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
Hi, Audrey.
I was also struck by the way Chinese culture, particularly typical Chinese ways of doing relationships, really challenges a lot of our North American assumptions and priorities. Greg really has a golden opportunity living with Jordan — he’ll be learning a lot of stuff through his daily experience that a lot of foreigners only read about in culture books.
(I’m the guy that interviewed Greg and his roommate and wrote the article. Thanks for the link!)
Hi Joel,
And thanks for writing the article! It resonated so much with some of the ways folks in my church community have been challenged to go against the grain of the culture. It seems to be fruitful too… it’s one of the few communities I’ve been a part of where I’ve felt an extraordinary sense of belonging and commitment to one another, and it seems that even newcomers and non-members say that this is a characteristic of the church. I do hope the latter is so, because one of the tough things about this aspect of Chinese culture is that it takes a long time, typically, to become an “insider.”
Thanks for stopping in and for leaving your thoughts!