Many of you familiar with the blogs and forum know that I’m a Christian through the various comments I’ve made there, and the debates I’ve entered into concerning climate change, apologetics, politics, macro-evolution, comparative cultures, US History, Chinese culture, worldviews, religion, and homosexuality.  I’m a Christ-follower who used to be a religious person. I attended church and embraced a New Age/Buddhist/Hindu worldview. I came to trust and follow Jesus while a Senior in High School.

            I had peace of mind for the next nine days as I waited patiently for my almost perfect match to return from her vacation.  But on the tenth day, I began to feel uneasy again.  I dealt with my uneasiness by sending two more messages to my almost perfect match.  The first message was short, just a reassurance that I was still waiting patiently for her.  The second one was to correct a mistake which I had made in my second message.  Those mistakes revolved around some confusion which I had about the time stamps on CLM.

Landfill trucks came and went for two weeks solid. They would drive past the vacant lot, now belonging to Noi, brake then reverse before tipping the load of landfill. This was repeated time after time until after a while a small bulldozer arrived and started to push and level the landfill material. That material seemed to be made up of sandstone rocks and shale. It came from a quarry about ten miles away. The lot was part of some old rice fields. They were sunken areas and still flooded with water in parts making proper landfill a necessity before construction could commence. Further back from the rice fields lay the inland lake, part salt and part fresh water. One happy consequence of the fleet of tipper trucks was they ate in Noi’s restaurant. I was paying for the landfill but at least Noi was getting some money back through increased takings in the restaurant.

Once more I got busy on the internet. Where would we all be without it? It’s a godsend for expats living in a foreign country as it’s a source of information in addition to keeping in touch with friends new and old. And, of course it’s essential for online dating but I no longer have use for the dating site I used to use. But I digress! Bali?

            At 6:00 p.m. I had resolved to upgrade my CLM membership.  I attempted to pay for the upgrade but I immediately ran into a problem.  The only card I had available to make the payment was the ATM card associated with my primary checking account.  Unfortunately, the card was a Mastercard and, for reasons involving international banking, PayPal would not accept it.  After three hours of fruitless attempts to use my bank card to pay for my upgrade, I sent an e-mail to CLM's customer support to ask them why I couldn't pay for my upgrade with a Mastercard.

I started this series by describing an incident that occurred while Yong and I were travelling in which she uttered a statement about the superiority of Chinese culture that seemed dubious to say the least in light of the historical record. Rather than confront the situation with reason and logic (which in my experience are of limited value in any relationship), I suggested that the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) is a more useful tool to bring to an intercultural relationship.  According to the DMIS, there are six levels at which we can relate to a culture other than our own:  Denial, Defense, Minimization, Acceptance, Adaptation, and Integration. As we progress through the various levels, we come to realize the filter through which we inevitably view other cultures, abandon the ethnocentric belief in the superiority of our own culture and ultimately adopt an ethnorelative stance that grounds itself not in critical judgment but in clear-eyed understanding.

Before I start on this blog, I want to share with you a rather funny story.......

            I vividly remember a case on another dating website where I encountered a woman with three or four pictures in her profile.  Her primary picture showed her wearing a business suit.  I did not find that picture particularly attractive but there was another picture showing her riding a lawn tractor.  She was dressed casually and she was not wearing any make-up or jewelry and that was the picture that made me interested in her.  That was the picture where I felt she looked the most beautiful and that was the picture that attracted me to her.  If her primary picture had been the only picture on her profile, I would not have given her a second glance.  I certainly would not have tried to contact her.  Naturally, she was an Asian woman living in Virginia and at the time she was a couple of years older than me.

In the previous entry, I distinguished three initial stages of intercultural understanding: Denial, Defense, and Minimization. All of these stages can be roughly characterized as “ethnocentric” insofar as they assume one culture (usually my own) has the correct stance/attitude on cultural matters. This is a natural enough state for people to exist in and if I had to guess I would say that most of humanity ends up spending their lives in this state—convinced of the rightness and rationality of whatever system of beliefs they happened to have been born into. However, we can only move forward to a level necessary for a healthy cross-cultural dating by abandoning this naïve belief that our culture alone has attained the true way and adopting instead an “ethnorelative” perspective that refuses to pass judgment but instead contents itself with understanding the endless variety of cultural expression.

When I was writing about my ideal match it never occurred to me that anyone would seriously object when I said that she would be both beautiful and sexy.  But then again, I had forgotten what I had learned in speech communication class:  that we interpret all forms of communication, even written communication, through the prism of our beliefs, experiences, emotions, and prejudices.  Thus, the reader will never perceive the message in the same way that it was originally conceived by the writer.  Words such as 'beauty' and 'sexy' are far more open to interpretation than others.