An intercultural trip down memory lane

I first met Dr. Gary Weaver as a junior at AU when I was taking his Intercultural Communication class. During the first session, he asked us to fill out index cards with our name, contact info, majors, hometowns, and cultural backgrounds. I was born in Louisville, KY, grew up in the Paris suburbs, and moved back to KY for high school. I've always considered myself a bicultural French-American. Dr. Weaver, however, deadpanned: "Ms. Marechal, you're not bicultural, you're schizophrenic!"

Children tend to be rather egocentric, so I didn't realize how unusual my upbringing was until college, and even now I am constantly rediscovering cultural quirks from my family and childhood. This afternoon during Richard Harris' excellent presentation on "Managing Space: Cultural Differences in Perceptions of Space and their implications for Managers" it occurred to me that I had spent most of my life in the middle of a cultural battlefield. Most of the battles were subtle. For example, throughout my childhood the furniture would mysteriously move an inch away from the wall and back again, as my American mother's preoccupation with permanent dust lines settling into the wallpaper was thwarted by my French father's desire to prevent objects being lost behind the furniture. By the time we moved out of that apartment, there were dust lines AND treasure troves of lost knickknacks.

Dr. Harris' discussion of communal and residential spaces also led to a "Eureka" moment. Having grown up in what most Americans would characterize as a busy urban area (though any French person who's been to Bourg-la-Reine knows that it's a prodigiously dull little suburb), I find American suburbs and many American cities very uncomfortable. For me, the "normal" way to live is in a modestly-sized apartment in a mixed-income neighborhood with many shops and buildings, where you know many of your neighbors but not all, and certainly where walking, public transportation and bycicling are the normal means of transportation - only driving when strictly necessary. I once spent a weekend alone (with the dog, thank goodness) at my father's house in the French countryside and was absolutely terrified. The sky was too big, the night too quiet, and there weren't any neighbors anywhere. On the other hand, I feel quite safe walking around DC by myself late at night, whereas I know many natives of suburbs who won't ride the metro alone past 9pm - and certainly not a city bus! In fact, I'm fairly certain that the Circulator buses that started running between Capitol Hill, K street and Georgetown were purposely designed to look different from regular WMATA busses to lure upscale riders. I've heard more than one person comment that they don't ride the bus, they ride the metro and the Circulator - that's completely different.

So far this conference has been great - I've learned a lot, networked with fascinating people, and it's lead to a lot of introspection about my cultural identity, how it was formed and how it shapes my interactions with the world around me. Thanks, AU, and Go Eagles :)