Building Cultural Brigdes in Shanghai

by Catia Dombaxe (United States of America)

Making a local connection China

While traveling through China, Japan, and Vietnam, I was faced with many barriers that I did not expect to encounter and obstacles I was unsure of how to overcome. The stereotypes and stigmas attributed with being a black woman with curly hair made it more difficult to build cultural bridges in Asian countries than I had anticipated. From the very beginning, I was aware of my salience and at first, I did not know how to use my salience to start a conversation or break the ice. Once I arrived in China, there were many moments where I felt racially profiled by almost every single local person I passed. Their faces read; They have never seen someone like me, they have never seen a black person before, and they have never seen my type of hair. Often their first reaction was to take pictures, stare at me, touch my hair, and many of them laughed at me. This made me very uncomfortable, sad, and upset, yet I persisted in trying to make them smile to me. I decided that no matter what, I was the stranger in their country and I should be the one trying to break the barriers between us. On one of the days, I was on the train and the only free space to sit was by my side. A little girl entered the train and tried to sit in the empty seat beside me, but then she saw me. She jumped in shock and ran to her mother. My initial reaction was to laugh because I did not want to get upset and scare her even more, and then I decided to start a conversation with her mother. The girl’s mother quickly apologized and explained to me that her daughter was not racist, rather she was simply scared because she had never seen someone like me before. Slowly, but surely the little girl began to get comfortable enough to start talking to me and eventually sat close enough to me to answer my questions about where she was from and what she was doing in China because she was from Hong Kong. She asked about where I came from and what I was doing in China. Before I left the train, I was able to share things about Angola and my culture with her and her mother, who were complete strangers to me only a few minutes before. I realized how I could turn my salience into an advantage by making this young girl comfortable and by educating her on my country, my culture and how it is not wrong or ugly to have black skin and curly hair. Overall, most of the people I encountered were not racist; they were just reacting to something they have never seen before. Realizing this made me very open-minded to the locals in the countries visited. The likelihood of me being viewed as causal is very big because I was very salient. Yet people naturally look for causal attribution when the salience is very outstanding. I had a much easier time sharing and learning from these cultures because I could apply many of the concepts learned in social psychology to the situation and be able to control the situation in order to favor me. If I had not been exposed to these concepts, I believe I would not have reacted the way I did. Rather than adjusting my attitude and view, I would have just expected them to understand that I am different even though they have not been exposed to someone with my physical characteristics before. Without this course, I would not have been able to be as open-minded as I was and build cultural bridges with the locals. The black woman with curly hair was able to learn that salience can be used to leave a good, lasting impression about a certain culture and eliminate the negative attributions that seemed prevalent in the area.