Kinship address: Socializing young children in Taiwan

While teaching an undergraduate class in intercultural communication, I showed a clip from the movie The Joy Luck Club (based upon the novel by Amy Tan, 1989) when Waverly brings her white, "American" boyfriend, Rich, to her family's home for dinner. Rich's performance during the meal is a disaster: he violates every conceivable norm of etiquette for a Chinese family dinner. I wanted to demonstrate how the rules of culture can often be foregrounded when a "stranger" (Gudykunst & Kim, 1997), such as Rich, enters a foreign culture and unwittingly violates that culture's unwritten rules (see Hall, 1976). In the ensuing discussion my students identified a number of cultural norms that Rich violated-norms which I had also identified. However, one student, who grew up in Hong Kong, noticed one norm which I had overlooked: she said that Rich addressed his girlfriend's mother (his future mother-in-law) by her first name; this, she explained, was Rich's most egregious cultural blunder.