Entry 1 (part 2): Speechless in Speech Acts

Dr. Deng focused heavily on the differences between responding to a compliment by the American (English) and Chinese speakers on the 29 January seminar. As mentioned in the previous post, the style of responding to a compliment can be generally (but certainly not always) categorised into four strategies: accepting, rejecting, returning and deflecting. Extensive research have shown some eye-opening observations on how American and Chinese speakers would commonly respond to an innocent, honest compliment. Here's the conspicuous difference: American speakers may adopt any of the four strategies if they receive a compliment, whereas Chinese speakers may adopt one of only three strategies, namely rejecting, thanking and denigrating (humbling), and accepting. Furthermore, I also listed the strategies commonly adopted by Chinese speakers for a reason: it's listed based on the most common observation. The most common strategy to respond to a compliment by the Chinese speakers is indeed rejecting it, followed by thanking and denigrating, and finally, the least common strategy, accepting.

I'll take a step further by explaining in detail how different the rejection of a compliment by American and Chinese speakers truly are. American speakers would only use the rejection strategy as a last resort it seems, by disagreeing with the compliment and further humbling himself/herself e.g. "I don't think I look that much different." The Chinese speakers however, would likely reject the compliment in three ways: By rejecting and denigrating oneself ("No, I know I don't look nice. In fact, you look much better than me."), by expressing embarassment ("No, don't say that. I'm embarassed"), or by explaining ("No, I was too busy and didn't spend as much time on it as I should have."). It's hard for some people to swallow this fact, but I can actually understand this since I've had similar experiences before (by similar, I mean how some people would denigrate oneself). My mother frequently speaks with our neigbour, a Chinese-Singaporean senior citizen who lives with her grandson, and they tend to speak about each other's children. I observe how their conversation would normally go, spoken in bits of English, Malay and Chinese (Hokkien):

Senior citizen: "Who's that? Your bigger son?" (points at my direction)

Mom: "No, my number two son." (my younger son)

Senior citizen: "Wah, so big! He's working now?"

Mom: "No, (he's) studying at NUS."

Senior citizen: "So smart, some more! Not like my son, so lazy and never listens to me. Very hopeless one..."

Here's the big question: Why the big difference in how they would respond to a compliment? What's the rationale behind them? Differences in responding to a speech act almost always have an underlying reason or two that influence their reactions. From the onset, we can generally agree that the American speakers favour agreement and more importantly, they emphasise the importance of confidence and self-esteem in how they conduct themselves. The Chinese speakers however, are strongly in favour of humility and modesty, values which are quite common in the Asian context. For American speakers, to denigrate equates to denting one's self-esteem and coincidence. For the Chinese people, accepting a compliment is deemed as somewhat arrogant. Now, this begs another question: Are the Chinese (or perhaps, Asians) more introverted than the Americans, with this serving as a conspicuous example? Personally, I think that there's some truth in this notion, but lately we're observing another trend: the Chinese are gradually adopting Western values. In the Xi'an province of China, back in 1993, only 4% of the people surveyed would accept a compliment, with landslide of 95% rejecting it. The latest findings have shown that now, over 64% of the people surveyed in Xi'an accept a compliment, with a small percentage rejecting to it. This reversal of response style may highlight how (my personal opinion) the Chinese population are slowly taking certain Western values into their own stride, possible as an important step towards globalisation and economic development. Here's a side note: how would I describe Singapore in terms of culture and values? Singapore is a generally conservative society based on a foundation of traditional eastern values, but we are gradually embracing western values.

Here's another food for thought: Do responses necessarily reflect a person's character and cultural influences? What if a person fakes his/her response (i.e. rejecting a compliment just so that he/she can "fish" for more compliments from the speaker)? This situation sounds comical to be seriously but if it's something people do, it's something worth pondering as well. What you say and what you think are completely two different things. I don't think this is something related to cultural background; it's something to do about one's sense of honesty. Plus, too much modesty is paradoxically a form of arrogance. I admit that even I occasionally reject a compliment because I want the speaker to go on complimenting and flattering me ( - -)v