Newsletter (2017-2018) January 2018 Newsletter | Page 7

What is Culture?
By Linda Lin
ly menu’s short-form writing on the white board
of a local cha chaan teng (茶餐廳), you know you
should shout your stop loudly on the mini bus,
you type half in Chinese and half in English with
your friends and they reply in the same way. You
get used to what you do, and people around you
do the same things. Sometimes you do not even
realize that certain things contribute to “cul-
ture”, but you are already a part of it.
Culture is food, culture is music, culture is lan-
guage, culture is value. It seems like culture can
include everything. Culture can be small–your
little family can have its own culture, the group
you are working with can have a certain culture,
the school you are attending can have its culture.
Of course, it can also be big–a country has its
own culture, a region has its own culture, so we
often hear Chinese culture, Asian culture, West-
ern culture and so on.
Culture builds walls. You stand out when you
are surrounded by a foreign culture. When you
look totally different, speak a different language,
and behave differently than others, you prob-
ably start to feel uncomfortable in a culture to
which you do not belong. It might be hard for
you to fit in. In Chinese culture, we tend to be
humble, and we do not want to trouble people.
Chinese reject people’s help at first, even if we re-
ally need it, and we expect others to keep asking
until we accept their offer. However, if we do the
same thing in some western cultures, we would
probably never get the help we need. Some may
think that western people are not helpful, but in
reality, they just do not understand our culture
and interpret our words literally. All these sim-
Culture melts insecurity. You feel safe when you ple little things can build walls between people,
are in your culture, because you can take com- and sometimes can distance people.
fort in the familiarity of everything around you.
In Hong Kong, you can use Cantonese fluently Culture can be a brand. Culture is formed over
to talk with people, you can understand the dai- a long period of time, and through cumulative
Commonalities make culture, differences make
culture. We all eat rice, we share hot meals, we
all speak Chinese, and we all have black hair and
tan skin. These are all factors that make us be-
long to a same culture–Chinese culture. On the
other hand, when you are abroad, other people
eat pizza, hamburgers and spaghetti, they might
speak English or French, and they do not have
black hair and tan skin. Therefore, you call them
foreigners, and you separate them from your
Chinese culture, and group them into a cul-
ture-called “Western culture”. Culture helps us
to define ourselves in some way and to distin-
guish ourselves from the others.
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JANUARY 2018