As I rode in a cable car in Taipei’s Maokong Gondola route, watching treetops pass by through the glass bottom, my friends decided that we should go around and each say “our type” of person that we find attractive. We ended up talking about dating in high school, touching on a notable cultural difference between Taiwan and the U.S. My language partner relayed that it wasn’t really that common for Taiwanese to date in high school, and that she never really felt pressure to do so. My American friends and I found this information to be unexpected, because high school dating features so prominently in American culture. To us, dating in high school was more normalized than not doing so, and was reinforced by the myriad of steamy movies and television shows that feature ‘young love’ in high school such as Riverdale and Euphoria. Dating in high school was also deeply tied to expectations of gender identity development; young men who date in high school in America are often rewarded with conspiratorial pride by those around them, while young women who date during this period are frequently regarded with suspicion. Teenage angst about “fitting in” aside, high school dating is a site of societal anxiety because of teenage pregnancy and STD’s in the United States. To us, it was a natural part of growing up during adolescence, as our pop culture assured us that the figure of the hormonal teenager would recklessly explore their sexuality, to the chagrin of the wiser adults around them. Nevertheless, this conversation caused me to realize that adolescence may be naturalized by American culture, but that this life stage is not “naturally” experienced the same way in different countries. Even so, I also learned through my experiences in Taiwan that it was really quite difficult to cleanly pinpoint cultural differences. Though we were warned that our teachers and host families may be stricter than we were used to in the United States, based on the experiences of the other students in my cohort, there was a lot of variability in terms of the classroom and home environments that the program facilitated. From my travels these past couple of years, I’ve learned that it is not as difficult to integrate into a new culture as I might have expected, given that people have the right support and guidance to move through that process. Even when we’re exploring different perspectives, such as in the conversation I relay in this post, I had a lot in common with the people around me. I’ve come to believe that culturally diverse people can understand each other through interpersonal connection despite our differences, and this conviction has really supported me throughout even the most challenging periods of my study abroad experiences.
