You have attended the first 2 lessons of of CDE. Reflect on the elective and your expectations.
From the First two lessons, I have learnt about basic American culture, and a simple differentiation between East Asian and US cultures. But firstly, Mr Karplus gave us an introduction on cultural differentiation by showing us a set of HSBC adverstisments, the one that's most hilarious is that a Caucasian man went to Hong Kong for some sort of business with Chinese. The Chinese invited him for a dinner. He was not used to the food that the Chinese has offered, and therefore he doesn't like it. But he quickly gulped the food down because it is a sign of politeness in Western culture. The Chinese, on the other hand, thinks that he needs more, so he called for more food for the men. This short clip of advertisement depicts the exact same problems that we are facing as a globalizing society. People has been making mistakes such as disrespecting other's culture or making a joke out of themselves, all due to their ignorance of other people's culture. Therefore, CDE is a great course we should take for us to understand more about Western culture, especially the USA.
CDE has been a course that I have interest in, and I'm eager to find out about the differences in culture. The first lesson we were given an introduction about the differences between Asian and American cultures. In the second lessons, we were taught about something that we are very unfamiliar-American culture, what is it like? Well about American culture, what comes to my mind first, is the fast food, which turns out to be a quality of Americans, to be efficient people. We are also taught that Americans love Science and Technology, loves to work and loves to progress. Americans, in my mind, always represent freedom and equality, while the East Asians are conservative. For me, it is actually not the case, America may represent freedom and equal. But the truth is that racism and prejudice, and white superiority still occurs in the US, therefore, the US isn't a country of Equality. In fact, many countries around the Earth are still having issues with racism and group superiority. Those are the content that I have learnt over the past two lessons. For me, although I feel that there are some differences between the East Asians and the Western culture, I feel that there are a lot of similarities between the different cultures. For example, Americans emphasizes on progress, and Asians also yearns for progression. Also, the ideals of collectivism of the Asian cultures are disappearing and got taken over by the US individualism. On the other hand, there are a lot of differences between the two cultures though, for example marriage, the Chinese hopes a marriage to be life long, and the relationship between the male and the female must be firm before marriage. In US, a marriage is more sort of about loving, and there is no responsibility to carry and a marriage can take place if they love each other. Also, the Chinese are much more relationship-oriented as compared to Americans, the Chinese believes that by maintaining a good relationship with work partners is more important than completion of the work itself, while the Americans will take completion of their tasks as priority. Surely there are lots of differences between American culture and Asian culture (that's why we take the elective), but at the same time, the cultural differences don't seem great in some aspect. Maybe that's due to the product of globalization, or maybe the culture may be just the same from the start. Who knows?
Mr Kaplus also talked about Google company, a company representing the American society. Deep in the silicon valley, we can see alot of things different about different companies. For example Google comparing to Apple, as we all know, google is exceptionally generous at providing it's employees with lots of great facilities, like free food, gym etc. But may I ask what's the point that Google is doing all this. The company could have just save up the money and invest it in its services, or marketing, etc. This actually brings back us to one of the core American values: Work hard, play hard. google believed that by allowing it's employees to enjoy themselves with the facilities provided to them,they will do better in their work when they are back to work. Also, Google allows for their employees to think up of something else other than their normal project. This allowed for innovation to happen, and alot of google services actually happened from that little thoughts of the employees.
I think the elective has been a really fun and enriching one, usually for IHE lessons like history, we only focus on the past, but CDE enables us to focus on current issues, and to face the future. Culture is the main part of CDE, and culture is what we are learning. Many people thinks that Culture belongs to history, but culture is actually present tense. As we looked into the culture, we can see many issues, or problems related to culture. I expect to learn about cultural differences between the Chinese multi-ethnic society and the US society. Also, I want to learn about the differences between Chinese socialism and the US political system. I am looking forward to learn alot of new information and differences. between the cultures, in many different ways, whether political,economical and historical.
