Cultural Musings #1

April 30, 2009

Cultural stuff, that’s what I’m meant to be talking about! Umm..I’m always pondering over new cultural stuff each day, I think. Recently here are the ideas clouding my mind;

The Chinese Perception of Friend

This one has really resonated with me recently, there have been two situations that have made this stick in the ceiling of my brain, I’ll mention one of them here. Over the holidays (likely beforehand), I made myself a new pen-pal from Shanghai. I hadn’t talked to her for over a month, when one day she started talking to me about feeling sad about somethings. That day she was dumped by her American boy friend as he wanted to be with another Chinese girl. Pretty heart breaking, she also failed at some English competition too, which is less tragic but still. I mean, what kind of jerk says that to the person they’re breaking up with? Particularly with a culture where friends can take on a different meaning (I’ll get to that soon) What a tosser eh?

Through consoling this girl and discussing the issue with her, another issue that’s always been at the back of my mind solidified. What I (properly) realized is that in China, friends are only very close (she directly said this to me actually). You don’t really have acquaintances, or, rather they’re not very important, but you’ll do anything for your friends. Much like the analogy Robert DeNiro made in Meet the Parents, there is a circle of trust. When you become friends with a Chinese person, you become friends for life. Achieving this is harder than making a normal friend, you need to first gain their trust. If I said that all the students in one of my classes were all my friends, they probably wouldn’t consider it that much of a stretch, even though our relationship doesn’t extend beyond the classroom. In China, people would never think like this, they, in the same way as staff members or store clerks, are cogs in the operation of life. They do their thing, you do yours – separate.

When you enter that (friend) membership group, you’ve become a very important member of this person’s life. This was highlighted well in one of my readings which cited from a China Daily an article where one person heard that their friend in another town, far away, was considering divorce with his wife, so the friend quit his job and moved to his friend’s town to comfort his friend and convince him not to do it.

I noticed that this occurred when I first become friends with Hanxue. I’d previously spent every week of the last year (2007-2008), being mates with (one of my best friends) Xi Wei. I helped him with his troubles and he did the same for me. Xi and Hanxue are very close friends, so when Xi put me in touch with her in Shanghai, she went out of her way to help me (as a favour to her close friend Xi). She helped me find an apartment, find a place to eat, get access to the internet as well as just spend time with me as a friend. Several times I questioned her motives, because this seemed so unprecedented, so unrequested, so selfless.

I put this question to another friend I’ve helped her out many, many times over the years, and sometimes she helps me out too. I asked her about this and pretty much said “what would you do for me, as a friend?”. Her response? Well “anything”, because (in her words) we are good friends and will be good friends forever. That’s comforting to know.

Perhaps more so than anyone else (hmmm…Xi Wei), I like to joke a lot with this person, and during our conversation on Chinese friendships I repeatedly made jokes about her using me to fix her translation homework. I usually make these jokes with her, and this time I was unsure how she felt about that. While she joined in on the jousting, truth is she was leaning more towards believing them and didn’t feel so good about that. Although she knew I was kidding, she felt bad that I would say that considering our friendship. That’s how serious its taken.

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