Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

R. Todd King has a long series of photos documenting the 2003 Harbin Snow & Ice Festival in Heilongjiang Province, China. The following is one of his pictures:

For an entry fee of 10 RMB, tourists on January 5 will be treated to a dazzling display of lit, carved ice sculptures. Wear a jacket–it can be as cold as -40 degrees F/C.

Additional Links:

• http://www.china-pictorial.com/chpic/htdocs/English/content/200204/7-2.htm
• http://ks.essortment.com/harbin_rbaa.htm
• http://www.china.org.cn/english/6083.htm
• http://talesmag.com/tales/road/realtrip/harbin.html

Want to make money fast? Stick “China” in your press release title, and sprinkle liberally throughout the rest of the text. China is the new sex, reports China Digital News.

Lenovo Group (??), a Chinese PC manufacturer based in Beijing, is planning on buying IBM’s PC division, reports the NY Times. An “Unknown Giant,” Lenovo Group is China’s largest PC maker, and the 8th largest in the world. Recently, Lenovo has been facing competition and price wars with Dell, IBM, and HP, causing its earning to fall lower than expected. Still, The Lenovo Group controls 27% of China’s market–and that’s a big market.

Don’t hold your breath–at least one other bidder has opened negotiations.

Huileng posted a piece describing the common practice of preserving your child’s umbilical cord for posterity. This isn’t something I’ve heard of in Western tradition. There’s also a Korean company that will gold-plate your child’s umbilical cord, and place it in a pleasant wall display…

Something from a psychology paper I just wrote - it was about effect of culture shock on identity.

There was a passage about a woman who was speaking Portugese, Japanese and English to different groups of people at a dinner party. She reflects on a comment by a guest who noticed that her personality seemed to change depending on the language she spoke. She wonders if she has split-personality, but concludes that all the personalities are hers.

According to the article, people growing up in different cultures acquire multiple sets of behaviours in order to fit in with different cultures. This is an unconscious process and when people first realize what they are doing, they wonder whether they have split-personality.

Interesting thing is, I’ve noticed myself doing the same thing. Languages bring out different personalities because they are so closely related with culture and different cultures call for different sets of behaviours.

The amount of respect accorded to the elderly is reflected in Korean and Japanese (don’t know about Chinsese) through the extensive use of honourific forms. While you can certainly be polite in English and show the same amount of respect in English, with Korean or Japanese, using a whole different form of the language automatically places the other person on a different level.

So if you want to know about the culture of a country, try reading their dictionaries.