Walking across the golf course – finding an intercultural imagination

As I take the public footpath across the golf-course near my home in Canterbury I encounter ‘Chinese’ golfers. I feel a warmth and just enough cultural knowledge to make eye contact and wave and shout ‘good shot’. I feel I can do this from my experience of students, colleagues and journeys to China over the years. Their immediate smiling response and waving back indicates that I got it right. 

There is also a sense of a cultural difference in that I didn’t think this sort of communication would work with the ‘British’ golfers I normally encounter, usually with no more than a passing nod. 

But this isn’t the silly cultural difference that’s so easily imagined – ‘Chinese vs. British culture – collectivism vs. individualism’ – falsely suggesting that the Chinese golfers respond in this way because they’re more relational. The Orientalist racism in that sort of theorising is very evident and dangerous.

I also need to remind myself that ‘Chinese’ contains huge diversity whether associated with China or the diaspora. And there will be more diversity amongst the so-labelled ‘British golfers’ than I might imagine.

There’s something more complex going on. 

There is something different about the Chinese golfers. Just like, as I’m sitting in the café writing this, among all the types of people around me, I notice a particular probably father and daughter in the queue whose whole demeanour and appearance, even in how they wear their clothing, makes me theorise that they have a background East of say Vienna. I’ve written about this sort of thing before. Something to do with the difference between the Arab and Iranian music playlists in my earlier blog.

Seeing this sort of difference isn’t to do with Othering or stereotyping. It’s instead about opening the intercultural imagination. Appreciating difference everywhere without positioning it, blocking it, containing it within large-culture boxes. It means that I notice something special about difference because I’ve travelled and looked and engaged in a range of different cultural scenarios. 

Intercultural imagination means that I can have a sense of how and where this diversity operates across the varicultural flow. It doesn’t have to be travel to distant places. It begins with the small – sitting in a café, travelling on a bus, classrooms, working in the library, going into shops, collecting grandchildren from school, their family mealtimes – with memories of going to school for the first time. And then transferring what I see there to distant foreign places if I have the opportunity; and then back again to the local. And when people travel to distant places, this is the resource they take with them if they can only notice it – and helps put aside the awful racist stereotypes.

This imagination then helps me make sense of when, further on in my walk, I encounter two groundsmen repairing and training the branches of a hedgerow. I say something to show interest and stop a short while, not to interfere with their work; and they explain what they are doing; and I show appreciation and ask just one or two questions that they seem pleased to respond to.

How I speak to them is informed by intercultural experience in Iran 50 years ago –  of the Persian phrase, ‘khaste nabashid’, ‘don’t be tired’ – commonly used to show appreciation. I don’t feel that there is anything similar in British English. (Though there are many ‘British Englishes’ with which I’m not famil­iar.)

Of course I didn’t use the literal translation because I think it might have sounded sarcastic. It was instead the recollection of this Persian phrase and its use that somehow enabled me to speak to the groundsmen in a way that showed my appreciation the specialist nature of their craft.

Also, not lingering too long was informed by my very distinct memory of being told very explicitly by a friend at the time that Iranian taxi drivers and carpet shop owners, who seemed at first sight relationally indulgent, were also busy people, and that I shouldn’t take up their precious time by lingering in paying the fare or small-talk.

This taught me the falsity of another Orientalist stereotype that ‘Eastern cultures don’t have the same urgency of time-management that we “modern Westerners” have’. There are just different ways of managing time and how it is spoken about.

Then, later on, I take my car for servicing and, because of my encounters on the walk, I’m conscious of the mode of English I use to speak to the reception staff. I’m still thinking here about what I learnt about taking my car to the mechanic in Iran and Syria – again, all those years ago. But, then, with the people in the courtesy minibus back into town I feel more foreign than I did in those shared taxis in my youth in Tehran.

I describe in detail the intercultural laboratory of catching shared taxis in Tehran in Contesting grand narratives of the intercultural, and developing back and forth intercultural awareness in time and place travel in ‘Revisiting intercultural competence: small culture formation on the go through threads of experience’.