September 4, 2016 - 12:12
Americans are insane.
Dim light, loud music, yelling people, dancing crowds. The music the girl on the stage was singing felt completely alien to me. The dance everybody but me was dancing made me feel like in a cult.
I was shocked. SHOCKED. This was my first time in the US and my first time in a party. Since the moment I stepped into the room, I was overwhelmed by the loudness and the craziness of the people here. This is just the culture difference, I told myself, I need to adjust to it. Walking around, I sat down at a table away from the music and the crowds with several other students. They welcomed me, shouted out their names and dorms (the music was still loud there), and introduced me the game they were playing. It was a game with words. Each person would have six cards in their hands, one of us would describe the word in one of his cards where other people would choose one of their cards to mix together with the original one, and everybody else would guess which one was the original card.
Easy, thought I. I can master this game and be friends with them. When I got my cards, however, I realized how ignorant I was. I knew nothing about the words on the cards. I could only guess if it was a celebrity or a TV show or maybe just a kind of Mexican food.
Despite how blank I was, the game began. I kept wanting to join everybody else’s conversation but failed, because I truly did not know a sentence about their topics. They were nice though, they threw topics to me, trying to involve me in their conversations as well. I was thankful to them, yet still, it did not change the fact that I was ignorant about everything on the cards. Soon I dropped out of the conversation, just randomly playing whatever I had.
Several minutes later I found myself outside of the party room, exhaled a big breath, feeling relaxed again.
On my way back to the dorm, I found several other Chinese students wandering in the campus, joking and laughing. I joined them. In those Chinese insider jokes, I felt myself much happier than when I was forcing myself into the conversation. Now everything came to me naturally because I knew what they are talking about. I felt connected back to the world again.
That was two years ago. Before that, I had only read about international students staying together in articles. I despised those who did so. But after that instance, I began to understand them and began to understand the word “culture”.
Culture is the collective shared experience that is universal to a group of people. When people from one region joined another region, and they found the collective shared experience in the new region is completely different from their owns, they feel alien. As in my case, I felt alien four times that night. The first time was because the loudness and craziness of a party were not in my experience. The second time was because the music was not in my experience. The third time the dance people dancing was not in my experience. The fourth time the words on the cards were not in my experience. These four things, however, are in the collective shared experience of people who identify themselves as Americans. When I encountered my dear Chinese friends, I felt connected again because we have many shared experiences. I know their jokes. I know the celebrities they talked about. I know the food they talked about. We have many shared experiences.
Culture is all about shared experience. When I identify myself as a Chinese, it signals that I too use chopsticks and speak Chinese in home. When I identify myself as a Bryn Mawr student, it signals that I too have studied in Canaday, and I too was touched by Parade Night. When I identify myself as a “she”, it signals that I shared the experience of going through the menstrual cycles and other feminine problems. It is not identity such as race, class or gender that shapes our experiences, it is our experiences that determine what we identify ourselves with.
Hence naturally it will seem like people have a stronger connection to those who share the same identity with them. Yet the truth is people are having a stronger connection with those who share the same experience with them, which makes them identify themselves as the same group of people.
To quote from June Jordan, “I felt how it was not who they were but what they both know…. that was going to make them both free”. Jordan was wise enough not to confuse the causal relationship between identity and shared experience. People with the same identity do not necessarily share the same experience. But people with the same experience will normally share the same identity.