I would be lying if I told you that when, back in October, one of my students peered over the toilet stall door to wish me a "Happy Mid-Autumn Festival," it was the first and only time I have scrambled to hide my dignity in China. Ten months later, and as I swiftly avert my eyes from the group of naked women casually chatting in the changing rooms, it becomes evermore apparent that I am still coming to terms with the idiosyncrasies that to a Westerner make up the Chinese way of life.

Etiquette concerning social interaction can be the biggest, if not the most obvious, disparity separating an Eastern lifestyle from one of the West. With privacy commonly being understood as one's withdrawal, including keeping public items and affairs, from public view, it should be recognized that what may be considered a private matter in one culture may be something else in another culture.

Frequently caught off guard by contradicting cultures, I am often slightly alarmed, and left rather pink, when the shop assistant tears her way through the dressing room curtain to help me with my dress fitting skills, causing me to make a lunge for the nearest hanging object in an attempt to grasp my evaporating modesty. At my local fitness center, women can stand for hours casually chatting in the changing rooms, completely oblivious to the fact that they are completely naked.

The differences in social interaction are rooted in the historical, social and cultural evolution of the societies in question, and the importance placed on "privacy" can vary a great deal.

In hospitals, modesty is often thrown to the wind as treatments are carried out in full view of milling crowds. When I had my own medical examination, people were permitted to walk in and out of the consultation room and observe the many tests I was being asked to carry out. Indeed, the curious crowd that had formed around the ultrasound monitor where my results were being projected was nothing short of bewildering. In the majority of Western countries, a person's medical condition is of the utmost privacy, a subject only to be discussed between patient and doctor, and individual examination rooms are nearly always provided. Indeed, such is the importance of respecting this privacy that a breach of confidentiality can lead to a doctor losing his or her medical license.

Friends have also told me of occasional conversations with Chinese friends, which led them to feel that they were being subject to an interrogation. In the most casual of social interactions, complete strangers think nothing of asking each other details, about their salary, weight and so on, which most Westerners would not share even with close friends. Most Westerners consider such topics to be very private issues, and as a result the questions may be perceived as awkward, intrusive and impolite. In a majority of circumstances, however, this is not the intention, and many Chinese people ask these questions in order to show friendly feelings of interest, and care for your well-being.

Understanding the culture you find yourself living in becomes of fundamental importance to avoid such misunderstandings, and the social, historical and cultural evolution of a society can enable us to really see what causes the concept of privacy to be viewed so differently.

Privacy as freedom from public intrusion is a concept that has developed in relatively modern times. It is true that Westerners place a higher importance on privacy in comparison to the Eastern world, mainly because there is a higher focus on the individual.

In the United States, scholars Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis published a paper titled "The Right to Privacy" in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. For more than 100 years, legislators in the United States have been drafting and implementing laws aimed at protecting personal privacy. In China, however, the emphasis is on the collective, not the individual, and so little value has been placed on the individual's right to privacy. This may be one factor to account for the slower development of notions of privacy in China compared with the Western world.

In an article titled "Chinese and American Views on Privacy," scholar Chen Fang wrote that China's Supreme People's Court made its first reference to individual privacy rights in 1988. Chen also noted that the word privacy (yinsi) only appeared in the Modern Chinese Dictionary in 1983.

The differences in Chinese and Western understandings of privacy are due mainly to the gaps in the evolution of the cultures. Only through comprehensive explorations of social and historical factors can we begin to understand and really appreciate a culture so very different from our own.

The writer is an American living in Tianjin