Submitted by: Submitted by PaperCamp
Views: 851
Words: 876
Pages: 4
Category: English Composition
Date Submitted: 06/03/2008 05:46 PM
Everyone on earth is different from each other. We have different personalities, looks, backgrounds and cultures. We can’t judge people around us based on these differences. I, myself am really tired of how people around me put me in situations where I am misunderstood because of my culture. The most common things that people misunderstand about my culture are the difference in manners, difference in cultural belief and difference in language.
In Chinese culture we have different ways of showing our manners. The way we try to be polite might make other people think that we are not. For example, I was in a Western restaurant drinking soup and some people stared at me. I think they have mistaken me, because my culture picks up the bowl, and we tilt the bowl inwards so that people won’t see you scratching the bottom of the bowl with our spoons. Western culture thinks that it is polite to tilt the bowl outwards because it shows that you like the soup very much. Another thing that people always mistake about Chinese culture is when we eat, our food usually has bones in them and we spit it out on our plate and we have always been mistaken by our people that we don’t like the food due to the spitting. As a matter of fact we think that parts of the meat with bones taste better than plain meat. The last example I think people always mistaken us is how we greet other people. The traditional way to greet people is to hold our right hand into a fist and put our left hand around the right fist and shake it in front of your chest. As time went on we changed from that to shaking hands. But we barely greet people by hugging or kissing them, and some people think it is impolite to not do that. Chinese culture is not as open as the Western culture—we tend not to physically touch each other that much.
We, the Chinese, believe in many different things compared to the Western people. We always get misunderstood because sometimes what we believe is totally opposite to that of...