Christine Forte

Anger is an emotion that often comes out of a sense of unfairness. That what happened is not what we wanted to happen, not what should have happened and most certainly not what we deserve to have happen. From a Darwinian approach, the survival reasons for anger would be to summon enough energy to take effective action to defend against a potential danger.

Recently the China Daily printed an article about this phenomenon. It primarily discussed what this has been like for the grandparents: how challenging it might be to move to a new city in one’s late 50’s, 60s or sometimes even 70s. (In one family interviewed the grandparents in their 60s and great-grandparents in their 80s all moved together to help take care of the grandchild!) Many grandparents experience isolation when they first move; making new friends can be challenging as a senior citizen. Quite often they may also find it difficult to communicate with their neighbors or people in their community as they may be unfamiliar with the local Shanghainese dialect.

Movies and books about cross-cultural relationships just wouldn’t be complete without the jokes about language misunderstands and mishaps. Who can forget the scene in “Lost in Translation,” where a Japanese woman is asking Bill Murray to “lip” her stockings, rather than “rip.” Or in “Under The Tuscan Sun,” when the protagonist confuses the Italian word for single with the word “celibate.” At times jokes of this nature can cross the line, but as with jokes of all genres, there’s no doubt a grain of truth in the awkwardness felt on both sides of a couple that just can’t understand each other.

Stepping out of Pudong International Airport in Shanghai, China for the first time you’ll immediately notice the air. You never really thought about air much before but you notice it now, and you wonder if it’s always this gray. After you get in a taxi and it takes you a few miles away from the airport, you begin to see high rise buildings and you think, “Oh, we must already be getting to the downtown.” But then the taxi keeps rolling on and the buildings keep getting bigger and 45 minutes later you finally arrive in what is actually the downtown. And then it sinks in that this is what a city of 20 million people looks like.

In brainstorming about what I would write in this, my first blog with the ACA, I really struggled with getting started. I typed and deleted, typed and deleted and then once more, some keystrokes followed by a stab at the ole backspace. Nothing seemed adequate for describing or introducing what it is that I do and where I live. I’d come up with a smorgasbord of topics that I wanted to write about, but I didn’t feel I could just jump straight in to one of them with no introduction.