The Cultural Impact of Borders

Any person who says that borders are meaningless lines drawn on a map that have no real cultural impact have obviously not crossed many of them before. Borders can be boundaries between different cultures, borders can also divide the same culture — but they all change because of it.

The difference that a traveler will experience when crossing a border that acts as true cultural boundary is obvious. The world is full of culturally respective borders — when you cross from Spain to France you know it, the same goes for traveling from the Dominican Republic to Haiti, etc . . .

But it is in the places where international boundaries are more political separators than cultural — where a dividing line bifurcates a nation of people — is where the power of a border can best be observed. I’m talking about places like the borderland between China’s Yunnan province and Laos or the border between Kurdish Turkey and Kurdish Iraq — the places where a group of people who were once a cohesive entity now exist on two opposing sides of a political divide. When crossing borders like this you logically expect a smooth transition, but this is rarely what you get: borders are powerful, they change the people on both sides of the line.

I’ve been hit in the gut by the unexpected transition of crossing borders between two similar cultures/ countries many times in my 13+ years of travel, but I don’t think I’ve experienced a larger shock  as when I went to Taiwan’s Kinmen Island from mainland China.

Kinmen Island is just a few kilometers from China, and and up until 1949 it was a full-fledged part of the mainland, populated by the same people that were on Xiamen Island and the nearby parts of Fujian province. I wasn’t expecting much of a cultural shift when going there, but fifty years of separation and inter-cultural mish-mash on both sides has created two cultures whose observable differences are incredibly stark.

As soon as I stepped off the boat on Kinmen the cultural differences were obvious. Everybody was overwhelmingly polite, courteous, soft spoken, and, dare I say, meek. Though incredibly hospitable and kind, these are four adjectives that would not work for describing mainland China culture. In fact, these adjectives were the polar opposite of how I would generally describe the way people in China tend to act.

People of the mainland tend to speak loudly, directly, and without any sigh or indication of shyness. I remember my wife’s surprise when on her first night in China we heard a group of people yelling and screaming in our hotel. My wife asked if they were fighting, and I had to explain that that’s just how people talk here. Welcome to China. Like Israelis, Egyptians, Greeks etc . . . the volume of Chinese culture is turned up a few notches.

Taiwanese woman and the Pacific Ocean

I busted out in a laugh the first time I was told that Chinese people think staring is rude. These are the most inveterate starers on the planet. If there is anything out of the ordinary about you — and simply being a foreigner is out of the ordinary in most places in this country — you will be mobbed in stares. If you’re stationary somewhere in public, it is not uncommon for people to walk right up and just look at you like you’re some kind of zoo exhibit. This constant staring breaks many foreigners down here — I’ve even known a few who imprisoned themselves in their apartments just because they couldn’t bear being out in the streets where everybody is looking at them.

Chinese culture is aggressive, loud, and engaging. It’s just the way it is. People push, they jostle for position in line, and if you don’t have a sharp elbow and a quick tongue ready people will cut in front of you in line as though you don’t even exist. When you walk through the streets it’s not uncommon to hear people yelling at you or loudly talking about you:

“Hello! Hello!”

“Waiguoren! Waiguoren!”

“It’s a foreigner! Hey, look, it’s a foreigner!”

“Laowai! Laowai!”

Oftentimes these wails are just catcalls, but sometimes they are verbal invitations to engage further and form an acquaintanceship.

The aggressiveness of Chinese culture is at the same time one of the best and worst things about living and traveling in China. It’s wonderful that this culture is so incredibly engaging and open to talking with and befriending visitors — but it can also be a little too engaging on occasion. I’ve programmed myself to balance Chinese assertiveness with assertiveness of my own — and it works out well — but on Kinmen I was plowing people over.

I had to take a step back and look around: these people are different. Nobody was calling out to me, nobody was engaging me, nobody seemed to even be noticing me.

“The people seem more civilized here,” a twenty-something American expat that I met on Kinmen spoke. This guy was also had a lot of experience in mainland China as well, and was probably the perfect person to test my observations against.

The people seem more civilized here.

Though I didn’t admit it that was exactly the adjective I was thinking of.

“When on the ferry you know if it’s a Chinese or a Taiwanese crowd by how the people are acting,” the American expat continued. He then paused for a moment before adding, “The Chinese just have more of the animal energy.”

This phenomenon probably couldn’t be described any better.

This American expat had a Taiwanese girlfriend with him who echoed his sentiment. “She hates going over to the mainland,” he continued, “she says that everybody is so rude over there.”

This was a young woman whose grandparents were completely born and raised in an undivided China. They represent the stock from which Taiwanese culture developed. It was clear that the difference between cultures was also obvious to the Taiwanese — there is something to this phenomenon.

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I walked around Kinmen like I was a part of the landscape, as though heavily tattooed, bearded, peculiar looking white guys walked through here everyday. I can’t remember the last time I attracted so little attention anywhere in the world. I’ve grown use to people looking at me, asking me questions about the tattooing, kids gaping when I come around a corner — it’s just normal at this point.

So I came to a start when it became clear to me that nobody was staring at me on Kinmen. I’d would walk into a noodle restaurant full of people and nobody would look up. I would catch nobody peeking over at me as though I was some kind of oddity. These people don’t stare.

It was unbelievable. I know I’m a little funny looking and I expect people to stare at me. Never before in my traveling career have I been treated so inconspicuously. What was amazing is that I knew it was all a show, that it was a culturally derived code of etiquette not to stare at people. This was obvious, as when I would engage someone in conversation they would often ask the same questions everybody else does and get their picture taken with me.

At first this was relaxing — it was a nice break from being gawked at as I so often am on mainland China — but after a couple of days I began feeling lonely. I realized the extent to which I’ve cultivated a way of interacting with people based off of commanding their attention. It’s normal for people to stare at foreigners outside of tourist zones, and I’ve learned how to convert this attention into conversation and acquaintanceship. On Kinmen, I was lost. I would make small talk with people who would politely respond, smile, and then slink away shyly.

I’ve never had difficulty finding people to hang out with in China (well, outside of the Shanghai/ Beijing bubbles — which is totally different). All I have to do is find a place that has people sitting around together, walk in, take a seat, and try to make eye contact with someone. The whole process takes about one minute — after that I’m chatting with an acquaintance or a group of people. Chinese culture is so engaging that it’s almost impossible not to make friends.

I found the people of Kinmen overtly aloof. Aloof is probably the last adjective I’d ever use to describe the people of China. It was remarkable that this place that was once China, that is full of Chinese people, has a culture that shows attributes that are so remarkably different.

———————-

I went into a noodle restaurant and ordered up some dumplings. The place was packed with twenty-somethings, and I was looking for a way to engage them. I was on the hunt for some people to talk with — I had a load of questions about their home and culture to unload. But the struggle I had trying to hook conversation showed me a very interesting side of this culture none the less.

There was a worker sitting next to me packing them with meat and folding them up. I decided to make a spectacle of myself. I asked the lady to if she could teach me how to fold a dumpling. She half smiled then half-assly and matter-of-factly gave me a lesson. I thought that I could have used this interaction as a way to attract someone’s attention in the restaurant in order to pursue conversation, but nobody even looked up from their soups. I would need to be a social predator to talk with these people.

If I pulled this move on mainland China (and I have before) people in the restaurant would have been cackling, taking photos, laughing, asking me questions, patronizing, talking to me. Here in Taiwan, nobody showed signs of caring. Again, the difference in behavior was stark.

This is not to say that this is bad, it’s just very different.
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I put the American expat’s challenge to the test as I visited a tourist site on Kinmen. It was proposed that you can tell the Chinese and the Taiwanese apart just by watching the way they act, and, though I already knew it was true, decided to test this theory anyway. From what I could tell, there were two ways that various groups of tourist at the site were acting: some were quiet and reserved and some were boisterous, loud, and obnoxious. It was clear who was from where. But I began asking anyway, and I was surprised.

I was walking behind a group of tourists who were cackling, yelling, and carrying on without regard for anyone else around them. I knew they were from the mainland, so I walked up and asked the patriarch where they were from. He told me that he was from “here.”

Alright, maybe I was wrong, maybe these different patterns of behavior are not 100% discernible. I slunk away, finished with my sleuthing. But I found myself walking out of the site next to this same group. I listened to the way they talked — their Mandarin was perfectly clear and contained hard “R” sounds instead of the “UH” that’s common in Taiwan. Then they started talking about me.

“That foreigner asked [name] where he was from and he didn’t understand him hahahahhahahahahahha.”

These people were definitely from the mainland.

“I can understand you,” I told them. They were talking about me right next to me, I figured I should let them know.

Of course, they were from China.

I am not sure if Taiwanese behavior changed after being separated from the mainland, or if it was mainland culture that shape-shifted with the rise proliferation of the communism model. Obviously, it’s both, but the rate of observable change is astounding: I didn’t think culturally derived behavior could change so quickly. What I do know is that crossing the two mile stretch of water between mainland China and Taiwan is to venture into another cultural realm. In this case, a border divided one culture into two.

All cultures have patterns. Getting the feel and learning the rhythms of these patterns is part of the intrigue of travel. Comparing cultures is a key way to observe the attributes which make each one unique. Observing how these cultures change, adapt, and evolve is probably the best way of learning the broader patterns of the big picture: a world of humans separated into groups that morph into each other and divide apart through time and space. Going to the borderlands of a politically divided culture is one of the best ways to observe this evolution: it’s like studying two related species that share a common ancestor.

Cultural evolution works on the same model as biological evolution: traits converge, diverge, and change as groups grow together and separate apart. Borders are conceptual lines that divide groups of people. When a culture is divided both segments will diverge until they are clearly separate entities from each other and what they once were. Nothing is static about culture — they are always changing, always shifting, always adapting to new circumstances. Borders are often the driving points for these changes.