Unsolicited Advice

"You need to clean your room," my friend said. "It's a complete mess. Also, you shouldn't have been sleeping so late. It's not healthy. You worry me."

I stirred my tea while he ran through a list of my various failures, inconsistencies, and insecurities. Each one made me cringe--he held up to the light every missed deadline, every late night, every unpaired sock and half-finished assignment. I found myself silently thanking all stars and gods that he didn't know me well enough to dredge up anything too horrific, because he surely would have. To top it all off, he spun every negative into a symptom, weaving for me a massive interrelated web of my inadequacies.

You might be wondering how I managed to spark such a disastrous fight in a language I speak poorly, in a country where I have few close friends who are not foreigners. In fact, though, I wasn't having an argument with anyone. The source of my detailed failure report: I told a chileno friend that I was feeling unsatisfied with a few aspects of my life.

Advice-giving in Chile probably accounts for a huge percentage of the country's collective interaction. It is a way of showing people that you care about them. In many ways, Chilean culture can be binary, and this is one of those instances. If you are not in the inner circle, you are Not In The Inner Circle. It is a reserved culture--friendships can be difficult to build. This is very different from US culture. For example, the first time that I met Kacy, a fellow US gringa, and saw that we clicked, I gladly told her various highly personal stories regarding my departure for and arrival in Chile. Less than four months later, she knows nearly all of the major personal details of my life.

At some point, though, you finally cross some invisible line and become a Good Friend. And this means that your life is now shared property. Chilenos will get themselves involved in every detail of their friends and families' existence. They point out the extra weight. They warn each other about pimples or a haggard look. They launch into monologues on the way that a situation at work ought to be handled.

And don't worry, you don't need to ask. The chilenos in your life will jump to give you the advice you need without hesitation, because they care about you and are paying attention.

To cope with this, I try to relate it to those great friends who show up to take you out for coffee without you having to call when you're feeling down. They're special because they care enough to notice.

This, I believe, is the spirit at the heart of the Chilean epidemic of minding other people's business.

I am, however, from a culture that, alongside the concept of minding one's own business, abhors Unsolicited Advice, reprimands the Bossy, and constantly reminds one not to Stick Your Nose Where It Doesn't Belong. Like Inuit words for snow, English has a wealth of vocabulary designed to deter the unwanted consejo. Small children all across my nation, without knowing that there is any precedent to their expression, burst out, "You're not the boss of me!"

The Spanish word for crash is chocar, and it is perfect to me that culture shock has the same sound. Things like this are like a car accident, a conversation flowing like easy traffic until two people run their respective stop signs and: smash. Glass all over the intersection. Watch where you step.

So I stewed for awhile. How was I meant to deal with a person who only wanted to help me feel better, but in the process made me feel worse? Meanwhile, knowing that what I was experiencing was culture shock didn't make me feel any warmer towards the lecture I'd felt I'd received.

Then I tried something absolutely radical in my confrontation-avoiding existence: I arranged a conversation. I explained, as best I could, how I saw the issue in terms of our respective cultures. My friend was amenable but somewhat confused. "But then," he asked, "how can I help you?"

"Just be my friend and hang out with me?" I suggested.

So I'm going to give that a shot. Culture shock might not be a preventable occurence, but if both parties can see it for what it is, then perhaps it doesn't have to cause so much drama. Hopefully these things can stop feeling like a high-speed crash, and start feeling like people stumbling into each other in a dark room, laughing, and helping each other up again.