CultureQ #2 : What is your relationship with your neighbors?

“Culture Q” has gotten off to a good start!

I didn’t expect many people to join right away as these kinds of things have a kind of momentum to them, but we did get a few responses to last weeks question about early exposure to a foreign culture and a few other posts in the community!

Since we are not a contest and merely a prompt feel free to submit responses to an old topic if you feel inspired to. We will curate it just the same as if it were the current weeks topic, though more people answering the same topic together could be more fun, it’s always nice to compare different.

Just a reminder, the new format is simple:

• I present a question or prompt through my personal account, and give my submission in the same post.

• You are free to read both the prompt and my response or just the prompt.

• You post a response in the cross culture community.

• We vote submissions at a % based on their quality and try to support all decent submissions to some extent.

• No curation posts, no community account, no bureaucracy, no complex reward distribution, just a prompt with some support around it.

• No rules other than use common sense

• Answers we suspect of being generated by AI will be ignored. If you use AI to translate to English, please leave your original text in your language at the bottom.

• Honesty, passion, effort and interaction are what we look for. Be yourself.

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Here is this weeks topic:

Talk about your relationship with your neighbors (now or in the past)? What score would you give them

I believe this topic can reveal a lot about the different ways people interact in different countries and also different places within a country. I think no matter what country you are in there is a difference between the city and the country

• You can talk about a single neighbor or the whole neighborhood.
• It can be any neighbor in the present or past
• You can even talk about how your friend or family interacts with their neighbor.
• feel free to talk about the ideal vs. the reality.
• positive or negative experiences are welcome
• if you DON'T interact with your neighbor, you can talk about what impressions they give you, what you know about them and how they behave, and what you like or don't like about it.

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My submission

As is often the case, I have my experience in America and then my experience after I left. Today I’ll share my experience in America.

In my hometown, our relationship with our neighbors was always case by case. It wasn’t a particularly warm and friendly neighborhood but it wasn’t cold either. The default was a “Good Morning!” And a smile and that’s it. Some neighbors we almost completely ignored, while others were close friends. Most we would only greet.

The exception was if you knew someone from somewhere else which was not uncommon since the population of the town was rather small.

The kids would play together on our side of the street, and the two houses to my right had kids in my grade so we all kind of got along, but strangely enough none of us interacted much in school. I can't really say why, maybe we wanted to branch out, or maybe we didn't really love each other that much but tried to make the best of being neighbors.

There were another 3 kids down the street who I carpooled to school with. We had fun in the car and when our parents took us out together but that was it.

Then there were the older neighbors whose kids had graduated and gone to live on their own. Mostly they were not friendly because there were always people who didn't pick up their dog's poop, and if it happened even once, they'd suspect every other household.

Actually before a classmate moved in next door, there was an older couple, and they HATED kids. Whenever the kids would run around outside, they'd come shouting "STAY ON YOUR OWN DAMN LAWN!!!!", and slam the door.

It was hard for me to understand such behavior. What was so precious about their lawn that we couldn't set a single step on it. They didn't even take good care of it. It was just one of the many cases where I could identify adults looking very much like children.

My mother told me they were witches, something she said about many people she didn't like, but I kind of believed her because they dressed very old fashioned and I couldn't think of any other reason they were so angry all the time.

One time my brother was digging a hole in between our houses, on what I think was pretty obviously our property, and the wife came out and said "What the hell are you doing!?!?" "I'm digging for monkeys!" My 5 year old brother said with a smile.

I burst out laughing and she stomped over to our door to ring the doorbell. "GET YOU'RE FERAL CHILDREN OFF MY LAWN!"

And so they got into a big fight over whose lawn it was. In the end, my mother let her win (we had the deeds if it ever came to that) because she didn't want any more problems. She knew there were more things for them to complain about since our family had kids, and they stayed inside all the time with the curtains closed, and so I guess she tried to buy some points with them.

On the other side was the Korean family I talked about in my last CultureQ post. In my first 2 years of elementary school, the youngest child (a boy), 3 years older than me, and his sister a year older than him would play with us. But as soon as they entered junior high, they were never seen on the street again, only in the car coming into the driveway.

"The parents keep them as slaves" my mother said, a bit dramatic, but not far from the truth. So I lived between witches and slaves :-P But meanwhile, both my mother and me and my brother had friends nearby.

In middle school, I used to meet 4 or 5 friends from a few blocks away and ride our bicycles around town most of our free time. We were a friendly biker gang, who loved to go to a convenience store for kitkats and if someone's parents weren't home because of work, we'd go over and play Nintendo 64 games like Golden Eye, Wave Runner, Smash Brothers etc. Sometimes we'd play with water guns or go further than our parents allowed us to go by bicycle to explore, or played pranks on each other.

Usually I had to be home by 5:30 so that gave me 2-3 hours to play before dinner, and after dinner it was homework time.

In elementary school, I had a massive crush on one of my neighbors, who had moved with her family from Russia. I loved how she always looked at things with a playful skepticism that I had never seen before in girls my age. I used to get nervous whenever I saw her playing outside, and we were never in the same class so I had no chance to interact with her in school.

Finally in high school when I had all but forgotten her, we had a class together and ended up almost dating but because we'd be going to different cities for university, we ended up just as friends. But she became the one friend I kept in my block after moving to the city. I spent New Year's with her family and her friends, both high school and university.

I wish my parents had made an effort to make them feel welcome earlier, I loved experiencing real Russian food and having a neighbor my age whose parents I liked, although my crush was a little too strong at that time so I might have creeped her out.

In university....the dormitory....is also a story for another day. It was absolute chaos in a way I can't express easily to people who haven't experienced it. We kept our doors open unless we were studying and there were always people messing around in some corner of the hall. One time I came how to someone pouring hot water and shaving cream on a book and shouting "PROPOGANDA!!!!". It was a fun kind of chaos that probably had a much bigger impact on me than I've ever really given it credit for until now, so I'll go more into it another time.

I really developed my sense of community from my university days and from my days living in the hipster part of Tokyo, as well as my participation in the music seen.

Looking back at my hometown, it wasn't horrible, but there were things lacking. My parents didn't really have any close friends and made us feel like we had to "be normal" to fit in. We always felt like our neighbors owed it to us to be good neighbors and make us feel welcome and they probably felt the same. There was no welcoming commitee, nor do I think we needed one, but more people could and probably should have taken the initiative to make it feel more welcoming.

Ironically, it was the family of outsiders who still had thick Russian accents who took me in and made me feel like a part of the community and it was after I had already left.

But the town wasn't cold and it wasn't dangerous, so I guess I should give credit where credit is due.

Another essay that got way too long. And this was already cut in half because I have more to say about Japan, so this might end up being the topic for the next few posts ;-)

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