3 October 2000

I've just gotten off the phone from my partner's mother. She calls when she thinks he's going to be in, even if that means her staying up until three in the morning. She's got a certain manner on the phone, to my ears a little cursory, perhaps sharp. I blink a bit more when I'm talking to her. I'm from a working class white English family, the kind that gets lugubrious and cloying over hellos and goodbyes. They last as long as the conversation itself. To the Chinese ear this can be intrusive, impolite and just plain unnecessary.

We've both spent extended periods of time with each other's families, living as locals in the other's community. The daily grind of tiddly habitual differences mounts up into sometimes quite severe challenges. The process of learning about 'the other' and then adapting, assessing and re-encountering your self so that 'the other' becomes just plain 'us' is arduous for many.

But how much of this is about culture? When you interview people from mixed relationships about their experiences of this cultural negotiation you don't get a clear picture. For instance, one woman told us that the best thing about being in a mixed relationship is that "you get to experience a whole new way of being". She added that the worst thing about a mixed relationship is that "you get to experience a whole new way of being".

This approach is actually quite typical. Many people in mixed relationships do not make an issue of it themselves. Much of their thinking and opinion building is in response to the constant niggling of society around them. One man said, "I couldn't say much about mixed race relationships because it's not an issue - but I could say a lot about mixed height relationships. They're much more interesting."

So why can culture impinge so much on some people, yet not be an issue at all for others? Culture in a person is like bacteria in yoghurt. In some ways it can be problematic and turn you sour. In other ways it's the healthy part. And in any case, culture refers to a way of growing. We do it to plants, families and society do it to us.

When any two people get together they bring their own culture to the partnership and thereby begin a negotiation. It's not the sole provenance of people from different races. Some things that appear on the surface to be personal and individual turn out to be common to many people within the same culture.

Fact is, we're all shot through with mores and habits which were programmed in to us, then subsequently owned by us. This is so much more the case in a post-modern world where anyone can conceivably own traits which traditionally belonged to another culture. Therapist and cultural researcher Mercedes Pavlicevic (1997) writes that in therapy situations people join together to create their own culture, negotiating their own etiquette and learning new ways of being.

It's like that in life too. The quandary of mixed race relationships is where you draw the line that separates the culture from the person. Or, indeed, if that is possible at all.