blog.marcwiesner.com

I think I’ve figured out what bothers me about most Europeans I meet traveling; they tend to put a fair amount of effort in trying to find or recreate the Europe they left behind. Despite being in a very foreign country they expect the same standards of clean, language, privacy, public behavior and what not that’s found in Europe. The shock of not finding this familiarity seems to be more than most Europeans can handle. Thus, the communities of people who have nothing more in common other than their place of birth arise out of a smoke of disappointment and dissatisfaction.

In the west we usually criticize such insular communities. Indian, Korean, Chinese communities, it’s thought, create a buffer which impedes integration. We think it bad when people live in these communities and become so insulated they can’t speak a national language but what contributions to Europeans bring to their communities? Are western restaurants as popular in Asia as Asian restaurants are in the west? Do we have many scientists and scholars who decide to move into China to help with academic research or philosophical inquiry?

People from English speaking countries traveling here in China seem to be particularly off. Not as a rule, just as a general observation, people from Australia, England, Canada, and the USA react remarkably poorly to such a foreign place where English ability are by no means an expected norm. I suspect the problem can be considered as stemming from a Continentinal Island mentality due to the fact that we aren’t really pushed to learn a foreign language since we don’t really have any neighbors who make it necessary. While the USA’s southern neighbor Mexico would seem to give us a good reason to learn Spanish it’s clear that this motivation is lost on most US citizens; a point which itself should speak to Mexico’s general status within America.