Live. Dance. Love. Sing. Cry.

The stars and the charts

And the cards make sense

Talking about specific cultural challenges as a “Third Culture Kid” always presents itself as trying, almost as much as the ever-dreaded question: “Where are you from?” Answering the latter usually leads to a five-minute monologue we have all internalised to the point where we could probably rattle it down whilst escaping a burning building. However when asked about the first we usually find ourselves at a loss – our whole lives consist of cultural challenges, so where to start? Where to stop?

One could ask how I can consider myself a “Third Culture Kid” since I was born in Germany, my father’s country of origin, and spent most of my life in Shanghai where my mother is from. Seeing as I grew up as an Expat in China – its own little cultural bubble – I believe that this classification fits perhaps not perfectly but more or less accurately. I do not think I have ever felt like I truly belonged; in both countries I remained somewhat of a foreigner. So when I graduated high school in 2010 I had no idea where to go next. I could not stay in Shanghai since my Mandarin was not sufficient to join a Bachelor’s programme at a Chinese university and never having felt entirely comfortable in Germany I did not wish to return for the time being. Besides, I felt the urge to explore more of the world. During my last summer before graduation despite initially wanting to stray a little further from my roots I decided to give modestly scaled Zurich, home of one of the most prestigious technical universities in Europe, a chance – and fell in love. The big-city girl that grew up in a concrete jungle was mesmerised by the narrow alleys between beautiful old buildings, the idyllic scenery and the ease with which one could find their way around. Funnily enough I was not even a big fan of cheese. My first challenge was finding a flat, not having been aware beforehand that hunting for an affordable flat in Zurich is kind of like trying to prove the existence of unicorns, but there was no turning back for me. I was willing to put up a tent on campus if it would come to that. Luckily for my extremities (it does get rather cold there awfully early in the year) my parents were willing to pay exorbitantly high rent for their peace of mind and agreed to me moving into what would turn out to be the funniest and most diverse flat share I could have imagined. My roommates were to be a freshly divorced 38-year-old elementary school teacher and a 28-year-old caretaker for the mentally disabled.

Later that year I packed all of my essential belongings into more suitcases than I care to admit to – not without shedding a tear or two for all the books I had to leave behind – and started a new chapter of my life. Having lived in Shanghai for twelve years, leaving was a very difficult process. Shanghai is one of those cities; it just takes your breath away with its ever-pumping heart of energy, that inexplicable feeling of freedom and just that hint of the edge. Most importantly of all it meant leaving my support system: my family, my friends and any sense of the familiar. I have to admit I was noticeably intimidated, never having lived by myself before in what later turned out to be a country that one might describe as right around the corner from Germany and be both quite right and impossibly wrong.

One of the challenges I had not expected was the climate. Not only did my skin completely dry out from the lack of humidity, but it also became evident early on that I was not nearly adequately prepared for the temperatures. In Shanghai it would maybe snow once a year and we would only fly to Germany for the summer months, preferring the much closer and hospitable beaches of Thailand during the winter holidays. In Zurich it sometimes even starts snowing mid-October and for the first time in my life I had the delight to experience double-digit sub-zero temperatures. I did not even own a hair dryer and arrived to lectures with icicles as my hairdo. My primary investments were a hair dryer, super-strength moisturiser, a light therapy lamp to cope with the lack of sunshine and a decent pair of winter boots.

My first day at university was probably the most insecure moment of my life – here I was halfway across the world in a mechanical engineering lecture with four hundred strangers. I had not entirely considered beforehand that there would only be about thirty other women in the room, which meant that I already stood out to some degree solely because of my gender. Marginally more problematic however was the fact that I could not understand a word of what anybody was saying. Do not let the “German” in “Swiss German” fool you; as someone who had only ever spoken standard German I was at a loss. The Swiss are able to speak standard German albeit usually with a heavy accent that would already cost me an awfully high degree of concentration to understand. This made conversations difficult but still possible. As soon as another Swiss would join our conversation however, I could generally go ahead and resign myself to smiling and nodding occasionally whilst reciting the first twenty decimals of Pi in my head. It is not that they wish to exclude you and when you politely ask them to switch back to the version of German you actually do understand, they will happily do so – for about three minutes at which point they will fall back into their dialect. It was a daunting time. In the beginning I would sit in lectures I could not understand thanks to the content that maths classes in high school had definitely not prepared me for and the professors’ scribbly handwritings, which made distinctions between Greek letters, the alphabet we were to be more familiar with than the Latin one, virtually impossible. During the breaks I would stand amongst people I could not understand because of the language spoken, silently nodding and every once in a while asking questions that had nothing to do with the actual conversation to remind them I still existed.

Thanks to overly high rents in the city itself all students that could manage commuting from home did so, some even from as far as two hours by train. These are some of the barriers that lead to German students in Switzerland usually flocking together. I had the luck of befriending a Zurich local early on; she refused to speak standard German with me after a week, but was willing to speak slowly and translate whenever it was required. After about two weeks of a lot of whats, bilingual short messages and feeling like an illiterate fool I started grasping the majority of daily conversations. This alone did wonders for my integration into the Swiss community.

The thing about the Swiss is that even though they all learn standard German in school and despite most of them mastering it very well, the majority is horribly embarrassed about their accents and feel uncomfortable about speaking it. Back in China any locals who could muster up even half a sentence in a foreign language would stumble over themselves trying to show it off. Incidentally this sometimes leads to highly embarrassing situations, for example having to explain to visiting friends how the Taxi driver greeting them with “Heil Hitler” has nothing to do with his political orientation, but with his pride of knowing something in German. The Chinese befriend foreigners with a passion, always wanting to learn more about their cultures, striving to improve their own vocabulary and helpful to a fault - the Swiss, not so much so. In my head I sometimes, and please do not actually tell the Swiss about this, compare them to dwarves. They are admirable and loyal mountain folk with a lingering suspicion of outsiders and since they are rather content with how things are, reluctant to change their ways. Moreover they are deeply proud of their traditions, such as the annual “Sechseläuten-Fest” in Zurich, which consists of a parade in traditional get-ups, including some fetching stockings, and peaks in the burning of the “Böögg”, a sort of giant snowman with a heart of explosives, but I guess each culture has their unique holidays. The Germans celebrate “Karneval” or the more internationally known “Oktoberfest”; the Chinese even have their own New Year Feast, which in my opinion is immensely superior to New Year’s Eve considering it lasts for fifteen days involving copious amounts of food and firework. Similarly to the Chinese superstition that the number of fireworks ignited during New Year’s directly correlates to how successful the year will turn out to be, the people of Zurich say that the sooner the “Böögg” explodes the nicer the summer will be. I guess it makes sense that in a perpetually cold city the success of a year is measured by its summer. Personally I found it hard to consider even August there as summer, since temperatures rarely rose above 27 degrees and back in Shanghai the thermometer would rarely show anything below 30. One could always identify me from the two to three extra layers I would be wearing compared to others.

Another aspect of the pride the Swiss take in their roots is how they treasure their dialects. In most parts of Germany speaking with a heavy dialect is considered provincial and lower class, so most people aim to eradicate any accent they may have. The Swiss love their local speech and compete amongst each other for the most agreeable dialect, not that I could keep them apart or would consider any of them as sweet-sounding at that point (ironically I now find Swiss German rather attractive; my sister decided this to be a form of Stockholm Syndrome). Even now I can only identify the general area since sometimes even neighbouring towns speak quite differently and are keen to keep it that way. Sadly the celebration of their linguistic roots means that the Swiss have even less motivation to try themselves at standard German.

One of the less friendly stereotypes of the Swiss is that they are hostile towards foreigners, especially Germans. Sadly this is partly reflected in the power the “Schweizerische Volkspartei”(SVP), the Swiss National Party, yields. I had the joy of moving to Zurich right before the controversial “Ausschaffungsinitiative”, an initiative of the SVP to expel all foreigner convicted of felonies, thanks to which political posters reminiscent of a politically more restricting era in Germany were plastered everywhere. When I first saw them I mistakenly thought I was looking at advertisements for a history exhibition, they were even kept in red, black and white. The most popular one showed three white sheep on a Swiss flag kicking off a black sheep with the caption “Sicherheit schaffen”, meaning creating safety. This initiative actually received a majority vote of 52,3%. If something like this happened in Germany, there would be a worldwide outcry. In China this would be a phenomenon too, but primarily because voting is not exactly big with the Communist Party. So yes, I can definitely see how some would feel unwelcome in the country of cheese and chocolate. However when one inspects the support base of the SVP a little closer closer, one can see that it consists mostly of working class second-generation immigrants, who have fallen on hard times, and the ultra conservative states, “Kantone” as they are called, such as the Appenzell (and honestly, who can take the political opinion of a state seriously that did not allow women to vote until 1990). Ironically these states barely have any foreigners to exile in the first place. Uncertainty, ignorance and fear breed extremist political opinions and sadly these are usually the people who are most motivated to vote. I do not think I have met a single Swiss during my three years there who agreed with SVP policies and most are outraged that they still manage to gain majority votes through strategic propaganda – although one has to admit that they plough on fertile ground seeing as the majority of the Swiss do have a conservative mind-set.

A lot of factors play into the perceived anti-German sentiment. For one there are a lot of Germans in Switzerland, so they are more prominent than any other ethnic groups. So discrimination of foreigners in general (and as much as we hate to admit, we find that in any culture) can easily be misinterpreted as hostility specifically directed at Germans. Also a lot of Germans coming to Switzerland expect a smaller and more mountainous version of Germany, not necessarily realising that some of their actions, whilst completely acceptable back home, come over as incredibly rude in Switzerland. The Swiss are exceptionally polite – some might even say overly so. Personally I did not find this to be a challenge since I am used to manoeuvring the treacherous waters of courtesy norms. Also having been raised between the cultures I sometimes find that Germans are fairly brusque in their social interactions myself. I do not even want to start on eating habits in China. However the biggest issue is probably the aforementioned language barrier. Since it is easier to communicate with other Germans and there are so many of them, they tend to stay in their own little German community. I made only a few German friends and all of them almost exclusively stayed amongst themselves. Some still have trouble understanding Swiss German today, which is not only a pity, but also quite ignorant considering they have been living there for over three years now. Obviously those are the ones who lament loudest about not feeling welcome in Switzerland.

I rarely experienced this alleged xenophobia myself; there are only two instances that I can distinctly remember; both were benign. I was grocery shopping and when the cashier asked me whether I wanted the receipt I did not understand her acoustically and asked her to repeat what she had said. My mistake apparently had been to ask in standard German, because her answer was an extremely rude “Scho guet, huere Dütsche” (roughly translatable to “whatever, damn Germans”). When I told my Swiss friend who was waiting outside for me what had happened, it took all my persuasion to keep him from going back in and extensively reprimanding her – he was murderous. The other happened in a nightclub when two of my girlfriends were being relentlessly harassed by two guys who were obviously of foreign descent; my guess would have been that their parents or earliest their grandparents had immigrated to Switzerland. Always having been a head taller than most of my girlfriends I have developed a protective streak and could not help but get involved. I asked them, not very nicely as I have to admit, to scatter off. They did not take this kindly and snubbed me as a stupid foreigner and threatened that we would all be “usgschafft” (“ausgeschafft”, meaning deportation). I literally had to start laughing at the irony of this. Besides they probably just used the first insult that came to their minds. If I had been talking Swiss German, which by the way I am capable of now - albeit with a heavy accent, which I am not embarrassed of because at least I am trying - they would have probably insulted my gender or something just as crude.

Evidently I did not take either of these cases seriously. The lady at the cashier probably just had a frustrating day or maybe she is a racist after all, who knows. Sadly there are idiots everywhere in the world and Switzerland is no exception to this rule. I have been slandered as a “Schlitzauge” (Chink) in Germany and as a “老魏” (Lǎo wèi, derogatory term for foreigner) in China. Racism and ignorance are age-old problems; the important thing is to not let instances like these influence your view of a nation as a whole.

One of the major moments when the Swiss completely baffled me was my first Street Parade. Here I am in an unapologetically conservative country celebrating the biggest annual dance parade in Europe (at least since the unfortunate incident at the Love Parade in Duisburg), an event with almost a million attendants (the total population of Zurich barely exceeds 350000) and hardly enough fabric to clothe half of them. Old and young come together to revel in the craziness, diversity and gaudiness. This only proved to me once more that in every culture and community, no matter how long you have been a part of it, there are still more layers to discover, more surprises to be had. One should never believe that because they have uncovered one aspect, they have seen all there is to see. Just like a banker with a full-body tattoo hidden by his suit, Zurich showed another one of its less obvious and marvellous faces to me that day.

Don’t turn away Dry your eyes, dry your eyes Don’t be afraid Keep it all inside, all inside When you fall apart Dry your eyes, dry your eyes Life is always hard for the belle of the boulevard