Culture-Crossed Lovers

I arrived in Canada from China in 1955 as a five-year-old. Fifty years later when I returned to China for the first time, it was as someone with no memory of her homeland; it was as someone raised in the West. However, because I am Chinese and lived with Chinese parents, I had some innate understanding of Chinese culture—nothing that I am able to explain in concrete terms, but rather something that had been bred in the bone, learned through a process of osmosis. If not adept, I was at least familiar with the indirect way in which Chinese people will often communicate. My husband frequently refers to the Chinese “no” that really means “yes.” And heaven help the poor person who takes the Chinese “no” at face value. And yet even I who had grown up with some sense of this oblique style of interaction experienced an East–West divide when I landed in China as an adult and found myself dealing with relatives there. At times it was hard to interpret what was really expected; other...