Bras and Panties and Culture Gap

I am thinking of one incident involving a domestic helper who just had arrived in Singapore. When asked by her employer to wash the feeding bottle, she hesistated. The employer was somewhat annoyed. She thought that her new helper was uncooperative or did not understand simple English. But the truth was the domestic helper or DH (let's call her Maria, though I have forgotten her real name) had been doing the ironing for the week. She believed that after handling the hot iron and the hot apparels, wetting her hand would cause her to have arthritis later in life. However, her English (more like Taglish) was not so clear and the employer (whose Singlish was better than her English) thought that her new helper was suffering from arthritis. Her first thought was to demand an explanation from her agent (Inter-Mares) for sending her a helper who was not 100% fit. Only after a lengthy explanation did the employer agree to let Maria continue working for her. Luckily, as it turned out, she liked Maria and thereafter the pair got along well with each other.

On another occasion a DH (whom we shall call Elena) asked to change employer because she believed that her employer was overly fussy and made her work unnecessarily. Elena had hung up her employer's bras and panties to dry in the sun, in an open space where people could see her unmentionable things. So, without any explanation, she told Elena to take them down and hang them up in the bathroom instead. Elena could not understand. She thought her employer's behaviour was weird. Worse, she thought that her employer was bullying her, making her do stupid things. But the fact is that Chinese women, especially the older ones, felt it was not proper to display their private things. I had to spend some time to explain this to Elena before she understood.

But the problems caused by culture gap are not always so easy to solve or avoid. Sometimes it is so difficult to explain and it takes time and effort. When I was a boy, my mother would teach me not to accept an offer of food eagerly. "People will say you are greedy or that your parents do not feed you," she explained.

Then one day when I volunteered to sell flags to raise money for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, I was offered a drink after standing in the hot sun for hours selling flags. I was hot and thirsty and would have grabbed the bottle of Green Spot (the favourite drink in those days) but, remembering what my mother had taught me, I declined the offer. The lady, dash it, whose mother did not teach her how to be polite, at once put away the drink and I went away thirsty as ever. Even to this day, many Chinese people consider it a reflection of poor upbringing to accept an offer of food or drink at once.

My mother and her generation were not stupid or hypocritical. Chinese people are not the only people to behave this way. According to my old headmaster who was from Wales, U.K., Welsh people of his and older generations behaved the same way. It was considred rude to accept an offer or to accept an invitation to sit down and share the dinner when one visits someone at meal time. Why? Because the party making the offer may not enough for themselves. But of course this is history, at least in more developed countries. History or not, a society's customs do not change overnight.