Travels in the Riel World

Virgin Media has an online feature about cultural faux pas to avoid in different countries and regions of the world. A sample:

*   The “a-ok” sign has positive meaning in Britain and in the USA. It’s also the internationally-recognised way that scuba divers say to each other “I’m just dandy, thanks for asking.” But in France, the very same hand shape refers to “zero” or “worthlessness”, and in Brazil it refers to a part of the body that the sun doesn’t often shine upon.

*   You’re in a restaurant in China. It’s heavy going. You’re pausing for a rest, so you stand up your chopsticks in a lump of rice and take a breather. Mistake! Vertical chopsticks in a bowl will remind your fellow diners of a funeral ritual, so would be a major faux pas.

*   In Islamic countries and parts of Asia there is a notion that bodily functions should be attended to with the left hand, which is therefore deemed “unclean”, however well you’ve washed it. Therefore it’s considered wrong to shake hands or present gifts with your left hand.

Egypt has a history that stretches back thousands of years. It’s a boon for the tourist industry, which draws millions of annual visitors to the Pyramids, the Valley of the Kings and other such sites, but the country’s long past also has an interesting cultural influence as it seems to induce a sense of fatalism in the people. That’s the topic of a recent essay on Egypt by Michael Slackman in the International Herald Tribune.

Cairo is a city of about 18 million people that is layered with history stretching back to the birth of civilization. The ubiquitous nature of antiquities - stick a shovel in the ground almost anywhere, and it is difficult not to find something - has helped mold a collective consciousness, a national identity, that is uniquely Egyptian…

Egyptians, as a group, are extremely patient, though given the growing pressure of daily life, a bit less than they used to be. Their it-is-what-it-is attitude is often attributed to a strong religious faith and a conviction that all events are God’s will.

Yet growing up and living amid so much history has something to do with that view, too; the abundant antiquities in everyday life are a constant reminder of one’s place in time.

People come and go, pharaohs come and go, even President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for 27 years, will go, too (though talk of that certainty is discouraged).

No need to worry.

Or as Egyptians like to say, “Maalesh,” which, depending on the circumstance, means “Never mind” or “Oh, well.”

“When other people talk about hoping to see something happen soon, they probably mean within the next few months,” said Aly Salem, an Egyptian playwright. “For an Egyptian, it could mean in the next 50 or 60 years. An Egyptian has a particular pace. His pace is different than an American’s. And a long history can do this.”

Students who take advantage of study abroad programs have a wide variety of experiences. In the best scenarios, they not only have a fun and enriching life experience, but also come away with nuggets of insight into the culture of a new country. That’s what happened for Laura Corser, who was recently profiled in the Boston Globe after spending a semester in Seoul, South Korea.

One of her key insights into Korean culture:

ACT YOUR AGE: “Korean etiquette is highly focused on age and rank. Often the first question out of someone’s mouth (after ‘what’s your name?’) is ‘how old are you?’ One habit I had to acquire (other than taking off your shoes when you enter a house and several restaurants or eating rice with a spoon) was the style of interacting with elders, like serving them with both hands, or with one’s free hand on the arm if only one hand is required.”

As the global financial system tries to right itself after staggering to the brink of collapse, one banking sector finds itself in somewhat better shape than most of the world. That would be the Islamic banking system, which credits its steadiness to practices that are unique to Islamic finance, such as banning interest and shying away from excessive debt and risk. The Washington Post has a story on the topic:

As big Western financial institutions have teetered one after the other in the crisis of recent weeks, another financial sector is gaining new confidence: Islamic banking.

Proponents of the ancient practice, which looks to sharia law for guidance and bans interest and trading in debt, have been promoting Islamic finance as a cure for the global financial meltdown.

This week, Kuwait’s commerce minister, Ahmad Baqer, was quoted as saying that the global crisis will prompt more countries to use Islamic principles in running their economies. U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmet, visiting Jiddah, said experts at his agency have been learning the features of Islamic banking.

Though the trillion-dollar Islamic banking industry faces challenges with the slump in real estate and stock prices, advocates say the system has built-in protection from the kind of runaway collapse that has afflicted so many institutions. For one thing, the use of financial instruments such as derivatives, blamed for the downfall of banking, insurance and investment giants, is banned. So is excessive risk-taking.

“The beauty of Islamic banking and the reason it can be used as a replacement for the current market is that you only promise what you own. Islamic banks are not protected if the economy goes down — they suffer — but you don’t lose your shirt,” said Majed al-Refaie, who heads Bahrain-based Unicorn Investment Bank.

The theological underpinning of Islamic banking is scripture that declares that collection of interest is a form of usury, which is banned in Islam. In the modern world, that translates into an attitude toward money that is different from that found in the West: Money cannot just sit and generate more money. To grow, it must be invested in productive enterprises.

“In Islamic finance you cannot make money out of thin air,” said Amr al-Faisal, a board member of Dar al-Mal al-Islami, a holding company that owns several Islamic banks and financial institutions. “Our dealings have to be tied to actual economic activity, like an asset or a service. You cannot make money off of money. You have to have a building that was actually purchased, a service actually rendered, or a good that was actually sold.”

Some countries easily embrace the concept of adoption. In the United States, for instance, adoption has long been commonplace and even foreign born children find easy acceptance in this multicultural society. In some other nations, though, people have struggled with the idea of adoption. This is especially true in a place like Korea, where family and ancestry are a vital part of one’s identity.

The situation is slowly changing, however, as this NY Times article notes. Last year, for the first time, more South Korean babies were adopted by Korean families than by foreigners.

Daunted by the stigma surrounding adoption here, Cho Joong-bae and Kim In-soon delayed expanding their family for years. When they finally did six years ago, Mr. Cho chose to tell his elderly parents that the child was the result of an affair, rather than admit she was adopted.

“My parents later died believing that I’d had an affair,” said Mr. Cho, 48, a civil engineer who has since adopted a second daughter.

Now, with South Korea becoming more accepting of adoptive families, Mr. Cho and Ms. Kim feel they can be more open, with relatives and nonrelatives alike. Ms. Kim, 49, attributed the change partly to the growth of other nontraditional families, like those headed by single parents or including foreign spouses.

“We feel attitudes have changed,” she said.

Just how much, though, is the critical question as the South Korean government is pushing aggressively to increase adoptions by South Koreans and decrease what officials consider the shameful act of sending babies overseas for adoption.

Brazil is a country that is mad for soccer (or football, as most of the world calls the sport). Now, that passionate love for the game has been permanently documented in a new National Football Museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil. What’s unique about this museum is that it not only celebrates Brazil’s star players and team accomplishments, but it also pays tribute to the sport’s role in Brazilian culture, as described in this article in the International Herald Tribune.

The museum tells the story of both sport and country, where the national pastime has come to represent and inspire the multiracial, samba-loving soul of the people. In Brazil, stuffy European soccer was transformed into “the beautiful game” of magical passing and dribbling that has won the country world renown…

Another room pays homage to Brazil’s fans. They dance shirtless, beating drums to samba rhythms on huge video screens, with cacophonous surround sound that makes you feel as if you are among the crowd.

A sport for the masses is a theme throughout. In one room, a short movie recounts how soccer in Brazil morphed from a country club sport that was socially segregated during Miller’s time, into one that took on the evolving character of the racially mixed working class that was propelling Brazil’s industrialization.

Does the look of your workplace or your living space reveal anything about your political ideology? According to this story in Live Science, it just might.

A person may hide their political ideology from others, including from pollsters, but the researchers were delighted to learn that a peek into subjects’ living quarters or even workspaces could give that away.

Conservatives and liberals leave behind distinct “behavioral residue” that can be picked up by savvy scientists and possibly other observers, according to the study.

What telltale clues, you might wonder, could possibly be found in one’s home or office? Here’s a sample:

Liberals’ offices were judged as significantly more distinctive, comfortable, stylish, modern, and colorful and as less conventional and ordinary, in comparison with conservatives’ offices, Jost said…

“Conservative rooms tended to be cleaner, more brightly lit, better organized, less cluttered, and also more conventional and ordinary in terms of decoration.” …

Individuals who reported a more conservative ideology also had bedrooms that contained more organizational and cleaning supplies, including calendars, postage stamps, ironing boards and laundry baskets.

Liberals’ rooms on the other hand were marked by more clutter, including more CDs, a greater variety of CDs, a greater variety of books and more color in the room in general.

So, conservatives are more organized and liberals are more diverse? In general that seems to be the case, at least according to this study.

The findings agreed with a link found by Jost’s team between two personality traits and political ideology. In personality tests of thousands of college students, Jost found that liberals tended to score higher than conservatives on one key measure called openness to experiences, which includes holding wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful.

Conservatives showed higher scores for conscientiousness, which measures a person’s need for order, discipline, achievement striving and rule following.

I just finished reading a book called “Four Seasons in Rome,” by Anthony Doerr. One the surface, it’s the tale of a husband and wife who move to Rome for a year (for a writing fellowship) with their two children. The catch is that the children are twins and are only a few months old when the sojourn in Rome begins, so the story is really about learning to navigate Rome while also learning how to be a parent to two young boys.

The story is fun to read and has the added benefit of wonderful prose and interesting insights into Italian life. A sample of Doerr’s writing about Rome:

Every time I turn around here, I witness a miracle: wisteria pours up walls; slices of sky show through the high arches of a bell tower; water leaks nonstop from the spouts of a half-sunken marble boat in the Piazza di Spagna. A church floor looks soft as flesh; the skin from a ball of mozzarella cheese tastes rich enough to change my life.

And an observation about Italians:

“Italians,” our friend George Stoll says, “will stop anything for pleasure.” And the longer we’re here, the more we feel he’s right. Espresso, silk pajamas, a five-minute kiss; the sleekest, thinnest cell phone; extremely smooth leather. Truffles. Yachts. Four-hour dinners.

I’m always amazed when writers catch my eye with just the poetic power of their prose, and I love to discover random nuggets of cultural insight buried in manuscripts about other topics. On both of these counts, “Four Seasons in Rome” was a good read.

It’s no surprise that the French have a complicated relationship with the United States. One that is certainly reciprocated, as the Americans and the French seem to both love and detest what is most unique about the other’s country. This love-hate dynamic is uniquely examined through the prism of politics in a recent essayby Steven Erlanger in the International Herald Tribune.

An excerpt:

The French have always found American elections amusing, in a horror movie sort of way. They grumpily regard the American president as in some unfortunate sense also their own, but they see the campaign through their own cultural lens.

They value sophistication above almost anything, and so they regard their own hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy, with his messy romantic life and model-singer wife, as “Sarko the American.”

But this year has been difficult for the French. Sarkozy has generally supported American foreign policy and has praised the United States’ openness and entrepreneurial verve. And the sudden emergence of Senator Barack Obama - black, and seen as elegant and engaged with the larger world - has sent many French into a swoon.

But the combination of two recent surprises - Governor Sarah Palin and America’s terrifying financial meltdown - has brought older, nearly instinctual anti-American responses back to the surface.

These two surprises, one after the other, have refreshed clichés retailed under President George W. Bush, confirming the deeply held belief of the French that the United States remains the frontier, led by impenetrably smug and incurious upstarts who have little history, experience or wisdom.

Even worse, from the French perspective, Americans are reckless optimists, incurably blind to the tragedy of life, to the weary convolutions of history and thus to the need for lengthy August vacations and financial regulations.

I came across a great article about a movement that has sprung up in Italy to preserve the country’s culture of cooking and serving good food. Ah, but Italian food is always good, you might say. Perhaps, but the members of the Home Food movement contend that something of the country’s heritage is being lost - the sense that food is about more than nourishment or even taste. Rather, the culture of Italian food, they believe, is about bringing people together and about satisfying the soul.

“I am deeply convinced that one of the best things we have in Italy is our cooking,” says Marcante, 48, married, with four children. “Italy is one of the few places in the world that you move 10, 20 miles and you eat something completely different.” She goes on: “We have such an enormous tradition about the food and we have to absolutely preserve it.”

The Italian Parliament seems to agree. It is trying to protect the Mediterranean diet, citing it as an “intangible heritage,” by reaching out to UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, to recognize it as such.

But there’s a preservation movement burgeoning even closer to the kitchen. Called Home Food, this four-year-old cultural organization collaborates with the University of Bologna in the belief that “good typical food” and civility go hand in hand.

It also believes “good typical food” is disappearing in Italy. Hence, its mission to preserve and promote authentic Italian fare: the traditional recipes, the painstaking methods of preparation, the hug-and-kiss-on-each-cheek delivery…

“Eating traditional, local foods is an experience that brings satisfaction to the palate but, above all, is enrichment for the soul,” says Italian sociologist Egeria Di Nallo in an e-mail. A sociology professor at the University of Bologna, Di Nallo founded Home Food four years ago after being struck by how expedient and global Italian food had become both in restaurants and on the home front. And that, she found civility-shaking.

“Those foods are symbol and metaphor for a traditional way of staying together according to a cultural heritage that we are risking to lose,” says Di Nallo. She goes on: “Home cooks hold the key to our Italian heritage. So our goal is to access that wisdom, keep it alive and share it.”

The best description of the community-building culture of Italian food may come from this quote by Ornella Marcante: 

“Around the table, everything changes,” Marcante explains. “People feel better, more friendly, more open. And even in the family, if there are problems, when we sit down at the table and we try to solve them in front of the dish of pasta, it’s different. It’s easier.”

Check out the whole story, which includes some traditional Italian recipes.

There is a short but thoughtful article in The Atlantic about the current U.S. engagement with Afghanistan and the story contains some useful pieces of information about Afghan culture. Specifically, it speaks about the tremendous importance of tribes and clans in the nation’s social structure, while suggesting that the U.S. strategy is on the wrong track in that we’ve tried to rebuild the country from the top down rather than from the bottom up.

(T)he current military engagement is also beginning to look like the Soviets’ decade-long Afghan adventure, which ended ignominiously in 1989. That intervention, like the current one, was based on a strategy of administering and securing Afghanistan from urban centers such as Kabul and the provincial capitals. The Soviets held all the provincial capitals, just as we do, and sought to exert influence from there. The mujahideen stoked insurgency in the rural areas of the Pashtun south and east, just as the Taliban do now…

National government has never much mattered in Afghanistan. Only once in its troubled history has the country had something like the system of strong central government that’s mandated by the current constitution. That was under the “Iron Emir,” Abdur Rehman, in the late 19th century, and Rehman famously maintained control by building towers of skulls from the heads of all who opposed him, a tactic unavailable to the current president, Hamid Karzai.

Politically and strategically, the most important level of governance in Afghanistan is neither national nor regional nor provincial. Afghan identity is rooted in the woleswali: the districts within each province that are typically home to a single clan or tribe. Historically, unrest has always bubbled up from this stratum—whether against Alexander, the Victorian British, or the Soviet Union. Yet the woleswali are last, not first, in U.S. military and political strategy…

The Taliban are well aware that the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the rural Pashtun district and village, and that Afghan army and coalition forces are seldom seen there…The rural Pashtun south has its own systems of tribal governance and law, and its people don’t want Western styles of either. But nor are they predisposed to support the Taliban, which espouses an alien and intolerant form of Islam, and goes against the grain of traditional respect for elders and decision by consensus. Re-empowering the village coun­cils of elders and restoring their community leadership is the only way to re-create the traditional check against the powerful political network of rural mullahs.

A few months ago, I had a post about the personality traits of cities. Now along comes a study on the personality traits of states, so perhaps there is something to this whole concept. The Wall Street Journal has the story.

Certain regional stereotypes have long since become cliches: The stressed-out New Yorker. The laid-back Californian.

But the conscientious Floridian? The neurotic Kentuckian?

You bet — at least, according to new research on the geography of personality. Based on more than 600,000 questionnaires and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the study maps regional clusters of personality traits, then overlays state-by-state data on crime, health and economic development in search of correlations.

Even after controlling for variables such as race, income and education levels, a state’s dominant personality turns out to be strongly linked to certain outcomes. Amiable states, like Minnesota, tend to be lower in crime. Dutiful states — an eclectic bunch that includes New Mexico, North Carolina and Utah — produce a disproportionate share of mathematicians. States that rank high in openness to new ideas are quite creative, as measured by per-capita patent production. But they’re also high-crime and a bit aloof. Apparently, Californians don’t much like socializing, the research suggests.

As for high-anxiety states, that group includes not just Type A New York and New Jersey, but also states stressed by poverty, such as West Virginia and Mississippi. As a group, these neurotic states tend to have higher rates of heart disease and lower life expectancy.

Lead researcher Peter Jason Rentfrow, lecturer at the University of Cambridge in England, said he was startled to find such correlations. “That just blew me away,” he said.

Psychologists unaffiliated with the study say it’s intriguing but limited. There’s no way to unravel the chicken-and-egg question: Do states tend to nurture specific personalities because of their histories, cultures, even climates? Or do Americans, seeking kindred spirits, migrate to the states where they feel at home?

In the U.S., the term “innocent until proven guilty” is so much a part of our legal culture and is so ingrained in our minds that it’s shocking to think that legal systems exist in which people are not, in fact, presumed innocent. A belief in individual rights is very much a product of Western culture, but even in the West one finds a variety of different court systems.

In Mexico, for example, individuals have not traditionally enjoyed the ”innocent before proven guilty” presumption. That situation is only now in the process of changing. As this article in the International Herald Tribune notes, Mexico is in the midst of a constitutional shift that will finally provide rights to accused persons and will overturn remnants of a legal system that was inherited from 16th century Spain.

Mexico is in the midst of a legal revolution, and Cristal Gonzalez is on the front lines. The U.S.-trained lawyer is one of a growing number of Mexican attorneys putting judges, lawyers, investigators and clerks through crash courses in justice, now that Mexico has amended its constitution to throw out its inept and corrupt legal system…

On a recent evening, the 30-year-old lawyer explained Mexico’s new rules of justice to a class of 200 professionals with the clarity of a preschool teacher: “The accused is IN-NO-CENT until proven guilty! Confessions cannot be coerced. Which means the person cannot be submitted to …?” She paused for a response.

“Torture,” several students answered in unison.

Under the constitutional amendment passed by the legislature, approved by all 32 states and signed by President Felipe Calderon, Mexico has eight years to replace its closed proceedings with public trials in which defendants are presumed innocent, legal authorities can be held more accountable and justice is equal.

There is a fascinating article in the NY Times about the culture of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. This city has become a contemporary melting pot of the Islamic world, where expatriates form a new identity and try to merge the choices of modernity with the traditions of their Islamic religion.

In his old life in Cairo, Rami Galal knew his place and his fate: to become a maintenance man in a hotel, just like his father. But here, in glittering, manic Dubai, he is confronting the unsettling freedom to make his own choices.

Here Mr. Galal, 24, drinks beer almost every night and considers a young Russian prostitute his girlfriend. But he also makes it to work every morning, not something he could say when he lived back in Egypt. Everything is up to him, everything: what meals he eats, whether he goes to the mosque or a bar, who his friends are.

“I was more religious in Egypt,” Mr. Galal said, taking a drag from yet another of his ever-burning Marlboros. “It is moving too fast here. In Egypt there is more time, they have more control over you. It’s hard here. I hope to stop drinking beer; I know it’s wrong. In Egypt, people keep you in check. Here, no one keeps you in check.”

In Egypt, and across much of the Arab world, there is an Islamic revival being driven by young people, where faith and ritual are increasingly the cornerstone of identity. But that is not true amid the ethnic mix that is Dubai, where 80 percent of the people are expatriates, with 200 nationalities.

This economically vital, socially freewheeling yet unmistakably Muslim state has had a transforming effect on young men. Religion has become more of a personal choice and Islam less of a common bond than national identity.

Dubai is, in some ways, a vision of what the rest of the Arab world could become — if it offered comparable economic opportunity, insistence on following the law and tolerance for cultural diversity. In this environment, religion is not something young men turn to because it fills a void or because they are bowing to a collective demand. That, in turn, creates an atmosphere that is open not only to those inclined to a less observant way of life, but also to those who are more religious. In Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Algeria, a man with a long beard is often treated as an Islamist — and sometimes denied work. Not here in Dubai.

“Here, I can practice my religion in a natural and free way because it is a Muslim country and I can also achieve my ambition at work,” said Ahmed Kassab, 30, an electrical engineer from Zagazig Egypt, who wears a long dark beard and has a prayer mark on his forehead. “People here judge the person based on productivity more than what he looks like. It’s different in Egypt, of course.” …

In this way, Dubai offers another prescription for promoting moderation. It offers a chance to lead a modern life in an Arab Islamic country. Mr. Abu Zanad raised his beer high, almost in a toast, and said he liked being able to walk through a mall and still hear the call to prayer.

“We like that it’s free and it still has Arab heritage,” he said “It’s not religion, it’s the culture, the Middle Eastern culture.”

Wandering is ingrained in the American soul. There is a transience inherent in the U.S. which is somewhat exhilarating and sad at the same time, as it reflects both the rootlessness of millions of people but also the unique capacity of Americans to do or be almost anything they desire.

The NY Times recently published an intriguing article about this cultural trait. It looks at the topic through the prism of Barack Obama’s diverse family background, but the story describes an important element of the American character in ways that go far beyond politics.

The migrations never stop. Even today, 2 in 10 households in the nation move every 15 months to two years — a restlessness unique among the people of a developed nation.

“Unrootedness is, and always has been, part and parcel of being American,” Arnold Rampersad, a professor at Stanford University and biographer of Ralph Ellison and Hughes, said in an e-mail message. “It is the flip side of perhaps the defining aspect of Americanness, the capacity of its citizens to reinvent themselves.” …

None of which is to argue, precisely, that Americans are at peace with the rootless…“You might say Americans are conflicted within themselves,” said Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia University. “There is a long and often sentimental tradition of celebrating the small town” — Andy Griffith’s Mayberry — “as the right kind of place to grow up and become morally solid.” At the same time, Mr. Delbanco notes, there is “a no less strong tradition of regarding the small town as airless and imprisoning.”

There is much more in the entire article. Check it out.

Cross-cultural trainers and theorists often talk about the differences between hierarchical and egalitarian societies, or they rank cultures based on their power distance. For instance, a country with a large power distance would be fairly hierarchical and would contain large inequalities between superiors and subordinates. If you want a perfect example of how this plays out in an extreme case, check out this article from the International Herald Tribune about the king of Swaziland who, apparently, can do no wrong. Here is an interesting and relevant excerpt:

As a local saying goes, “A king is a mouth that does not lie.” The government is bad, people tend to conclude, but the king is good. “Others in authority abuse their power, not the king,” explained Ncoyi Mkhonta, the acting chief of the village of Mahlangatsha.

Corruption is bleeding the treasury, but His Majesty’s exalted status has complicated the work of law enforcement. The finance minister has publicly estimated that $5 million - and maybe as much as $8 million - is siphoned off each month. Various anti-graft bureaus have failed to exact justice.

The latest corruption-fighting commission is headed by H. M. Mtegha, a retired judge from Malawi. He is not optimistic: “If we go after someone high up and he says the king told me to do this, what can I do? To be satisfied, I’d have to ask the king himself, and this cannot be done. The king is immune.”

The best designed governments are those that build upon the culture of a country, rather than those that try to impose foreign ideas and systems on a people. So I read with interest this recent story in the International Herald Tribune about a movement to re-design the government of Somalia in a way that would emphasize the traditional role of clans and elders.

Does the international community have it all wrong on Somalia? After 17 years, 14 transitional governments and more than $8 billion in foreign aid, the country is as violent and lawless - and many say hopeless - as ever…

Nothing seems to be able to lift Somalia’s curse of anarchy. And part of the problem, a rising number of Western academics and Somali professionals argue, is that the bulk of outside efforts have concentrated on standing up a strong central government, which may be anathema in a country where authority tends to be diffuse and clan-based…

But there may be another answer: going local.

Many Somali intellectuals and Western academics are pushing an alternative form of government that might be better suited to Somalia’s fluid, fragmented and decentralized society. The new idea, which is actually an old idea that seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance because of the transitional government’s shortcomings, is to rebuild Somalia from the bottom up.

It is called the building block approach. The first blocks would be small governments at the lowest levels, in villages and towns. These would be stacked to form district and regional governments. The last step would be uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that controlled, say, currency issues and the pirate-infested shoreline, but did not sideline local leaders.

“It’s the only way viable,” said Ali Doy, a Somali analyst who works closely with the United Nations. “Local government is where the actual governance is. It’s more realistic, it’s more sustainable and it’s more secure.”

The Chinese are proud to be hosting this year’s Summer Olympics in Beijing, and they certainly want the home team to perform well. But perhaps not too well.

There was an interesting cultural note in a recent Washington Post article about Chinese rooting interests in these Olympics. It seems that while the Chinese are proud of their nation’s growing might on the world stage, some of them think it’s a bit too soon - and too showy - for their athletes to emerge with the most medals this year. It’s typical for the Chinese to be self deprecating, and this reminded me of a Chinese-born woman who used to work with my wife. She was horrified at the thought of filling out a performance review for herself at work because it would be unseemly to be too self congratulatory.

Apparently, that attitude even extends to the Olympics. Here is the telling anecdote from Francesco Sisci in his Post story:

The Olympic Games aren’t just a show for me; they’re a family affair, and one that’s turning out quite differently from what I’d expected. I’m Italian, but I’ve lived in China for about 20 years. My wife is Chinese — and very patriotic — and my two daughters grew up here…So you can imagine my state of mind before these games. I thought we all had to be very patriotic — that is, pro-China.

But when my mother announced before the games that she hoped that China would win the most medals, my wife, Luoyan, looked at me as if my mother had said something inappropriate. “Well,” she replied, “I hope that China comes in second and America will be first.”

She’s not alone. There’s a sizable undercurrent of hope here that the United States will top the medal rankings…The subtle reluctance to win may also be related to China’s being host of the games; by coming in first, China would look like a showoff. It could also be part of an idea that sport stands for economic and political might, and China knows that it certainly can’t challenge American supremacy, at least not yet.

“It’s not our moment. It would be too ambitious and too unreal to be the first in the Olympics now,” said a friend of mine at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the country’s premier think tank. “Many people, even among the leaders, think like this.”