Shortly after moving to the Czech Republic from China, I found myself in České Budějovice square. Taking in the scene, I noticed a Chinese tourist pushing past a young Czech girl to get a better view of the fountain. This prompted the irritated Czech girl to shoot her a disapproving glance. Her annoyance was understandable, but having lived in China I wanted to tell her something.

That Chinese woman wasn’t being rude, she was just behaving as she normally would in China. If you don’t push to the front of the queue then you miss the bus; if you don’t haggle until the shopkeeper threatens to throw you out then you get fleeced; and if you don’t slurp your food loudly then you aren’t enjoying the meal. It’s a shame that such behaviour — seeming selfish, loud, and with no comprehension of personal space — is attributed to the personality of Chinese people when, in reality, it is a product of cultural conditioning.

In China, trying to understand this behaviour was a steep learning curve. I’ll never forget the time a Chinese friend warned me to stop saying “please” and “thank you” because it made me sound “weak.” Or when a student told my American colleague: “You’re looking very tired. When you began teaching here you were really beautiful. But now? Not so much.” I asked why he’d said this. “I thought she needed to know,” he replied. I asked if he would say that to a friend. “Of course! I wouldn’t be a true friend otherwise.”

Before I began to travel I thought all people were fundamentally the same, so whenever a Russian glared at me I told myself they were having a bad day, and whenever I met an upbeat American I told myself they were having a good day. But it’s hard to maintain this outlook when these things happen again and again.

Even before moving to the Czech Republic, my interest had shifted from what I think of a culture to how the inhabitants see themselves. That was a question I posed to my Chinese students during a weekly language meet-up.

“Chinese people are very reserved,” one told me.

I found this difficult to believe, mainly because he was sitting so close he might as well have been on top of me, and speaking so loudly you could hear him from another room. My cultural conditioning was telling me he should back off.

When I’m in England, I try to talk about cultural conditioning but people don’t want to hear it.

“I thought travel’s supposed to broaden the mind,” said one of my oldest friends.

“It does.”

“So, how come before you went travelling you were liberal and accepting — and now you’re borderline racist?”

It’s not racist is it? We’re all products of our own culture, and often this is so engrained we can’t even see it. That’s why cross-cultural studies ought to be taught in schools. Otherwise what’s the point in learning a second language? Understanding the other person’s cultural tendencies is just as important as grammar.

These were some of the things I wanted to tell the Czech girl in České Budějovice square. But I didn’t. You can’t just go up to someone and say whatever happens to be on your mind: where I come from that’s rude.

*First published in Milk & Honey, České Budějovice, Czech Republic