Are foreigners OPEN-MINDED?

Teaching ESL is popular and there are people who teach it online and in their own country, however there are a lot others like myself who are resident in another country. And obviously one significant aspect of being an expat is interacting with people who are of a different culture than what you were born with, in all sorts of places like the supermarket, restaurants, on the street, and in taxis. While daily life is about teaching as an ESL teacher, sometimes we have to digress and spend time dealing with the assumption that foreigners are “open minded”. What exactly do they mean, Sigh…. Let's take it from the top

 

What does it mean to be open minded? I've heard this statement used many times and I feel there's a lot of misuse.

 

Going by google’s definition, open minded means, "willing to consider new ideas; unprejudiced." Straightforward right? The semi colon right there, that means the statement before and after it are related and have equal relevance. So it is not enough to be willing to consider a new idea, but you also have to do so without any prior conclusions about the matter. Then and only then are you truly open minded.

 

So technically being open minded has to do with something which is basically new to you. While it’s supposed to truly reference the ability to try out new cuisines such as eating bull frogs in China, the popular reference I have come across with regards to being open minded has to do with Sex. I’ll explain this in a bit so stay with me.

 

So are foreigners open minded? You bet. Of course foreigners are open minded. Not at first, but eventually. But why? Let’s talk about three things.

 

 

WHY and HOW foreigners become “OPEN MINDED”?

To quote Mark Twain, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the Earth all one's lifetime.” 

 

There is a level of prejudice that is dissipated by just traveling and seeing all sorts of things. There’s a saying where I come from, that “If you haven’t gone to another person’s farm, you always think you have the biggest farm”. So when you experience different things, you realize that there’s no one way of doing things, you realize there are different cultures. You realize that what you think you’ve achieved, someone else has gone even further than that. Basically, accepting you don’t know it all and knowing that, there exist different situation amongst men does indeed make you open minded.

 

The idea behind society and culture is standardizing things to create equal opportunities for everyone, at least that’s what it’s supposed to be. Culture is relentlessly hinged on survival and people do things differently in different places to survive. The weather is different in different places. Plants are different in different places. Landscapes are different. And so so many more. Even the same animals are different in different places. And while the kindest I was to my dogs as a child was to put it on a leash in the backyard, most people live indoors 24/7 with their dogs in these parts of china. Furthermore, if say you’re in a country where temperatures drop to -30 degrees Celsius, you’ll be more motivated to develop a car with heated seats and heated steering, as compared to the northern regions of a country like Ghana where you’re hitting 40 degrees Celsius on the regular. So sometimes, what forces people to think outside the box is survival, and to the foreigner, you have to sometimes do what’s undoable where you come from , or even where you are, in order to survive. Basically, a foreigner is a foreigner and will have to continually try to find ways to blend into his new environment and that means being open to new ideas.

 

In a foreign land, you’re forced to do things differently because that new location has a track record of achieving things in a certain way. You see, as humans we all want the same things and so the foreigner isn't really different from the dweller of his new environment. The only difference is that people in different places have different ways to achieve these same goals. We're talking about health, wealth, love and happiness, etc. and so when you go to another region, for the earliest period, you try to do things as it were in your native country, and that makes you feel obviously like the foreigner you are because of the results you get. And even when people treat you like a local person, that makes you feel even more like a foreigner because it doesn't resound with how things are done where you came from. Hence you're stuck in limbo at first. Eventually you learn to sail with the tide and not against it. You learn to ride the waves and do things as it is done in Rome.

 

 SEX!

So let’s get back to what most people mean when they tell me that foreigners are open minded. Almost all the time when I pry deeply, my discovery is that their assumption that foreigners are open minded has to do with their reference to sex. And the reference is the same whether I’m hearing it from a man or a woman, adult or teenager.

 

Why do they think this? Mainly because of movies, what else? Not all of them have even had a direct interaction with a foreigner and their assumption or conclusion whichever it may be, is based on movies they have seen. So are they right to think this? Well yes and no. YES because that’s what is portrayed in movies and while they may talk about this as though they have a great experience with this, they usually don’t. A lot of the people I talked to about this think the sheer ability to talk about this openly means you’re open minded. So they feel foreigners are outgoing and that they do things that they would not dare do themselves. Also, this is a NO, because those are just movies and they don’t always represent reality accurately.

 

In conclusion, my opinion is that everywhere you go, you'll find a substrata of the same representation of people. In segregation, you'll find almost the same categories of people everywhere. So, even when normal people think only foreigners go all out on certain things, you'll find the same people in their community too. You'll find good and bad people everywhere, you'll find rich and poor everywhere, if you're referring to sex too, the same is everywhere you go. The only difference is that the foreigner happens to be under sort of a spotlight so his or her case seems more obvious to the masses. But then yes, foreignes, or at least I can say a lot of them become open minded in many ways.