Shanghai Pt. 1

I want to start this blog with probably my first “memorable” intercultural communications experience. When I was around four or five, my parents took me to Shanghai for the first time that I remember. While my parents also took me to Thailand and (I think) Vietnam before then, I didn’t remember much from those times, and I didn’t need to interact with anyone either. In China, I had to talk to strangers in a completely different language for the first time, instead of hiding behind my parents. When in China, all my relatives assumed that I knew how to speak Shanghainese (my memory is very fuzzy and I may be completely wrong, but I had never actually spoken it before, though I could understand it), while I was too shy to reply during the first week. Once, in a department store, I remember I was too shy to ask where the bathroom was, even though I’m pretty sure I knew how to speak Shanghainese well enough, and ended up gesturing to people until someone figured out what I meant. I was there for I think a little longer than a month, so in that time I basically spent all my time with my family. My parents lived in a hotel, but my grandma and I lived with my aunt and cousin, so I got to know them pretty well. By the middle of the vacation I got comfortable enough to start speaking Chinese in front of my family, but I was still too shy to really say anything in public. The most surprising thing for me about this trip is that I’d never thought of myself as a shy kid before, but going to China was just so different to me that I felt totally overwhelmed for a while.