now there's a cultural divide

[kaigou]

The most surprising things trip me up in watching non-USian film/television. I remember watching Banlieue 13 and having a complete disconnect early on, and for the remainder of the movie I couldn't ditch a sense of something out of place. Only later did I learn that in France, there are instances where military police and civilian police are equivalent -- so someone could go from doing an MP's job right into the civilian police corps, and retain that military title. That's absolutely impossible in the US, where military law and civilian law can differ widely. Even if you did a stint in the US Armed Forces as an MP, you'd still have to attend a police academy before you could become a cop. (This is due in great part to the Posse Comitatus Act, if you're really interested).

A similar reaction happened when I watched Delightful Girl Chuun-hyang, in which Chuun-hyang creates a single necklace design for a movie, and it's made clear that the production company now owns the design's copyright. Okay, fine, if the original piece is considered work-for-hire... but it soon became clear that somehow this wasn't a single-use, but constituted the production company owning the copyrights on all of Chuun-hyang's designs. It was a major plot-point, yet it was an interpretation of intellectual property that's so completely opposite the USian interpretations that I was spending more time just trying to get over my indignation at a creative artist essentially giving away all her rights. For several episodes, I couldn't even tell whether the story expected me to see this development as par for the course (if a really sucky course), or a sign of impending plot-complications due to Chuun-hyang suing the pants off the production company.

Now I'm hitting that wall again, and this time it's while watching My Girl (the jdrama, not the kdrama). A divorced mother of one is interviewing for jobs, and she's being asked -- and I think I have a bruise on the underside of my jaw from when it hit the desk and bounced -- by the interviewers whether she'll be able to work overtime given that she's a single parent of a small child. And in another interview, to be asked whether she has someone to take care of her child, should he get sick. These kinds of questions are illegal in the US, and hearing them asked is causing a visceral reaction in me.

No, I don't mean "aren't acceptable," I mean are illegal; they're violations of fair hiring practices laws. You can't ask a person's marital status, or whether they have kids or don't, you can't ask where they live or how much they spend on anything, you can't ask whether they have daycare or a stay-at-home-spouse. (If the person happens to volunteer such information in an interview, that's one thing, but you're still not supposed to use that information as basis for hiring or not-hiring.) The very notion of being asked those kinds of questions in an interview makes me want to rise up out of my chair and smack someone down.

In a sense, it's like Chuun-hyang and the copyright issue: I'm having trouble relating to the character's growing frustration. The character's reaction is born from helplessness in the face of "how things are" -- and yet my own cultural sense of "how things are" is so totally different, that I don't see the helplessness as warranted. I keep wanting the characters to get mad and freaking do something. I keep tripping over my own sense of fury on their behalf. The stories want me to see the characters as victims, but it's my own cultural biases that see the story's approach as essentially blaming the victim, and that pisses me off.

I think the best analogue for US/EU folks might be if, say... a story has a teacher who's reprimanded for, I don't know, something minor. That night, the teacher comes home to find his house has been repossessed and his belongings sold at auction, all because he's been reprimanded at work. You probably wouldn't be feeling sorry for the guy half so much as you'd be frothing at the mouth because they can't do that. You wouldn't see him as helpless, you'd see him as an idiot for not pointing out to someone that this isn't right, that this is a violation of his rights. It's one thing to have someone fight back and lose, but it's another thing when the person accepts the loss and doesn't even think of fighting. Hell, even blames themselves for the entire situation!

To realize that you're watching a story based in a culture where it would be considered acceptable, even expected, to make someone homeless on the grounds of a bad employee review -- that's the level of "I don't get this" that I deal with, sometimes, in watching foreign films/shows. Like the first example (of the police officer), it's not always a negative in the sense of a comparison (of another culture being better/worse than one's own), so much as just a radical departure from the everyday unthinking "how things work" cultural setups. Running into that kind of a total difference is a sudden reminder, or realization, of my own cultural assumptions.

Strange, isn't it? Or maybe not so much: that in watching/reading other cultures' stories, I find and re-find elements of my own culture that I do value but had never considered in such depth. Or should I say, that I discover I value but it's only through contrast that I recognize what I'd always taken for granted.

Comments

[whatistigerbalm]

Hah, those intrusive questions are par for the course in the private sector back at mine. Reading this I was less able to empathise with your "get mad and do something!" impulse than I was with the little I got of the film from the description. Huh. Cultures!

[kaigou]

Reading this I was less able to empathise with your "get mad and do something!" impulse than I was with the little I got of the film from the description.

I do think it's highly contextual, based on the culture -- I'd be willing to bet that if you watched the same movies/shows, there'd be something that make you blink... it'd just probably be something completely different from what made me blink.

Tangentially, when it comes to such intrusive questions, I go with what my mom taught me (since she used to do recruiting/training for people entering the workforce, and that's how I even learned what questions interviewers can't ask) -- which was if someone does ask such a personal question, you don't dignify it with an answer, if possible. Or, you just flat-out lie, preferably with an answer that's vague enough that you won't get caught later. Eheheh.

Although with that background, it makes me even more frustrated, sometimes, when I see someone (especially women, who get that kind of intrusive attitude far more than men, at least in the US, though I bet it's just as true elsewhere) getting treated like that. My first reaction is: lie, damn it! Paste a smile on your face and lie like a goddamned rug! Which I suppose means that when the character doesn't prevaricate or evade, I'm doing a bit of victim-blaming myself (eg "if she hadn't been honest, she might've gotten that job" kind of thing), eh.

[whatistigerbalm]

if you watched the same movies/shows, there'd be something that make you blink... it'd just probably be something completely different

Absolutely! As an example off the top of my head, I was boggled to hell and back when I watched the original Dark Water. I couldn't even get to the stage where I'd pay attention to the supernatural, out-of-the-ordinary events because I couldn't orient myself on the basic, ordinary level to begin with - the protagonist's relationship to her husband, the peculiarities of her former job, etc.

[billie]

Strange, isn't it? Or maybe not so much: that in watching/reading other cultures' stories, I find and re-find elements of my own culture that I do value but had never considered in such depth. Or should I say, that I discover I value but it's only through contrast that I recognize what I'd always taken for granted.

That's what cultural exchange does. Is supposed to do, I guess. I get it both ways-- a lot about my time in Japan had me ready to smack people, but back in Germany I realised that a lot of the things I'd come to take for granted in Japan weren't, not at home. Very strange, that.

I had something else to say about this, but I forgot-- might be back later.

[kaigou]

back in Germany I realised that a lot of the things I'd come to take for granted in Japan weren't, not at home

It does make me wonder in the opposite direction, just like you say -- I wonder how many times in American television/movies, there's an in-story reaction of "you can't do that!" and the non-American audience is going, wtf why not? Heh.

[billie]

I wonder how many times in American television/movies, there's an in-story reaction of "you can't do that!" and the non-American audience is going, wtf why not? Heh.

Mostly, it's things to do with politics or with lawsuits. In Germany, we tend to view the US as a very, very sue-happy place -- some of the things that win lawsuits overseas probably would just be dismissed over here (famous example is that guy who sued McD's because he'd scalded himself on his take-out coffee -- with the result that all paper mugs now have to be marked "caution, liquids contained may be hot" or somesuch). Then there's the whole "different approach" thing -- one example that comes to mind is how the US uses anti-discrimination laws to do much of the job that strict workforce protection laws (lay-off protection, regulated notice periods, etc etc) do here.

As for "they can't do that" -- a Japanese friend of mine started to work at a large sales company earlier this year. A few weeks ago, her she commented on how sexual harrassment (a la "You're a girl, you shouldn't be a sales rep for a business company-- you should be nurse or a clerk!" or "Why don't you grow your hair out, you look way too masculine to find a boyfriend") was a close to everyday thing at her workplace, but she couldn't very well talk back to her bosses or clients.
Comments could be roughly devided into three groups: "wtf, file a complaint!", "that's just the way it is in Japan, this place is so slow to change ..." and "just hang in there and earn enough to get out (of the company/Japan) ASAP."

Guesses as to which group said what? ;)

[kaigou]

As an aside, I think the reason the US comes across as so suit-happy is because our system is set up to put a great deal of the burden of change on the judicial side, and not the legislative side. If you want change, as a citizen, you're going to get it through the courts more than you will through the legislature, honestly. Yes, this does mean it's our courts that get the brunt -- continuous appeals over, say, asking Congress to do something -- but that's also because in certain cases, the suit could wend its way all the way up to the Supreme Court. We tend to put a great deal more weight, socially, on decisions out of the Supreme Court than we do on legislative decisions, at least historically -- nearly all of our major social changes have originated from court decisions: desegregating schools, striking down miscegenation laws, legalizing contraceptives for married couples, legalizing abortion... and plenty of other big issues. Outside the past decade or so of certain conservative areas whining about "activist judges", our legal/social system has pretty much always looked to those same "activist judges" to protect the minority from the majority. Popular votes/referendums (like CA's gay-marriage issue) are assumed to swing with the majority over the minority, and the legislature is frequently seen as a top-down forced change (and therefore not good) -- so we fall back on the courts when, as a minority, our rights are being trompled. The result, it seems to me, is that we see "lawsuit" as the answer to everything, because it's the answer to so many of the important things.

What's ironic or sad about common Japanese workplace sexual harrassment is that it wasn't really that long ago in the US that the same comments would've been considered acceptable. Actually, it's really only been in the past fifteen years or so -- or less, honestly -- that I could expect finally not to have to hear such nonsense. Me, I think this has to do with the dot-com and technology booms, which needed such a huge influx of new (educated, trained, skilled) workers for the boom that it was pretty much a free-for-all: companies were hiring like crazy to meet demand, and the old "we'd rather take a man over a woman" (for various reasons) was pushed to the wayside: "we just freaking need people, get us people who know what to do"... and that helped open a lot of doors.

But yeah, sad as it is to say, I didn't really stop getting comments like the ones you mentioned -- or the even more teeth-gritting, "well, a major factor in promotion is how long someone will be with the company" (with the implication -- if not said outright -- being that as a woman, they expect you'll soon be leaving to have babies, so why bother investing training in you, or promoting you? Being asked at work by managers how soon you're planning to have a family is just infuriating -- because if you indicate that you don't plan to have a family, they either see you as suspect (not following the proper gameplan for young woman) or they don't believe you anyway, and discount you as a liar (to yourself or others). And I'm sure I could talk back to my bosses more than a Japanese woman, but I couldn't talk back that much. Most corporate environments, I find, tend to discourage employees from going off on their bosses about being misogynist, chauvinist asshats without even two braincells to rub together, and so on.

[aldanise]

Which might actually play into cultural appropriation issues, because the appropriator has an entirely different set of "how the world works" assumptions than members of the culture, and often they won't even realize just how bad their assumptions are.

Or, I was having a discussion about Kill Bill with a group of Japanese friends, and (out of all the issues with that movie) the one that really bugged them was the Bride driving through the streets of Tokyo with a bare blade prominently visible. It was like, it shouldn't even be an issue whether her victims' private armies could fight her off, because a situation like that would cause a major police mobilization that should simply have swamped her, because you don't do that in Tokyo.

And a discussion like this is how I know I've spent entirely too much time in Japan and applying for jobs there, because the idea of questions about my marital status, child-having status, and future family plans don't make me blink, despite knowing from my mother-the-lawyer that most of them are completely illegal in the US. [Are questions about marital status illegal here?]

[kaigou]

the one that really bugged them was the Bride driving through the streets of Tokyo with a bare blade prominently visible

haha, I used to do the same thing when it was a film set in Washington DC and the protagonists are running through the streets with visible firearms -- dude, it's (well, it was) a firearm-restricted city. There was NO private ownership of firearms! Unless you're wearing a uniform -- and even then, maybe -- it's like, the police will be coming out of the woodwork after your ass. (Not to mention even if firearms are allowed, open carry is going to raise eyebrows and not a few calls to the police.)

Questions about marital status illegal here, by "here" you mean in the US? If yes, then: yeah, very much illegal. I think the only times you can be asked something personal is height/weight and that's only if it's an issue of whether you'll be able to physically do a job, like maybe a job where you need to be able to lift 50lbs (airport skycap, postal worker, that kind of thing). But questions about children, spouse, family, where you live (and whether you have housemates or extended family living with you), how you'll get to/from work, what your parents or siblings do for a living: all off-limits. Ah, they can ask if you have "reliable transportation of your own" if your job requires you do a lot of driving, like a salesperson who does on-location visits, but only if the company isn't providing your vehicle.

I have been asked in interviews, "where do you see yourself in five years?" but that's usually meant as being limited to "in terms of working here/your career". I'm too much of a smart-ass, because if the question happens to be phrased as "where would you like to be in five years" (which is the way I've usually heard it put), I always toss right back, "independently wealthy and living on a beach in Tahiti drinking something fruity out of a tall glass with a little pink umbrella". If nothing else, it breaks the interview tension, and I figure if the interviewers don't crack a smile, I wouldn't want to work for them anyway!

[whatistigerbalm]

But questions about children, spouse, family, where you live (and whether you have housemates or extended family living with you), how you'll get to/from work, what your parents or siblings do for a living: all off-limits.

This is not directly related, but it reminds me of something you mentioned in a thread on education once and it's been bugging me ever since; it had to do with Uni or school wanting to know how well your dad did at Uni or school and to this day I can't understand how on Earth that could possibly matter wrt your own enrolment.

[kaigou]

Sometimes it's because a school gives weight to legacy: where the parent attended the school, and if the child applies, that pushes the child above other applicants who are otherwise equal. It's called "having legacy," and I have legacy at several major universities and even two of the Seven Sisters (all-female schools that are traditionally the sister-schools to the Ivy League colleges) ... and as you might be able to guess, the notion of that legacy was enough to make me not apply to any of them! Where I did end up going also had legacy, and sure enough, my first roommate in college was legacy, since her mother had attended our college.

(Incidentally, most colleges who ask, will ask for information on both parents: where they went to school, any advanced degrees, and what they do for a living. Since my father was kind of a jack-of-all-trades -- if a very brilliant one -- for the military, this prompted a long discussion on "just what do I put down on the application as your job title, anyway?" and Dad's unhelpful response: "well, do you mean this week or last week?")

Other times the schools will ask because they're looking to offset legacy, on a general level. A friend of mine is director of admissions at a major university, and she's told me that when two applicants are otherwise equal in terms of test scores, references, essay, grades, they'll look at the child's family's history. A kid with good grades and top scores and generally good academic achievement -- but whose parents didn't have advanced degrees or who didn't even go to college -- will sometimes get more weight than an applicant whose parents are clearly majorly educated. The idea is that here's an applicant who, in a sense, went "against the grain" and obviously pushes herself/himself even harder, because his/her family didn't just "assume" the kid would go to college.

I mean, when you're legacy, sometimes you've been raised (as have people I've known) to expect that since your mother or father went to X school, that when you hit 18, you'd apply and go to X school as well. Family tradition, and you don't question it. But schools do recognize that it can be a very different matter to apply to a major university when you have a father with only a high school degree, and a mother who didn't even graduate from high school. (As is true of another friend of mine, who was the first in her family not only to attend a four-year college, but to graduate and then go on to get a master's.) All of her applications asked legacy-type questions, and I wouldn't be surprised if her answers did tip the scales in her favor, because that history demonstrated how much more driven she was -- compared to someone like me, with parents with multiple advanced degrees, who could reasonably be expected to see school as "just something you do".

However, not all schools ask those kinds of questions. Mostly the ones with long-standing legacy traditions, or state universities that are trying to make sure they don't just pick the applicants who are already entitled. Admissions are a funky thing in the US, and there are a lot of issues and problems with them, but having met plenty of admissions officers in my life, I know that most of them do try -- and when it comes to state (public) universities and colleges, they often try to expand the student body by including/accepting applicants who aren't "the norm" because that makes for a stronger, more diverse, student body. Asking legacy-questions is just another way (along with bizarre essay questions) to try and dig out which kids have potential to bring more to the table than the idea that college is "just something you do".

[dancing_serpent]

I don't have the get mad and freaking do something reaction, it's more a "be patient with the characters, things work differently here" thing. Sometimes it's hard to do, though - for example, I still don't really get the protagonist's desperation and her resulting actions in Jodi Picoult's Perfect Match because it would work completely different in German legal system - the source of her desperation would simply not exist here.

[kaigou]

Oh, the getting-mad is entirely contextual. To be honest, most of the episodes in Chuun-hyang that dealt with that situation, I was just baffled. Everything turned on this notion that the production company had "purchased" her copyrights, and since I didn't see how anyone could "purchase" a copyright for work not even designed yet -- that is, as she designed new things, they were treated as falling under the original purchase of a single necklace design -- so all plot-points devolving from there just had me utterly stumped. Because I had no basis for how things were "supposed" to work (per the Korean system/expectation), I had no idea how to gauge character reactions or dialogue. What might've been just everyday or logical for a Korean audience -- "she sold her copyright, and now the company will manage all her work" -- or might've even been just bad translation -- "it's not really 'copyright' but is a more technical term like 'the company has become her investor and has licensed all her work" -- made no sense to me.

The get-mad was definitely a gut reaction for the jdrama, though, even as I intellectually knew that such questions are not just acceptable but expected in Japanese corporate world. (And other places, too, as other replies have noted.) The problem, I think, is that when you sympathize with a character strongly, it's harder to distance yourself, and it requires distance to say, "okay, this is a different place/time, things will work differently here". You're too busy -- or, at least, I usually am -- going, "how would I feel? how does this make me feel?" because that's part of relating to a character. So when a character reacts or acts completely differently, it's a whiplash kind of effect, and makes you realize you're not judging the situation by the same yardstick.

What's odd is that the situation in Chuun-hyang was so baffling, lasted for several episodes, and was such a major plot-point, that it did end up causing distance, and I nearly disengaged completely from the story. Not out of disgust or dislike, but as a facet of that "must pull back and remember things are different here" but that also came close to undoing my ability to relate to the characters. The situations in the French movie and in the jdrama, however, were short enough and/or went by fast enough -- and were not major plot-points -- that I could relate to the characters even as this disconcerting sense of "that's not right" or "that's really strange" co-existed. Because, I think, the story didn't require I then process my "that's not right" reaction as part of following the plot, if that makes sense.

The legal system is probably the biggest stumbling block, though -- we don't realize how much we integrate our culture's legal systems until we're faced with stories that take completely different routes because of completely different systems.

[cyphomandra]

From a jaded Australasian viewpoint, I think of such interview questions as illegal but subject to being weasled in anyway. A trainee of mine recently interviewed for a job in Australia, and was asked what she could do if she didn't get the job - before she could answer, the interviewer said "I guess you'd just stay at home with the kids?" and waited. We're all in a very small field; I know (and dislike) the male interviewer, and he knows that my colleague has two under-fives, and he also knows that she wants to work part-time, so despite the complete lack of ethics involved he obviously sees this as an appropriate line of questioning. I suspect he would, if challenged, argue that he was planning to employ her anyway (she's an excellent trainee who had far better offers that were geographically unsuitable) and just wanted more information, and my trainee has no desire to cause trouble, but you have to have a certain smugly insulating level of white straight male entitlement to assume that such questions have no threatening implications to candidates.

My main cultural dislocation when reading/watching US media is the completely bizarre approach to healthcare. (paperwork? insurance? authorisations for family members?) I get the same sort of visceral "You can't just not *treat* sick people" reaction to that.

[kaigou]

when reading/watching US media is the completely bizarre approach to healthcare

oh, yeah -- there's another one that's byzantine, and if you're used to byzantine, it doesn't make any more sense to run into a simple system, either! When I was watching the jdrama, in one episode the 5-year old daughter refuses to go to school because her stomach hurts. The father's reaction: "we should go to the hospital, right away!" My reaction to the father's reaction: "talk about totally over-reacting! Why not just call your family doctor?" And then as the show continued and I realized the number of times characters just went directly to the hospital (for things I'd never even consider worthy of hospital visits, like "fell down and scraped knee" and "has a slight fever"), I started thinking, "ahah, so actually it's just that these people are RICH. Gotcha!" (And then I asked CP, who explained a bit more about the system, and I had to totally revise my entire perception of the situation/s. Ehehe.)

While you're getting a kneejerk from scenes where a patient or family member is struggling with hospital paperwork, I get the opposite from UK/EU films -- when we see someone going into the hospital and then cut to obviously very-expensive private (private!!) hospital room, I find myself mentally inserting a scene of patient or family member dealing with paperwork. Like, it's so natural to assume that this headache is mandatory that my brain -- even knowing intellectually that this isn't how it works when the country has, like, real healthcare system -- is just trained from birth that paperwork and insurance and authorizations and primary care physician involvement and all that other crap is absolutely mandatory. My suspension of disbelief ends up completely un-suspended, if I don't do that mental insertion.

(Unless I think about it consciously, and then I think of all the times my father's told me about the healthcare system in Sweden, and I say to myself: "I really really wish I spoke Swedish (and could handle five months of freaking cold and 3-hour daylight!) because I would totally be there just for the national healthcare." Yes, it's true. I have Swedish National Healthcare envy. I'm not proud. I'll admit it.

[cyphomandra]

Heh. I have Swedish parental leave envy (16 months paid! Two months minimum reserved for each parent!), and I don't even have children...

[brainwane]

The second part of the UK House of Cards trilogy, which involves the relationship between the Prime Minister and the King, had a really "bwuh?!" denouement that baffled my household, because there are certain norms that we don't have in our bones the way British viewers would.