Deeper Meaning

Something I've been learning a lot about is China's High context culture. This means that Chinese say a lot with what they don't say. Their nonverbals are just as important as what is being spoken. This differs from our culture where we are a low context culture where what is being said is what is important. Some examples of this is water and money and the color black. We learned from Lina that the Chinese associate water with the color black and that the color water is associated with money. So these three different things are very interconnected with each other. Lina explained this out when describing a bank in Beijing as we drove by. Another example of China's high context culture is the Chinese symbols. In Tianjin we had lunch with Lilly and Amy and they informed us that in China you have noodles on your birthday. This is because noodles represent long life in China.

Each symbol has its own story which is very cool but very daunting to me. It would be so difficult to learn about chinese symbols as they mean so much more then just their mere face value. I think this would help one learn chinese as each symbol would be so interesting to learn about. Lina explained to us that the more symbols you know relates to your status class in China as knowing more symbols means you have more free time to learn more symbols. I really enjoy learning about China's high context culture as I knew what high and low context cultures are from my communication classes, but I could have never even imagined what China's high context culture would be like. Its really mind blowing and I hope to learn more about it on this adventure.