Coca de Vidre

“Coca”. Say the word and it conjures up all sorts of connotations – mostly illicit. But in Catalonia, coca is a traditional flatbread which has echoes in other Mediterranean societies, the best-known being Italian pizza and focaccia, along with pita bread and its more distant cousins the matzah or even Indian chapati. Coca can be covered with either sweet or savory topping, and its sweet guise reveals the kinship of the word “coca” with the English “cake” and the German “Kuchen”. Coca was developed as a way of using bread dough that didn’t rise. Thank goodness leavening agents don’t always work: they have left us the legacy of both cocas and the American invention par excellence: brownies.

Cocas are a dish for both rich and poor; the topping reveals which. Some are simply sprinkled with sugar, which caramelizes in the oven, others with olive oil and salt, scrumptious in and by themselves, while yet others are loaded with delicacies like seafood or vegetables, chocolate or pastry cream. Either way, in the past Catalan households had no ovens, so after the town bakeries were done baking their bread for the day, they let the neighborhood housewives bring their cocas and bake them in their ovens. Sometimes the bakeries would even donate their unsellable bread dough that failed to rise. Nowadays, bakeries sell ready-made cocas, often with roasted vegetables like peppers, eggplants, and onions on top, although any homemade version is infinitely better. They also make sweet cocas, like the famous “coca de vidre” (more on that delicacy below).

Cocas are often associated with holidays in Catalonia, such as the “coca de reis” and the “coca de Sant Joan”. Coca de reis is eaten on the Epiphany, January 6^th, when according to the Bible the Three Wise Men, or “reis mags”, reached Baby Jesus bearing their gifts. Coca de reis always has two surprises in it: a diminutive ceramic wise man, which brings the person finding it good luck, and a dried fava bean, which means that the person who bites into it or, in a more cowardly fashion, digs it out with their fingers, has to pay for the coca next year. But beware: they are both hard on the teeth!

The “coca de Sant Joan” is eaten on St. John’s Eve, June 23^rd, when Catalonians take to the streets to return to their pagan, solstice-celebrating roots, couched in Christian terms. They stay up all night lighting fireworks, building bonfires, drinking whatever is at hand, and waiting to welcome dawn on the beaches, most in a drunken stupor by then. They then eat this candied fruit-laden coca with a glass of “cava”, Catalan champagne, to welcome the summertime. Many a coca de Sant Joan has been eaten with no recollection whatsoever, I imagine, just as many other midsummer night’s frolics have quietly, thankfully drifted into oblivion after the inebriated revelry.

On to my favorite: coca de vidre (literally “glass flatbread”). It was so named because of the crystallized sugar that forms as it bakes. The dough used in Spain is more similar to pizza dough, but coca de vidre is equally – if not more – delicious using a flaky homemade pie crust. Yet another name for coca de vidre is “llengua de gat”, or cat’s tongue, because of its elongated shape.

Here’s the recipe: there is none. Like most traditional dishes, each cook has her own way of making it, and they’re all valid. How should you make it? However you like. However it tastes the best to you. But if I must: you preheat the oven to – I don’t know, maybe 400? Roll out the dough, brush a thin coat of olive oil on it, smother it in white sugar, and add pine nuts that toast up nicely in the oven. When is it ready? When it’s ready! How do you know? Does it look delectably edible? Yes? Then it’s ready. As soon as you remove it from the oven – and this is the key – spritz it with anisette (anise liqueur); this immediately liquefies the sugar with a satisfying sizzle, which then hardens into a glass-like coating. Hence the name. Don’t stint on the sugar: coca de vidre is emphatically NOT a diet food, so indulge… and enjoy! And eat it hot, right out of the oven, when all the flavors infuse the senses with the delightfully cloying sweetness of the anisette-glazed sugar, the toasted earthiness of the pine nuts, and the buttery flakiness of the crust.

I don’t know… it’s fairly heady stuff. So maybe coca de vidre should be considered a controlled substance after all, bringing into closer kinship with its better-known namesake.

Closure

When you leave your country and come back periodically, or permanently as is now my case, you notice trends, groundswells of popularity for things or notions that only had a shadowy existence in the past. Take Asiago cheese. Where did that come from? I had never heard of it, but about eight to ten years ago Asiago was suddenly on every menu. Was there a surplus in Italy that Sysco got wind of? And what about tilapia? When I was a kid there was haddock, catfish, flounder, not to mention what I was raised on: frozen “fish” patties. But I had never heard of tilapia.

Language goes through pendulum swings, too. What’s up with “My bad” and its counterpart – on the opposite end of the spectrum – “I’m good”? I didn’t ask you if you behaved well, I asked how you were. But that’s probably just the old dried up sourpuss grammarian in me. As a human, however, there’s another new emotional, armchair-psychological, faddish development I take issue with: closure.

Closure is a tempting notion. Something bad happens, you want closure and poof! It’s gone. A loved one dies, you get divorced, or a friendship ends: Americans seek closure, the panacea for all woes.

Rituals to mark sad occasions abound as time-honored ways of helping us handle bereavement. Over time every culture has developed its own way of mourning the death of a loved one, some of which last for months or even years: a fitting way to grieve over the survivors’ loss and honor the deceased person’s memory. Mourning is messy; it can entail wailing, sometimes even with formal paid wailers, special clothing – widow’s weeds, or ritual purification, prayers, or processions. Yet it also involves love and togetherness, solidarity and support in the guise of dishes cooked and brought over, company kept with the bereaved family. All of this in its motley, makeshift, utterly human way gradually lures the mourners back into the world while acknowledging their loss.

But closure isn’t about mourning, and it’s not a slow process: it’s a modern, streamlined version. It’s quick and simplistic and tries to erase everything in one fell swoop.

Closure is business-like. We perform a quick act with the aim of sweeping that sadness under the carpet and getting on with the bright side of life. After the Oklahoma City bombings, some suggested that the families of the victims watch McVeigh’s death as a form of closure. As if that could erase the loss. Or, less drastically, some celebrated the jury’s decision as a form of closure. But did justice really heal anything? Now the loss is… what? Karmically offset? Nullified? The idea behind closure is neat efficiency: instead of coexisting with the sadness of loss, we perform or witness a quick act with the expectation that it will cauterize that wound and erase that scar, pronto!

Sadness, like death, is part of life. Why we try to avoid it is understandable; why we think we can is incomprehensible. American culture is deeply uncomfortable with anything associated with sadness, and hence with death. I remember being disconsolate soon after a very painful event. A friend told me, “Maybe you need to take antidepressants.” I was flabbergasted. I was sad! I was sad for a reason and I felt I had the right to be. That was not abnormal and it was not clinical; it was a healthy response to loss. I wasn’t floundering, giving up, burrowing inward, plunging into the abyss. I was rightfully sad. I wanted to be allowed to be sad, yet it seemed that I was violating some happy pact. Apparently we do not allow ourselves time to mourn anymore; instead we seek the mythical grail of closure so we can get on with the brisk business of life.

By the time we reach a certain age, most of us have already experienced serious loss. And if you have, you know it’s not something you can quickly cauterize and then blithely gloss over. If only! Instead, loss gradually tears away at the edges of our bright, shining youthful selves; it beats our innocence into submission and leaves us battered and bruised. In our culture we then desperately seek that band-aid, that cure-all – closure – to try to get back to where we were pre-loss ASAP. Why not simply accept our rips, shreds, and bruises? They are our history, and they don’t go away. Like all our experiences, they season us and they burnish us; they make us who we are. They are an inextricable part of our biography. There is no need to wallow in them, but nor is there a reason to erase them. And let’s face it: even if we wanted to we couldn’t.

So, reluctantly, Asiago and tilapia are keepers, I guess: Sysco says so. “My bad” and “I’m good” are grammatical abominations, but I’ll save tirades on them for another day. Closure, on the other hand, is what needs to be swept under the proverbial rug and replaced with an acceptance of mourning and sadness, acknowledgement that life and its travails are a messy business that sometimes needs time to be processed and never wholly goes away – the good or the bad.

Nine Years Ago Today

It was nine years ago today that my life as I knew it and envisioned it came to an end.

It was the day my husband became my ex-husband. It was the day he packed up his stuff and left home.

When these life-changing events happen, like death, we can hardly process them they’re so immense. It’s only after the fact as we live and relive them that they begin to make sense.

The indelible image engraved on my mind is this: he took our daughter for the weekend, so he wouldn’t be alone. She was three; she had no idea what was happening, bless her innocent, trusting heart. They left, taking the elevator to the street while I went out on the balcony, invisible to them, to witness the final departure. They crossed the street, holding hands, a man with a tiny, tow-headed girl, and I watched them walk away until they were out of sight. My life and everything I had imagined it would be vanished with them.

When my mother died, I remember my father walking down the stairs at home in his suit, ready to go to her funeral, laughing at the patchwork tie he was wearing – a gift from my mother and a running family joke – using merriment to hide our grief. That day, I had no one to conceal the grief with, no one to process it with; that might have been a blessing.

I will never forget that day, or the date. I can never remember whether I was married on June 27^th or 28^th, but January 26^th is etched in my mind forever as the day a new life began, unbidden. The day I had to reinvent my future, the day I had to learn to stand on my own two feet for two of us, Cecilia and myself, and try my best not to topple over.

I’m still processing it.

Abu Omar

I think I’d like to rename this blog Um Cecilia’s American Adventure. Let me explain:

New Year, new students. As an introductory exercise, my students have to write about each other. One of my Saudi students, Riyadh – who by the way, was not named after the city; rather his name means “many gardens”, he told me – was consistently referred to by fellow Saudis as Abu Omar. In fact, on his own paper he signed his name Abu Omar/Riyadh. So I asked him about it.

“My son is named Omar, so I am called Abu Omar, father of Omar.”

Abu Omar/Riyadh is a professor back in Saudi Arabia. So I asked him whether at work he is also called Abu Omar or whether it is a private, personal name.

“At work, too, everyone calls me Abu Omar.”

“You’re called Abu Omar everywhere?”

“Yes, I and all fathers are called ‘Father of’ by anyone who knows us.”

“So what is your wife called? Is there a counterpart for women?”

“Yes, she is Um Omar.”

In Saudi society greetings are not “How are you?” but “How are you? How is your family?”, even if you don’t know the family. The family defines you; it is not only your pride and joy but who you are. You, alone, do not exist; you are part of your clan. You exist in relation to your family, and Abu and Um reflect this primacy of the family.

So I began to wonder: what happens to people who have no children? Are they not entitled to such an affectionate form of address? Are they left out of this tradition? So I asked Abu Omar and another Saudi student. They said, “No, they decide what they’d like to be called. Abu whatever they choose. And sometimes they choose their father’s or mother’s name if they have no children.” So maybe I was Um Katherine before I became Um Cecilia. Or maybe I would have randomly chosen Um Priscilla or Um Mildred or Um Gertrude. Then again, maybe I would have chosen more tastefully (my apologies to all the Priscillas, Mildreds, and Gertrudes out there)! My students went on to explain that there are certain Abu/Um names associated with certain first names because of associations from the Prophet Mohammed’s time.

I like this. It is warm and familiar and emphasizes personal, familial relationships over professional accomplishments and power. It brings everyone back – or up – to the same level.

When we meet someone new in our country, usually one of the first questions is, “What do you do?”, so we can define, or pigeonhole, our new acquaintances into some predetermined hierarchical mental schema. In Germany, Abu Omar would be Herr Doktor Professor Riyadh. His family would merit neither mention nor interest. It is a separate realm, one that has no place in professional life.

In his society, one’s crowning achievement is not degrees or professorships or riches earned but parenthood, or kinship, something we all share. And how wonderful that families, personhood, and warmth come before accomplishments, at least in the way they address each other.

So Um Cecilia’s American Adventure it is!

The Nostalgic Prowler

I lurk, I peer, I eavesdrop, I close my eyes and inhale deeply.

I reclaim the streets of Barcelona furtively, privately, like a prowler on a secret mission. Or a Baudelairean flâneur, walking the streets for no other purpose than to experience them. To privately enjoy the personal pleasure of checking in on them, checking in with them. Back on a visit to Barcelona, I am like a dog who once marked her territory all over the city and town, now revisiting my old haunts to make sure they’re still there, to make sure they’re still mine.

I walk through the Gothic Quarter. I close my eyes and smell the wet paving stones, the savory and sweet pastries tempting me in the glass cases of the bakeries mingled with the putrefaction of centuries of densely occupied streets. I hear snippets of conversations: Catalan grandparents with toddlers warning them to be careful as they joyfully bounce around a square; tourists from all over the world trying to figure out where on earth they are amid the narrow, winding streets; young Catalans out on the adventure of trolling their city on their own and claiming it as theirs the way I once claimed it as mine.

I gaze at the stone slabs of the buildings and the ornate metalwork of the balconies, some hung with laundry, many with hanging plants, colorful geraniums enlivening the ancient cityscape. I stop into the shops where I once bought Christmas presents and decorated my home; I note the ancient markings on certain hard-to-find buildings nestled deep in the narrow, chaotic streets indicating the Call, the ancient Jewish quarter, an eerie, moving relic of the past. I remember being shown these streets decades ago by old friends on a quiet, rainy night and feeling the palpable presence of the tragic past.

I stop at my favorite xocolateria, El Pallarès on Petritxol Street, where early summer mornings I once breakfasted on spoonfuls of viscous liquid chocolate topped with a thick slab of whipped cream, a suizo, with an ensaimada dipped in, with my boyfriend, now my ex-husband. Today I eat my suizo with churros, fried dough rolled in sugar, the crunchy sugar and saltiness of the dough offsetting the creaminess of the chocolate and whipped cream. After wolfing it down I quickly pay so that the customers lined up by the door can sit down, and then I head to the paper shop down the street where I used to buy beautiful wrapping paper and ribbons to festively wrap Cecilia’s childhood presents awaiting her under the tree on a Christmas morning.

I stop in the cathedral, sit in the prayer chapel, breathe in the cold, damp air, and note that in this quiet oasis set aside for prayer I am only accompanied by the elderly and the foreign. I look at the side chapels, with their mysterious, flat Romanesque figures, the blues and reds still brilliant and the gilding still lending them a hallowed air. I go on to Santa Maria del Mar, sit in a pew, close my eyes and once again smell the rosemary and thyme strewn on the floor and warmly scenting the chill air for that midnight mass on Christmas Eve so many years ago.

I stroll down the Rambla – you have to stroll the Rambla, ramble along it; no American-style rushing! The only ones moving quickly are the artful pickpockets. I get lost in the bustling, chaotic mix of locals and tourists, the street performers, the flower stalls, the Liceu opera house where my friend Steve initiated me into this lovely art, and far down below it all, Columbus pointing to America as the Rambla hits the sea, my beloved Mediterranean. I pass the wax museum, I place I have never stopped into, fearful of its seaminess, although I should... I walk by the university where I once taught, where heading there one day I witnessed the old opera house burn down. I catch a glimpse of Plaça Reial, my first wild, exhilarating experience of Barcelona over 30 years ago, on a summer Eurrail pass with my friend Christa. That trip is the reason my life took me here – as a friend once told me, an entire life course hinges on the most minor of details.

I take a walk along the sea, smelling the fried seafood that wafts up from the exhaust chimneys in the Olympic Port, remembering when that same boyfriend, now ex-husband, worked there to earn money for college and I would visit him on summer evenings and sip a cool beer. I head further away from civilization and pass the chic chill-out bars with elegant tapas and cocktails set to smooth music with the gently breaking waves as the backdrop, barely audible as night falls and they vanish into the darkness, and even further on to the rope jungle gym that Cecilia used to climb and to the jetties where old men set out their fishing poles as night falls and the beachgoers in their sunburned weariness dress and gather up their gear for the day.

I go to my favorite restaurants: Flo for the crepes Suzette, as delicious as always, the tartness of the Cointreau and orange peel contrasting with the sweet crunch of the unmelted sugar. I remember the time the chef accidentally used salt instead of sugar and the horrified waiter quickly whisked away the plates before we noticed… although it was too late and our sighs of delight turned into “yucks” of horror as we spit out the vile imposter. Santa Maria for the foie with figs that melts in your mouth; it has always rendered me momentarily speechless as it once did my friend Jamie and I, Jamie, who introduced me to the arty-cool Santa Maria. Da Greco for the parmesan risotto poured into an enormous, half-empty wheel of parmesan cheese and then scraped out with thick shavings that half-melt in the rice. Dos Palillos for the oysters in sake: the oyster explodes in your mouth – close your eyes and you’re swimming in the sea in the middle of a hot summer day – then the shot of oyster-flavored sake awaiting in the shell to wash it down. My friend Paola and I never miss a trip there and are always dismayed in the summertime when there are no oysters (as per the Catalan saying that seafood is only good in the months with “r” in their names). Flavors etched on my memory that I yearn for when I’m far away, and that are far too fleeting when I get to savor them.

In our hometown outside Barcelona I go to the park a few blocks away. The park that was the scene of so many warm afternoons of my daughter’s childhood, playing in the grass with her plastic horses after lunch; watching her learn how to ride a bicycle and then gleefully racing around the park with her, both of us on our cool new mountain bikes; her first taste of freedom on her scooter or roller skates as I let her circle the entire park by herself (secure in the knowledge that the entire town knew who she was and would help her and find me if she fell); sitting by the rocks at the edge of the pond looking at the lily pads and any fish we could spot, catching any frogs unfortunate enough to be in our pathway (which were later, mercifully, released); her favorite climbing tree, still there. Night-time picnics with our friends, drenched in champagne, picnics lasting until late into the night thanks to the indulgence of the night watchman who didn’t have the heart to kick us out (yet dutifully refused our offer of a glass for himself!). And even earlier, Cecilia in the sandbox playing and then fighting with other children over the plastic shovels and rakes and buckets (palas and rastrillos and cubos – my Spanish vocabulary expanded…), the parents sorting out the implements and gradually civilizing their wild little ones. And now as I go visit the park, I lay in the grass, I look up at the sky through the leafy trees, I close my eyes and hear the next generation of children and parents doing the same. I cry for this past, I miss it as I recall all the wonderful, heady times I’ve had here, and even, or especially, as all the despair and sadness that life in Barcelona brought me comes washing back over me.

Do we leave a smattering of cells behind us as we go through life? Do I leave a trail of the stardust that I’m made of as I make my way through the world? Do the places I’ve been to leave their DNA on me? If so, Catalonia is marked on my soul, and I like to think a little of my soul is marked on it as well.

How Cultures Vary

This is a summary of what I do in my American culture classes at the Center for English as a Second Language.

We hold these truths to be self-evident…

What’s good for me is good for you…

In our culture it is common, and even considered generous, to view all humans as more alike than different. We imagine that what we like, value, enjoy, and even believe is shared by all of humanity. Yet once you start interacting with people from other cultures, you realize that, in fact, we share very little. You realize that all of these questions, from what we think is beautiful to what is polite to what is enjoyable and even what is real fluctuate greatly from one culture to the next and are indeed culturally bound rather than part and parcel of our shared humanity.

When I travel to Spain, I give two kisses to just about everyone I meet, regardless of age, gender, and situation (work, social, etc.), and even regardless of if I have ever met them before. Yet Americans would wonder if I started homing in on them for the traditional “dos besos”, and in Latin America the two kisses become one or three, depending on the country. My Asian students avoid kissing socially at all costs, considering it a far too intimate act to be shared generally. Meanwhile, my Arab students understand the kissing, but they do it only with family and the same gender, as women kiss women socially while men kiss men. And as the Arab men living in the United States kiss each other, some Americans look on wondering about their sexual persuasion. Greetings are a minor display of a culture’s values, yet the codes of “what’s right” and “what’s wrong” vary drastically among cultures. At the more transcendental end the cultural divergence spectrum, imagine you walk out into the middle of a gorgeous glade with a fervent believer in God (or Allah) and an atheist. To the former, everything around her is proof of God’s actions, whereas that contention would be viewed as absurd by the latter, who would view nature’s bounty as nothing more than the evolution of the Earth since its inception. All of these differences show that most of what we do and believe is cultural more than universal.

I often tell my students that as humans we share little more than our biology: we are conceived and born the same way, and we grow and die the same way. Beyond that, virtually everything is cultural. We all seek happiness and fulfillment, but what makes an individual happy and fulfilled is cultural. Therefore, our opinions about the world around us, both the familiar and the unfamiliar, are inevitably colored by our culture. We interpret every person, every thing, and every act through the lens of our culture. And yet, most people are unaware of this; since culture in this sense is rarely taught or discussed, most people believe that their way of doing things is the natural way, and that any other way is, beyond good or bad, simply strange.

Like students in most English-language programs in the United States, my students come from all over the globe: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Togo, Mozambique, Turkey, Spain, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Japan, Taiwan, China, Korea, ... and more. Each of them comes to the U.S. wearing the lenses of their culture. None comes totally unaware of our culture thanks to cultural globalization, yet their notions are often erroneous based on the media, which unquestionably exaggerates certain glamorous (big houses, beautiful people) or horrifying (violence) traits of American life, while totally ignoring the more mundane ones. My students’ commentaries on the United States and its people and culture, and on our English program, even after they have been here several months, are fascinating. They include:

“Old people in the U.S. are lonely because their families don’t care about them.”

“Americans are cold and inexpressive.”

“American talk too loud.” (Notice the contradiction with the previous statement.)

“American children/students don’t respect their parents/teachers.”

 “American teachers are unfeeling because they are inflexible about assignment deadlines.”

“My teacher doesn’t really care about me because she doesn’t want to be my Facebook friend.”

 “When I go to my teacher’s office, sometimes she won’t meet with me even though she’s there.”

Yet equally fascinating – and erroneous – are the comments by my colleagues on our students:

“Our students try to manipulate and intimidate us by visiting us in groups.”

“Our Latin/African students are too boisterous – they dominate in the classroom.”

“Our Japanese students never speak up.”

“I’d really like my students to call me by my first name, but they insist on addressing me formally.”

 “Our students expect us to break the rules just for them.”

“Our students don’t understand that we are not there to be their friends, but that doesn’t mean we don’t care about them.”       

 “Our students expect us to be endlessly available.”

What is happening here? What is happening is that we all judge other cultures based on our own; we see other cultures through the lenses of our own, and therefore, we see them wrong.

Many Dutch and British researchers have performed both longitudinal and latitudinal studies of different cultures, particularly corporate cultures, and they have tried to break down the cultural differences into different dimensions. All told, around fifteen dimensions (and counting…) of cultural variation have been identified. Following are some of the dimensions that I have found to be the most useful when interpreting the cultural differences that we find in the students in our program, and that our students find in us. Each dimension is followed by a brief description of the features of a culture of this kind. These dimensions are not absolute; in other words, a culture is not either one or the other. Rather, they are continua, and the goal is to map both our own culture and the target culture along each continuum. Obviously, the closer the cultures are, the more the other’s culture will seem “natural” and will not even register on our radar; conversely, the further away they are, the more the other’s behavior will seem “wrong” and will thus draw our (usually irate) attention.

Individual vs. Collective

INDIVIDUAL }  Autonomy }  Standing out from the crowd, creativity }  Self-realization }  Satisfaction and identity come from one’s own independence

COLLECTIVE }  Togetherness }  Blending in with the crowd, conformity }  Group wellbeing }  Satisfaction and identity come from group belonging

A person from an individualistic culture like the U.S. tends to label collectivists as weak, dependent, or immature, while a person from a collectivistic culture tends to view individualists as cold and selfish. An individualist takes pride in being self-sufficient and solving his or her own problems, whereas this independence simply has no value for a collectivist. This is not to say that individualists do not care about others; bulldozing others to get to the top is not accepted; rather, they simply make their own choices and do their own thing, regardless of the collective. And in an individualist culture the collective, specifically the family, would never dream of imposing its will or needs on them.

Since most cultures are more collectivistic than American culture, our students’ misconception that “Old people in the U.S. are lonely because their families don’t care about them” is understandable. Yet what they don’t take into account is that many old people here cherish their independence; it is, in fact, what keeps them youthful and maintains their self-esteem. Likewise, as members of an individualistic society, we often think that “Our students try to manipulate and intimidate us by visiting us in groups,” but what we don’t realize is that individuals in a more collectivistic society rarely deal with problems on their own. Visiting us in groups is not meant to intimidate; it is more for the students than us. These are perfect examples of how all of us misinterpret and negatively label each other’s behaviors based on what they would mean in our own culture, not what they mean in the target culture.

Neutral vs. Affective

NEUTRAL }  Emotions are not displayed }  Expressing emotions = offensive, imposing }  Effusiveness and touching are awkward/uncomfortable

AFFECTIVE }  Displays of emotions are OK }  Expressing emotions = honesty }  Effusiveness and touching are welcomed ways of sharing

The neutral vs. affective dimension defines to what extent emotion and expressiveness are accepted in our cultures. Interestingly, the U.S. seems to be in the middle of the spectrum worldwide. Therefore, international students from more affective cultures – Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, for example – often find us cold and milquetoast, whereas that is how we label our students from cultures that are even more neutral than ours, such as most of the Far Eastern cultures – Japan, China, and Korea, just to name three. So as teachers we may say “Our Latin/African students are too boisterous – they dominate in the classroom,” or “Our Japanese students never speak up,” in each case bemoaning the fact that the other is not just like us on the neutral vs. affective scale! And our students do the same with us, with claims like “Americans are cold and inexpressive,” or conversely, “American talk too loud,” depending on the speaker’s home culture.

Students from neutral cultures find us overbearing, while students from affective cultures find us flat. With no awareness that this is a dimension along which cultures vary, we tend to judge others, but once we are aware of it, we can more readily accept that people tend to be embodiments of their culture. One of my Japanese students once told me that his teacher, my colleague, had told him that he should “smile more”. I apologized to him; this teacher would do well to understand that there is no need for the student to change his behavior to be more American; rather she should understand his values with regard to expressing emotions.

Egalitarian vs. Hierarchical

EGALITARIAN }  All humans are equal }  Outward displays of vertical distance are distasteful/ mistrusted      }  Questioning authority is a duty

HIERARCHICAL }  There is a pecking order }  Outward displays of vertical distance are expected }  Questioning authority is subversive

This is conceptually an easy dimension, yet one that manifests itself in multiple ways. It is not about whether a given culture has a hierarchy; all cultures do. The question is how comfortable we are with showing that hierarchy or conversely how comfortable we feel thumbing our noses at it. My favorite way of getting my students, who usually claim that everyone is equal in their culture, to discern whether their culture is more egalitarian or hierarchical, is to ask them what they call me. My gripe is: “I’d really like my students to call me by my first name, but they insist on addressing me formally.” I always tell my students to call me Mary, yet their automatic show of respect for a teacher is so ingrained that it simply feels wrong, and if they feel close to me they might call me Ms. Mary, but never just Mary. This clear-cut sense of vertical distance, also called power distance, is a clear sign of a more hierarchical culture.

My favorite illustration of the egalitarian ideal of the U.S. (ideal because in reality there are scores of exceptions) was supplied by an Afghan student of mine. He explained how on his visit to Afghanistan, Barack Obama went through a cafeteria line and sat with the troops to eat. The Afghanis were flabbergasted: He’s the President! But this sort of “regular-guy” behavior is almost expected of a leader in American culture, and any signs of superiority are met with rabid rejection. In a more hierarchical society, however, it is natural and fitting to show and respect rank. Therefore, my students often say to me something along the lines that “American children/students don’t respect their parents/teachers” because they see children arguing with parents and students calling teachers by their first name. This casual behavior, which epitomizes an egalitarian culture, would be interpreted as disrespectful of the parents’ or teachers’ authority in their culture. Likewise, the pomp and circumstance associated with more hierarchical cultures seem ridiculous to a more informal, egalitarian society. Differences in this dimension lead to many misinterpretations of other cultures as, paradoxically, either disrespectful because some people are regarded as visibly superior to others, or disrespectful because inferiors are not deferential enough to their superiors.

Universal vs. Particular

UNIVERSAL }  Rules }  No exceptions }  Blanket application to all people/situations }  Objectivity is fair

PARTICULAR }  Rules, but… }  Flexibility, exceptions are expected }  Every person/situation is unique }  Subjectivity is fair

            This dimension – which mainly describes how “fair” is defined – is fascinating in the context of an English language program, where both students and programs have so much at stake. Most of our students are eager to get admitted into the university, and the English program is just a required way station. Many of them will beg and cajole to get through the program, and teacher complaints tend to sound like, “Our students expect us to break the rules just for them.” From a culture closer to the universal end of the spectrum, we believe that systems can only remain coherent and functional through strict observance of the rules. That does not mean that there are no exceptions; it means that the exceptions are few and far between and clearly justified. We think this is fair.

Yet a person from a particularlist culture believes that taking into account each individual’s circumstances is fair. Students may come with a late homework assignment and beg off with personal reasons, which fall onto the somewhat unsympathetic ears of many American teachers. We, in turn, often refuse to be flexible as a way of “training” students to work within our system, which is what they will encounter at the university. Our students then complain that “American teachers are unfeeling because they are inflexible about assignment deadlines,” viewing this as draconian strictness and a greater concern with rules than with individuals. Who ever knew that the concept of fairness was cultural, yet it is! A univeralist will think that a particularist is trying curry favor or get around the rules, and in the worst case scenario is corrupt, while a particularist views universalists as cold and uncaring. As such fertile ground for misunderstanding, this particular dimension has serious implications for smooth interpersonal relations among people from different cultures.

Specific vs. Diffuse

SPECIFIC }  Relationships based on objectives (“my soccer friend”) }  Relationships easily entered and broken }  Compartmentalized lives

DIFFUSE }  Relationships permeate all realms of life }  Relationship are forever }  Hard to access, but once you’re in, you’re in

This particular dimension tends to have repercussions mainly in students’ social lives, yet the one place I have found it is in the confluence of the two: the social relationships I develop with my students. I often socialize with my students, but I consider this part of my job, and rarely do I admit a student into my truly private sphere. If I do, it is usually when they are no longer my student.

The incident related to this dimension comes when students send me friend requests on Facebook. My Facebook page is for me and my friends and family members. There, I am “me”, not the “work me” or the “professional me”, but the real, authentic, uncensored me, a distinction that someone from a diffuse culture would find baffling. I am reluctant to accept my students’ friend requests because that means letting them into the personal side of my life, which might include political or social beliefs that I do not necessarily want to share with them. Yet in many cultures, the idea of slicing our lives into difference pieces is quite foreign and even absurd. If you are my friend, you are my friend, and I put no boundaries on this friendship. In the past I seriously offended many students, who said, “My teacher doesn’t really care about me because she doesn’t want to be my Facebook friend.” And yet my response would be, “Our students don’t understand that we are not there to be their friends, but that doesn’t mean we don’t care about them.” Caring in some aspects but not in all parts of our lives is a foreign concept to someone from a diffuse culture, and one that often leads international students to be sorely disappointed in their friendships with Americans, which they often perceive as lifelong, although within months of leaving the country the American often loses touch.

Sequential vs. Synchronous

SEQUENTIAL }  Time is a tangible commodity }  One thing at a time }  The task counts; I’ll deal with you when I’m finished with my task }  Time is linear

SYNCHRONOUS }  Time is intangible }  Multitasking }  Relationships count; I’ll finish my task after I deal with you }  Time is overlapping, looping

            It is quite astonishing how much a sequential, or Western, conception of time can lead to serious cultural misunderstandings. Since ours is a sequential culture, time seems to loom heavily over us. The illustrious anthropologist Edward T. Hall wrote how the Native American groups whom he studied actually believed that the European-Americans had a “devil inside who seemed to drive them unmercifully. This devil was time” (Hall 1992; p. 218). In fact, the idea that time is a commodity that you can “save,” “spend”, or “waste” is downright laughable (and not a little pathetic) to people from synchronous cultures. We sequentialists are jealous of our time; it may seem even more important than the people in front of us. My classic example of this is when I lived in Spain. I was the director of a language institute, and whenever I was working on my computer and an American teacher came to my office door, I knew I could just tell them that I’d come find them when I finished what I was doing and they would leave, perfectly happy, knowing I would hear them out as soon as I could. However, if I did that to the Spanish support staff the reaction was insult: I was putting some abstract task on the computer above this living, breathing person requesting my attention here and now.

Our students, like Spaniards, tend to be more synchronous than we are; in fact almost every culture – perhaps with the exception of Germany and Japan – is more synchronous than we are, and this leads to misunderstandings. In our program, teachers have office hours when they must be available to students, yet they work many more hours, some of which, in the interest of productivity – grading, planning, committee work, etc. – simply is off-limits to students. Yet our students are often not familiar with strict hours when they are welcome (or not) and may come at any time. When the teacher rebuffs them, as they sometimes do, and tells them to come back during office hours, the students may think, “When I go to my teacher’s office, sometimes she won’t meet with me even though she’s there,” which is interpreted as a slap in the face and proof perhaps of the teacher’s lack of interest and even professionalism. One former student of mine from a hierarchical culture even interpreted this as the teacher pulling rank and showing her superiority over the student, yet another example of how our interpretations of a culture are often more a reflection of our own. Our teachers, in turn, complain that “Our students expect us to be endlessly available.” We do more than teach, although it is the core of our profession, and there are times when we simply must devote our attention to our other duties. Yet because of this different cultural perception of time, our students may view us as rude, uncaring, and inflexible, while we see them as pushy and disrespectful of our time.

            This has been a brief survey of just six dimensions of cultural variation, and I have necessarily simplified them for the sake of space. Yet there are many more, and each of them affects our relationships with our students. Other dimensions include direct vs. indirect (which has huge implications on both verbal and written communication); high context vs. low context (which also affects interpersonal communication and behavior); external vs. internal control (who or what determines the course of our lives and to what extent); and ascription vs. achievement (how we are accorded status, by our own merits or by birthright, which is closely related to “leaders” that often develop among student groups from the same culture).

            The value of the dimensions lies in the fact that they can provide us with a systematic scaffolding on which to hang our cultural experiences and incidents. Without this scaffolding, we simply accumulate random experiences and have difficulty making sense of them, since culture on this level – the underwater level in the iceberg metaphor, in which the tip or visible culture is readily visible – is rarely discussed or taught. However, with the scaffolding of the cultural dimensions, we can not only organize our cultural experiences and incidents, we can also make sense of them, and understand that our own culture’s place on that continuum is just one of many and that whenever someone acts differently, it is most likely a symptom of a different cultural mapping along one of these continua. It is in this sense that cross-cultural awareness becomes a tool of peace. Instead of judging others’ behavior as wrong, and likewise labeling them negatively – as rude, disrespectful, cold, unfeeling, obnoxious, corrupt, etc. – we understand that they are simply playing by different rules and operating from different coordinates. We learn that our way of being is not natural; it is cultural. We learn that our assessments of other cultures are not necessarily accurate and usually say more about our own culture than the culture of the person with whom we are dealing. We learn not to judge others based on our own culture, and instead we learn to observe, analyze, and understand, not to react viscerally.

As I always caution my students, this does not mean that anyone should adopt anyone else’s rules or culture; rather all it means is that we begin to grasp that there are different possible rules governing a culture, and so instead of reacting negatively or viscerally (with irritation, frustration, condemnation) at others’ behavior, we can react more as cultural investigators, with the thrill of trying to decipher what dimension might be at play and filing away that knowledge away for future reference. We learn that every culture has its logic, even though we may not share it. So we learn to understand and therefore respect (and not fear!) different cultures. Anger, misunderstanding, and even hatred morph into a fascinating game of cultural diversity, one that leads to understanding – mutual understanding in the best of cases – which is the antecedent to any peace in this world.

Stranger, Danger

Today I had to go to a nearby small town to get my car fixed. It’s the kind of Midwestern town that has been built around an interstate intersecting with a local highway, one that has gradually spread its tentacles of truck stops, fast-food joints, half-deserted malls, gas stations, and car dealerships ever wider, but that is basically still rural, hillbilly, local, Appalachian here in Southern Illinois. A town nestled so deeply inside the United States that you could drive for an entire day and never reach another country.

I had about a two-hour wait, so I took my students’ final exams to grade. Seeing the papers spread over the table in front of me, the couple in the seats along the wall behind me asked what I did. I told them I teach English to foreigners. The man’s immediate response was: “I wish you’d teach all of them. Cain’t even speak the language – what’re they doin’ here?” Okay. To avoid going there, I told him I teach students who come from abroad to earn university degrees here. His next response was: “Who pays for them to study? I hope not our government!” I assured him their governments usually paid and he was relieved. An aging, tattooed hippie across the room joined the conversation, adding how it was criminal that not everyone in America could speak English and how we let just anyone in when it’s our country, clearly referring to migrant workers.

The first man asked me where my students were from, and I told him Latin America, Asia, and mainly the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan (which doesn’t really count as the Middle East, although I suspect they wouldn’t have made that distinction). Mr. Tattoo squinted his eyes and peered thoughtfully into the distance. “You know, how do you really know what they’re thinkin’ and what they’re up to? They act nice but who knows what they’re plottin’ behind our backs?”

I guess I understand that: the unknown is frightening, and if the only images and words the average uninquisitive American ever receives from the mainstream media are evil terrorists insidiously infiltrating the West and creepy, bearded medieval-looking characters who seem to live in caves, that would be a reasonable conclusion. It would be the same as my students in Spain who were convinced that all Americans carry guns and are just a step away from gunning down the entire school, mall, etc., that we live in mortal fear of being shot down every time we leave our homes. After all, what other news do they get of this country but the dramatic bloodbaths wrought by raving fanatics? And what other images do we get of Saudi Arabia (bearded men in gowns), Iraq (the evil Saddam) and Afghanistan (those half-animal cave dwellers)? We always get the striking, electrifying images, the scary ones, the shocking events which seem to be the only fodder for what we call the news and that only fan the flames of misunderstanding and hatred. We never get pictures or stories of everyday, decent people just trying to get through life with some modicum of comfort and happiness, regardless of their country. In other words, we never see what we share with them; we only see what sets them apart from us, what makes them alien, unknown, and thus frightening and threatening.

“Well,” I told him, “my students are great because once you talk to them you realize they’re just like us. Almost every single Muslim student has told me how saddened they were by 9/11, and the Saudis told me how their country was also targeted by Osama Bin-Laden and his folks,” something we never hear in the U.S., the great and only victim.

I went on: “You know, the Muslim women with their faces all covered up are kind of scary and intimidating to us, but as a woman once I get to know them and they take off their headscarves and coverings, they’re as modern as I am, and smart and funny. They just keep it private. And all my students walk around in jeans and carry cell phones. They dance and laugh and will talk your head off. And they work really hard. All they want is a better life, which is all any of us wants, really.”

The other couple had left, but Mr. Tattoo was engaged now. He was softening. “You know, you got something. In my company [the oil pipeline business, it turns out], the only ones who work hard are the Mexicans. The Americans are just lazy and good-for-nothing, so it’s not surprising we’re losing jobs to foreigners.” He went on to tell me about the youthful slothfulness of his own son, which he fortunately remedied through hard lessons. “They’re good guys,” he concluded about his immigrant workers, “I just wish they spoke English.”

“Well, maybe the company can offer them some English classes,” I suggested, not so much as a distinct possibility but as a way of saying that meeting them halfway might work. “Yeah, I’ve even thought about taking a Spanish class,” he said, imagining himself taking a step to bridge that gap. Wow! Where had that bigot gone? Our conversation had gone from trite, pseudo-patriotic “hate them foreigners” to real discussion and consideration of solutions, and of these people as humans worth interacting with instead of scary monsters threatening our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

People are funny. It’s as if my American-ness led him and the other couple to believe that I would naturally be equally outraged at what they perceive as the takeover of America by non-Americans and equally suspicious of foreigners, the expected attitude, at least around here. What they couldn’t have imagined is that I actually feel so much more joined with my students than with them: we share a larger worldview, a sense of the greater world as tangible and important as opposed to distant and abstract; a realization that differences come more from open or closed mindsets than from geographical origins (which are, after all, accidental); a sense that someone different from me is fascinating, not threatening. Yet once these possibilities were brought into the conversation, Mr. Tattoo became reflective and willing to listen; he even defended those “dang furners” who are purportedly taking over our country.

It makes me think that a more educated discourse in the media and among individuals would surely bring this world closer together and build bridges, sow the seeds of understanding and harmony instead of suspicion and hatred, even among people who are arguably as adamantly pro-American and ignorant of the outside world as is possible here in America’s heartland, days from any other country. It makes me think that this would make the world so much smaller and knowable, it would shine light on what unites us instead of what divides us, and it would be so much more productive than the current discourse of hatred, mudslinging and stereotypes, which people who don’t know any better just swallow, their all-American mother’s milk that nursed them into patriotic being.