Text E Chinese and American Understandings on Friendship

A Friendship Quiz

Where do you sit on the scale of friendship? Are you a good friend or something else?Before reading Text E, take the following quiz and find out your understanding on friendship!

1 You are working on your mid-term project. Your friend drops in and expects you to go to the mall with her. You will___.

A. go with her immediately

B. explain you are working on the project and ask her to go with someone else

2 What do you think of friendship?

A. A true friendship is a relationship that endures through life changes.

B. Friends will change over life changes. One may have different friends in different periods of his/her life.

3 When your friend is struggling with some difficult issue, you would___.

A. give him/her some concrete help

B. give him/her emotional support

4 If your friend tells you something about himself/herself that was quite shameful, you would___.

A. tell him/her that you understand and try to help him/her figure out how to get past it

B. listen in a non-judgmental way

5 Your friend's new boyfriend is a total dweeb. What would you say when she asks what you think of him?

A. Tell her the truth, even if it is mean.

B. Give no comment and tell her to get to him better.

6 Do you make apologies to your good friend when you ask him/her to give you a ride?

A. No. Since we are buddies, it is unnecessary.

B. Yes. Even if we are buddies, I need to be polite with him/her.

If you have chosen a lot of A's, it is likely you have a traditional Chinese understanding on friendship. If you have chosen many B's, then you have an American view on friendship. Want to know why? Continue to read the following text, and you will figure out the reasons by yourself.

In writing assignments in English classes, my students frequently raise the topic of friendship. Reading what they write, I start to understand Chinese friendship obligation. For instance, once a student wrote that she understood that her friend wanted to go shopping. My student was busy and really had no time to do that, but she kept silent, put her work aside and went shopping with her friend. Sometimes they write about middle school friends and describe the closeness they feel when they are together. Sometimes they write with great sadness when they feel they are no longer close to someone they considered a friend. All this is quite different from what American young people would say about friendship.

In the Untied States you can certainly ask a friend to do something with you, but you would not expect a friend to recognize and respond to your wishes without stating them. Nor would you expect a friend to drop everything to respond to a non-urgent need such as going shopping. In fact an American friend would feel that they had imposed too much if the friend gave up a real need study to go shopping. There are limits to what you can expect from a friend. In the U. S. you feel free to ask your friend for help, but you recognize that the friend may say no, if they give you a reason. A friend in China is someone who, sensing that you are in need in some way, offers to assist you without waiting to be asked. In China there are few limits on what you can ask or expect of a friend. You can feel free to tell your friend what he or she can or should do to help you or please you.

Another difference is that my Chinese students seem to expect their friendships to stay the same over a long period of time, maybe for a lifetime. A true friendship is a relationship that endures through changes in the lives of the friends. In the United States a person is likely to change even“best friends”several times over the years. Even this relationship in which people feel close emotionally and tell each other their secrets and personal problems may not survive life changes such as move to another city, graduation from a university, a significant change in economic circumstances, or the marriage of one of the friends. I think the reason is that friendship, like so many other relationships in the United States including marriage, depends on frequent interaction with the other person. If the people involved do not see each other and interact regularly, the relationship is likely to wither and die.

In the West, people often have many friends at one time, but the friendships are usually tied to specific circumstances or activities. When a person changes circumstances and activities, he or she changes friends. A person may have work friends, leisure activity friends and neighborhood friends. Also two people who are friends usually have similar financial circumstances. This is because friendships in the West are based on equality. Friends should exchange similar activities and give similar things to one another. If one can afford to treat the other to a meal at an expensive restaurant and the other does not have enough money to do the same, it will cause a problem in the relationship.

As with so many other things in the West, people prefer to be independent rather than dependent, so they do not feel comfortable in a relationship in which one person is giving more and the other person is dependent on what is being given. For Westerners' friendship is mostly a matter of providing emotional support and spending time together. Chinese friends give each other much more concrete help and assistance than Western friends do. A Chinese friend will use personal connections to help a friend get something hard to obtain such as job, an appointment with a good doctor, an easier path through an official procedure or an introduction to another person who might also be able to give concrete help. Chinese friends give each other money and might help each other out financially over a long period of time. This is rarely part of Western friendships, because it creates dependence of one person on the other and it goes against the principle of equality.

American friends like Chinese friends give each other emotional support in times of trouble, but they do it differently. A Westerner will respond to a friend's trouble by asking, “What do you want to do? ”The idea is to help the friend think out the problem and discover the solution he or she really prefers and then to support that solution. A Chinese friend is more likely to give specific advice to a friend. For instance, if in a friendship between two Chinese women, one woman is arguing with her husband, the friend might advise and she says so directly. An American friend in a similar situation may want her friend to choose wise actions too, but she will be very cautious about giving direct advice. Instead she may raise questions to encourage her friend to consider carefully what may happen if she does one thing instead of another.

We have noted that Chinese people often communicate indirectly while Westerners tend to be more direct. In close personal relationships as friendship, the opposite is often the case. Talk between Chinese friends would probably sound too direct to Western ears. As we have seen, Chinese interactions with strangers or guests are more formal and polite than is typical in the west，but in China relationships with friends are much more informal than similar Western relationships.

Americans apologize to their friends for minor inconveniences such as telephoning late at night or asking for some specific help. Even in close friendships Americans use polite forms such as“could you…”and“would you mind…”Because Chinese do not use these polite forms in their close relationships, they probably do not use them when speaking English with Westerners they know well. As a result, they may seem to be too direct or demanding to their Western friends. At the same time a Chinese person who is friends with an American continues to be formally polite after the two have established their relationship.

(Adapted from Cultures in Contrast: Miscommunication and Misunderstanding between Chinese and North Americans)

For Fun

Books to Read

1) Hu, Wenzhong and Cornelius Lee Grove. Encountering the Chinese: A Guide for Americans. Yarmouth: Intercultural Press,1999.

· The book takes the two perspectives of the authors, one American and one Chinese, to help explain the ways of the Chinese people, so that they can be better understood from an American perspective. Merely explaining the customs of the Chinese to an outsider would be superficial. To really understand where the Chinese are coming from and how it affects their beliefs and rituals in everyday life, one must be able to relate and understand why it is they do what they do. This book does a beautiful job at detailing every aspect of Chinese life and creating a way to help the outside reader grasp Chinese culture.

2) Gudykunst, William and Kim, Young Yun. Communicating With Strangers: An Approach to Intercultural Communication. New York: Mcgraw-Hill,1997.

· This highly successful intercultural communication book provides a comprehensive overview of important theory and research in intercultural communications. Communicating with Strangers looks at the basic processes of intercultural communication and then ties those processes to the practical task of creating understanding between people with different cultures, backgrounds and communication patterns.

Movies to Watch

A Passage to India is a 1984 adventure-drama film directed by David Lean, based on the novel of the same name by E. M. Forster. It is a masterpiece on cultural misunderstandings. Cultural mistrust and false accusations doom a friendship in British colonial India between an Indian doctor, an Englishwoman engaged to marry a city magistrate, and an English educator.