Cultural Convolution

Germany is broken.

I am not talking about the so-called never-seemingly-ending-post-war-reconstructions still going on in various parts of Germany, nor am I talking about the Nazis or WWII that the rest of the world cannot stop making jokes about. — I am not even sure the majority of Germans and young residence of Germany remember what these words meant except some distant stories about their ancestors that somehow explained why “Overt patriotism may be a bad thing”. The brokenness is not a philosophical concept but something that one can see on the most common streets of German cities, inside public transportation, from the glares of their TVs and on the faces of its people. Solid, tangible evidence of broken families, broken education system, sluggish law enforcement system, the consequences of boorish immigration policies from the ghastly past, the less known side of argument to National Health Care and high tax to the rich which feeds the homeless, jobless yet capable men and women who enjoy their unemployment benefits to the fullness by spending it on beers.

On a warm, early Spring night without rain, the spoiled youth of Germany poured into the streets in herds, chain-smoking, beer sloshing, hallucinogen dealing and flinging their future to outer space. The level of testosterone on the streets sent out an unbearable scent to the sweltering air that made older women coming back from REWE or tired businessmen in suits quickened their steps while averting eye contacts with the “Elites of Germany”. They burnt holes into the seats of the tram, painted graffiti on public spaces, hurled insults to curious passerby if not challenged them to a stand-off with their childish, defiance glances. Though most of us could comfort ourselves with the fact that almost certainly in all cases, they delivered nothing empty promises of violence.

Somewhere everywhere in Germany, groups of men and women were piled over each other on couches, passed out on toilet bathroom floors, or beating their heads to the monotonous higher art called techno music, and passing time with hallucinogens that seems to come all too easily in Germany parties and clubs where some even designed their furniture to accommodate these incapacitated future of the country. Doener places business flourished at the wee hours of the morning as a consequence of desperate hungers in consummated youth with bad cases of acid reflux.

In the seedy places on the streets, of apartment buildings, of basements of old abandoned establishments, in the internet and last but not least in the hearts of the wealthy, middle-class Germans, certain crimes of morality were being committed every second. Honesty, loyalty, trust and love were based on trickery, lies, blind faith, or mutual disclosures of equal disinterests in traditional, biblical values. Relationship histories were ill-written chronicles of sexual conquests of proportions no less gory than the invasion of Arabs in Western Europe 700AD.

At home, bored adults were watching spin-off shows from the worst of American media — Heidi Klum telling girls made out of skins and bones they were far too fat to be Germany’s Next Top Model; 15 year old kid prancing on stage on Germany Super Star singing ‘Das geht ab’ (You dont need to know how to sing per se to sing that song…), in competition with another pale faced blonde hair boy yet to reach puberty who admitted publicly he didn’t know whether he loved men or women. — The next morning at work, these people would share their pointed opinions about these TV personnel in intense fervor with their colleagues in the office, as if they also had a monumental health care reform bill passed just the night before.

Google pulled out of China sparked some minute interests in the German people about foreign cultures. One after the other they repeated their ignorant comments about their foreign counterparts, persevering cultural misunderstanding deeper into the their heads.

There’s no safe place in Germany for a drug-free, mentally sane, literate and self-respectable person. I asked myself where did all the true elites of Germany that I have met and was so impressed by gone to?

With the increasingly diversified environment at work, in training, in school and volunteering events, I was exposed to people from all over the world visiting the US for the first time and communicating with them through the one common language that we have, English, have reminded me of my own experience learning the language and speaking it for the first time to native speakers in the States. I completely understand what they were going through as I am learning languages myself at the moment. Learning a foreign language so that we are not only fluent but confident in using it is a tough journey that one has to overcome on their own by lots and lots of practice. And being misunderstood can often led to social withdrawal behaviors that I have witnessed only a couple days ago on a lady from Mexico in a company training. As the listeners, being “tolerant” is not enough. We need to actively engage these ESL speakers by asking them relevant questions without putting them on the spot and be patient and open-minded about what they have to say. But the universally understood rule about asking question is be careful what you ask for — ‘cause if you are not prepared to have your opinion be challenged, then don’t bother asking.

It is also imperative that we “see what we are not seeing” and do not make assumptions about other people — we certainly cannot “see” what we are “not seeing”; but it is the awareness that there’s blind spots in our cognition that’s what drive better understanding. I had this enlightenment during my Product Research training recently but that’s another story.

Recently in my German class, we had a discussion on racism during the culture section where we talked about the demographics of the German populations and read two poems speaking against discrimination. Then Frau Hampton turned to us and asked if any one in the class has any experience before. The question is obviously directed to me, because I’m the only immigrant (first generation or what have you) in the room. I thought about my life here for a second and I was relieved to say that I couldn’t come up with stories. I have seen other people being treated “differently” but that’s mostly because of their own, well, stupidity, in provoking their American counterparts. What I’m trying to say is, relationship could only be established if there are two or more people involved. Hence courteousness and respects are expected of both sides, not just one. While one person open their arms, the other person needs to step forward to finish the hug. If we do not accept, adapt to or at least be tolerant of the culture we are stepping into, expecting to be treated like every one else is unrealistic.

Now, I must add, that being “different” is not necessarily a bad thing. Some times it could be an advantage. And I’m not just talking about races or sexes but also your ability to roll your tongue, your distaste for chocolate, your obsession with purple and orange ensembles. It’s all about playing your stereotypical “weakness” to your strength. In Product Research world, for example, not having been married and without a baby nor any diapering experience doesn’t mean you cannot talk to Baby Care consumers and do good research work; as my coach has taught me, tell the mom “You are the expert in the area.” will put her into a teacher’s role and there no better way to get a mom talking than that. Being Chinese in the Midwest might mean I will get ridiculous questions/propositions/acc

Because of misplaced creativity on the translator’s part, the movie Pulp Fiction was renamed “The Dangerous” in Chinese in Hong Kong, which was in a way befitting when one skimps the surface of the story. But it was, as I later discovered, more than what was spelt out. The movie was released in 1994 and I was at the time no more than eleven years old. As the movie was a category 3 movie (which was equivalent to NC-17, the most restricted level in the US movie rating scale), the poster on which Uma Thurman in her iconic hairstyle laid seductively on a bed, holding her head up in a supercilious tilt while smoking a cigarette was stamped with a red warning symbol with the Roman character of the number 3 enclosed inside a solid-colored equilateral triangle that by the weird force of association reminded me of the somewhat triangular (inverted) Caduceus one sees on ambulance. One could only think of the movie as extremely vulgar and violent which were the very characteristics of most gang movies that enticed millions of audience which, me, the child of a righteous man no less protected than the sons and daughters of any southern Presbyterian preacher. Because of these, the Oscar-winning movie has eluded me for a great many years.

Some ten, fifteen years have gone by and I finally got to watch this movie made famous in my social circle more because of the taboos that Chinese film-makers at the time of my teens would not venture touching upon in their movies than the movie itself. Despite the hype that was built up around the movie that I knew, if it wasn’t in the least bit brilliant, would sure to disappoint, I was duly impressed. Scenes in the movie lingered in my mind way after I have finished the movie. I honestly said to Nate, who complained that I was hard to impress when it comes movies (and pretty much everything else as he will soon find out), “Wow, it was really good.”

If you have forgotten about the movie or have never watched it and plan on watching it soon, I must say, please be warned: the movie was far from perfect in its execution. But like the hackneyed saying, the imperfection was what made the movie so impressive, so perfect in its own way. The way how different short stories were shuffled in a seemingly random order and the way how those considerably long but clever and absolutely necessary conversations were dully documented, although they were stretching the audience’s patience a little bit, they made perfect sense when the movie wrapped. There were many prolonged scenes that was intriguing in a way but with the huge production dollars associated with every extra second of the film and the easily lost concentrations of modern days movie-goers, they seemed to some rather daring directing efforts in the movies. For example, why did the camera followed Travolta around in the restaurant for a whole minute? Why did they showed almost the entire dance between Thurman and Travolta in the twisting contest? Those were parts that would be easily skipped in movies nowadays since they didn’t necessarily assist the flow of the story but yet, in that odd minute or two when you see the two danced, their genuine, somewhat awkward interaction made you feel good and really get you into their states of mind. And when the unexpected happened, you get a bigger pang out of it. Your heart beat with that of Travolta not the half-dead Thurman laying in a horrid state on the floor after overdosing on heroine.

My favorite part of the movie was no doubt near the end when Samuel L Jackson made that long speech about his revelation about the purpose of his life. I liked that he tried to redefine the Bible passage from Ezekiel he recited every time before he killed a person over and over again to let us follow the logic of how he finally saw that he was the sinned and he was to repent his life’s wrongdoings by saving another man’s life. It was just rare that any action movie, regardless of whether the story was good or not, would take time to deliver a moral message that was so critical to the movie yet could also be skimped over as easily under another director/writer’s hand.

If you think based on what I said Pulp Fiction was a snob movie, you were absolutely wrong. The story and the characters were extremely colorful. Nate and I were laughing our asses off when Bruce Willis stood in the counter of the black market store trying to pick his weapon. His first picked a rifle, then he saw a baseball bat. Just when he was swinging the bat to prepare himself for battle, he saw a chainsaw. At that point we were already falling off our chairs. Then he laid his gaze upon the Japanese knife set upon the shelf. He unsheathed the knife and went into the backdoor to kill his enemies. It totally foretold the obsessions with Japanese knives Quentin Tarantino has and reminded us of Kill Bill. I was basically in awe looking at Bruce Willis. In his exchange with his fictitious goofy French girlfriend he showed himself as incredibly attractive, funny and more importantly an excellent actor that a simple love scene was no challenge for a man I have thought only capable of demolitions, flying across buildings and driving a truck to a helicopter filled with Russian manslayers that almost never die. Of course, the stabbing people in the heart with needle part and the homosexual cop ass-raping the black guy part (as with the appearance of the Gimp) were more graphic than I hoped. But it’s an American movie after all. These kinds of things were the essential ingredients of most gangster movies. And without some dramatizations, the world probably wouldn’t talk about the movie as much as it did.

One thing I realized after watching Pulp Fiction was that there was absolutely no sex scene in the movie and the promotional photo on all the posters and DVD covers of Uma Thurman lying on the bed was rather misleading. (Not that I would like to watch her. Both Nate and I were befuddled at her popularity for how genuinely ugly she looked.) She wasn’t even in the movie that much.

There was no real, tangible gain one can get from watching movies like that apart from the mental stimulus. Pulp fiction is, after all, pulp fiction. But if I were to say something I learnt, I guess it was not to judge a book by its cover, or more precisely not to based our judgments of things entirely on the advices of a conservative governmental agency.

It is crystal clear. The rival for the most gold medals in this year’s Olympics is simply a battle between two nations, US and China.

The Olympics would have been a reasonable trigger for identity struggle for someone who’s trapped in the middle like me. Luckily, being a thoroughbred Hong Kongese who only some years ago got my nationality changed from British National Oversea to Hong Kong SAR of China now here living out in the Midwest, I have assumed the attitude of indifference, like many other expats in America, in light of the Olympic spirit and ethos of sports in which there is no country in sports (hypothetically speaking), only the gifted and the trained, the surrender and the endurer. And the world game is a facilitator of reaching the goal through series of intimate cultural exchange experience.

Hence, as I’ve said, in the face of this year’s Olympics Slogan ”One world, one dream.”, I have chosen to take the high road and remain impartial to avoid making unfair judgement of one team against the other. Certainly, my childhood in the small island of Hong Kong that was devoided of any type of patriotic education and my adolescence after the handed-over of Hong Kong which managed to maintain its own fairly independent government and a highly liberal press, made my enthusiasm for National sports only so-so and ”making it to the world stage” has not been my sole personal goal like many other Chinese youth. I barely know any of the famous sportsmen from China that appeared in the opening ceremony except Li Ning and Yao Ming and I supposed that’s how most other fellow Hong Kongeses are too.

My personal background has made me an impartial reader to Olympics news and being aptly equipped with a rather new HP computer that automatically loads up Yahoo! as my homepage on which I would always get immediately carried away by the intriguing news headlines before I have a chance to type in Yahoo! HK to read about the same competition in Chinese, I am under the advantage of being able to learn about the Olympics in both the perspectives of the American and the Chinese presses. And what I’ve found from the juxtaposition of the two was that the American press coverage always, with a humorous (at times sarcastic) undertone, highlights the brighter (actually, not so bright) side of things occurring in or behind the scene of the Beijing Olympics while their Chinese counterparts tried hard to maintain their perfectly amiable image by keeping all their news painfully sterile and to-the-point. The difference is grossly interesting. 

Let me give you an example. The Chinese gymnastics team — they are a widely popular topic over the lunch table here. The fact that they are amazingly good athletes is only a small part of the reason for their world acclaim in comparison to the controversy around them about their real ages. My personal opinion is that there is no dispute about the fact that some of the gymnasts are underage, but the press acitivity revolving the issue was just too much of a monkey business. Reports from self-proclaimed experts trying to decode the game videos and photos, and the plethora of reports about evidence American journalists have dug up from ancient Chinese history concerning the real age of those poor Chinese gymnasts, trying their best to deface the Chinese team are ungracefully abundant. When I went on to the Chinese news website, however, there are nothing but straightforward reports about their brilliant performance. I missed the show, but apparently NBC has a program a couple of nights ago where they’ve brought in anthropologists to analyze the facial features and bone structures of the Chinese gymnasts to determine their real ages, and came up with the conclusion that they were no more than 14 years old. Of course, the anthropologists came from the States. What magnificent way to contest the validity of the gymnasts’ ages that were testified by the Chinese government itself. Hmm… it seems like neither country is very good at this.

Another example is the controversy around the girl who lip-synced in the opening ceremony to Ode to the Motherland. The switch has caused many hostile opinions over China’s obsession with maintaining the perfect image. But who could blame them? You don’t get to do the Olympics everyday. The only pitfall of the Chinese government over this matter would be not to have realized that Westerners think all the Chinese people looks the same and that the girl with the crooked teeth, much like how we see Caucasian kids with freckles, are just as cute as any six-year-old kid is. The little girl herself whose voice was used was also reported to have said that it was an honor already to have her voice being used in the opening ceremony and it didn’t matter that she got replaced. That was very graceful in her part.

After you finished reading as many of these reports as I’ve, you would certainly realized that American presses are definitely much more liberal and at times highly infilterated with personal opinions. Because of the pervasiveness of mixed media broadcasting that the boundaries of journalism ethics and standards that keep television and newspaper reports in its impartial and honest state have become much more vague when it comes to broadcasting on the web and on a blog, even though those sites are still connected to the news agencies. And this prompts us to question the unbiased, unprejudiced nature of the journalism on this side of the earth.

Because of the Don Quixote spirits of American press, every other news article now reads like a crusade waged against the integrity of the Chinese sportsmen and their government. Regardless of whether the Chinese are lying or not, they will get badgered by the rest of the world until the end of time and that’s the truth whether you accept it or not. US and China relation is no more cleaner than that between Israel and Pakistan. It’s God’s will (whoever their Gods might be) to put the two Nations in constantly conflict and I’m afraid that cannot be helped. But we should rejoice that they have shifted the battlefields from lands to papers and computer screens. Perhaps one can think of the western world as the mother who just can’t help nitpicking everything her son does and there’s nothing he can do about it until he grows up and become independent of her, then her good-natured advices wouldn’t matter anymore.

There are much deeper political implications of the Olympics than a person like me can fathom and I acknowledge that my light-hearted analogies about US-China relations are definitely inadequate and very inaccurate. One thing I know for sure, however, is that the news on this side of the river (when I say river I mean ocean) are definitely funnier.

The Europeans are grateful —  Hop on any European airline, chances are you will be moved by the clapping and cheering of the fellow passengers around you when the flight has successfully landed and you will find yourself having a renewed appreciation for the wonderful job that the pilot did for bringing a full flight of passengers safely from one city to another across the endless ocean, the violent turbulence, the roaring weather, and slipping out of the deadly chances of mechanical failures and human errors by the meticulous preparation by the crew even before the journey begins.

Clapping is just a way for the passengers to say thank you to the crew. It is a tradition that begun a long time ago when flying is still a luxury instead of just another option to driving. While the novelty of flying has worn off a great deal in America and most part of Asia due to the light-speed advancement in flight technology and airline and route expansions, the tradition persisted in Europe, Africa and some Asian countries. Patrick Smith from Ask the Pilot column of Salon.com suggested that the phenonmenon is more pervasive in economy class. His said that ”There’s a certain communal spirit, especially after a long-haul flight, when you’ve spent several hours in a relatively intimate space with hundreds of people. In a way, the applause acts like big collective handshake.” He has his points.

I say we oughtta keep this tradition alive on American airlines and celebrate our living moments while we can because one doesn’t know when one would by the twist of faith board a flight of no return, given how manifestly bad American pilots are being trained on plane landing. And I am speaking from experience — for the past eight months I have travelled nationally through various American Airlines (US Airways, United Airline, Northwest, Continental and Delta) no less than ten times. As far as I can remember, more than twice my planes have landed at inappropriately acute angles like missiles aiming for the unknown enemies hidden underground and barely missed snapping into two halves after the thunderous thugs when the planes finally hit the asphalt and rushed forward at neck breaking speed. While my typically reticent fellow Americans squeaked in terror around me in the cabin, which turned into a collective laughter that was second-nature to any human to cover their embarrassments for their over-reactions, I released my grip on the arm rests, rolled my eyes and gave the direction of the cockpit a disgusted look.

Erraneous decision in the cockpit, however minute, has incalculable implication. Although humans are born to make mistakes, the airlines that are responsible to the training and re-education of the flight crews are being paid exorbitant amount of money by their trusting customers to ensure the chances of them making incorrigible mistakes are kept to the minimum. As nearly 50% of all airplane accidents occurred during the last phase of the flight, which is preparation landing (dropping altitude, circling at low altitudes before the air traffic authority of that particular city gives out permission to land) and landing on runway itself, these types of near-misses showed how much more importance we should be putting into training pilots on this portion of the flight and into reconstruction of any physical infrastructure and system to allow the appropriate landing procedures to be carried out in the most conducive environment. Seriously, one crash landing is just one too many.

Of course, never-failingly the pilots would speak to us after those near-misses in his deep, sexy nasal voice to welcome us to the city XYZ, as if absolutely nothing abnormal has ever happened. Sometimes I wonder if pilots are recruited based on the level of theatrics they displayed in making takeoff and arrival announcements rather than their leadership skills, their expertise in flying a plane, and most importantly landing one.

Let’s clap and cheer for the flight crew next time your plane lands safely on the runway of your destination like the Europeans. You just cheated death again. It’s never too late to realize the need to celebrate being alive.

I didn’t think it possible — I have trouble keeping up with my dad.

My parents came to visit me here from Hong Kong. The last I’ve seen them was about two years ago. A great deal of change has befallen us over this past two years: I graduated from college and moved to the Queen City last year, took a 9-to-5 and started working for a corporation; My dad turned sixty and to prepare for his retirement, he started to take interest in the stock market. Given how we used to be the perfect representation of our own generations — me as the tech-savvy Gen-Y and my dad as the conservative, hard-headed Baby-Boomers, I didn’t think that a complete role-reversal could find its way into our typical little Chinese family. It’s like our family is going through a “domestic menopause”. I’m having all kinds of bothersome physical and mental reaction to the change in the dynamics of our family and I am clueless as to how to deal with the situation.

For the past couple of nights, my dad stayed up till 2 a.m. in the morning watching Japanese drama that I’ve for a minute thought a good idea to recommend to him featuring Takuya Kimura. I honestly didn’t see this coming — I have to throw in the white towel when my dad said he wanted to go for another episode for the third time yesterday night. Still, like an old woman who couldn’t break out of the daily routine ahe has established over the course of her long industrious life, I woke up 7:45am sharp every morning, with an aching back and rheumatic joints to work. I simply could not shake off the urge to work. Like a spinster living in the old castle tower working her spindle, I turned on my computer, a new 2.8Hz dual-processor slim tower with 4G RAM and 500GB storage space that my dad has bought for me yesterday, and I tried to write something for my blog. Anything. But when the monitor came to live, a burst of electromagnetic waves blasted me to outer space. My dad has set up the enormous 22” widescreen flat-panel monitor for me while I was sleeping. 22” doesn’t sound like that big a number until you realized that it the biggest computer monitor any company offers and it’s a widescreen monitor so it’s actually bigger than your regular 22”. And this is not just an ordinary monitor…‘The Thing’ (The only name fitting for this enormous piece of equipment. A tribute to ‘The Thing’ in Fantastic Four) can actually be rotated 90 degree clock-wise for best viewing of photographs should you care about those tiny amount of digital information you’d lose if you rotate them internally. It can ROTATE! Did I stress that enough? I am not so much bragging about my new computer as I’m bragging about my old man. He knows more about electronics than the guy who worked in Circuit City. The darn ‘Thing’ was so overwhelming that I‘ve to block my eyes with both hands as if an excavator in front of a treasure chest filled with gold coins. All I can say was “Holy shit.”

Before I snapped out my the trance, my dad, who slept till eleven o’clock like a teenager on summer break walked into the living room. He said I’m not using the computer right and took over the wireless keyboard and mouse. He went on to Yahoo! Weather and checked the forecast for Orlando for the next couple of days since we are going to Disney World tomorrow (also his idea) . I lowered my head and quietly picked up my nineteen hundred English novel about lost youth, curled up in the sofa and read.

I feel ancient compared to my dad.

Yesterday I have an argument with the GPS, also courtesy of my Gen-Y dad. I’ve been pretty proud of the fact that I can drive to pretty much all the places I need to go without one. But the moment my dad found out about how the little device can communicate with satellites and do all sorts of crazy location tracking, traffic update kind of witchcraft, he insisted that the family of Chow should possess one of such device, I presume, as a ‘symbol of wealth’. And he can’t just buy a frugal one on sale. He has to buy the one with an XL screen. When the sales from Hhgregg told him that the one that cost 50 bucks more with text-to-speech function can say “Turn left at XYZ Road in 500 yard” instead of “Turn left in 500 yard”, his eyes lit up. There was nothing me and my mom could do to protect our family fortune. Since I’m a girl, I picked a male “Richard” from the Tom-Tom voice database as my navigation guide when I set it up. To my horror, this “Richard” is my dad’s double! My dad loves to back-sheet drive. Imagine what will happen when two men with same hobby meet each other. The result was disastrous — they become buddy-buddy with each other instantly. Instead of one dad, I now have two dads now trying to remind me to “turn left and then turn right then merge into the highway” at a sharp bent while I was going at 55mph because my two dads would start beeping and flashing warning signal if I go over the fucking speed limit in the slow lane. I was about to go crazy but I tried my best to contain my emotions. However, when “Richard” insisted that I go back across the bridge to Ohio when I was right next to Newport on the Levee (a place I can drive to even with my eyes close) in the Kentucky side in order to reach there through the route it suggested, I almost wanted to yank its power cord off and strangle “Richard” inside the GPS, if it could be done. Of course, my dad was on Richard’s side. Fuming, I went back from Kentucky to Ohio back to Kentucky just so I could please Richard’s ego. Later, the Flobot song “(I Can Ride My Bike with no) Handlebar” came on the radio. I thought the song was dedicated to me.

“I can drive my car with no GPS. No GPS….”

My dad used my free LG cell phone to call my brother in HK today. He noticed that it was an LG phone. I told him I got it for free. He asked me if I wanted a new cell phone. I looked at him and all kinds of emotions were surging up through my chest. Why, of course I want a new cell phone, but Jeeze! If I say yes, he’s gonna start buying me new air conditioner, new dishwasher, new refrigerator, new vacuum cleaner, new microwave, new bathroom vent, too. I lived in a $500 apartment like a poor college student with only 2 glass plates, 2 bowls and a few plastic spoons and forks. My dad already bought me new curtains, new rice cooker, new cabinet, new water boiler, new plates, new shoe rack, new tables, new GPS and computer. I am so used to living in a rut and making-do with everything I’ve got that I felt very uneasy being pampered like this. There’s a Chinese saying that “The king’s bed is not as good as the dog’s house.” That’s exactly how I feel. But not only does he buy things, he cleans things and fixes stuff too at my apartment. He said that he still hasn’t gotten over the jet-lag. I felt like I’m the one who hasn’t gotten over the jet-lag. The light in my house now is almost on 24 hours a day. While my dad was running around doing all sorts of things around the house (he even danced when I played “Dreamgirls” this morning to test my new computer), I feel like I am constantly exhausted and I could collapse anytime. I wonder if this is how most parents feel when they have young kids at home. I actually look forward to going back to work….I looked at my dad this morning carefully while we were eating Mcdonald’s, also per his request. He is 60 years old. There isn’t a single visible white hair on his head and I know for sure it is not because he color his hair. He could actually tell you the chemical composition of hair colorant and its damaging effect on hair growth. It is amazing.

We still have one whole week with each other, my dad, my mom, “Richard” and I. I hope my dad doesn’t arrange –marriage me to “Richard” by the end of the two weeks.

People from different countries have different ways of symbolizing the answers to any yes-no, right-wrong or true-false question. While the English uses the checkmark and the cross mark as symbols of opposite meaning, American often uses the cross mark to replace the use of the checkmark to symbolize the presence or the positive state of something as if the two are interexchangeable. In Japan, they use a slightly different system which is the “maru and batsu” —-the hollow circle dot and the cross mark. Maru, which means “circular” in Japanese becomes the representation of merit and excellency while batsu, which actually came from the word “bad” in English becomes the representation of all things negative. Because of all these subtle cultural differences in the usage of signs and symbols, confusion can sometimes be created.

Western cultures are very keen on the uses of the cross mark, which is the same as an “X”, or the 24th alphabet, to indicate new technology or breakthroughs in general. For example, Microsoft uses the name “Xbox” to represent their newest gaming system. While the Americans and the rest of the world love their innovation, the Japanese were skeptical simply because of its misleading name — the “Bad Box”. There are many other interesting uses of the “X” mark in America such as “X’mas” as the short-hand for Christmas, which my grade school art teacher who was deeply pious regarded as a sacrilege of the Christian religion, and the simple use “x” to replace “ex” to promote the power of many commercialize products like the “Xtreme” energy drinks or “Xterminator” anti-spam software.

Many linguists will say that English is the first true international language, a common language that promotes cultural and commercial exchanges. Today, 89% of the EU claimed that they are English speakers. Around the world, there are 375 million people who are English speakers. Although not every single one of them is of English descent and possess very distinctive local cultures of their own, many cities and countries who have used English as their official language, or rather the “unofficial” people’s language for a substantial amount of time such as Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, India, United States of Emirates and many more African countries such as Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria had adopted the British signs and symbols system together with the English languages over the years and continued their usage long after the British colonial rule. It is interesting to see, however, that the Americans have broken out of the pack and developed their own sets of rules, as for everything else. Of course, as one of the biggest, most powerful nations in the world, they can decide that the rest of the world should go through the trouble of following them while they make up rules that make their lives easy. This attitude can be exemplified even by the usage of something as trivial as the checkmark and the cross mark.

Sometime I cannot believe how arrogant Americans are with regard to filling out forms. Because of my work, I have administered many consumer research studies in which people were asked to answer a few very simple questions on the questionnaires regarding their impressions of the quality of the products of inquiry. They treated the instructions as if they were optional: When asked to fill in the circle next to one of the descriptions that fitted their situations best, there would always be people who put checkmarks, cross marks or even circle the descriptions themselves completely disregarding the space we provided for them. With respect to all these defiant behaviors, I could only attribute them to the traumatic SAT/ACT experience many Americans have to go through as teenagers, which forever disabled them from ever “filling in the box” again.

This is all just very fun to read about until the way how you express yes or no becomes life-threatening. For example when one travels across the borders to different countries, one is often given custom declaration forms to fill out. What if the question is “Are you in possession of firearms?” and with his/her unyielding Americanism, this stubborn American tourist puts an “X” in the “No” column. So what does that even mean? Does it mean he/she “is not in possession of firearms” ? Or he/she is saying that “I negate the fact that I am not in possession of firearms?” I’m certainly very impressed by the Americans for their linguistics dexterity.

I have never been gifted with mathematical genius. It’s been a running joke between me and my brother that our parents were so obsessed with the same school of thought that captured the imagination Mr. Gradgrind from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, if he has any, despite our glaring technical mediocrity that they went to great lengths just to see us failed as engineer and scientist by investing huge amount of money for our college education. After years and years of strict educations on “facts and calculations”, the Gradgrind children that we are, turned into, naturally as the story went, sly and rebellious Thomas (that’s me) and the obedient, day-dreamy type Louisa (that’s my brother). Being not mathematically gifted, as I have stated earlier, I did not understand the Convolution Theorem very well when it was first introduced to me a couple years ago in a “Advanced Mathematics for Engineers” class. The only thing I can recall now from that grueling hours of lectures in my Junior year of college, was how the professor liked to refer to formula as “guy”. “This guy multiplies that guy, gives this guy.” The professor would say, as we doggedly counted the numbers of times he used that same word to keep ourselves amused. And we would all refer to that class as the “crazy class” because the textbook was written by a person with the last name “Kreyzig”. Unfortunate for him, his book only lend more credits to the insane level of mathematical fervor he intended to channel into us through the most complex compilation of signs and symbols that almost never worked. The second time I encountered Convolution Theorem was in a computer music class. The basic idea was introduced to us but the full understanding of the theorem (which means the capability to answer questions related to it in finals) was optional because the main goal of the class was to stimulate our creativity (within the frameworks of the restrictive Nyquist programming language) and have fun in the process. So despite the fact that I had been in close encounters with the theorem in question, it never registered in me. Well, not that I expected it to have any practical meaning in the practical life I lead anyway.

The reason why Convolution Theorem was brought up, was the fact that it illustrates the logic behind the name of this site, the Cultural Convolution. For me, the complexity of the mathematical theorem is almost beyond comprehension that on a bad day, I might put it in line with the unified theory that even Einstein couldn’t comprehend. However, for people with great arithmetic ability and numerical dexterity, Convolution Theorem is as easily understood and subsequently applied as putting butter on a piece of toast. Those people will not only be able to explain it with perfect sense (to themselves or their own kind) but will almost always unfailingly consider anyone else who doesn’t a worthless retard. The point here is that perceptions we get off of various objects are often reflections of the viewers themselves. It is so for mathematical theories and it is so for cultures.

There are many cultures and customs in the world that we do not necessarily fully understand. And when I talked about cultures, I not only mean cultures of different ethnicity groups, but also economic culture, corporate culture, spiritual culture, teen culture, gay culture et cetera all the way down to bathroom culture. By speaking to, living with, reading about the people who are different from us , we benefit not only the knowledge of their existence but also put ourselves on a vantage points on the hills of life every person has to climb, giving us confidence of an experience hiker to foresee challenges that lay ahead of us and face them without fear. As Isaac Newton had once written, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Let’s forget about the debatable moral of Isaac Newton when he addressed those words to Robert Hooke, a fellow colleague whom he envied and have been suspected to have stolenl works from to develop his own Newton’s Laws, and let us focus only on the humility he was trying to express in the fabled lined he thought crucial to his huge achievements in Physics. It’s only those who seeks to look beyond ourselves that succeed. That was basically the summary statement of my life. And recorded here, in this website, are the observations and thoughts I have in years of studying, learning, assimilating, adapting and at times loathing, resisting, and eventually reconciling my own culture with the cultures of the rest of the world. It’s a struggle that was no less difficult than the struggle to understand convolution theorem, but at the same time no more difficult than understanding an overtly complicated theory that was developed in the first place to simplify our lives by grouping certain behaviors of the world under a few formulas, which I had treated as a joke dismissively and am still alive and breathing without fully understanding it. And I believe the same can be said about cultures. — We need to treat all cultures with respects. If we bow and kneel so readily when we are asked to, we should also snort and laugh readily when they leave us no choice.