A few days ago my father gathered the whole family at the Good Friends Restaurant in the Kantstrasse, which is probably the best chinese restaurant (my father is chinese). There was a momentous occasion: Chinese New Years Eve. Normally my father doesn’t accept people from outside the family to join us in this private moment, the only person who he was inviting was my friend Fehmi, a german-arabic handsome cool dude. Everybody in my family likes him. The babies, the kids, my brothers, my cousins, my uncles and aunts, and I think I found out what makes him so trustful. So trustful that he became my witness to a marriage. He is a master in body language. He was the very first person who dared to hug my father. You need to know: my father is a grim person, kind of tough on the outside – but also tough on the inside. My brother’s wife still says “Sir” to him. And my wife started one year ago to say “Du”, after five years calling him “Sie”. Actually Fehmi hugs my father cordially whenever he sees him and something happened with him which I didn’t expected. He likes it. I thought my father is unhuggable. But I was wrong, and I also started to hug him. What would be completely inaccepatible is to give him a handshake. He says, only foreigners do give handshakes. Family members should not greet like foreigners, he says. And indeed somehow this might be the cultural influence of thai friends that my father used to have when he lived in the neighbor’s town in Nongkhai. When I was in Laos fifteen years ago (for holidays) I had to trespass Thailand and it was weird: In Thailand you don’t barely touch nobody, even not at the initial hellos. You just greet people by putting your hands together and nodding a little like praying to buddha. But a few kilometers ahead after crossing the Laos borders the greeting ritual completely changes: lao people gave me a handshake. And I thought maybe the handshake is a communist thing.
Well, actually nowadays in Germany it feels odd to handshake women or female friends. When I like them, I hug them. And I know that there are people who hug anybody on principle like my italian friend Daniela Musca (who is a pianist) or Raphael Fellmer. But I also know that there are a lot of people who feel penetrated in their private zone when people come to close. Although hugging releases hormones such as Oxytocin which can induce labor during pregnancy. Scientists also found out that hugs set Prolactin free, which is a hormone that fuels young mother’s boobs with milk. And hugs decrease blood pressure. That’s why it calms you down. Ten years ago an australian artist called Juan Mann started the most famous hugging movement: Free hugs. They hugged so much that policemen started to arrest hugging people.
So hugging is somehow too close and handshaking too distanced. Handshaking is a good symbolic thing, remember president Obama handshaking his cuban rival Raul Castro at the Nelson Mandela a few weeks ago. This single handshake strived a lot of critics in the US. (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/10/world/la-fg-obama-castro-20131211)
But a handshake is not a handshake, you can combine it with a shoulder bump, like rappers do, and people from the afro-american communities.
What good friends also often do, if you don’t have the time to hug, is a my-man-grab. Both moves were seen when Obama met sportsmen in a cabin trying to motivate them for olympic games. (http://thebiglead.com/2012/07/21/president-obama-has-two-different-handshakes-one-for-white-guy-assistant-and-another-for-kevin-durant/)
Probably the funniest way to handshake someone is the fresh prince style, who saluted his friend DJ Jazzy Jeff in a special manner (http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=58BNRcI_ChU). This inspired a whole fun generation in the nineties to shake hands in a creative way and in this video you see how it also influenced the president: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-cuSiVwxy9o (a fake?)
Handshaking can be a fun ritual, but what I think which works out really good, even with people who don’t know the cultural codes is another new invention of the last decades: high-fiving.
Babies understand it, kids love it and you can also do it independendly from gender and age. Fehmi does it all the time whenever his dialogue partner says something which he appreciates. He high-fives everybody, even my father. And when he high-fives my wife there is nothing to be worried about, in comparrison to twinkling. This can be very seductive, but high-fiving is a comrade thing, or Barney Stinson would say a Bro-Code thing. In the TV-broadcast “How I met your mother” the kinky playboy Barney develops more than a dozen high-five versions. My favorite ones are the phone-five (high-fiving someone on your phone) or the two-fiving (this is the peace sign which he used to do when he was a hippie teenager). Check this site to learn more about Barneys High-Five collection: http://de.how-i-met-your-mother.wikia.com/wiki/High_Fives
Try out and high five the ones you like and people you want to show appreciation. And if you need some practice, check the online crash course by Herb Tankersleeigh on
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-mMRY2N6s2I