An Exploration of the Sino-American Cultural Differences in Everything I Never Told You from the Perspective of Hofstedes Cultural Dimensions Theory. 基于霍夫斯泰德文化维度理论探析《无声告白》中的中 美文化差异文献综述

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文 献 综 述An Exploration of the Sino-American Cultural Differences in Everything I Never Told You from the Perspective of Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory.基于霍夫斯泰德文化维度理论探析《无声告白》中的中美文化差异1.Introduction1.1 Introduction to Everything I Never Told YouCeleste Ng, a post-80s Chinese American writer, publishes her debut Everything I Never Told You at the end of 2014. The novel tells a story about a family composed of a Chinese husband, a white wife and three mixed-blooded children. Starting from a suspense, the story gradually extends to the level of delicate psychiatrical description, involving the first and second generation of immigrates, love, marriage, study, death of mother, extramarital love affair, leaving home, homosexuality and so on. The novel got a lot praise, such as from O Magazine, which pointed that there is much here that might impress Pulitzer and Man Booker judges, and from Los Angeles Times saying that Everything I Never Told You is at heart the beautifully crafted story of a family in pain, and the many reasons, personal and societal, that the Lees have lived most of their lives as strangers to one another. Everything I Never Told You has been translated into over thirty languages and is being adapted for the screen. The first work of Chinese American writer Celeste Ng, describes a story of an interracial family living in America. The novelEverything I Never Told Youopens with 16-year-old Lydia Lee found drowned in a lake. Shewas her parents favourite, the opposite of a troublemaker but an innocent. How did it happen, who was responsible for her death? And can the family survive?The mystery of Lydias fate propels the narrative, which is tightly focused on one couple and their mixed-race children in 1970s suburban America the secrets that have been kept, the hopes dashed, the sense of not fitting in. A page-turning literary thriller that is also a thought-provoking exploration of parenthood and family life. The novelEverything I Never Told Youused non-linear narrative in the textual space, combined with flashback, pre-writing and other writing techniques, thus forming a sense of time and space stagnation. In the search for the cause of Lydia's death, the author brings the whole story to life. James and Marilyn's interracial marriage can be said to be the trigger for the constant family conflicts. The culture differences between the Chinese father and the white mother also strikes the reader.The plot of mixed marriages involved in the novel also engraves the mark of society. In 1958, James and Marilyn married in Boston, but in Virginia, in half the country, their wedding would break the law. Even in Boston, she sometimes saw disapproval in the eyes of the passersby (Ng, 2014, p. 51). At that time, it is rare case that American white people married with other ethnic race, and it is even illegal in some areas. The facts have proved that this mixed marriage is the source of the tragedy of this family. The people around them looked at James with their strange eyes, and their children did not escape the fate of being regarded as heterogeneous. Lydia has no friends, and she is excluded from the local culture and difficult to find her own identity. Under the circumstances, Lydia has to pretend to be able to adapt to the environment, pretend to have good friends, and pretend to enjoy a happy life. Marilyn has a dream to be a doctor since her college years, but it was not easy. At that time, the status of women was low, and they were difficult to be doctors, lawyers and merchant, etc. Another distinctive character of the novel is the father James. He is always very silence, not good at communicating with people, and always in a state of repression. In the family and work, he is always silent, and also very alienated to his children. When he was a child, James learned to be silenced when his father came to the classroom to repair the window. He does not want people to look at him with ridicule, and do not want to be incompatible with others. But it turns out to be futile because he is an Asian. And the white people excluded Asians to a great extent with that social background.Therefore, he was treated as a heterogeneous when he was young. he was unable to integrate into the local life, and bore a variety of ridicule and exclusion. Additionally, Nath, the eldest son of the family, was always ignored because of his typical oriental face, yellow skin, dark hair, short building and introverted personality. James wanted his son to grow into a different person, a person who could make friends with white children, a person who can fit in. The truth is Nath reminded him more and more of himself, or everything he wanted to forget from his own boyhood. He knew that Nath was becoming a reflex, one that left him painful and ashamed. As for Hannah, the youngest and the most helpless daughter, is almost invisible at home. They set up her nursery in the bedroom in the attic, where things that were not wanted were kept, and even when she got older, now and then each of them would forgot, fleetingly, that she existed (Ng, 2014, p. 160). Besides Nath and Hannah, in this novel, Jack who is suspected to be involved in Lydias death actually is a homosexual boy having hidden love to Nath. Jacks mother, Janet, a single mother gossiped a lot by other community members, surprises Marilyn because of her identity of a female doctor.Those characters mentioned above, more or less live far away from the main stream. The dilemma brought by the lack of conversation can be said to have indirectly contributed to Lydia's death. However, this intercultural dilemma is not an accident, but an inevitable result of the difference in Chinese and American cultural values. This novel reveals the difficulties of the Chinese immigrants who try to merge into American society and how they get rid of the interracial pressure through the description of every family members mind. 1.2 About the author of Everything I Never Told YouCeleste Ng is an American writer and novelist. She is the author of two novels, Everything I Never Told Youand Little Fires Everywhere and has released many short stories that have been published in a variety of literary journals. Her first novel, Everything I Never Told You(2014), was a New York Times bestseller, and named the best book of the year by over a dozen publications, also itwon the Amazon Book of the Year award, as well as abundance of praises from critics. Little Fires Everywhere is a 2017 novel. It is her second novel and takes place in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where Ng grew up. The novel is about two families living in 1990s Shaker Heights who are brought together through their children, which explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, the ferocious pull of motherhood and the danger of believingthat following rules can avert disasterNg spent six years writing the novel, going through four different full drafts. In the six years between the end of graduate school and the 2012 sale of her first novel, Ng started keeping a color-coded document detailing each time she submitted a story to a literary magazine. She referred to it as the Spreadsheet of Shame. The file is still active but marks an era when Ng was mired in the struggle to tame the multiple timelines and points of view in her first novel.There was a period of time where I was like, I am never going to write again, Ng said. I hadnt finished my book when we had our son, she added. The first four months were really hard. I was dealing with postpartum depression. Then she won a Pushcart Prize for her story,Girls, at Play, published in the Bellevue Literary Review. It was this huge boost of confidence. It was a story that I had submitted, and it had been rejected like 17 times.Thenovelist Celeste Ng has been known for her literary page-turners that disassemble family dynamics, and parse suburban life and attitudes about race in America. Now she is turning her preternatural competence to publishing at large. Ng has become a singular force of literary activism, championing the careers of fellow writers who need a boost. I am in a mixed race marriage myself, and I have a mixed race son....the racial perception interest is probably always going to be there to some extent., Celeste Ng once was interviewed on February 22, 2016. Being asked, "Where are you really from?" It makes one feel othered. As the interracial family background and growth experciences give Celeste Ng a profound and deep comprehensions towards the Sino-American cultural differences. 1.3 Hofstede's cultural dimensions theoryCulture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster., said Prof. Geert Hofstede. Within the increasing cooperation between China and America, there are more and more cross-cultural communications emerging., meanwhile, the rapid economic development and the status of China has improved in recent years. In order to promote Cross-culture Communication between Chinese and American, more and more foreigners want to learn Chinese, however, to be a bilingual also means that there is need for getting acquinted with bicultures as much as possible. Sino-American differences are different from the languages, lifestyles, and ways of thinking, which means different cultural backgrounds between the two countries. People always find the differences emerging in Cross-culture Communication. This specific folkways culture does not reflect only an atmosphere of city life but also lifestyle existing in the world. There is of great importance for us to understand the details about the bicultural differences between American culture and our local culture. Gerard Hendrik Hofstede was a Dutch social psychologist, IBM employee, and Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, well known for his pioneering research on cross-cultural groups and organizations.Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory is a framework for cross-cultural communication,it shows the effects of a society's culture on the values of its members, and how these values relate to behaviour, using a structure derived from factor analysis. His dimensional theory of national culture, which he developed using IBM employees as subjects, covers almost every discipline in the social sciences. He regards culture as the psychological processes that people share in an environment and that distinguish a group of people from others. According to Hofstede, the differences of values can be divided into six categories: power distance, collectivism and individualism, masculinity and femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation versus short-term orientation and indulgence verus restraint. For the sake of comparison, the dimensional index of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan is used as a representative of the Chinese sociocultural index.Cultural differences are the various beliefs, behaviors, languages, practices, and expressions considered unique to members of a specific ethnicity, race or national origin. It is said that people who from different ethnicities often have more similarities than they do differences, but those differences can sometimes outweigh the similarities. While these various differences can create a more vibrant social environment, they can also lead to more than a few problems resulting from culture differencecs.Cultural differences should not separate us from each other, but rather cultural diversity brings a collective strength that can benefit all of humanity." Also, "Intercultural dialogue is the best guarantee of a more peaceful, just and sustainable world, said Robert Alan Aurthur. This paper addresses and critically reviews one of the most important theories in intercultural research, Hofstedes dimensional cultural theory recommends a theoretical framework or perspective for intercultural communication research in China. Theorizing in intercultural communication can better disclose the multidimensional relationships between cultural values and interpersonal communication; cultural values and social activities; and cultural values and organizational behavior. Hofstedes theory can be of significant help for research in communication, management, and language teaching activities that occur in intercultural environment.With the increasing cooperation between China and America, there are more and more cross-cultural communications. The studies concerning Sino-American cultural differences have played a significant role not only in helping people understand the differences but also in promoting further communications between the two cultures. Under the circumstance, this paper intends to analyze Sino-American cultural differences in the novel, Everything I Never Told You, and discusses the solutions to the bicultural differences dilemma based on Hofstedes cultural dimensions theory.2.Literature ReviewThe novel Everything I Never Told You has already been researched from various aspects and gained multitudinous critical evaluations. These studies mostly include the theme of love and fate, identity conflicts, marginalization and so on. Through the reviews of these studies about Everything I Never Told You, it expects to provide an all-sided elaboration about Celeste Ngs novel. Chen (2017) mentioned that centering the narration on the death of Lydia with her own immigrant identity and cross-ethnical marriage, Celeste Ng has penetrated into the marginal culture in American society 1970s, exposing characters marginal condition caused by ethnical identity, gender and sexual orientation, and then did a brief analysis of marginalization in Everything I Never Told You. Shen and Xie (2017) analyzed Celeste Ngs Everything I Never Told You in its spatial narrative in terms of the physical space, social space, spiritual space and textual space. In this novel, Celeste Ng uses a lot of different forms of space, as for physical space, she used a lot of space images, such as the kitchen, photos and rooms, which can reflect the social problems at that time. Secondly, in terms of social space, the mother Marilyn in this novel did not want to be a housewife, and even ran away from home to pursue her dream of being a doctor, which fully reflected the rise of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile, Lydia's identity crisis in Everything I Never Told You focuses on Lydia's social, family and campus life environment on the strength of Erickson's theory of self-identity and personality to analyze Lydia's identity crisis (Shen Zhai, 2019). Arinda (2020) analysed the psychological state of Lydia as a child of dysfunctional family in Everything I Never Told You. There are some reflections indicate the dysfunctional family in Celeste Ngs Everything I Never Told You, such as, the cause of dysfunctional family shown by authoritarian parents, the characteristics of dysfunctional family shown by prolonged conflict and perfectionist expectation toward children, and the type of dysfunctional family in form of chronic conflict family. The psychological state of Lydia as the child of dysfunctional family is illustrated by isolated and empty feeling, dependent due to fear of being abandoned, super responsibility by adopting the enabler type, feel guilty when looking for satisfaction for herself, and the ego defense mechanism in the form of regression. The psychological state of Lydia is described through the apparatus in her unconscious mind. Beside the prolonged conflict due to the lack of communication, perfectionism toward the child also becomes the characteristic of dysfunctional family in object of research.Above all, in the previous studies, scholars focused on the perspectives ranging from ethnic identity conflicts, family atmosphere in which young people grow up, marginalization to childhood tragedy. The aim of this thesis is to further demonstrate Everything I Never Told You from the Perspective of Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory. Despite former researches have touched upon this view, few of them have analyzed those bicultural differences influence on interracial family and the wayout and solutions to bicultural differencecs dilemma. What should be paid attention to is that while scholars at home tend to analyze the specific figures in this novel, scholars abroad tend to discuss ways of identity conflicts in a more critical attitudes. Generally, the exploration of ethics in the ethnical bicultural difference approach hasnt been probed into. Therefore, this thesis is devoted to discussing the ethnical relationships in bicultural differences and managing to ease the conflicts and get rid of dilemma emerging from cultural differences. Hofstedes (1984) Cultures Consequences explores the domain of studying international organizations. He collected data from a large multinational corporation, IBM, and analyzed data collected from forty different countries. Through his empirical data analysis, he concluded that organizations are cultural-bounded (p. 252). In addition, he identified four work-related cultural dimensions, including power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and masculinity, to analyze work-related cultural values in different countries. In addition to the original four cultural dimensions, Hofstede (1990) proposed the fifth cultural dimension, called Confucian Work Dynamic. The Chinese Culture Connection (1987) conducted a Chinese Value Survey (CVS) based on traditional Chinese cultural values and identified this non-Western cultural dimension. There is no doubt that Hofstedes model remains one of the most valuable pieces of work in the field of intercultural communication helping organisations to understand how they can collaborate more effectively across cultures and if nothing else causing thought-provoking discussion and further developments in the field. Meanwhile, Hofstede's dimensions, in 2010, a sixth dimension was added to the model, Indulgence versus Restraint. This was based on Bulgarian sociologist Minkov's label and also drew on the extensive World Values Survey (2013). The sixth dimension approach hasnt been probed into relevant book review and literature as well.In the past 3 decades, Hofstedes (1984, 2001) work-related cultural dimensions were used as research paradigm in the field of intercultural communication,cross cultural psychology, and international management. His country classification on five work-related cultural values, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity-femininity, individualism- collectivism, and Confucian work dynamics, has been frequently cited by researchers in the past few decades. While his work has been used effectively, his data were collected 30 years ago and have become dated. In order to update and expand Hofstedes (1984) research, there are two purposes of this current study. First, this study has collected data from one Eastern culture, China, and one Western culture, the United States, in order to provide updated information about work-related cultural values in these two cultures. Second, this study has expanded Hofstedes (1984, 2001) study by studying work-related cultural values in the higher education setting. The following section of this paper reviews literature and scholarly research related to Hofstedes cultural dimensions.Thus, Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory can be illustrated as a good wayout for analysis of bicultural differences between China and America.This paper addresses and critically reviews one of the most important theories in intercultural research from Hofstedes dimensional cultural theory, and recommends a theoretical framework or perspective for intercultural communication research in China. Theorizing in intercultural communication can better disclose the multidimensional relationships between cultural values and interpersonal communication, cultural values and social activities, cultural values and organizational behavior. Hofstedes theory can be of significant help for research in communication, management, and language teaching activities that occur under intercultural environment. This thesis also considers the dilemma of the figuresJames Lee, Marilyn, Lydia, Nath and Hannah, besides, the ultimate social and cultural causes of Lydias tragedies and James Lees identity conflicts are deserving of further study. Futhermore,this thesis is aimed at easing the conflicts and get rid of dilemma emerging from Sino-American cultural differences with relevant suggestions to some extent.3.ConclusionThe novel, Everything I Never Told You, not only makes people stay in a better position of knowing Sino-American cultural differences, but also it gives people many inspirations. To some extent, Sino-American cultural differences dilemma can be avoided by mutual tolerance and good communications to some extent.At the end of the novel, James and Marilyn leave the house after a big fight and realize in their memories and reflections that the cracks in their lives can still be mended and that it is not too late. The interracial differences can be said to be the root of all conflicts between Marilyn and her husband James. It is the clash between two different cultures that leads to the tragedy of the marriage and even the family. This is how the author deals with the clash at the end: " I thought you were gone." Marilyn finally says. James' voice is hoarse and sharp: "I thought you were gone." This also implies that they love each other and cannot be separated from each other despite the cross-racial differences and constant cultural clashes.Thus, although there are differences between Chinese and American cultural values in the six aspects of Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory: power distance, collectivism and individualism, masculinity and femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation versus short-term orientation, and indulgence versus restraint. The intercultural communication of different values tends to be promoted and the cultural adaptations tend to be the tendency of integration. The novel, Everything I Never Told You, not only makes people stay in a better position of understanding Sino-American cultural differences, but also it gives people many inspirations. To some extent, Sino-American cultural conflicts can be avoided by mutual tolerance and good communications. Therefore, under Sino-American communication, we should abandon the tendency of cultural centrism, but improve cultural inclusiveness, and achieve mutual understanding and commonality among cultural differences. ReferencesArinda, K. (2020). The psychological state of Lydia as a child of dysfunctional family in Celeste NGs Everything I Never Told You, Metophor, 3(1), 68-86.Chen, Y. Q. (2017). A brief analysis of marginalization in Everything I Never Told You. Journal of literature and art studies, 7(8), 982-985.Ding. S. H. (2020). The identity reconstruction of James in Everything I Never Told You. International journal of literature and arts, 8(1), 1-5.Hofstede, G. (2010). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind (third edition). New York: McGraw-Hill Education.Luo, L. Qiao, F. Y. (2021). Comparison and reflection on basic education teaching management between China and America from a cross-cultural perspective.Open access library journal,8, 1-8.Merkin, R. S. (2000). 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