Take a peek into the colorful culture around you: what do you see?
It has been my dream to bridge the gaps between different cultures, particularly cultures that are very dissimilar from each other (e.g. Chinese culture and American culture). With this dream, I travelled across the ocean to the U.S. My thought was, if I get to interact with American people, I could maybe tell them more about Chinese culture just as they would about American culture, and the mutual understanding would follow.
Over the eight years that I have lived here, I realized that things are not that simple. Even when I have a very keen listener with a curious mind, things are often hard to represent in a different language, as many concepts with corresponding vocabularies and connotations in one language/culture are not translatable, at least not easily translated into one single English word. This baffles me.
So I decide to start this blog, with the hope that this venue will allow a more thorough explanation for key concepts in one culture to an outsider, using easy-to-understand language. In addition, as an observer and participant of both cultures, I often notice fragments of life that demonstrate some deeper ideas embedded in different cultures, that I would like to share with people who may be interested in learning about other cultures as well as reflecting on their own. If it inspires a little bit more understanding among different cultures, and makes it easier for readers like you to take in the diverse world, I would be very, very happy.^-^
Over the eight years that I have lived here, I realized that things are not that simple. Even when I have a very keen listener with a curious mind, things are often hard to represent in a different language, as many concepts with corresponding vocabularies and connotations in one language/culture are not translatable, at least not easily translated into one single English word. This baffles me.
So I decide to start this blog, with the hope that this venue will allow a more thorough explanation for key concepts in one culture to an outsider, using easy-to-understand language. In addition, as an observer and participant of both cultures, I often notice fragments of life that demonstrate some deeper ideas embedded in different cultures, that I would like to share with people who may be interested in learning about other cultures as well as reflecting on their own. If it inspires a little bit more understanding among different cultures, and makes it easier for readers like you to take in the diverse world, I would be very, very happy.^-^
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