Uptight asians

Asian cultures have always fallen into the category of high context cultures, due to the fact that we just seem to operate on the basis of more rules and regulations and appear less liberated as compared to our western counterparts. Here is a video from the BBC sketch comedy show 'Goodness Gracious Me' demonstrating the high context culture portrayed by typical Asian parents.



Obviously the video is an extremely exaggerated act of Asian parents but the idea of that Asian parents tend to place great emphasis and pressure on their kids' studies is still very much well shown in the video. Restricted codes and contextual cues, one of the characteristics of high context cultures, can be seen here, as it is almost viewed upon as a taboo for Asian kids to not do well in their studies, and this ideology seem to be regarded more highly in the Asian society than the Western world. This is a familiar mindset of our Asian culture whereby not doing well in school is almost like a death penalty, causing kids growing up in such environment to devote most of their childhood to all work and no play. The parents shown in the video is a good reflection of Singaporean parents as they are obviously overly kiasu and concern about their children's grades even from a very young age, and also the ridiculous habit of comparing their kids to others'. Kids as young as 7 may have their schedules dominated by math tuition, piano lessons, swimming lessons, chinese tuition, grooming and etiqutte lessons; whatever those crazy parents of theirs may think of. This is the unfortunate culture that Asian parents have picked up; god bless us Asian kids.

The video also illustrates the fact that Asians culture similar to that of high context culture sees 'face-saving' as taking precedence over the truth. From the video we can understand that the father was utterly embarrassed and displeased at the idea of his son not scoring As for all his subjects, thinking that the son had put the family to shame by merely getting a B for his classical studies. We can infer from this that our culture views the way people perceive us as of great importance, we work in a way that other people's opinions about us seem to be of higher priority than what we want ourselves to be, we avoid disappointing others' expectations for us. This coincides with the theory of Collectivism whereby fulfilment of others' needs on top of our own is deemed to be necessary.

Here is another video from the show demonstrating subtle cues are more important than actual words spoken.



The video shows how the Indian son tries his very best to drop hints to his eh dim-witted parents that he is in fact gay. Such as hinting that he never brought any girls home and he lives together with his English boyfriend while the boyfriend places his hand on top of his to give off clues about their intimate relationship. The Asian culture that we are brought up in taught us to speak in indirect ways in situations where people may get embarrassed or uncomfortable by the blatant truth. It may be seen as a cultured behavior on our part but sometimes beating around the bush just leads to more misunderstandings and unwanted annoyance.

Although due to media globalization there is the increased happening of cultural imperialism in our Asian society due to the influence coming mainly from American TV, Asians very much still fit the bill of a high context culture environment. I guess the culture programmed in us is not all that easily alterable by Hollywood after all.

P.S: Last post woohoo! Thanks for all who ever commented. Til next time, BYE WORLD!