Indigestion

My two cents on your post about a culture that is not your own.

I keep getting in my feed all these newsletters from Americans giving each other advice on how to survive any given European country¹. I know there is nothing karmic about the algorithm, so I am sure I get them because I have read a few hence, the boomerang effect. So, like everything in life online, since you showed some interest in something, we are now serving you a bucket-full. Unfortunately, it tends to establish a bias. I will now think that all Americans who travel around Europe are either stupid or xenophobic or some other type of wrong cliché that one can construct about any given author that writes a 3000-word post with the intent of clamming any culture inside it, explaining it to their audience and feeling like a regular expert on the subject at hand. That’s it, folks, that is all there is to know about the Dutch, French, Swedish, Spanish (insert your country of choice) where you went on vacation for three whole weeks and now fully understand. Even moving to a country and living there does not enable you to understand the nuances of any given culture. Heck! Even if you are a native of the culture, you will be missing the point if you try to write any such all-encompassing, cliché-filled pamphlet². Much like forming an opinion about someone you met online after they posted two comments, you are bound to be wrong about them (unless they post something along the lines of “the holocaust is mathematically impossible” or “slaves liked being enslaved” in all seriousness. Then your opinion about them will be 100% right.)

Before you stop reading and mutter the words, “How dare she! I pay attention! I know what I am talking about! French waiters are ALL rude! ALL Spaniards are Bon vivant, and ALL Italian women are hot!” while shutting down the phone or your computer screen righteously enraged, let me illustrate the point. I moved to Sweden in 2014. When the people in my work got to know me, and I felt comfortable enough to say what was on my mind, I heard things like, “You are so straightforward in the way you express yourself, so to the point, so Spanish!” Only to hear, two weeks later, during the summer break, my own mother saying to me, “No wonder you like living in Sweden. The way you express yourself is so straightforward, so cold in your matter-of-fact opinions, so Nordic!”

“Which is it?” I wondered- “Am I Spanish or Swedish?”

My mother does not contemplate if I was switched at birth (and I doubt there was a Swede giving birth in the same hospital on the same day back in 1979). Of note, I have always expressed myself in a direct, frill-free manner. Still, short-term memory seems to run amok in my family, who always categorized my straightforward ways as somewhat uncomfortable, so I guess it is a relief to be able to ascribe them to another culture.

“You certainly did not get that from us!”

However, my ways have not become more “Swedish” since I moved here, especially judging my colleagues' opinions about them. Funnily enough, should you speak with a Dane, they will tell you Swedes are incapable of taking decisions, and Swedes will say Danes are just a bunch of drunks. Spaniards cannot stand the Brits, but we are united in hating the French. You can fine-tune it down to the village level if you want. You go to my hometown in Spain (population 8996), and my fellow villagers will express an global opinion about the people from the next town (population 11 984) who are ALL stupid and poor, only to then walk the two kilometres that separate one village from the other and get their side of the story; which by all accounts, except theirs, is absurd—the nerve of those illiterate morons.

Oddly enough, and contrary to popular belief since my newsletter is all poise and elegance and contains informed opinions of the highest taste and elegance, I am no better than my fellow human comrades from the US. I generalize a lot and extend my bias where I go. I worked in the USA (Boston and New York) for a couple of years doing a postdoctoral fellowship, and I established a friendship with a lab technician who was at least 10 years younger than me and had never travelled outside of the USA. She was smart and funny, and we worked so many hours at the bench that we shared, so we chatted a lot. One day, she asked me— “So, Ana, what is your opinion of people from the USA?”

“Well, you have to take into consideration that most of the people I talk to from here have gotten a degree from Harvard, so that will give me a biased approach to “people in the USA”, but if I am to be brutally honest, my overall view of people from the USA is that they are truly stupid” was my reply.

She was not offended because she knew me and my ways, and we were friends. She asked a question and wanted an honest answer; I had also gotten honest answers from her plenty.

“Why?” was her curious follow-up demand.

“Well, because of the information we get about you and your way of living over there in Europe.”

“What information?”

“Well, we hear about mass shootings in schools, and no one does anything about it. But most of all, we hear that people need to work three jobs and still cannot afford medical insurance. That is quite stupid.”

“You have a good point.” She replied, and we kept on working.

But now, in retrospect, I know generalisations like this are just wrong. The issues are much more complex than all that, and human stupidity cannot be measured with clever “gotcha” phrases. It is just about as idiotic as saying that medical care in Europe is free or many other issues that I will not even name because I like Pandora’s box shut (and sealed) on the internet.

So you see, generalizations are horrible, and reading a “witty” article entitled “I went to France and oh boy do I need to report back” needs to be taken with a pinch of salt and a lot of Alka-seltzer. Even better, don’t read it at all because it will be as inaccurate as it will be reductionist. And be warned, should you have the need to write it, know that you will just increase the contempt Europeans feel for you and your opinions about us, and you run the risk of seeming just as foolish as that woman who “forgot” to learn French and expected to socialize in France since she was “such a chatterbox”³. If you must write it, maybe put in a disclaimer: “This is just my teeny-tiny little experience of this massive culture I have truly no idea about.”

XOXO,

Ana

Expert in… everything, really.

1. I have to point out two things: One- I do not name names because I am elegant like that, but I promise that all that has come up in my feed is the opinion of people from the US about living or travelling in Europe. Two- I will happily read any from Europeans about the US just to confirm my suspicion that we are just as bad.

2. Unless it is a truly witty satire about your own country. That is just in good taste to write.

3. She featured in a CNN article… now she is in the witness protection program for stupid.