| The Silent Game |
[May. 26th, 2005|10:44 am] |
Imagine you are trapped in room filled with people playing chess, but in this room no one is able to talk. You sit down and start playing with someone. After a few moves, your opponent starts making moves that seem a little strange. He moves pieces back to where they started. He moves pieces to positions that provide neither advantage nor disadvantage. He starts to miss chances to put you in check, or even checkmate, and takes pieces that aren't so important to your strategy. It messes with your head. "What am I missing? Is this guy a really crappy player? Or worse, is he thinking 10 moves ahead and I can't see it? What's going on?"
Then suddenly he moves a bishop sideways and takes your pawn. Naturally, you're pissed off. The guy is cheating, right in front of you! You glare at the guy, but he looks confused. He seems to be asking, why are you so mad? Don't you know how to play this game? Frustrated, you get up from the table and look for someone else to play with. The other tables seem full, so you decide to just sit and watch a few matches until someone is free to play you. Suddenly one of the players in the other game moves his pawn sideways, but the other person keeps playing as if it's totally normal. You stand up and walk around the room to find that everyone else in the room is playing a different game--one where it's okay to move your bishop sideways. A deeper realization hits you. It's not just the way people are moving their pieces. They aren't even trying to capture the king!
So here you are, alone among all these players with your foreign rules and no one to explain the local game. What do you do? Some people in your situation would get pissed off and try to leave the room, cursing the other players as fools on the way out. Others would keep playing but ignore the fact that no one else is playing their game, disregarding the people they are putting off with their blissful ignorance. But you know that if you're really going to make it in this place, you've got to learn the game. So you step back and spend a lot of time watching other people play. You start to get better feel for the game and eventually get up the courage to play some people. You make a few mistakes here and there, occasionally frustrating your oppenents by your inability to play the game properly. But little by little the game starts to make sense to you. You learn to anticipate how another person will move, what the strategy is, what piece they are going after. And eventually you win your first match. You still lose more often than you win, but you're a little more confident, with an appreciation of how deep this game goes.
That's what it has been like for me trying to learn the culture here for the last three years. I'm not talking about surface things like fashion, or food, or even language. I am talking about how humans use behavior to communicate. For me, the real differences in cultures lies not whether we use chopsticks or forks, or what side of the road we drive on, but in what we say to each other through our actions. Sometimes that includes what people say, but how they say it always far more telling. Not being able to immediately access the massive amount of symbols we modern humans recieve on a daily basis forces you to look elsewhere for social cues. The trick is that most of the actions around you seem familiar, but everyone once in a while some moves that bishop sideways.
My time here is almost over. I'm coming back to America in two months, but in the meantime I'm going to take some time and reflect on my long process of learning the game.
I hope you will enjoy. |
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