Cultural Differences, the Ignorant American and Star Trek

May 21, 2010

I’ve watched Star Trek since the 1960s and have seen most of the spin offs.  In the Star Trek Universe there are many cultures and races—far too many for even Christians or Islam to convert since that seems to be a driving force behind both of these major religions even if it means using war and violence to make it happen.

One way to look at this is to consider cultures and countries like China, Japan, both Koreas, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and others as if they are light-years away from Western culture.

If the US sent a spaceship to a far off world around another star and discovered a culture that was alien to our way of life, but these aliens had powerful, modern weapons and a strong military to defend themselves there would be no way to force them to change as the West did to so many cultures during the 19th century and a good portion of the 20th.

But what if this culture around that foreign star had products and materials  we wanted or needed for our civilization to survive. To do business with them, we would have to accept that culture the way it was and not attempt to change them or judge them as if that planet were an American Territory to be terrorized and converted.

None of the Asian cultures on our earth developed from Christianity, Judaism or Islamic roots. Even our staunchest allies in Asia, Singapore and Thailand, are Asian cultures with governments that do not fit the America model.

What does loss of Face mean to most Chinese?

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Leave a Comment » | Christianity, Confucianism, cultural differences, Islam, religion, Taoism | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Cultural Differences, the Ignorant American and Suicide by Railroad

May 21, 2010

There is always a spat of suicides in China when public school students don’t get into college. Recently, near Stanford, California, there were suicides by Asian students who weren’t doing well in high school and it didn’t look like they were going to make the grades needed to get into the US university they wanted to attend.

An example of Western religious intolerance may be seen in this post about the Gunn High suicides.

The students would lay on the train tracks and wait for a train to end their misery. As the suicides mounted, the city did what it could to make it difficult for more kids to do the same. The high school shut down and testing was cancelled to remove the pressure. Gunn High is one of the highest ranked public high schools in the country. The Asian student population is about 80%.

Behavior like this is shocking but it is part of Asian culture.  As a Christian nation, is it the responsibly of American citizens to change this behavior even if we have to use violence and war like we are doing in Iraq and what we did to the American Indians in the 19th century?

Learn about the important of an Education to the Chinese

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Cultural Differences, the Ignorant American and the Architect who Hung Himself

May 20, 2010

Another day, when our daughter was seven, we were hiking in the hills above a park in Southern California. On our way out of the hills along a steep-dirt trail leading toward the park, our daughter rushed ahead.

Minutes later, she was back looking shocked. She took us to her discovery.

An Asian man had hung himself in a tree beside the trail. He’d used an electric cord. It was obvious that he had climbed into the tree, tied the cord to a limb and around his neck and leaped off.

I called the police on my cell phone. They came, identified who he was and went to his mother’s house. The mother and sister arrived and my wife talked to them (for the police) since the mother and sister didn’t speak English.

The dead man was a Chinese architect from Taiwan. He was a partner in a business that had gone bankrupt and he could no longer support his family. Because he had lost face, he killed himself.

In fact, since the global economic crises caused by US, Wall Street greed, family suicides have been on the rise in Taiwan.

See how Power Corrupts

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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Leave a Comment » | Buddhism, Chinese men, cultural differences, Taiwan | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Cultural Differences, the Ignorant American and the Japanese Wife

May 20, 2010

The Japanese wife’s two young children died and she survived thanks to one of the men fishing on the pier who jumped in and pulled her out. She was going to be tried in a US court.

However, the Japanese government requested that she be returned to her country explaining that what she did was cultural.

Japanese Geishas

Later it was revealed in the press that her Japanese husband had cheated on her and was keeping a mistress. The wife saw this as her fault and loss of face and the only way to erase that shame was the take her life and the lives of her children—at least that’s what the US media said. The US agreed and sent her home to be dealt with in Japan.  In fact, in 2009, there were more than thirty thousand Japanese suicides.

I never did find out what the Japanese did to the wife who killed her children.

Discover what Honor means to most Chinese

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Cultural Differences and the Ignorant American

May 20, 2010

Unlike the citizens of Europe or Asia, most Americans seldom rub shoulders with other cultures or spend time outside of the United States aside from Latinos from south of the border who washes the cars, mows lawns or washes the dishes Americans eat from when going out to eat in a restaurant.

Don’t mistake having a foreign friend as rubbing shoulders with another culture. To know a culture you have to live there or discover that culture through study.  Even then, nothing compares to living in another country as an expatriate like Tom Carter, who taught English in China before he went on the road to shoot “China: Portrait of a People.”

Recently I posted another response to Timothy V at Left of the Right. I used examples to show differences between cultures. Those examples appear in this seven part series.

It starts with the wife of a Japanese corporate executive working in the US, who tried to kill herself and her children by jumping into the ocean off the Santa Monica pier. She took her two children with her. (to be continued in the next post)

Learn about The First of all Virtues

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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