Lost in Chinese translation

A Chinese youth knelt beside a grasshopper, cupping his hands to ease it into the neck of a dusty plastic bottle. Looking back over his shoulder, he offered us a wink to make sure we knew to keep watching.

As a small group of Duke students wandering around rural Sichuan, we didn’t understand much about the young Chinese man stooping 10 feet in front of us. For starters, we didn’t speak his dialect, so we couldn’t ask him what he was about to do. Nor did we have any real access to his cultural background, his family life, his educational history or (most importantly) his opinion of grasshoppers.

In these situations, when we find ourselves uselessly inarticulate in a restaurant, a barter-friendly souvenir shop or a hotel lobby, we usually nod helplessly and defer further communication to our savvier, Sichuan-native classmate. Unfortunately, she seemed to have gone missing. We were on our own, and though we knew nothing about our Chinese conspirator, we recognized his boyish smirk and his mischievously squinted eyes. Out of both necessity and curiosity, we looked on in mute complicity.

Take, for instance, our all-too-American laissez-faire social instincts. A few taciturn Chinese dinner companions were not really shy (as per our original assumption), but actually put off by our lack of active engagement with them. As Americans, we placed the burden of participation on each individual, preferring to allow everyone his own right to silence. As Chinese natives, however, our dinner guests were uncomfortable entering our conversation unless invited to speak.

Not that Chinese social behavior left us completely at ease. A multicultural group, we were instantly labeled and stereotyped by our new Chinese friends: Our Indian girl was very beautiful like all Indian women, our Caucasian girl automatically looked like a Barbie doll and our only male was incessantly offered cigarettes and beer by every fellow man he encountered. A little too much typecasting for our politically correct sensibilities.

Other cultural missteps followed those: distastefully arguing about sex education at the dinner table, awkwardly trying to tell a monk that his town is an ideal honeymoon spot, attempting to ask our English students about romantic relationships, forgetting the BYOP (Bring Your Own Paper) bathroom policy—the list continues, some mistakes more egregious than others.

Call us the victims of “culture clash,” then—the cliché fits us well. But the discoveries we’ve made so far on this trip are imaginably only the tip of a very large, very robust iceberg. The truth is, the dissimilarities between our Western cultural impulses and our students’ Chinese inclinations runs much deeper than technology, popular music and television and the other so-called Westernized aspects of China. Despite the news media’s emphasis on Western influences on contemporary Chinese culture, such changes in Chinese culture remain only skin-deep: cell phones, Western television shows, cleaner cities and even non-squat toilets have done very little to bridge gaps in embedded cultural customs.

We may have heard Lady Gaga blasting in the grocery stores of Chengdu, but how much closer did that brief recognition bring us to understanding the cultural intuitions of our English students in the same city?

Pointing to such relatively superficial developments as an implication of some sort of significant alignment of Chinese and American culture now seems hyperbolic. It’s one experience to read about Chinese youth surfing the web at cybercafés and biting into a piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken—then, they might not seem so different from their American counterparts. It’s another experience entirely to teach college students in Chengdu and to realize exactly how many significant issues still guarantee that American and Chinese remain virtually foreign to each other.

So when we found ourselves staring at the young Chinese man that afternoon, we stared with no anticipation of his next move. Grasshopper now secure in his plastic bottle, he ran into a nearby building. When he swaggered back into our view, the bottle had been filled halfway with beer, grasshopper now floating listlessly on the liquid’s surface.

He’d killed it, and now he sought our admiration as he showed off the dead body. Halfway around the world, such juvenile cruelty is still communicable—but what could we say to him to express our disapproval? How could we know that he would identify with our objections? We looked at each other before resorting, once again, to a tried and true evasion technique: smiling tightly, we nodded our recognition. Then we looked away.