On Thanksgiving Thursday, we ordered a full turkey dinner for our whole team.  In Chinese, the word for turkey is 火鸡 (huo ji) which literally translates to “fire chicken.” All day my colleagues asked “Fire chicken 来了吗?”  in anticipatory glee.

With mashed potatoes, gravy, salad, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie and more, it looked and tasted a lot like the Thanksgiving feasts I’ve enjoyed at home.  (We ordered from Culinary Capers, a catering company that just opened the restaurant Switch at 798.)

My colleagues really loved the meal.  We sat in the company cafe for about two hours, chatting and laughing.

Fire chicken night contrasted sharply with the Thanksgiving scene in Rachel DeWoskin‘s memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing.  When Rachel moved to Beijing in 1994, she stumbled into a starring role in a Chinese soap opera, and worked in public relations. Her boss, an older American woman she calls Charlotte, takes the whole company out for Thanksgiving dinner at a fancy foreign hotel.  As her Chinese colleagues poke awkwardly at their plates of dry turkey, Rachel realizes how little her boss connects  with the local staff. She wonders why she didn’t just take them out for a Chinese banquet, for more familiar food the staff could really enjoy. (I hope this is accurate; I am writing it from memory, and the book is not at hand.)

When I mentioned this scene to one colleague, he said, “China has changed. We are a lot more open to foreign things now.” I added that this food might be more flavorful than the international cuisine available in Beijing circa 1994, since more foreign restauranteurs have moved in.

After this delicious meal, we headed back to our desks to finish the evening’s assignment.

My mom sent me four paper turkeys, by airmail. One is still on my monitor :)

This special dinner gave me the opportunity to share something from my own heritage with my colleagues.  As we get to know each other better, we can work more effectively together.

It reminds me of one of my all-time favorite articles: The Cross-Cultural Classroom, by Christina Shunnarah.  Ms. Shunnarah teaches kindergarten at International Community School in Georgia. The school serves students from more than 40 different countries, many of them refugees.  Ms. Shunnarah writes:

I often think of culture in terms of the “iceberg concept” commonly used in educational studies, with its small visible tip and huge mass below the surface. Most people tend to view only the surface aspects of culture “observable behavior” sometimes known as the five F’s: food, fashion, festivals, folklore, and flags. But of course culture goes deeper than that. It is the other 95 percent below the surface of which we need to be aware.

Deep culture (below the surface) includes elements such as child-raising beliefs, concepts of self, beauty and personal space, religious rituals and perspectives, eating habits, facial expressions, eye contact, work ethic, approaches to problem solving and interpersonal relationships, moral values, cosmology, world views and personal discipline — to name (more than) a few.

The children that come into my classroom each year have such a variety of life paths. Looking at their cultural backgrounds with the “iceberg concept” in mind has helped to keep me aware of the aspects of their lives that are not in plain view. And the more I work with the students at I.C.S., the more my awareness of these subtle realms increase. [more]

Though I am no longer officially a teacher, this lesson definitely still applies. Celebrating Thanksgiving falls into the superficial category of the five F’s of “observable behavior,” and I see it as a first step in digging into the real iceberg: how each person’s culture shapes his or her worldview, expectations, and so much more.

Tomorrow I’ll share a list of my own core beliefs, hidden biases, and religious perspectives, and how understanding them has helped me in my day-to-day interactions.