Grown up in China, I had hardly heard anything about the "comfort zone" until I attended a Foreign Language School. Since young, I had been told to "keep close to your fellows in order to show unity." So in kindergarten, our class went to the dinning hall at noon in an intense line led by the teacher. In primary school when there was a class trip, I was told to seat next to my classmate on a bus even though there were still unoccupied seats. I once sat in a 70-meter-square classroom with another 50 students in the junior middle school. Sometimes I to stand in a twisted queue in a small poorly-ventilated room with arm next to another sweating arm, just as the case when I was in Shanghai EXPO. Sounds disgusting, right? However, that is the truth.
In Western countries, keeping the comfort zone is appreciated. Lines in front of cashiers are loose here. People would rather stand than sitting close to a stranger on the subway. When people greet with each other, they tend to keep a distance of one meter in order to be polite or thoughtful.
I believe that to keep personal comfort zone is necessary. However, we have such a large population that the average space for a person is quite limited. Maybe that is why Chinese don't pay much attention to comfort zone.
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