Cultural Identifiers

            From a young age we are told not to judge a book by its cover - and yet we do.  We size people up based on their appearance – what they’re wearing, how they’re groomed, how they compose themselves.  This makes life easier for us.

            We call them stereotypes and generalizations, and as much as we’re told we’re wrong to use them, we do anyway.  Maybe we know we shouldn’t use them; we do anyway. 

            As we walk down the street, we use these generalizations to categorize people.  Instead of taking the time to have a conversation with someone to really get to know what they’re like, we use these generalizations to save us time.  

           In some instances, we do it for our own safety, or so we think.  We cross the street in order to avoid this person who’s dressed in the ‘dangerous’ category.  In other instances, we do it to save time or energy, or so we think.  We choose to ignore what some people are saying because they belong to the category of people whose wisdom we think is worthless.  In still other instances, we are attracted to certain people who fit our description of what we consider to be decent, attractive, respectable and wise. 

            As I sat today in the middle of Yunnan University in Kunming, China, I looked at all the different people walking around me.  It was a busy campus, full of students, and busier still with all the tourists who come to admire the fall leaves of the Gingko trees and architecture of the old buildings.  I realized that being in this foreign land, I was stripped of the cultural cheat sheet that has allowed me to save time and energy in my own country.  I was no longer able to gauge who were the ‘creeps’, the ‘youthful rebels’, the ‘hippies’, the ‘business types’, and ‘the normal.’  Without this cultural crutch, I was at a loss of who to avoid, and who to engage.

            I was suddenly aware that despite my buying into that age-old adage, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover,’ I did, constantly, every day in every moment back home.  It is a totally natural instinct, developed in our reptilian brain to help us quickly distinguish between danger and safety.  And yet being here, in the middle of a Chinese university campus, I felt freed of this evolutionary baggage, and for one of the first times, maybe since childhood, really able to walk this world, free of stereotypes, and open to all.