The fungibility of personal space

Norms around touch are far from universal

Hola Global Jigsaw,

Touch, and personal space, are not universal in their interpretation. I grew up in the Delhi of the 1980s, where to live was to rub up against. The claims by others on one’s body were constant. At bus stops, ample-bosomed matriarchs reached out to use my arm without comment or consent, to steady themselves as they heaved up into vehicles. Queues of every kind- for cinema tickets, college admission forms, onions – tended to dissolve into melees of intertwined legs and elbows. On trains, travelers divvied up their eggs and parathas with everyone in physical proximity. And it was always possible to squeeze one more person into a car, a tuk-tuk, the back of a truck.  

The upshot was that I lacked a strong consciousness of private space/property, a fact that dawned on me only after I moved to the U.K in the late 1990s. I still smart with embarrassment remembering the sharp reaction I provoked in a college mate when I unselfconsciously helped myself to his open packet of crisps, as we sat chatting in the common room one afternoon. In my initial few months in the country, I was always crossing the lines of permissible touch. I’d notice an undone shoelace and lift my foot onto the boot of a parked car so I could tie it, setting off an alarm. 

I was wholly unprepared for the fear that touch could generate. That you shouldn’t tweak the cheeks of a cute baby without permission, or that you needed to apologize if you brushed up against someone inadvertently. Over the next two decades I went on to live in China, Belgium, Indonesia, Japan and Spain, only to realize that every country has its own norms around touch. And nothing brings these differences into sharper focus than pregnancy and babies.

There are cultures where a pregnant mother and her offspring are treated as community concerns, and there are those where one’s belly and baby are off limits to anyone but the individual herself. It’s the classic cultural fault line between collectivism and individualism that divides East and West.

My first pregnancy was in Beijing, and as soon as I was showing, random women on the street began to hold eye contact for longer than usual, a knowing smile playing on their lips. An auntie at a subway station once reached out and patted my belly without any invitation and beamed as she gave me a thumbs up sign. The receptionist at my local gym took it upon herself to give me unsolicited advice on what foods I needed to avoid eating.

Three years later, I was pregnant again. This time in Brussels, where a stranger was as likely to pat my belly, as the city was to enjoy a rainless summer. Worries about pedophilia and stranger-danger were rife among parents of young kids. Children were taught about good touch and bad touch as early as kindergarten. If someone touched your child without permission, it could escalate into a matter for the police.

A few years passed and we returned to Asia and the (literal) embrace of strangers. My older son, Ishaan, who was about seven at the time, was taken aback when a hijab-clad, elderly lady took such a shine to him on a bus in Jakarta, that she hugged him tightly without any warning, other than the smiles she’d been flashing him ever since we’d boarded. And once we had alighted, she even followed behind us a for a few minutes, blowing kisses. Being the poster boy for the sort of Eurasian look beloved in much of Asia, Ishaan would find himself in similar situations repeatedly. On a trip to rural China, for example, a line of people gathered to take photos with him.

Ishaan and Nico in Beijing circa 2018

Where do I stand on this issue of touch and personal space? The fact is that Ishaan does not particularly enjoy being hugged. In Spain, where kissing is the standard form of greeting, he prefers to shake hands. Yet, even as a younger person he could detect that the attentions of the old ladies of Jakarta, and the excited village folk of China, while unasked for, were far from ill-intentioned. They were in fact, a way of expressing appreciation. It was a matter of weighing the slight discomfort he felt at the encroachment of his personal space, against the kindness he’d be doing to the strangers by acquiescing to a hug or a photograph.

Our travels have given our family the cultural intelligence to know how important context is. What can come across as annoying, unacceptable, or even criminal in some cultures, can be seen as affectionate or flattering in others. In an ideal world, we would all be on the same page, but in fact, social conventions differ.

It’s important to talk to your children about good touch and bad touch from a young age, and most children know how to distinguish the two instinctively. It is also important to stand up for your child if they are made seriously uncomfortable by the attentions of a stranger, as opposed to just being startled by an unfamiliar way of social contact. The boundary between individual comfort and the pleasure of knowing you have avoided hurting the feelings of a kindly human being who is attuned to different cultural norms, is a tricky one to navigate. As always, nuance is the key.

*****

I hope you enjoyed this. Do let me know your experiences/expectations with regards to personal space/touch. Where would you draw the boundary line, I talk about in the last paragraph?

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Until next week,

Un abrazo grande a todos,

Pallavi