Evaluating Intercultural Behavior

A few months back, I had taken part in a 4 days event called “Broadcast Asia 2011” held at Suntec, Singapore. During this event, I had the chance to interact with some Spaniards since I was helping out a company from Spain.

Upon my first meeting with them, I realized that there was a difference in the way Asians and Spaniards greet each other. Normally, when an Asian greets another Asian, they will extend out their hand to do a handshake. Although one may think that this is common and true for people from other nations, this is certainly not the case for the Spaniards. For them, greeting is performed in the form of cheek kissing, and it is alright for men to be doing that to women. My first thought was that this form of greeting is definitely not common in Asia, given that Asians tend to be more conservative in their thinking compared to Westerners. Even if such gestures were performed between Asian men and women, the gesture probably has more of a romantic meaning to it rather than just a simple greeting. As a Singaporean, I was uncomfortable with the idea of doing cheek kissing with others. Hence, I extended out my hand and chose to do a handshake as my form of greetings instead. Of course, I was given a firm handshake backed too.

Thinking back about it, I was glad that I did not try performing cheek kissing. I think that it may be better to avoid doing it rather than to get the entire procedure wrong (e.g. starting on the wrong cheek or kissing the wrong number of times), which may end up offending the other party instead. However, if ever there is a chance for me to go overseas to a place where cheek kissing is common, I would definitely try to do it for I think that it is important to learn to embrace other’s culture when one is in a foreign land.