The other night when I came home from work I pushed the elevator button and waited there with my bike as the floor indicator ticked down. When the door opened, my neighbor, one half of an older couple that lives across from me with their son and grandkids, saw me and said, "回来了" (huíláile), or, "You came back." In that moment, not knowing exactly what 回来了 meant I responded, "你好" (nǐ hǎo), or, "hello." We smiled at each other, she moved out of the elevator (in her hand was a bag of food scraps...I guess maybe she was on her way to throw them out) and I got into the elevator with my bike. As soon as the doors closed I took out my phone and recorded what she said three times ("huílaile, huíláile, huí lái le") and the next day, played the recording for my tutor. We talked about this particular greeting and when to use it (when someone has come back), what to say in response, (对, 回来了; yes, I came back), and when not to use it (if the person has not come back). It's all pretty basic, but it points at something bigger, that is, that in Chinese, when greeting people that you know, greetings are contextually dependent. Or in other words, one does not use generic greetings like "what's going on?" or "how's it going?" but greetings that express an awareness of what an individual is doing or going to do.
The most common example of this phenomenon then is "你吃了吗" (Nǐ chīle ma), or, "Have you eaten yet?" which is, so I've been told many times, a common greeting here in China. My apologies to anyone reading who has studied Chinese for more than ten minutes, but the larger point here is when saying hello it's important to consider where the person is coming from or where they might be going. In contrast, in the English speaking United States that I'm familiar with (Midwest, WASPy), asking if someone has eaten yet is regarded as a kind of invitation to eat. An invitation isn't bad, but it requires an intimate relationship between the individuals. In relation to what my neighbor said, in the U.S., if someone who lives across the hall with who you do not speak with regularly, said to you, ah, you've come back, a person might feel intruded on. As in, so, this person who I don't know has been keeping track of my whereabouts, and makes mental notes of when I am home and not home. Red flag. Of course, if you know your neighbor, and you both speak regularly, the expression that you came back would be regarded differently. At any rate, in China it is generally polite to assert an interest in the physical well being of a person if you have some acquaintance with them. I like this about being here. I liked that my neighbor said to me "回来了."
To further go down this road of generalization then, I'd say that in the U.S., it's polite to exclude context. Or in other words, that it's rude to presume something about someone unless you know them intimately. And even then, presumptions of whereabouts, desires, or doings might not be welcome. I think about living in California, talking with random people at bus stops or when carpooling with strangers from Oakland to San Francisco. It's was impossible to know by looking at someone where they were from, what language they might speak, what they did for a living, etc. The sheer diversity that exists in some place in the U.S. makes it difficult to guess accurately about an individual or what customs and cultures they have. The skill then becomes not "reading the air" (as it's called in Japanese), but in how one uses their words to draw a person out (i.e. classical notions of rhetoric). People who actually study this kind of thing might call this the difference between a "high-context" and "low-context" culture, where as the high-context folks, due to an assumed homogeneity, make presumptions based on non-verbal cues, and the low-context folks explicitly articulate (to name one difference). I'm not sure how I feel about these kinds of generalizations, but it's hard to get past the feeling that I am being rude by presuming an interest in a person's well being that I don't know well. This is not only a language issue, but is a product of deeply entrenched habits, i.e. my foreignness, 回来了.
