Intercultural Collaborations

Difference is everywhere. To start broadly there are different cultures, and different people, and different languages, different ways of using the same language, different ways of living, different ways of seeing the world, different ways of storytelling, different ways of thinking, different standards and differences in the things we notice. Simply, humanity consists of many different habitus . What writing can achieve is taking us into those differences. If we are willing, and we understand that our way of seeing is not the universal, we can tilt our perspective and see the world slightly differently. Before this course I believed that if humanity could bridge all differences and unite then people could live much more happily. But what does it mean to bridge differences? If bridging means to connect then how do we connect? Let’s say that connecting is the same as understanding. So to bridge means to understand differences. But what does understand mean? Is it to know and accep...

With exposure to new things and new people my habitus has changed. My exchanges with people have given me more to think about and broadened my understanding of the world. Learning about a different place and watching movies about a place is one experience. This is the first step towards understanding. Actually talking to different people gets you an understanding on a different level. There is a lot of learn from the exchanges themselves and how you relate to one another. You get to know how similar you are, you see yourself, and you see the differences. My experience has made me more aware of my own surroundings. Me and my HKBU partner have being sharing pictures and stories from our daily life to go towards her assignment. We were sharing these things before, just casually as a way of getting to know each other but now it’s more deeper. She is planning for us to write “a day in the life…” type of story, where we write a story from each other’s perspective. To do that we send ev...

Reindeer had just finished a yoga class when I WhatsApp video called her. The English Major student at Hong Kong Baptist University calls herself Reindeer simply because she likes reindeer. We laughed easily and were able to speak to each other for over an hour and the time drifted away. She spoke from her yoga studio and I was inside my bedroom. We found little similarities: we both poster our bedroom walls, like yoga, have similar taste in movies, enjoy contemplative walking. When we talked a bit deeper we found some of our thoughts and values to overlap. She was concerned with childhood, innocence and growing up in a similar way that I was. But she had a different kind of insight. She feared the loss of innocence of her young cousin who is about to enter primary school. She feels that the pressurised school system in Hong Kong will rob him of his time. His playtime will turn to homework time, and then she won’t be able to spend as much time with him. She wants to treas...

A Response to Xu Xi's Multi-Culti Literati: There is multi-cultural and then there is multi-culti or “moolti-koolti,” as a German arts promoter said it. According to Xu Xi, the first is PC (politically correct) and clouds understanding by the illusion of universality. While trying to be inclusive and reach out to different people in the PC way, universality or a false sense of universality is ruling over our differences. She claims that this PC idea of multi-cultural “might prevent us from understanding other worlds as a distortion of our own way of knowing and being, just as we are, as well, a distortion of theirs” (pp136).  She talks about true understanding of different cultures, not as an act of bridging divides, but as a process of distortion. To understand someone or some place that is “other”, we have to go beyond our way of seeing things and “tilt our vision slightly askew to see and reflect those myriad humanities as ourselves” (pp135). This is the multi-culti visio...