Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 25, Issue 1, 2015

This paper critically reviews cultural similarities and differences between European Americans and Asians or Asian Americans found in contemporary supportive communication research. In addition to research primarily examining and reporting cultural differences of social support between European Americans and Asians or Asian Americans, recent research in culture and social support has been focusing on examining both cultural similarities and differences. Broad similarities across cultures have been found regarding evaluations of support provision goals, messages, behaviors, ratings of support provision beliefs, attitudes, and intentions, likelihood of seeking support and so forth. These findings therefore provide us an alternative lens to examine supportive communication across cultures: rather than highlighting cultural differences, we instead want to attend to both cultural similarities and differences. Theoretically, this transition allows us to have a comprehensive understanding about support processes across cultures. Practically, this change of focus provides bridging opportunities and helps enhance understanding between European Americans and Asians or Asian Americans during supportive interactions.

This study presents an ethnographic approach to unpack the differences in digital media use, illustrating how these differences can be better understood as a negotiable quality of incessant action and interaction, rather than as a given quality of social life mandated by the individualism/collectivism dichotomy. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with seven Taiwanese sojourners in the United States and five Americans in Taiwan, this study asked informants to retrospectively recount their sojourning experiences regarding the use of multimedia messaging services (MMS), which presently often involve smartphones. Taiwanese sojourners exhibited stronger family ties than their American counterparts. Instead of relying on collectivistic/individualistic traits as an explanatory mechanism, this study identifies three themes from the life narratives of both groups of sojourners that could explain the observed cultural differences in the terrain of smartphone communication: first, the economic basis on which sojourning was organized was asymmetric between the two groups; second, parents of the two groups had asymmetric knowledge of the sojourning destinations, and this impacted conversational repertoire; and third, the intersection of gender and media constructions of sojourning destinations also shaped varying degrees of bonding. The larger asymmetric structural context at a macro-level may offer fertile ground for further theorization on cultural differences and commonalities.

This study offers an Eastern alternative to the Western perspective that is fundamentally disjunctive in its approach to culture and communication. Inspired by Cartesian dualism and Hegelian dialectics, most Western theories subscribe to the concept of cultural divides that separate two different, often opposing, cultural premises, such as individualism-collectivism and high-low context communication. Based upon the holistic worldview and Taoist dualism of the East, this study proposes that intercultural communication scholars should pay more attention to the dynamic processes in which two seemingly opposite forces such as collectivism and individualism interact with each other to maintain homeostasis in society. This study does not intend to mitigate the importance of studying cultural differences or similarities, but aims to steer researchers away from regarding culture as a completely static or dummy variable, claiming that a certain culture is a high-context culture or an individualistic culture.

This article addresses an ongoing and persistent problem of imbalance between similarity and difference in cultural description by proposing a way to simultaneously explore both similarity and difference, relying on the principles of Russian literary and cultural critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Five principles, employed as sensitizing concepts, are described as portals to allow consideration of cultural similarity into linguistic descriptions of culture: specificity; ownership; tension; open and closed perception; and uncompletedness. These portals are applied to various forms of cultural description to be found in East Asia, including transnational political depictions; cyberactivist protest; and touristic literature. It is concluded that the Bakhtinian ideas offer a convenient and useful means to bring together similarity and difference, with the result that each quality enhances the other.

This article surveys the idea of commonalities in cross-cultural communication through examining potential semantic universals in languages, particularly in their proverbs — the smallest verbal folklore genre that vividly reflects the mentality and culture of any nation. At the proverb level, it is possible to identify, (1) basic cognitive universal mechanisms that lead to the creativity of metaphorical thinking; (2) principles of verbalization of common human values in different languages; and (3) statements of affability, translatability, and as a result, mutual understanding between nations. At the global level, diverse human languages and cultures exist and are interconnected in a dialectical unity reflecting both its universal/common and specific features. Based on the idea of Noosphere, i.e., the latent planetary source of any kind of intellectual and spiritual information, this metaphysical perspective enables us to identify human universality in all its forms.

This study examined the effect of age, gender and socio-economic status on attitudes of Malaysians of Chinese descent towards their Chinese dialect and Mandarin, the standard Chinese language. A survey of 300 Chinese (150 Foochow and 150 Hokkien) living in Kuching, Sarawak was conducted. Their Chinese dialect is valued as an ethnic marker but does not derive its importance from numerical dominance or status of ingroup members. The Foochow and Hokkien participants are significantly different in their attitudes on the importance of their Chinese dialect and Mandarin, and their pride in using these languages but are similar in doubting the instrumental value of their Chinese dialect and Mandarin, feeling embarrassed for not speaking the Chinese languages, and valuing their Chinese dialect as an ethnic marker. Factor analyses identified four and six factors which explained 75.85% and 77.32% of the variance for the Foochow and Hokkien participants’ attitudes respectively. The Foochow participants have more homogenous language attitudes than the Hokkien participants. Gender did not have a significant main effect on the language attitudes of both groups but age significantly influenced the Hokkien participants’ attitudes. Socio-economic status has significant main and interaction effects on attitudes of both the Foochow and Hokkien participants.

Four years after the sovereignty of Hong Kong was returned from Britain to China, a Matched-guised Test (MGT) was conducted to examine the subjective reactions of students to speakers of the three major spoken languages used in the city (i.e. Cantonese, English and Putonghua). Respondents were the first cohort of students under the mandatory mother tongue education policy, which was implemented one year after the political handover. Eight years after, when further socio-economic changes had taken place in Hong Kong, the MGT was administered again to find out the attitudes of the younger generation towards the three languages. Although English and Cantonese distinctly excelled in different domains in the first test, the second MGT shows signs of power redistribution among the languages. This paper is to report a comparison between the two tests and thereby uncover the directions of language shift in Hong Kong.