Taiwanese not fond of Koreans?

Muninn reports about and speculates on reasons for “anti-Korean sentiment” that he has noticed in Taiwan. He suggests a few possible reasons why a lot of Taiwanese people he has run into say they “hate” (討厭) Koreans:

• personality clashes (he says that he has noticed that Koreans are “sometimes more intense and aggressive” in their style of expression than Taiwanese)
• “a kind of insecurity complex” on the part of the Taiwanese when they compare themselves to the more internationally visible South Korea.

Muninn continues,

When it comes to Taiwanese sentiments towards Korea, if my very limited exchanges are at all suggestive of anything, the Korean brand power, food culture, and drama fandom seen here are not incompatible with a degree of emotional disdain.

This is all very new to me because I never noticed any kind of anti-Korean sentiment in Taiwan before. In fact, there was a Korean student in my Freshman English class last year who seemed well-liked by his classmates, as far as I could tell.

So what do my readers (or maybe there’s only one reader anymore!) think? Do you think Taiwanese have personality conflicts with Koreans any more than they do with, say, Japanese or Chinese from the PRC (maybe they’ll have more of the latter now that we’re letting PRC tourists in!)? Let me know…

Miscommunication and culture

Kerim Friedman and other folks at the Savage Minds anthropology blog have written frequently about how the United States military is using anthropology and anthropologists, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kerim writes here about the “myth” of cultural explanations for miscommunication. He argues that such explanations for misunderstandings often ignore the power differences between the people involved and the lack of respect the more powerful group (like the US military) might have for the other culture.

He also discusses a critique of Deborah Tannen’s work (which we read and discussed before) by Deborah Cameron, who points out

that much of the literature on miscommunication between men and women lets men off the hook for their inability to understand women’s speech, even though the actual linguistic evidence implies that men use the same linguistic strategies (such as indirect requests) when it is convenient to do so. The point being that such miscommunication is treated as a cultural problem when it is really a problem of unequal power relations. The same woman who fetches her husband’s ketchup when he asks “Is there any ketchup?” will treat a similar question from her daughter as a factual query, replying: “Yes, dear, its in the cupboard.” Cameron argues that treating such communication problems as a matter of intercultural miscommunication (as Deborah Tannen does), obscures the real problems.

This adds an interesting and needed angle to intercultural communication studies that I hope I can discuss in class whenever I teach ICC again.

“Chinese” fortune cookies

The China history blog “Frog in a Well” has a post on the history of the fortune cookie.

A grad student from Kanagawa University may have cracked the great riddle of Asian cuisine: the origin of the Fortune Cookie! As the NY Times reports, the original fortune cookies may have been produced by Kyoto-area confectioners in the late 1800s.¹ The practice — and the distinctive iron grills used to make the sembei crackers, which are part of the historical puzzle — spread to Japanese-owned Chop Suey houses in San Francisco.² From there, Chinese-owned restaurants began to offer them, and Chinese-owned bakeries supplied them.

(If you don’t know what a fortune cookie is, it’s a kind of cookie that Chinese restaurants in the U.S. give to patrons at the end of a meal. Inside the cookie is a piece of paper with a “fortune” written on it, like “You have a potential urge and the ability for accomplishment” or (my favorite) “Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else’s water lily.” There’s some discussion and some pictures of fortune cookies at Wikipedia.)

Muninn on “Foreigner Shock Meltdown” in parts of East Asia

(Hmmm… long title…) Muninn has a great post discussing what happens in places like Japan and Korea when a stranger (someone clearly not native to that country) comes on the scene: “a paralyzing shock [is] exhibited by natives of the country when faced with a non-Asian, especially ones who show some proficiency in the language.” He describes three kinds of reactions to the foreigner:

1) Faced with a Caucasian (or, I assume, any other not-Asian-looking individual), the Korean or Japanese person in question will have complete a meltdown, and do their utmost to complete the entire transaction (at the post office, store, restaurant, etc.) without making any eye contact or speaking a single word. In extreme cases they can completely crap-out and request help from the manager or other co-worker before even beginning the transaction or confirming that their customers does not, indeed, speak Korean/Japanese.
2) If the NALI (not Asian looking individual) is in the company of anyone who looks even remotely Asian, they will completely ignore the existence of the NALI and speak/recognize only the Asian looking person. This will continue even if a) the NALI continues to respond to questions and speak passably well in the native language of the Japanese/Korean person in question and/or b) if the Asian looking person in question in fact does not at all know how to speak Japanese/Korean.
3) Faced with a NALI, the Korean or Japanese person in question will panic and try to communicate in a non-grammatical mix of their native language, really bad English, and hand signals. This can happen even if you speak passably well in the native language of the person and have not yet shown any inability to understand their regular Korean/Japanese.

It’s an interesting read–check it out!

Culture and education in Taiwan: an American’s views

Even though I’m not teaching ICC until next fall, and even though there probably aren’t too many people reading this course blog, I thought I’d point to two recent posts by long-time Taiwan resident Michael Turton about Taiwanese vs. American culture, particularly in the contexts of higher education.

The first, “The NT$325 Vacation,” describes a trip he took with students to Sun Moon Lake. In the middle of the post, he has this to say about what he views as the authoritarian nature of collectivism in Taiwanese education:

In Taiwanese universities student life revolves around the Class. In the vocational universities, the intake is divided into groups of 50 or so students, usually on some random basis like odd-even student numbers. For example, our intake is 100, producing two Classes, designated A and B. For the rest of their university career, the kids in A class will take courses only with A class. What courses they take and in which order will be determined by the university, which assigns classes and teachers. There is no way that a B Class student could choose to take a writing class with a teacher designated to teach A students. Moreover, by organizing the students into classes and designating what teachers and courses they take, the university prevents mixing between students from different years, impairing the development of vertical relationships between the students of different years.

The authoritarian nature of this system, with its emphasis on cutting the bridges that people might build to each other, should be obvious. In the martial law days student leaders were recruited in each class to spy on their fellow students. Society might be democratic now, but the university system retains the structures of authoritarianism, and thus, still experiences their effects. This system will be defended and taken for granted even by teachers with extensive experience abroad — one of the defining moments of an academic career in Taiwan is when you realize that all those Taiwanese with western educations brought back only their degree from overseas. All else was checked at Customs.

Michael’s other post, “Collective Disaster,” depicts an instance of miscommunication across cultures that rises out of some decisions made by administrators at the school where Michael is working on his doctorate. They decided to form a foreign student association for the foreign PhD students and to have a Christmas party in which the students were to participate. As Michael describes it,

The foreign students were aghast. The western students found this attitude inexplicable. Coming from cultures where collectives are fluid, weakly bounded, voluntary, ad hoc, and where clearly defined rights can be asserted against collectives, they were flabbergasted by a culture where inside-outside boundaries are more rigid, collectives are tightly defined by authority, compulsory, and all-inclusive. The idea that they could be appointed to some office without their permission was deeply offensive, and they found the immediate suggestion that the Collective organize a compulsory party to be both infantile and time wasting (Have fun! It’s compulsory!). Meanwhile Authority here is deeply puzzled by such attitudes. Isn’t it showing its benevolence and graciousness by organizing a special collective for just the foreign students, and speaking to them in English? And these troublesome foreigners have the temerity to object! Who can understand such attitudes?

Michael uses Hofstede’s ideas about individualism and collectivism and Hall’s about high-context and low-context cultures to explain the different reactions of the foreign (American?) students and the Taiwan (Chinese) administration. I have to say, though, that there’s an undercurrent (or not even an undercurrent) of criticism about Taiwan’s culture in his posts that I’m a little uncomfortable with. It’s his right to be critical, of course–it’s his blog. I guess what I’m uncomfortable with is his use of Hofstede and Hall to support (?) his criticisms of Taiwan.

Back next fall

I won’t be offering this course in the fall of 2007; rather, I’ll be offering it in the fall of 2008 so that I can (hopefully!) finish my dissertation before 2008. My apologies for any inconvenience.

More on New York City dialect

There’s a nice Wikipedia article on “New York dialect” that has a section on pronunciation. It also discusses the social and ethnic factors that contribute to New York dialect. It also mentions (as of this date) the topic that Levonar was asking about last week regarding education and/or social class as ways of “removing” accent. The article says (again, as of this date):

Nevertheless, not even all European American New Yorkers use this variety. Upper-middle class European American New Yorkers and suburban residents from educated backgrounds often speak with less conspicuous accents; in particular, many, though hardly all, use rhotic pronunciations instead of the less prestigious non-rhotic pronunciations while maintaining some less stigmatized features such as the low back chain shift and the short a split ….

Similarly, the children of professional white migrants from other parts of the US frequently do not have many New York dialect features, and as these two populations come to dominate the southern half of Manhattan and neighboring parts of Brooklyn, the dialect is retreating from their neighborhoods. Many teens attending expensive private prep schools are barely linguistically recognizable as New Yorkers. Nevertheless, many New Yorkers, particularly those of Southern and Eastern European descent from the middle- and working-class, retain varying degrees of what has been coined New Yorkese or Brooklynese within their daily speech.

There’s also a link to the homepage of the alt.usage.english newsgroup, which contains an audio archive of people with different accents reading texts. There are samples of a New Yorker reading “Arthur the Rat” and “I teach Ferdinand the calm cat to fetch cold cups of coffee. Who knows more about tasting things? He’s used the book.“

(I should add that the discussion page on the Wikipedia article is pretty interesting, too…)

Online audio files for Deborah Tannen article

As I mentioned in class, the audio for some of the conversations from Tannen’s article is available online. Click on the links to listen to the conversations from pages 138-139, 140-141, and 143. (Some of what’s on the recordings is not in the article, but don’t worry…)

Wikipedia project: Taiwanese localization movement

Due to the strong national power of Mainland China, Taiwan has been struggling to find its place in international society. For most foreigners, sometimes it is hard to distinguish Mainland China and Taiwan on culture, art and so on. That is why the Taiwanese government tries to develop the localization movement.

The article “Taiwanese localization movement” is divided into four sections: effect, history, suppose and dispute. At the very beginning, the article explains that in order not to be regarded as a part of China, the movement highlights the distinguishing characteristics of Taiwanese culture. It should be glad to see that Taiwanese government has put their effort to advance the local culture, whereas it is sad to know the movement has become a political trick which is played to win their elections in recent years.

Except, the article points out that the movement is mainly developed in three ways: rewriting textbooks to emphasize the history of Taiwan and tried not to put too much issues about the national identity problem between china and Taiwan, promoting the language and culture of aboriginal and Hakka through media, changing the names of some companies and organizations from “China” into “Taiwan.” However, it fails to contain the controversial part that each elementary school student is required to be taught Taiwanese which is a spoken language and the writing system had lost, thus causes many complains from schools and students. Yet, in my opinion, it is not wise to practice “the Campaign for the Correction of Names”. Because most of Taiwanese cultures and arts are developed from China, it means nothing even though the word “China” has been taken off from the title.

The article illustrates that the local identity of Taiwan had kept ignored by the Imperial Japanese government and the Kuomintang, but now the localization movement is highly valued after the governing of President Lee Teng-hui.

Moreover, according to the article, the movement earns the support from the two major political parties and PRC. However, there are some arguments between “three main political groups”, the article mentions, about whether Taiwan should create its own identity in order to separate from Mainland China or not. However, the process has been played as a dangerous movement; for some politicians are intend to lead people to think that we should drive anything related to China out of Taiwan, including those who came from China but stay in Taiwan now. It becomes a line which is hard to across between Taiwanese and Chinese. Besides, for instance, how do you define a literature, which is written by a Taiwanese yet is accomplished under the governing of Japanese government, as Japanese literature or Taiwanese literature? This article can add more information about what the movement influence Taiwan.

On the discussion part, one guy mentioned that the issue of localization movement “ is not a divisive issue on Taiwan”, and it also the support from major political parties. I agree with that. Since Taiwanese already has a strong conscious of nation identity, there is no political party want to lose their supporter for against the movement. Others say that “The Taiwanese localization movement really has nothing to do with the political status of Taiwan (now, it did in the 1970’s). It’s more of a question of local cultural identity”. In some part, people have more interested to find out what the root of Taiwanese art, literature, culture is. Yet, in other part, the movement is still effected by politic. They try to put the label on culture, art, and people about what is from Taiwan and what is not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_localization_movement

Taiwanese Operas

The topic that I am going to talk about is “Taiwanese opera.” As everyone has known, Taiwanese opera had been very popular in last generation for such a long time. And most of people at that time might have stirring of emotions about Taiwanese operas, especially people who were from countryside.

After reading the article in Wikipedia, I was surprised and found that Taiwanese opera had originated from Taiwan. And the language that actors and actresses used in Taiwanese operas is native Taiwanese. Step by step, Taiwanese operas had been a common currency in Min Nan-speaking areas. Also, basically speaking, the stories were usually related to mythic legend. In Taiwanese operas, men would always play female roles. On the contrary, women would always play male roles. The article mentioned that this kind of way of “cross-dressed performers” was happened very often in most Chinese operas. In addition, people played some traditional Chinese instruments in Taiwanese operas, such as suona horns (嗩吶) and 南胡. The places where they always acted were in front of the temples, because temples were the only places that people would get together.

In this article, we might say 楊麗花 was the ancestor of Taiwanese opera. She started to act in operas in the early 1980s. Because of her, Taiwanese opera had been a hot trend in our society. Just like in rural village, after those moiling works, watching operas would be a really pleasant entertainment for those farmers.

In recent years, Taiwanese opera have changed a lot. For example, some modern western instruments have been used in these Taiwanese operas, like saxophones and guitars. Besides, aboriginal characters and stories would sometimes show up in operas. And they indeed influences so called “Hakka tea-picking opera.”

Nowadays, Taiwanese opera had ever performed in Europe. It means that Taiwanese opera is not a kind of native culture any more. It has become an international culture. Also, it would make people in the world know more about the beauty of Taiwan culture.

By the way, the history of the article has not been changed a lot. There is no big different in them.