Evaluating Intercultural Behavior (Post #4)

This was an incident that I happened to observe at a hospital in Singapore. The patient, an  old man from China,was in such a critical situation that he needed to be admitted right away to the medical ward.Patient was assigned to bed number 4. However, the patient's family member was not satisfied and consistently requested for a bed change.The reason was that number 4 was  a homonym for “death” in Chinese.The nurse manager explained to the family members that the hospital then was experiencing a severe shortage of beds due to high patient load and it would take as soon as 2 days to get another bed available. It was imperative to let patient have treatment at the ward right away. Surprisingly enough, patients’ family members agreed to forgo bed number 4 and let  the patient  stay in the emergency department until another vacant bed was ready.  

Due to such procrastination,the patient was in coma for 3 weeks and would not likely to  recover. On top of that, the family was then in a state of financial difficulty.Therefore, the doctors suggested a humanitarian death as an ultimate solution for him. However, again, the medical team encountered one significant issue : the cultural  barrier.The family members took their suggestion in such a negative way that they became so agitated and requested for a transfer to another hospital.

The medical staff tried to explain their viewpoint but to no avail. Finally, the patient was shifted to another hospital as per request.

Analysis :

The above story might sound very awkward to some of us .How could one allow the life of his/her beloved one to be  endangered due to such ridiculous matter of a bed  number ? However,strictly speaking, number four has been well-known to be an unlucky number in Chinese culture.Due to that, many numbered product lines skip the "four". For example, Nokia phone does not have a series number starting with 4. Some buildings skip floor 4 or replace the number with the letter "F", particularly in heavily Asian areas. And there is absolutely no table number 4 in a Chinese wedding dinner....Assumed that you were educated by your parents  with such strongly fixed mind against number 4, chances are you would not know other better way to behave than the above Chinese family did.

Another underlying issue was the delicate and sensitive topic of death. Death has been such a taboo across cultures that it leads to conversational unease or even  disruption.After all, number 4 was not well-received because it implies death.The extent in which people accept death and how much they are willing to talk about it varies from culture to culture. In this case, the Chinese family had rather extreme preconceptions about it. As a consequence,such ideas have hindered them from saving their own family member from the hand of death.