The Surprising Truth About Misreading People When Living Between Cultures
It was a Tuesday afternoon after school. My daughter had been waiting patiently for the swing. That particular kind of waiting that children do when they want something very much and are trying very hard to do the right thing. She waited her turn. The older children left. She sat down, settled in, began to swing.
Two minutes later, three girls came over. They were around thirteen or fourteen years old, wearing traditional Gurung dress. They did not ask. They did not wait. They simply stopped my daughter and took the swing.
My daughter looked at me. I looked at the girls. The one who had taken the swing came over to us. She made gestures, as if asking what the problem was. She did not speak to us in Nepali or in English. I told her, in the way you do when you are trying to stay calm and not quite managing it, that she should have waited her turn. That this was the polite and friendly thing to do.
She nodded her head.
My daughter and I both understood this as a no. A dismissal. And I felt the frustration that comes when you believe someone has done something wrong and is refusing to acknowledge it. We left the playground not long after. My daughter was upset. I was still carrying the sharpness of it.
It was only later, when the afternoon had settled, that I remembered. In Nepal, a nod of the head like that does not mean no. It means yes, or I understand, or I hear you. And the taking of both ears, which the girl had also done, is a gesture of apology. A real one. My youngest stepson used to do it when he was small and had done something wrong.
She had been apologising. And we had walked away from her apology without realising it.
This is what living between cultures does. Not all at once. Not dramatically. In small moments at playgrounds, at school gates, in shops and offices and conversations, where the signals you are reading are coming from a different system than the one you grew up with. And both people are trying, and both people are getting it wrong, and neither person knows.
When Social Signals Come From Different Systems
There is a version of intercultural misunderstanding that gets talked about often. The big moments. The dramatic failures of communication. The meetings that go wrong, the negotiations that collapse, the friendships that end over something that was never what either person thought it was.
But most of the misreading that happens when you are living between cultures is quieter than that. It happens in the ordinary texture of daily life. A gesture that means one thing where you grew up and something entirely different here. A silence that feels like indifference but is actually respect. A nod that reads as dismissal but is actually acknowledgement.
The difficulty is not that these signals exist. Every culture has them. The difficulty is that they are largely invisible until they go wrong. When everything is working, when the signals match and the meaning lands as intended, you do not notice that a system is operating at all. You simply feel understood, or not. Comfortable, or not. At home, or not.
It is only when the signals misalign, when your reading is wrong and the other person's response does not make sense, that you become aware there are systems involved at all. And by that point, the misunderstanding has usually already happened.
What Living Between Cultures Does to Your Confidence in Reading Situations
Here is what most people do not tell you about living between cultures for a long time. It does not get easier in the way you expect it to.
In the early years, misreadings feel like mistakes you will eventually stop making. You are learning a new system. You are paying attention. You are building up a knowledge base of what things mean here, and gradually the signals start to make more sense.
But there is another thing that happens alongside this learning, and it works in the opposite direction. The more you become aware that signals can mean different things in different systems, the less certain you become about your own reading of any given situation. You start to hold your interpretations more loosely. You second-guess more. You ask yourself, more often than you used to, whether you are reading this correctly or reading it through the wrong frame.
This is what the research on intercultural experience consistently describes as the erosion of interpretive confidence. Not a loss of intelligence or perception. A reasonable, logical response to having learned that the system you used to trust without question is not universal. That there are other systems. That you might be in one of them right now and not know it.
What happened at the playground was a version of this. I know Nepal. I have lived here for years. I know the head nod. I know the taking of the ears. But in the moment, caught up in my daughter's distress and my own frustration, I read it through the wrong frame anyway. The knowledge I had built did not protect me from the misreading. It was only in the calmer space afterwards that it came back.
This is humbling. And it is also, I think, important to say out loud.
The Part That Stayed With Me
What I kept thinking about afterwards was not my own misreading. It was my daughter's.
She is growing up between cultures in a way that is different from my experience of living between cultures as an adult. She did not arrive here as a formed person and begin the work of learning a new system. She is forming here. Both systems are part of who she is becoming. Belgium and Nepal are not two separate worlds she moves between. They are both, in some sense, home.
And yet she did not know what the taking of the ears meant. She saw a girl her own age make a gesture she did not recognise, and she read it as nothing. Not as an apology. Not as a reaching out. As nothing.
We talk often, she and I, about the differences between cultures. About how things work here and how they work differently in Belgium or in Europe. These are conversations I think are important. But what happened at the playground reminded me that knowledge passed on in conversation is different from knowledge lived in the body. She knows, in a general way, that things are different here. She did not yet know, in the specific way that counts, what that particular gesture meant.
I do not think this is a failure. I think it is simply what it is to grow up between cultures. You build your knowledge of both systems gradually, through accumulated experience, through getting things wrong and then understanding what went wrong and slowly, over time, building a more layered and nuanced picture.
But it is worth naming. Because the same process that happens in adults, the gradual erosion of certainty about what signals mean, happens in children too. Just at a different stage, and in a different direction.
What This Means for Women Living Between Cultures
If you are raising children between cultures, you may recognise something in this story. The moments where you are trying to explain something that you yourself did not fully understand in the moment. The gap between what you know intellectually and what you can access when you are emotionally activated. The way the knowledge you have built over years can quietly step aside when the feelings are running high enough.
This is not something to be corrected. It is something to be noticed. And there is something genuinely useful in noticing it.
Because the misreading at the playground was not, in the end, a failure. It was a moment. A moment that passed, and that both my daughter and I can now understand differently. The girl was apologising. She was doing the right thing in the language she had. We were too upset to receive it.
That is worth something. Not as a cautionary tale, not as a lesson about what to do differently next time, but as an example of what living between cultures actually looks like from the inside. Not seamless. Not fully understood in the moment. Often only legible in retrospect.
The interpretive confidence that living between cultures asks you to build is not the confidence of perfect reading. It is the confidence to sit with not knowing, to return to the moment later with more information, and to understand it more fully then. That is a different kind of confidence than the one you started with. But in some ways it is a more honest one.
If you are interested in understanding this dynamic more deeply, the article on why living between cultures can make you doubt your own interpretation explores it at length. And if you are just beginning to find language for this experience, the free guide is a quiet place to start.
A Closing Thought
We went back to the playground a few days later. My daughter played. The girls were not there. But I thought about them. About the one who had come over, who had tried to make it right in the way she knew how, and whose gesture had landed in silence.
I hope she did not walk away thinking she had done something wrong. I hope she understood, in whatever way she could, that the foreigners had simply not known how to receive what she was offering.
We are all, in some way, reading each other through systems the other person cannot fully see. Living between cultures just makes that more visible. More often. More unavoidably.
That visibility is uncomfortable. It is also, I think, one of the more honest ways to understand what human communication actually is.
| Reflection questions
Have you experienced a moment of misreading a social signal in your current cultural environment, and only understood what it meant afterwards? What was that like to sit with? When you are emotionally activated in a cross-cultural situation, do you notice that your knowledge of the culture becomes less accessible? What helps you return to it? If you are parenting between cultures, how do you talk to your children about the differences in social signals? What feels most difficult to explain? Is there a misreading from your own past, a moment you handled through the wrong frame, that you now understand differently? What would you do differently, and what would you leave the same? |
