Scene 1: The Cup of Tea
- Peg O’Brien, 67, retired librarian in Hamilton
- Rana Haddad, Peg’s neighbor, from Beirut
Peg O’Brien had vacuumed the living room twice and put out her good china. Peg is 67, a retired school librarian in Hamilton, Canada, and she had been looking forward to this visit all week. At three o’clock the doorbell rang. There stood her new neighbor, Rana Haddad, holding a plate covered in foil.
“Just something small,” said Rana. Under the foil were about forty little pastries, filled with dates and dusted with sugar.
“Oh my goodness, you shouldn’t have! Come in, come in.” Peg led her to the sofa. “Can I get you a cup of tea?”
“No, thank you,” Rana said with a warm smile. “Please, don’t trouble yourself.”
“Are you sure? It’s no trouble at all.”
“Really, I’m fine. Thank you.”
“Well, just let me know if you change your mind!” Peg settled into her armchair, pleased that her guest seemed so comfortable.
They talked for an hour: about the Haddads’ move from Beirut two years ago, Rana’s two children, Peg’s roses, the winter that was coming. Peg did most of the talking. Rana sat very straight, her hands in her lap. The good china stayed on its tray.
When Rana got home, her husband Samir asked how it had gone.
“She’s nice,” Rana said slowly. “But she didn’t offer me anything.”
“Nothing? Not even coffee?”
“Well, she asked. Twice. But not really.” Rana frowned. “I don’t think she wanted me there.”
Scene 2: Mateo’s First Week
- Mateo Rojas, 17, from Medellín, Colombia
Mateo Rojas, 17, had been in Minnesota for six days. He’s spending a school year with the Nygaard family in a small town an hour south of Minneapolis. So far, he had been sending voice messages to his family in Medellín, Colombia, almost every hour.
Day one: “Mamá, the school bus is yellow, exactly like in the movies!”
Day three: “I counted. The supermarket has forty-one kinds of breakfast cereal.”
Day five: “The whole town went to the football game tonight. Not real football, the American kind, with helmets. Everybody was cheering. It was amazing.”
On day six, the message was quieter.
“Dinner here is at five-thirty, Mamá. Five-thirty! Like in a hospital. And after dinner, everybody goes to a different room. Dave watches TV in the basement. Julie reads. Emma is on her phone, and Tyler plays video games. Nobody stays at the table. I sat in the kitchen by myself for twenty minutes.” A pause. “I think maybe they don’t like me very much.”
The Other Side
Back in Hamilton, Peg was washing two clean cups and feeling uneasy. Had she said something wrong? Rana had seemed so stiff. I offered tea twice, Peg thought. I didn’t want to pressure her. Where Peg grew up, if someone says “No, thank you,” you believe them. Pushing a guest after they’ve said no would be rude. It suggests you don’t trust them to know their own mind.
What Peg didn’t know was that in Rana’s world, a polite guest says no at first, and a good host keeps insisting. In Beirut, Rana’s mother would have offered three or four times, then put a cup of coffee in her guest’s hands anyway. Rana’s “no” was the opening move in a game that Peg didn’t know they were playing.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Julie Nygaard was worried about Mateo too. “He went so quiet after dinner,” she told Dave. “Do you think he’s homesick?”
She had left him alone on purpose. Dinner is early because Dave starts work at six in the morning and the kids have homework and sports. Evenings are everyone’s “downtime,” and in the Nygaard house that means giving each other space. “I thought he’d want some privacy after a long day of speaking English,” Julie said. “I didn’t want to crowd him.”
Nobody in either story was being rude. Everyone was being polite, by their own rules.
What’s Going On?
The water we swim in
People sometimes say that a fish is the last creature to discover water. It has been surrounded by water all its life, so it never notices it. Culture is a bit like that.
Culture is “the way we do things around here.” It’s the shared, mostly unwritten rules that a group of people learns about how to behave, what to value, and what things mean. The Dutch researcher Geert Hofstede called it “software of the mind”: programming we receive as children, which keeps running in the background without us noticing.
Neither Peg nor Rana thought, “In my culture, we offer tea this many times.” They each thought, “This is how a polite person behaves.” That’s what makes culture so powerful: it doesn’t feel like culture. It feels like common sense. We usually notice it only when we leave our own water, or when someone else’s water flows into ours.
The iceberg
A popular way to picture culture is as an iceberg. (The idea is often credited to the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall.) Only a small part of an iceberg shows above the water. Most of it is hidden underneath.
| Above the waterline: what you can see | Below the waterline: what you can’t |
|---|---|
| Food and drink | How many times to offer, and what “no” means |
| Clothes | What counts as polite, rude or friendly |
| Language | How close families are, and how much time they spend together |
| Music, art and festivals | Ideas about privacy, independence and respect |
| Buildings, buses and supermarkets | Attitudes to time, rules, age and authority |
Mateo loved the top of the iceberg: the yellow buses, the cereal, the football game. His trouble came from underneath, from different ideas about family time and what it means to leave someone alone. Peg and Rana both knew perfectly well what tea is. What they didn’t know was each other’s rules for offering it.
That’s the pattern: most cultural misunderstandings happen below the waterline. And because we can’t see that part, we don’t experience it as “a cultural difference.” We experience it as a feeling. We feel unwelcome, or hurt, or annoyed. We decide that the other person is cold, or pushy, or strange.
So the first skill in this course is a very simple one. When something feels wrong, stop and ask: “Could this be the water?”
Postcards
Wellington, New Zealand. Ploy Srisuk, 16, has just arrived from Chiang Mai, Thailand, for a year of high school. In the supermarket, she stares at a man walking down the aisle in shorts and bare feet. Did he lose his shoes? Is he in some kind of trouble? Her host brother, Nikau, just shrugs. “Nah, that’s summer.” Plenty of New Zealanders go barefoot in stores when it’s warm.
Ohio, USA. A cashier smiles at a visitor from Russia and asks, “How are you today?” The visitor answers honestly: his back hurts, his flight was delayed, and the hotel is noisy. The cashier looks alarmed. In much of the US, “How are you?” is a greeting, much like “hello.” The expected answer is “Good, thanks. You?”
Delhi, India. A British visitor staying with a friend’s family thanks his friend’s mother every time she brings him a cup of tea. After the fifth “thank you so much,” she looks a little hurt. In many Indian families, constantly thanking the people closest to you can sound formal, even distant, as if you were a stranger.
Try This
- When something feels wrong, ask: “Is this a rule, or just my rule?”
- Ask about the water. Try “In your family, how do you usually spend the evening?” or “Back home, how many times would you offer a guest something?” People enjoy talking about this, and the answers are often surprising.
- If you’re the host, make offers easy to accept. Instead of “Would you like some tea?” try “I’m making tea anyway. Shall I pour you a cup?”
- If you’re the guest, it’s okay to say yes the first time in places where people take “no” literally. If you’re unsure, watch what other guests do.
- Make your own water visible. “Where I’m from, we always offer three times, so tell me if I’m overdoing it!”
Activity: Draw Your Iceberg
Take a page in your Culture Journal and draw a big iceberg, with a waterline across it.
- Above the line, write three things a visitor would notice about your culture in their first week, such as food, clothes, festivals, or what the streets look like.
- Below the line, write three things they would only discover by living with you, such as how your family shows love, what time counts as “late,” what counts as rude, or how guests are treated.
Stuck below the waterline? Think of a time someone from somewhere else surprised you, or you surprised them. That surprise is usually a clue.
Pause and Reflect
- Think of a time someone’s behavior seemed strange or rude to you. Could it have been the water, rather than the person?
- What’s one thing in your daily life that feels atarimae, too obvious to explain? Would it be obvious everywhere?
Key Takeaways
- Culture is the set of unwritten rules we learned so early that they feel like common sense.
- Food, clothes and festivals are only the tip of the iceberg. Most of culture is hidden below the waterline.
- Misunderstandings usually happen below the waterline, where both people believe they’re simply being polite.
- The first step to understanding other cultures is noticing your own.