Accidental cultural competence

The ability to navigate through another culture sneaks up on you. Especially with language, when you reach a point that you spend so long focusing on how much you don’t know that you take for granted what you do know. Combine that with all the other bits of cultural competence you build up – the comfort-level of making a joke in what was once an uncomfortable situation, the ability to read street signs without thinking “I am reading a street sign in another language” – and you can forget how others see you.

I had a strange encounter on Wednesday in the park across the street. The family has been away at the dacha, and I’ve been staying in the city getting some work done. It’s been a lot of work, and of course, lots of football matches to watch on television. I watched the tense England-Slovenia, US-Algeria matches, and decided afterwards to take a walk. It was about 8 p.m., and the long Moscow twilight was still in effect. The weather has been beautiful, about 30 degrees C with a nice breeze, so I opted to take a walk.

 I went to a kiosk and bought a Starry Melnik beer and went through the park near our house and sat on a bench to think through some problems in the book. The park is interesting -- it is a woody place, with a few benches, but it is usually perfectly safe except when it gets dark. I sat and watched parents with their kids in strollers walk by, a steady stream of people heading home from work, a few groups of young men and women gathered at nearby benches drinking beer and talking.

 Along came a pair of visibly inebriated guys, who came up and started a conversation. One was a normally dressed fellow with a buzzcut and a tan, and the other was wearing blue workers overalls. They appeared to be Central Asian. Each of them was carrying a can of Baltika No. 9, a kind of strong, disgusting dark beer. Buzzcut sat beside me at a respectable distance, the other guy squatted a little to my right. They had a brief and poignant story about how they had just finished a long day of hard work, and that it was Buzzcut's birthday.

I realized quickly that these weren't muggers or hooligans -- just two hard-working guys who didn't have any more money and didn't want the fun to end. They needed someone to buy another round of something, and I looked like an easy mark.

I wasn't particularly interested, so I fell back on my default position for getting out of these things -- "I'm sorry, I don't understand."

They repeated themselves, hard work, birthday, etc. And I stuck to my story. They began asking, politely, where I was from. They were from Uzbekistan -- did I know where that was? Yes, I said. Near Tajikistan (I was very careful not to mention Kyrgyzstan in any imaginable way). I even said something about how they made lovely tea-cups (piali, which are actually, quite lovely).

And they wanted to know if I lived in Moscow. I said no, and insisted I didn't understand what they were saying. They wanted to know what "republic" I was from. I insisted I was from somewhere else. Probably Latvia? Lithuania? Eventually, I said I was from Canada. I have fallen back on this for years. Given the ambient anti-Americanism in Russia, there is an assumption that all Americans are rich idiots. There is also a weird contempt for Brits afoot, so I decided during the Bush years that pretending to be Canadian was best for wriggling out of these kinds of situations. It accounts for my accent, but is a country that I think most folks in Moscow feel indifferent to, or regard as a distant thing they can't quite map onto their radar of prejudicies. These two guys seemed not to know what I meant. So I explained that Canada was a friendly country over the ocean, far away.

They seemed to decide together to continue onward to their primary goal. "Look, it is his birthday! We've had a hard day of work, and it is his birthday!" They raised their half-empty cans of Baltika, and what could I do? I am, above all, a polite and culturally sensitive person. So I raised my half-empty Starry Melnick and, for the first and perhaps only time in my life so far, wished him a happy birthday -- apparently in a way that would make my long-suffering Russian tutors proud. Я поздравляю Вас с днем рождения.

Buzzcut remained perfectly friendly as he said, "I"m sorry, but you're Russian." I insisted no, I don't understand. Canadian. And he kept saying, "I'm sorry, but you're Russian."

The squatting fellow tapped him on the knee to get him to stop. But the conversation continued this way for a several more minutes. I was pretending I was dumber than I was, and they insisted I was more than I would admit. I kept apologizing and saying I didn't understand, and Buzzcut kept insisting that I was a Russian.

Eventually they gave up. We toasted one more time to Buzzcut's birthday, and they wandered off. They paused for a few words with two pretty young women sitting alone nearby, who unceremoniously told them to screw off, and they stumbled off toward the Metro station.