New York's 'exceptional sense of self'

In my preparation for my move to Beijing this fall, where I'll be participating in an exchange program with the business school at Tsinghua University, my Asian and Asian-American friends have been preparing me for life in Beijing, including gearing me up to negotiate for everything. The 'rule of 1/8ths'-- whatever the price is quoted, pay 1/8th that. It sounds tiring. It is, they say, but negotiation is just part of the culture.


How we engage in the buyer-seller relationship is an interesting lens into who we are. Just in the U.S. alone, one day's cross-country flight highlighted the huge differences in cultural behaviors between New York and San Francisco. In the new JetBlue Terminal 5 at JFK, I got my last dosage of New York attitude before getting on my plane to SF. The woman in front of me at the Boar's Head Deli, who had a plane to catch in 15 minutes, confronted the deli person when another woman got her sandwich first, with a classic, Whaddya doin? I gotta plane to catch and I was here befora her! But the confrontation was purely transactional-- it was not personal, and not a single eyebrow was raised at this culturally-normal interaction.

In San Francisco, such behavior would be met with waves of disapproval, dirty looks... and assumptions that you were a FOB from the east coast.

I miss New York already.

But I suspect that New York's high-energy and high-decibel interactions over life's minutiae are just an expression to the person across the counter that, you're in the circle, I respect you, I have high expectations of you, therefore my freaking turkey-swiss-pesto should have come out in order, dammit. To go any softer would be a sign of disrespect or doubt that this person across the counter was a capable opponent.

And I suspect that Beijing is similar, in that the participation in negotiations is a cultural barrier to entry and a sign of respect for the capability of the person across from you.

But I'm curious about the origins of these regional cultural norms. One theory on the origin of New York's 'exceptional sense of self' says that because New Amsterdam was founded for trading and profiting, it developed a more profit-driven mentality than the cities founded on religious freedoms or freedom from persecution (Boston, etc). But that theory is called into question when we consider that San Francisco also grew because of gold-seekers. So perhaps it's that they both have equally strong sense of self-- but very different selves.

I think if cities had self-confidence meters, NY and SF both meet or exceed cocky. Like Paris or LA. And isn't that why we love them? They know what they are, and what they aren't. And they aren't like each other.