If what I did was culturally inappropriate, the victim of my faux pas would probably have forgiven me if I was obviously someone from another culture. However, I have spent the last fifteen years painstakingly learning to blend into the Australian scene. And so my cultural standing is rather ambiguous, and chances are, I was viewed as a local during the above-mentioned incident.

I didn’t realize that I’d possibly put my foot in my mouth, until a few minutes afterwards, when I tried to strike up a conversation, and said person walked away from me with the group ‘they’ were with. Now it’s highly likely that the person was simply distracted by the group. There is also a tiny chance that the person was, in a culturally appropriate way, intimating that I’d been annoying/hurtful before.

Because the person isn’t a close friend, I am not sure how, in a culturally appropriate way, to communicate to that person that I am sorry, if I had acted in a culturally inappropriate way before.

In the end, obsessing over whether I was culturally inappropriate, and if so how badly, is going to take a lot of energy. It just isn’t worth it. I will have to chalk up this incident as a possible ‘thing’ to be aware of in the future, and get on with life.

What a confusing post with a lot of ambiguity. If you have read through it to this point, I congratulate you! Of course, the confusion is intentional, to illustrate some of the cultural confusion I – and I suspect a lot of other cross-cultural people – grapple with.

Does any of this matter? Knowing how trivial the incident was, I think probably not. Ultimately it illustrates my tendency to try to be Ms Perfect, with never a social misstep – yet another TCK/CCK legacy.