Hunan, China
As I visit countries around the world I am constantly confronted by different cultural practices and standards of conduct – with the constant expectation that “when in Rome do as the Roman’s do”. But is that how a foreigner should actually act? After all, in many societies the visitor from afar is regarded as an “honoured guest”. As such, it is surely important to make them comfortable as they are accustomed. There is also arguments concerning personal protection, taste, ethics and practicality.
I live in France, but although the French like to eat frogs and horsemeat – and carry live ducks with legs tied and hanging upside down from the back of motor scooters – I do not feel obliged to follow such cultural norms. To complicate matters further I am vegetarian and that runs in the face of almost every cultural eating norm – except in southern India. There are also cultural practices which treat women as inferior, allow prejudice to minority ethnic groups, involve unquestioned acceptance of authority, produce veal or Pâté de Foie , require sustained fasting or the eating with fingers from a common bowl …. And so on. Is a foreigner obliged to go along with such practices or have to leave the country?
I frequently experience problems with the way health and safety is regarded in many countries and find it so often falls short of standards in the UK or France. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but it is one thing being careless about the risks to nationals, but quite another when visitors from other countries are being endangered.In most countries health and, in particular, safety are merely treated as a formality and little attention is really given to them. Of course, it is also a different matter when it is your own personal health or safety at stake. Two years ago I stayed at a Berlin 15-story hotel. The fire escape stairs were in the middle rather on the outside of the building and if you tried to use them the doors on each floor only allowed you to enter the central open funnel containing the stairway and not to return to your floor or any other level until reaching the ground floor. This meant that in the event of a fire escaping people would enter the funnel and get trapped. If the fire was on a lower floor they would all suffocate. I quietly told management it was unsafe, but the duty manager’s eyes glazed over.
Recently I visited a tourist location in China. To reach the top of the mountain required entering one of three lifts that climbed 335 metres vertically in seconds. Access to the lifts was along a tunnel many hundreds of metres long. The queue was densely packed and any incident along the uninterrupted tunnel length that made the crowd panic would have led them to trample over each other. There would be no escape and around one third of the eight thousand+ people in the queue at any one time were small children. To cap it all one of the lifts was not working and the wait in the tunnel was over 90 minutes. There would be a simple solution – which would be to schedule people’s access to the lifts – as the Chinese do when giving access to railway platforms. In a country where reporting on a huge disaster can easily be removed from the news such safety concerns can, of course, be readily ignored.
I once went on a one-day course on how to deal with Japanese culture. I was taught how to present business cards, respect seniority, be non-commital, lower my eyes … but over lunch I asked the tutor why it was necessary to pretend we were Japanese when in Japan – or even when entertaining Japanese visitors in our own countries. He said that it was considered rude to act otherwise. Then I asked “is it necessary to treat non-Japanese colleagues in such a way too if there is a Japanese person present?” He reflected for a moment and replied “of course”. I have since wondered if Japanese executives go on “western business culture” courses before they undertake assignments abroad. If that is the case both parties would be confused.
The problem with being a conformist is that everyone likes you – except yourself.