Having grown up in SF I always had Chinese friends and felt lucky to experience the culture firsthand.   Am also a huge fan of Japanese culture, design, aesthetic, and martial arts.   Later got into kenpo, a Sino-Okinawan form.   Southern Asia in general has always been a big influence in my life.

 

 

The Stalin's USSR was huge friends with the Communist China. There came a saying "Russian and Chinese are brothers forever". Then, after death of Stalin brothers divorced. "Forever" happened to be two decades or so. 

The nowadays Russia, it seems, do not really feel any kind of brotherhood with China. Just a geopolitical game, a revenge too.

Shadowyzard wrote: First of all, Chinese culture is very different mainly because their mindsets were mostly inspired and shaped, not by religious or political figures as in most cultures, but by a philosopher: Kung Fu Tzu (Confucius). (I know he was into politics too, but mainly he was a thinker.) Also, their main attitude is like: " https://tureng.com/tr/turkce-ingilizce/let%20every%20man%20skin%20his%20own%20skunk" rel="nofollow - let every man skin his own skunk ". It can sound very cruel and inhuman to us, but they even don't save a drowning baby inside a pool. Our teacher experienced something like that. While he was walking, he saw a small child drowning in an ornamental pool. He jumped inside and saved the kid. The thing is, Chinese people ridiculed our teacher by pointing their fingers to him and laughed up their sleeves. The kid's mommy finally came and couldn't believe her eyes and was at loss for words to thank our teacher, and show her gratitude enough. If s/he is not their kid, they don't even bother to get wet in a shallow pool. Chinese people are fascinated by the foreigners who can speak Chinese fluently. Like adoration, in fact. If you say to a Chinese: "Are you Japanese?", he might not speak with you for the rest of his life. (Same thing, vice versa, for the Japanese...) Similarly, they liken the blond and blue-eyed Europeans to each other. Keishiro, if you're reading this I want to ask: is this correct? Is it still the same?

I am still in the process of hoping one day to write a book on the Soviet (and partly post-Soviet) realities. I clearly see a lot of parallels. There are obvious illusions, stereotypes, mis'es and dis'es in the western (and eastern, as well) perception of the USSR and Russia. 99.5% of foreigners do not really know this topic. 

One has to live inside for no less than twenty years, talk to a lot of natives (who also lived inside for decades), see a lot, watch a lot, read books written by natives for natives in the native language. Then you have to analyze, compare, look retrospectively. Even natives may massively usually get some things wrong. For good example, there's a well-known among post-Soviets meme "There is no sex in the USSR" (sex meaning making love, not the gender). In the 1980s there were numerous USSR-USA satellite TV "bridges" where the audiences from the two countries talked to each other. One of the shows of the kind included the scene where an American old woman complained there's violence and sex in the American TV ads galore (probably meaning not only TV ads but the whole video production), she asked if it's the same on the Soviet TV... A Soviet old woman did not get used to the typical western TV clip format (speak everything as fast as possible, for the TV broadcasting is an extraexpensive thing), the Soviet TV was slow, detailed, definitely not clip-wise. Therefore, a Soviet respondentess slowly pronounced her words, she said, "There is no sex in our country" and then the Soviet audience burst in laughter, then the American audience heard the translation and burst in laughter, too. However, the laughter silenced the ending of her speech (that the host and the producers nevertheless heard and they claimed it afterwards), "We have love". She definitely meant a very obvious thing. She wanted to say that the Soviet people only make love if they love each other, and that for the Soviet people love as such prevails over making love - sure, it sounds like propaganda, et al. But she definitely did not mean quite what she is now supposed to mean. Anyway, even the majority of post-Soviet people still repeat that pattern putting a wrong notion into it. 

Shadowyzard wrote:  thing is accelerating, so some of the stuff I mentioned here might be outdated.

Honestly, I don't understand why should the rest of the world celebrate Helloween (especially, with the letter e to the left) or Thanksgiving Day or so... Or even Valentine's Day. Or Catholic Christmas on December 25. Because it's fun? OK. Russian Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on January 7. There's a bunch of Soviet feasts (February 23 - male feast, March 8 - women's feast, May 1, December 31-Jan 1 the New Year). However, gradually western way of celebration, western feasts come to our post-Soviet lands. 

I have no doubt that the younger generations of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans are also taking the western stuff/staff. It is not tragic, of course. But it's dramatic. It is actually sad. 

Shadowyzard wrote: Mike, I kindly request you learn some stuff from him (your "roomie") and share with us here.

Chinese topics are so vast that you need to be more specific about what you're interested in.

I do know that the I Ching is the basis of Chinese philosophy and differs from Western belief systems substantially. Western culture is more binary in its thinking i.e. everything has a beginning and an end therefore linear. Chinese culture focuses more on a spiral approach.

Just by studying the I Ching alone one can ascertain a significant amount of Chinese culture since it all stems from those sacred texts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching" rel="nofollow - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching

My 2 cents: some people believe China is still "Communist".....either they're deaf, dumb and blind or they're stuck in the past in the 1960s and have gone insane. China has copied the worst things from the Western world and are using these things to manipulate the world.......NOTHING TO DO WITH COMMUNISM....A LOT TO DO WITH MODERN CAPITALISM :):)

....and to think that Erdogan is anti Trump...oh I forgot, that latter fool is NO MORE hahhahahahhahahah :):)

I'm waiting for a Chinese forum member to stand up and say, no, you are different. We're just normal.

I know not a whole lot of "Chinese Culture" ... and if I learned anything about it, it was on the hands of the many Chinese film makers that have graced our screens for 25 to 30 years now, and made a statement ... 

I know that cinema is not exactly a good sight for this knowledge but it's really hard to "not" understand what was going on in Zhang Yimou's TO LIVE and then also see a little of what passes for the underworld, and one might even take this back to historical times when things were ... very controlling and all that.

In reality, many countries have this same, similar history, although it may not be talked about much ... as an example, England had writers and others upset with the revolution (industrial) in the 1850's and yet its hierarchy of riches ignored all the comments and right on ahead ... to create a system that still maintains a sense of upper and lower classes working and paying ... even though it is said that so much is taken out in taxes ... like the Queen gets taxed ... from one place to another not in the pocket!

China, however, from what I can see, is trying hard to maintain its size and its dominion over the smaller provinces that escaped over the years, and one of these days, they will pay for this imperialism by losing it all, like everyone else has in the past 75 years!

All in all, I don't think that any "culture" is invisible ... and most of it is fairly well seen, however we have to take our sunglasses off and see the actual colors ... and this is the part that we are not willing to do very well ... at all ... in the western world!

I also have a certain fascination with China by the way, but there are limits to it, as I'm too fascinated by too many things generally. I've been to China only once (plus once Hong Kong, to some that counts as twice then). Also I have seen a good number of realist style Chinese films, mainly  between 1985 and 2010; unfortunately hardly anything in the last 10 years or so, and a number of travel documentaries etc., which shaped my perception of Chinese culture. The first message from the films really is that Chinese people, like people everywhere, are really, really heterogeneous, and every general statements about "the Chinese" that doesn't hold for everyone else as well will not apply to a great number of Chinese people (one major characteristic of China is that the number of Chinese people is huge, but also apart from that there are very different regional cultures, and in all likelihood big heterogeneity within the same region as well).

Superficial things that struck me in China: Music, game playing, and of course food are big. There are some things that are clearly more "cultivated" in China than in the west, such as public parks (many with loudspeakers that play music all the time, but also the park designs). When I went to China I was warned to not talk about politics because that could get the Chinese into trouble, and then I was very surprised that a good number of Chinese people wanted to talk politics or history with me (if mostly European and Western politics & history), with surprisingly different views. Apparently a European was something of a sight in those days and people would often come to talk to me and practice their English. People who talked to me didn't strike me as substantially different from people in the west, but of course these people were in all likelihood not very representative of Chinese people in general (whatever that means).

Maybe the most striking observation, more from films than from seeing it (but what I saw was in line with that), was what I'd call "unit culture", a group of people lives together in a pretty much closed unit comprising a few houses and a garden space, say, with very little space per person; everyone is close to everyone else; everyone is observed by everyone else, but people from the outside hardly see anything of them. I know in communism these units had some official function and there was state organisation connected to them; maybe it is still like that, I don't know. Not sure how this is organised in high rise buildings and whether generally this has been diluted these days, but my perception of Chinese culture is strongly dominated by the idea that in these units having an individual lifestyle is really hard because of peer pressure, and was officially discouraged for a long time; on the other hand there was little connection (and often the kind of apathy reported in the opening posting) to anything or anybody outside the unit.

You draw a far reaching conclusion from a small joke. Not sure what my Germanness has to do with it anyway.

Shadowyzard wrote: Peace out bro. I really "feared" you didn't get what I meant. It wasn't an obvious joke, for my understanding. Ah, we the thick headed Turks.

Fair enough, and nice topic anyway. (I see why me initial post could be interpreted as negative, it wasn't meant to.)

I am glad to hear that. My point is that generalisations rarely work well. So, the personal experience matters, personal relations with the natives. I can easily say on the topic of my lands where I was born that anything Russia-related, Russia-based is traditionally surreal, irrational, but most important of all, UNPREDICTABLE and MULTIFACETED. And surreal, for sure. 

There was a well-known (for its time and place) WW2 song "Comin' In On A Wing And A Prayer" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHt8m_q-XqQ" rel="nofollow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHt8m_q-XqQ ). Its lyrics told that "with our one motor gone we can still carry on, comin' in on a wing and a prayer". The Soviet crooner Leonid Utyosov sang it translated in Russian. And here you can evidently see the difference between the western and eastern civilisations, so to say. The USSR was officially atheist, so the Russian translation said of "on an honest word and on one wing". "On an honest word" is an idiomatic expression, loosely meaning here "God only knows how and why it still works". Notice how the Russian lyrics underline that a wing is just ONE wing. The English original was full of emotions, but actually technically adequate: one motor lost, one is still active. This is the English way, Anglo-Saxon way if you like, North American way: brave adequate people using adequate airplanes. The Russian text went much further: "our fuel tank was pierced/broken, the tail of our plane is burning, yet our machine is flying on... on an honest word and on one wing". I have no idea whether the Soviet translator realized that he wrote very symbolic lines. Because those lines reflected the Russian way of doing anything. Certainly, usually, as a rule, in a rational world an airplane with the burning tail and broken fuel tank would hardly fly on, it would rather fly down. But the Russian airplanes tend to live their own independent life. At least, in the songs. Still, it is Europe. Eastern but Europe. There's an airplane, and in theory with the broken fuel tank and the burning tail... well, in theory it is possible. Once in a billion cases... You can explain it to an American-thinking person, he/she may agree that it is still not that insane. Miracles happen here and there. 

My personal problem with Asian and African cultures is that I do not belong to them, do not understand them - and it seems to be mutual. Imagine what the same song would have looked like in China... Dragons flying over the hills planted with cherry trees as sweet as the breasts of the virgins in the dead of the night - something like that, I suppose (Peter Sinfield definitely had dominant major Asian roots). Again, not going to generalize, but this is it. 

I remember very well (I have no Chinese or Japanese mates, so forgive me my slightly off-topic shifts) the Moscow Victory Day parade on May 9, 2015 (the 70th anniversary, that is). The Chinese leader was the most important foreign guest, and I watched the Chinese TV broadcast on YouTube (just for curiousity). Russian Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu whose last name hinted he must be a Buddhist, is nevertheless a Christian. As a Christian and a Russian patriot he learnt somewhere about the centuries-old Russian pre-Soviet tradition to keep one's head uncovered and then make a sign of cross when passing under a certain Kremlin gate. And I know that the average Russian watcher was either pleasantly surprised by such behaviour or did not really care. Just like any other European or American watcher, I suppose. There are old traditions, often connected with Christianity - a very European thing, even if the actual participants are non-believers. But I heard how the Chinese reporters went crazy, they laughed and were actually audibly shocked. As if the Minister got naked or so. It was evident to me how strange was all this European culture to them. 

I read all such conversations with interest, but I know that I have never been Asian, and I clearly don't get the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, etc. ways of life. I don't get their jokes, their songs, their sense of humour. 

Meanwhile I believe I understand Turks. At least, my childhood was full of Turkish bubblegum (Turbo, Oto Moto, Tipi Tip), chocolate bars by Ulker ("hazelnut" was one of the first English words I have learnt). I think that Turkey is - quite like Russia - represents the Eastern European front, as it were. 

Oh, yes. 1992, I'm 9 y.o. That long-nosed guy from Tipi Tip gum inserts, and "Love Is...". And also Lazer... I didn't understand a word they said/wrote. But the pictures/photos were nice. 

The first foreign bubblegum I have ever bought, was Turbo. Bought in Kiev in, I think, 1988, when I was 5 y.o. It was very expensive. But my parents bought me one. Later on, in 1994 I fell in love with Lazer. Military vehicles, jets - great for such an age. 

One highlight of my career was traveling to China on business a couple of times, one time spending 2.5 weeks there. We started in Shanghai, flew to Fuzhou then drove to Nanping and Sanming, then north to Lianyungang, Linyi and then finally up to Harbin. I think we took like 6 plane flights.....

I ate everything put in front of me, it was awesome!! Other than street cart food we did not eat of course.....One of my work mates was from Toronto, he lost 15lbs as all he could muster to eat was fried rice, poor guy could not get himself to try anything else, there was a place where we had some baked pork ribs, I think he ate them all he was so happy for meat!! That was the place I tried 1K year old egg, liked em and ate like 4 of them...

We were mainly out in the sticks, mountains and very small villages so the food was very regional cooked almost from peoples houses and small restaurants, it was all great food.

But I could see how to understand the Chinese culture would take years to study and research.......Ever since then I don't look at any "Chinese Food Restauants" the same anymore...

Chinese American here. Been a forum member since 2005. 

THAT'S IT! NOW I'M MAD!

Can I ask you for a favor? Could you please not talk about this stuff in this thread as it might cause what happened in that OTHER thread?  The thread's name is about Chinese culture, not Chinese politics.