Written Discourse

Chinese Culture（中华文化） was a compulsary course in my secondary school, hence I have had some experience with Chinese literature text. I still remember how I completely failed to grasp some of the analogies back then, sometimes even after my teacher has explained them. The Zhou Dun Yi prose was one which we were taught. The original prose （原文）was a total mystery to me with its ancient sentence structures. Even after we were shown the 译文, I thought he was just simply talking about flowers, until my teacher explained to us what he truly meant.

One of my favourite piece of Chinese writing encountered during the class then was a simple poem by 曹植 (Cao Zhi) who composed the poem under duress in 7 steps when his brother threatened to kill him if he failed to do so, hence it's known as 《七步诗》(Seven Steps Poem).

煮豆燃豆萁，
豆在釜中泣。
本是同根生，
相煎何太急。

To translate the poem, it simply means :
When cooking beans, one would burn the beanstalks. The beans are wailing in the pot. Since they grow from the same roots, why is it that they are so eager to kill each other?

I love this poem because of the simple analogy it used to convey the deeper message that as brothers, they should not be out to kill each other. And it worked brilliantly, because his ruthless brother actually spared his life, moved upon hearing the poem.

If I'm not mistaken, this piece of writing follows the qi-cheng-zhuan-he structure talked about during the lesson.

曹植 was indeed a brilliant man of his time.

Spoken Discourse

Last week in class, one aspect of spoken discourse we discussed was phone closings. As it is considered rude to hang up the phone abruptly, telephone users often use pre-closing devices to lead the converastion to terminal exchanges.

Upon reflection, I realise that I often use warrants and summing up the reason for the call to signal that I was ready to hang up. However, it is a different case when my friends sometimes call for the purpose of random chitchat. Such calls often last more than an hour and when the use of warrants fail to steer the conversation to an end, I find that it usually takes an overt announcement on my part before I feel it's alright for me to hang up. They range from "It's getting late. I'm feeling sleepy." to "My mum is nagging at me to stop hogging the phone." Often after I've made my excuses, the conversation would come to an end.

However, there were a couple of times when I was involved in phone conversations in which the other party did not seem to get my hints that I was ready to close our phone conversation. It is frustrating when this happens. But I have since devised a method to end such "never-ending" phone conversations.

First, I will use another phone to call the number I'm currently using to chat.

Me: Sorry, I got another call coming in. Please hold.

(clicks to the other line and count for 10 seconds before switching back to first caller)

Me: Hey. Someone's calling for my mother/sister/etc. on the other line. I'll talk to you another time alright? Sorry. Bye.

It's kind of sneaky but it works. And at the very least I didn't put the person on hold indefinitely, which actually happened to me once. -_- (My friend swore she forgot I was on the other line.)

Speech Events

In last week's lesson, the example of a Japanese Marriage Proposal was given to highlight how people have different norms of intepretation for the same speech event.

To indicate her consent to the marriage, the woman has to hang her head, lower her gaze and remain silent. Personally as a girl, if I behave in the same exact manner, it would be because I am furiously trying to think of a way to reject the guy! By avoiding eye contact and keeping deadly quiet, I hope the guy proposing would understand I'm trying to reject him and so I would not have to utter the cruel word - No.

I really cannot help but wonder though. If this is how a Japanese woman accept a marriage proposal, then what is her course of action if she wishes to turn down her suitor? Look right into his eyes and make non-committal noises like "え...え...え..."?

When it came to time for the group activity, my group actually selected my interview experience to analyse using the analytic system given to us. The activity made me reflect on how I behaved during the interview, that I was trying my best to adhere to the rules of such an interaction, so I could ace the interview. Having analysed the situation so throughly, I left the class worrying whether I said/did the right things during my interview. Not a good feeling. Ha.

Speech Acts

During last Friday's lesson on speech acts, I learnt that there are differences between American speakers and Chinese speakers in the way they responded to compliments which was attributed to differences in social values.

What I found interesting was when the class had to classify own responses for the activity worksheet according to Chen Rong's categorisation systems, we actually had a high proportion of Accepting rather than Rejecting. While we joked that this meant we're not that humble, I think it proves that our generation is more influenced by western culture and thus some of us adopt the linguisitic politeness strategies used by Americans when communicating with others. This is not surprising considering the fact that we are highly exposed to American movies, music, TV shows.

Perhaps because we Singaporeans live in a multi-cultural society and each of us know at least two languages, I think most of us do okay at intercultural communication. In fact during the lesson, it was taught that intercultural miscommunication is a result of the lack of knowledge of cultural diversity. Hence, it is my opinion that since we are all living in a globalised world today, it is essential that we all make the effort to familarise ourselves with as many cultures as we can in order to better communicate and interact with people from different backgrounds and cultures.