Playing the Game

September 8, 2010

In respects to my previous article, I do enjoy playing the cultural game with the Chinese. Ultimately, it always ends up a destructive affair, but it can be fun nonetheless.

The Chinese like to hide their real feelings, intents and ideas, so, as a westerner, crazy on all things frank and direct, I like to unearth the innards of Chinese thought. I do this because ultimately I like to create a chaos and see how the events unfold. This procedure, as hazardous as it may be, can help us understand more about each other.

“Playing the game” is actually very simple. You just have a deeper-than-usual conversation with a Chinese person and probe when appropriate. Unlike in western conversation where westerners just love talking about themselves and will gladly tell you all their secrets if you simply listen to them long enough, Chinese people aren’t so forthcoming. There’s a lot to be learned about conversational strategies in this way; the art of courting the right answer your trapping your interlocutor by covering all the escape exists and eliciting an answer. Even though it all winds up frivolous and without purpose, I do enjoy debating with Chinese people, trying to push the hard questions and not get a soft answer.

This should all be interpreted as bullying, if you mean to understand it the wrong way. When I argue with Chinese people (all for fun, never seriously), I play by their rules—after all it is their game and they will only play fairly if you play by their rules. So, by this, I mean, just have some bloody tact. Don’t attempt to push people into uncomfortable places, because that _is_ bullying, rather draw people to the question, all the while getting them to agree with your invalidation of the answers you assume will later come out of their mouth. And once you get use to debating the same topics with Chinese people, the answers all become rather predictable, so it’s easy to corner them in this way.

If this seems all very manipulative and sneaky, then well yeah…I suppose it is. I guess, trying to actively participate within their culture warms you into this stuff. Ultimately, I am not conniving, because such behaviour is natural for most people, even if we don’t think about it or come to write blog articles about it. Since I’ve come back, I’m finding that I’m managing to loosen up my arguments and simply gather information from people without being so aggressive. I’m becoming more Chinese in fact, the tactical elements of secretism is permeating into my subconcious. Yikes!

Posted in Life | Comments (0)

Directness Vs Secretism

September 5, 2010

The Chinese sure are a secretive bunch, and as an individual looking to integrate, this gives me plenty of headaches. Personally speaking (and I in no way represent the western world), I am a man of reason. I like to break things apart and make sense of the way things operate in order to understand the world around me. For this, I am always looking for answers, and in my quest to understand Chinese culture, it is the people whom hold the answers I seek.

Yet the Chinese don’t always want to fess up, and that’s fair enough. China has an incredibly selfless culture where the private is kept well out of plain sight. People are not direct, since directness is seen as individual and individualism leads to suspicion and social exclusion and criticism. In order to avoid this overbearing weight largely built up by the older generations, but, by virtue of this pertinent within all generations of Chinese people, Chinese people contrive ways around expressing individual wants, desires and emotions.

Foreigners may feel that Chinese people don’t give clear answers, when in actuality, Chinese people are perhaps naturally acting out their defensive habits in order to protect themselves, to stay in line. Personally, I find this to be incredibly awkward since, at least in my mind, there is rarely anything face-threatening in our conversation, so the very act of avoidance arouses suspicion alongside the invariable confusion that follows. As a foreigner, I also find Chinese relationships to be extremely apathetic and cold. I guess Chinese people are just not quite use to expressing warmth in ways that I am personally familiar with. As opposed to a westerner using touch (say, a hug, for instance) or directly commenting on the good points of others, a Chinese person may drops signs of appreciation, such as ensuring that others have eaten well and looking after others when they are ill.

These differences are brought to the fore with my relationship with my current partner. She cares very deeply about me, perhaps more than I will ever know, however, she goes to certain lengths to conceal direct expressions of her feelings and personal wants. I struggle to deal with this, I honestly do, and sometimes being in a relationship with a Chinese person can feel like an insurmountable burden, a crushing weight of misunderstanding and contrivances.

There are benefits and detriments for both practices, as my brother suggested, when two westerners break up, others must hear the long-winded tales making a mockery of the other half of the relationship, the pathetic narratives which people use to hold their ground of dominance. It can seem that everyone in western culture is screaming to be heard. On the other hand, Chinese social structure is a spider web of face and face protection, needless one might say. Then again, so is western politeness.

I guess, sometimes you do have to just accept things for what they are and have faith, even if this isn’t made obviously apparent. I hope that in the future I can use this blog to pan out some more of these ideas.

Posted in Life | Comments (0)

Why Racism is Good and Why We Will All Come to Destroy Each Other

September 3, 2010

A good friend of mine once said that to me that westerners “respect Chinese culture, but will never come to accept it”. I believe that her statement is true and can in fact be broadened to assert that “people of one culture can come to respect, but may in fact never come to accept the culture of different people”. Just because us westerners are easy targets (in that we act directly and directness can be inferred as arrogance), doesn’t mean that we are always deserving of the vilification our white skins earn us (of course, there are many exploitative western bastards in China, may God piss on their graves). After all, we are just as guilty a party as any other race.

This may come to some surprise, however, I don’t find that westerners who believe that Chinese people are weird, complicated and have strange mannerisms are all that terribly racist, because, after all, the Chinese are saying the same things about us, just as anyone else would. It’s only natural that a bunch of people going to a new and foreign place, no matter what cultural orientation they may well be, would find the foreign land to be strange and exotic, because, in relation to their lived experiences, it is. Sure, we’re talking about racism, but it’s not serious, deep-seeded racism. Mild racism, the racism that dictates that foreign things are strange, is an unavoidable byproduct of human nature. The human brain simply cannot comprehend ethnical and cultural gradients, it must break our existence into pre-package archetypes like Asian, Caucasian, African and so forth, and then assign these classes attributes (read: stereotypes) based on shallow inferences.

For the brain to operate it needs to continue to break the world and all of its constituents (that includes people) into digestible chunks, understanding foreign culture therefore works against the brain’s natural process. The brain seeks to typecast and simplify, cross-cultural communication seeks to add depth and complexity. In the end, we were born to destroy each other.

Posted in Life | Comments (0)

« Previous Page — Next Page »