This is Part 1 of a two-part series on learning to think interculturally, even in your own neighborhood.
I like to joke that my first cross-cultural experience was moving to Texas. I was born and raised in New Jersey, which is like wearing a bullseye when you are in the Lone Star State.
But I quickly learned to adapt, “adapt” being another way of saying “survive with some level of positive engagement”. I even traded in my deck shoes for a pair of Justin boots bought in a most iconic frontier-looking town. To be honest, the deck shoes had been my adaptation to Central Florida when I went to college.
Over the years, I’ve learned to adapt to all kinds of cultural settings. The Ozarks, the Pacific Northwest, Taiwan, remote regions of Northwest China, and for much shorter stints in Buenos Aires, Munich, the Philippines, Thailand, and Merry Old England.
A U.S.-born-and-raised friend of mine moved to the U.K. for several years. Later talking about his experience, he said he was amazed at how difficult it had been to adapt. He thought he’d have an easier time there than moving to some other country because he spoke the same language. But even accounting for awkward accents, minor linguistic differences, and peculiar spelling preferences, he found surprisingly great cultural barriers to fitting in with those distant British cousins.
Thinking interculturally is not just a skill to be used when moving to a new place or fitting in where everyone around you speaks a foreign language. Thinking interculturally is a skill to be used in settings much closer to home.
I’ve recently started attending brunch with seniors at my church. These are my kind of people age-wise, but I am discovering how my cultural adaptation skills come in handy even when relating to people my own age. We are the same age, right?
The same is true of a monthly men’s breakfast. Don’t all men think alike? Think again.
Such adaptation takes place all the time and everywhere – wherever we find ourselves in settings that vary from our default comfort zone. Like a new church or new social club. A new neighborhood or new school. A new job – or even a new grocery store.
When our kids were little, we loved watching a cartoon called The Magic School Bus. (Note the pronoun “we”) In the cartoon series, a student named Phoebe has recently moved from another school. Every time she encounters something different in the new setting, she comments, “At my old school…”, and then proceeds to explain how things are different. Phoebe is going through cross-cultural adjustment.
In my book, Night Shift: Crossing the Cultural Line for the Kingdom, I write: “In relationships, you absorb culture more than you study it.”
And yet there is great value in studying all you can about a new place. Before we moved to Taiwan and later to Xi’an, we read all we could about the local culture, history, language, religions, foods, and tourist sites of our future homes. Plus, we soaked up all we could from others who had lived there. In other words, we did our homework.
The same was true recently when I was invited to serve on the board of a local nonprofit. Having run a similar refugee resettlement ministry in another city, I already had solid background on the organization’s mission and role. And I had years of experience working with nonprofit governance. But there was still much to learn about this specific organization and how it operated. So, I devoured all I could by surfing the internet, starting with parsing their website, studying the specifics of their mission statement, and finding out what I could of their staff leaders and the other members of the board.
A little over a year ago, I went hunting for a new church home. I identified a dozen churches near where I live and spent hours researching online all I could about each church before visiting in person. I wrote about that process here and here. Most of these churches had larger denominational ties and I was already familiar with their umbrella organizations through years of research and engagement. But, still, I wanted to make sure I gleaned as much background as I could about these churches.
Yet with both the nonprofit and the church that I finally settled on, there was still a huge curve of learning and exploring after that initial visit. Valuable as study is, there is no substitute for actual engagement.
In the end, whether moving to Northwest China or serving on a local nonprofit board or finding a new church home, the key is taking time to absorb the culture of a place. I don’t just mean taking in the ambiance of a setting. Location and architecture do have influence on a gathering or a neighborhood. But drive-by observations are like the casual impressions of a tourist. Much more importantly is to get to know the people of a place.
When we moved into the neighborhood we now call home, we made a concerted effort to meet everyone as quickly as possible. We live on a cul-de-sac, basically a dead-end street with a wide turnaround at the end. Our street has 11 houses, including ours. Some neighbors we met even before we moved in. Other more elusive neighbors took months to track down.
That first Christmas, Kim had the idea of making cookies, packaging them in holiday cheer, and taking a batch to each house on the street. This being the Northwest, people don’t always open their doors to unannounced strangers, so we attached a note stating we were their new neighbors and left the care package at their door. Our neighbors responded warmly, even bringing us goodies in return.
When we would first meet a neighbor, we’d exchange names, phone numbers even in some cases. But actually getting to know our neighbors has taken repeated contacts and observing how they act beyond just with us. It helps that the neighborhood mailbox tree is practically in front of our house.
What we were doing was exploring our new neighborhood in Salem, Oregon, just as we had done in new neighborhoods in Portland, Xi’an, Hsinchu, Taichung, Waxahachie, and Springfield. On one level these cities all look very much unlike each other. But the process of adapting to our new communities has been largely the same wherever we’ve lived on this vast globe of humanity.
In Part 2, we’ll dig deeper and sort out how that process of adapting to new settings works.
To make sure you don’t miss Part 2 when it comes out later this week, subscribe here.
I’ve written about intercultural adaptation from a faith perspective in Night Shift: Crossing the Cultural Line for the Kingdom. You can order a copy here on my website.
I often write about intercultural experiences – look up my old posts on intercultural engagement here.
Photos (clockwise from top left): me signing documents with the governor of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Loralee Carpenter Meier engaging with a local student in China, a neighborhood peacock, 3 men of NW China (Tibetan, Hui, Han), Jim Kwon and Robert Kenyon at high school graduation, a resident of Buenos Aires.