A Tale of Two Cultures

What kind of role does globalization play in Asian community’s smoking cessation in Philadelphia?
A business trip to China could destroy all the effort you made to quit smoking.
Last Friday I talked with Dr. Grace Ma at the Temple University. Dr. Ma has worked on the smoking cessation program in Asian community for many years. She told me many Chinese Americans smoke again after they went back from China. Because they have to do business with Chinese by smoking.
As Dr. Ma said, smoking is the social norm in China. That is why smoking cessation is really a harsh battle for these Chinese Americans who travel a lot between the States and China.
But not for Melissa, the reporter at the Inquirer. She went to China in the 1980s and the first Chinese sentence she learned to speak is:
Smoking is not good.
That time she was in a closed train where almost everyone around her was smoking.
I hope more people like Mellisa could learned Chinese and then the globalization would help the tobacco control in China.