Naked Girls and Their Naked Mothers

It's hard to believe orientation at Penn was only two weeks ago. Life is starting to gell into some kind of routine, though I imagine the gell won't completely set until after Yom Kippur next Monday. My class schedule is finally complete, and I can begin looking for some kind of work-study job to bring in some needed spare cash. But for the time being, I see only calm waters on the horizon.

As I've noted before, my classmates in Intercultural Communication are approximately twenty, mostly Asian women. These mostly Asian women are mostly Chinese nationals who will likely return to the Middle Kingdom once they have completed their studies. But in the meantime, I expect I'll get to witness a lot of people struggling to make sense of a new culture.

My first opportunity to witness this struggle came at the first meeting of one of our required courses. All students in the Intercultural Communication program are required to take a class called Discursive Approaches to Intercultural Communication, which focuses on analysis of discourse, both in individuals' interactions and at the level of institutions. At the first class meeting, one of the Chinese students started talking about an event she had witnessed the previous weekend, in which an environmental group of one kind of another decided to raise awareness for its cause by bicycling nude through the streets of Philadelphia.

Now, even before this class, I would have imagined that nude bicyclists would attract just as much attention in China as in America. And I would have imagined right, because my fellow student used this nude bike ride to draw attention to Chinese-American cultural differences, as she saw them. She found it fascinating that so many young people had chosen to participate in such a ride, because in China, parents would be shocked and outraged if their children went through the streets naked. She was utterly amazed that American parents apparently took this display of nudity so nonchalantly.

As an act of intercultural misinterpretation, I think this pretty much takes the cake. I explained as gently as I could that almost all American parents would be shocked and outraged if their children went around in public naked. To which this woman replied, with real astonishment, "Really?"

Although the moment was one of great hilarity, I think it raises a few questions:

1) What kinds of pre-conceived stereotypes and misconceptions did this woman have of Americans that led her to believe Americans would be sanguine about their children's being naked in public? I can't really speak with any authority about Chinese stereotypes of Americans, but there were definitely some stereotypes of Taiwanese people I had before I had my misadventure in Tao Yuan.

2) Are we more likely to understand a particular culture's norms and values in the breach than in the observance? I tend to think the answer is yes, at least with respect to the kinds of norms we call "etiquette". I think most people have had the experience of not realizing a particular rule of etiquette even existed until they saw someone violate it. For instance, when you turn to a stranger at a bus stop and say, "Can you tell me what time it is?", you do not expect this person to respond, "Yes, I can." You expect him to say something like, "it's four-thirty." If someone actually did respond, "Yes, I can," this response might come across as quite rude. But most of us would not be able to formulate a rule of this kind of interaction until we had actually seen the rule violated.

3) Did this woman actually have a point? A lot of commentators, both on the left and the right, have noted how guilt and shame have come to be less and less effective motivators in American society over the past century. I half-suspect that what this woman was trying to express was that Chinese students would be unwilling to participate in a bike ride like this because their parents would die of shame, yet these American students apparently did not consider their parents' shame a reason not to participate. So there may be something real to what this woman perceived as a cultural difference, given the traditional Chinese emphasis on filial piety.

4) A couple weeks before I left home, I recall seeing a rerun of Roseanne, an American sitcom about a blue-collar, Midwestern family. In this episode, the title character was sitting in her husband's motorcycle shop, looking through magazines for bikers that, apparently, featured naked women, since she said:

"You know, every one of these girls has a mother out there somewhere who's dying of shame."

Then, three seconds later, she said:

"I stand corrected--here's one with a naked girl and her naked mother in the sidecar!"

In light of my fellow students' comments, and somewhat in light of this one-liner on Roseanne, I'm forced to wonder if shame has any meaning in American cultural these days. I cannot recall one instance of someone saying he decided not to do something he wanted to do because of how someone important in his life would be shamed by his actions. Kind of weird that it took someone from China to make me realize this.