It was inspirational to read the "What's it mean to be Canadian?" edition of the Richmond News. Many of the contributors spoke positively about our multicultural population and how cultural diversity forms a big part of what they like about Canada and being Canadian.
Some of my readers accuse me of having a rosecoloured perspective on life in Richmond; that I ignore the damage being done to our civil society by "foreigners" - immigrants who fail to respect their neighbours and Canadian customs. And the fact that they don't know how to behave and are just plain annoying. They talk too loudly. They drive badly. And they ignore us.
There is definitely an undercurrent of tension in Richmond, covered by a veneer of political correctness. Richmond's intercultural advisory committee has recognised this tension and it's planning a series of events leading to a public dialogue in the fall.
We hope it will encourage people to frankly discuss their concerns so that we can begin, as a community, to address those problems.
I often write that integration into Canadian society is a multi-generational process, but it's legitimate to ask why it should take so long. There is a lot more to learning how to fit comfortably into a new society than learning the language, important as that is.
Public behaviour is based on unspoken rules: how loudly we speak, how much we gesture when we talk, and whether we make eye contact as a sign of sincerity or look away as a sign of respect.
Our body language is culturally determined and so are ideas like saving face or how to confront someone whom we feel is not being honest. These rules are not only unspoken, but unconscious - so that we are not only incapable of explaining the rules, we aren't even aware that we have them. But we feel uncomfortable when they are broken.
Here's something that's critical to our comfort - how far we should stand from someone we are talking to. We have three zones around us - intimate space, personal space, and social space - and the size of those zones differs from culture to culture.
You can see how easy it would be for person A to feel uncomfortable talking to person B from another culture who insists on coming into her intimate space, while person B is wondering why person A keeps rudely stepping back to increase the distance between them.
One person's personal space is another person's intimate space.
A friend of mine complains that what passes for conversation among his neighbours sounds to him like they're screaming at each other. He thinks it's see Common Sense page 16 disrespectful to do that in public.
It doesn't make him feel any better when I launch into one of my sensitivity talks about different cultures having different customs, but there's truth in what he says. His neighbours are doing what comes naturally to them - behaving under the secret rules they learned unconsciously growing up.
They probably aren't aware that they don't know how to behave by Canadian standards because everyone equates their own secret rules with universal common sense. Einstein said, "Common sense is the sum of prejudices acquired by age 18."
Tracey Derwing, co-director of the Metropolis Centre for Research on Immigration, Integration and Diversity, who did some research on how well immigrants integrate into Canadian society, says in addition to learning the language is learning the "secret rules" of behaviour.
"If nobody tells you what they are, you're going to have a hard time figuring it out," says Derwing. "Communication is a two-way street and they need a little help from the people who understand the system."
Maybe it's time for the rest of us to stop gritting our teeth in annoyance and to reach out to help immigrants learn how we play the game here.
Dr. Joe Greenholtz is a regulated Canadian immigration consultant (RCIC) and a director of the Premier Canadian Immigration Co-op. He also sits on the Richmond intercultural advisory committee. He can be reached at [email protected].
