A Little Story about Cultural Differences.

I feel like writing this post just because. It’s very different from the kinds of posts I normally do. I thought I would share a tiny little story from my life with you all. Here we go!

It’s been 7 years since I relocated from India to my home here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Being an immigrant is an interesting thing. Every so often, I learn something new about American culture and, so, by default, about Indian culture.

Some years (a year?) back, I got an email from a friend here who told me my writing was quite good. Quite good. To me, this sounded a little patronizing.

Quite good. Which really meant not so good. Hmm. I was quite irritated by this comment.

I was already feeling a little wobbly about my self-worth as a writer, doubting where I was in the process of writing my book. So, this felt like an energetic hit.

Soon after this happened, I was seeing The View one day. On it, I noticed Whoopi Goldberg say that Ricky Gervais was quite good. Only quite good? Wow. I guess if someone so successful was only categorized as being quite good at what he did, then it was okay for me to be called quite good.

Or maybe, some people were just miserly with their praise.

But then, soon after this, I heard another interview.

It was on a late-night talk show (Jimmy Kimmel, I think) in which he was talking with the English-American actress Emily Blunt. In it, she mentioned something really interesting. She had recently been called quite good by someone and she jokingly talked about how offended she had felt at first.

You see, in Britain, quite good means quite the opposite.

It means someone is being snarky and telling you that you are actually not that good.

But turns out that’s not what quite good means here in the States. Quite good literally means quite good.

The person saying it actually thinks you are good! There is no double entendre, no hidden-meaning, no sneaky little snark attack.

This was a mini-insight for me. I had stewed in my friend’s words for quite some time. But they didn’t even mean what I thought they meant.

In fact, they seemed to mean the complete opposite. Our wires had gotten crossed. Our cultural contexts were completely different.

This is just one of those things about being an immigrant. This is just one of those things that happen when different realities criss-cross and mesh.

Sometimes, the same words can mean some very different things.

Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which TEDx speaker Andy Mort calls “a fascinating insight into the life of a highly sensitive person & emotional empath.”

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