became interested in girls. My second crush was Russian (straight off the boat) and later in University I fell head over heels for a Polish girl who turned me down for her ex. I dated Korean/German, Mexican and Filipino girls (at different times! I wasn’t that guy). The Egyptian girl I asked on a date turned me down without a thought because I was not Muslim though we became friends.

I only really had one “American” girlfriend, my first, and by American I just mean her great great great great grandparents were German and Irish and her family had come over before later waves of immigration.

I didn’t fetishize other countries or cultures, but the desire to understand was how our initial interactions sometimes began. If I saw someone who looked unsure how to join in or who had a different way of doing things, I’d try to make them feel welcome, and there were many at my school.

This wasn’t exclusive to romantic interests of course. I went out of my way to expose myself to other cultures in university, finally finding a very good Korean friend who had enough independence from his parents to befriend me, and learning more about the culture as he was also “straight off the boat”, not a citizen, only on a student visa and unnecessarily felt personally repsonsible for the experienced I had had with Korean kids in high school and their parents.

That being said I also made friends with Americans whose roots were far back and convoluted and who had been raised in more conservative and homogenous environments. A good friend from Kansas and another from Texas which both felt like froeign cultures to me. I had never shot a gun or seen a cowboy hat worn seriously before, nor had I been to a warehouse rave, and they had tons of stories for me so I started to realize how culture isn’t just about nationality or religion.

Slowly I became jealous of some of these friends, particularly the Polish girl and Korean guy who both spoke English almost as well as me, just with an accent, and had both been in America for less than 3 years each. They could switch back and forth between their native languages and English automatically.

I wanted to be able to jump in and out between cultures and this is how I began studying languages. I went wild one semester and signed up for French and Arabic and as an experiment tried to self study Japanese.

I found self study far more effective and quit the other to to focus on Japanese, in part because I had been exposed to even more food and media in university and still hadn’t met any Japanese people until I actively started looking for language partners.

For years I felt a little insecure about my interest in Japan because although I had an light interest in anime and games, my interest in the country came mostly from other things. Looking back it makes perfect sense that I gravitated to Japan, given the strange paradox of being ever present and almost completely absent.

Finally it was the music, the food and the linguistic differences which made it an obvious choice since my goal was to get out of my cultural bubble and expose myself to a completey different way of thinking.

So in a way, other cultures have never not been present from my life, which may be why I don’t feel the need to self identify as American even if it’s undeniably where I am from.

I am just a dude in the world.

In the beginning each culture was just a thread but I felt a desire to pull on as many threads as I could and to adopt what I liked from everywhere.

This is already second nature to me and I’ve seen into so many worlds and studied some aspects of them in depth, so when I think about culture…countries, national identy, ethnicity, and religion are only tangential ideas, not something inevitably bound to the culture. You and me can have our own culture.

Culture is something you decide to inherit or reject and also something that you learn and create. It’s as dynamic and evolving as we are as individuals and the more aware we become of how and why we interact with others, the more capable we become to influence the culture around us.

——

My work:

Confessions of the Damaged audio book and Sun ashone Blue EP up on streaming platforms