Talk about intercultural behavior, first thing comes to me is the foods and customs on eating. A Chinese proverb
saying "Food
is the paramount necessity of the people", which is also true for people
from different countries. However, people with different background have
extremely different customs on eating, Japanese like to eat raw fish as
"sashimi" and delicate foods, Americans give others images with
loving fast food like hamburger, chips and coke, Indians crazy about curry with
heavy smell and eat with hand, Europeans love steak and toast, and finally
Chinese seems dare to eat anything! Singapore's eating customs are
multicultural, southeast tastes but also similar to south part of China, so for
me it is not considered as intercultural, but I did met some friends with
different behavior.
Last
Chinese new year, I hung out with my Chinese friends, together with two German
guys and one Spanish guy. We went straight on Chinatown to eat self-service
Chinese steam pot, the foreign guys looked very exciting, maybe this was the
first time they tried real Chinese steam pot. First interesting thing was when
they ware going to pick the food, they prefer to pick their own food only, then
put into the pot piece by piece, finally eat their food only, for me I just picked
beef full with two plates, crab full with three plates so and so on, then put
them all in the pot for everyone to eat. It reminds me one main difference
between west and east on the dining table, which is that westerner usually put
the foods into their own plates and focus on their own food, stands for their
independence and self-health. On the contrary, easterner prefer to place the
food in the center of table to share each other and pick food for others,
stands for close relationship and harmony. Ok, time to showed how to enjoy real
steam pot in Chinese way. Second interesting thing was the most usual one,
chopsticks. Obviously, these foreign exchange students were not good at using
chopsticks, most of the time these two little sticks really freaked them out,
one of the them even gave up but instead of using hands. Why do westerners use
knife and fork while people from most eastern countries use chopsticks? That is
a long story. During the dinner, we talk about the most weird thing you have
eaten, I believed my answer deepened the bias about Chinese dare to eat
anything, including dogs and bugs. In my opinion, I treat dogs, pigs, cows and
chicken as the same, they are all creatures with equal lives, unless you are
the strict vegetarian, otherwise you should not judge me what animals I
shouldn't eat. We also talk about the other differences of table manners and
eating customs between east and west, I found the interesting stuffs of
intercultural behavior in food eating. If you have interesting thing on the dinner
table with respect to intercultural behavior, share with me!
