My former housemate, Greg moved to China just this summer and has been living with a Chinese roommate. Recently, a local magazine featured an article about them and the things they discovered about their respective cultures by living together. I was especially challenged by the light it shed on my own devotion to individual autonomy. In so many ways, I actually live and believe like personal space and self-actualization are the highest untouchable human rights.
I think American culture does tend to coach us to isolate ourselves, and to miss out on the depth of relationship that can only develop through accepting the inconveniences that come with prioritizing relationship over self-actualization. There’s a high cost to this. A friend of mine who’s Romanian tells me that there’s no word for “loneliness” in her language. She talks a lot about the adjustment she had to make when she moved to America to avoid treading upon “the sacred cow of the autonomous individual,” as she put it. As a kid in elementary school, I remember feeling bewildered by an odd sense of distance I felt with my non-Asian friends. I was coming from being immersed in the Taiwanese immigrant community, so it was a change of worlds for me. I suppose this is all anecdotal, but it’s something to think on as I head for Taiwan.
Here’s a link to the article I mentioned:
http://chinahopelive.net/2009/01/30/two-worlds-one-apartment
