Coming Good

Well I said Anshe should apologise and today she came to me, and she did.

She explained that she didn't mean to marginalise the other players in SL, and what she meant was different to what she said.

I don't speak for anyone else in SL, but personally, my hatchet with Anshe is buried. I consider the matter dropped.

Strange you should say that. Since her incredible "self-pity" posting, I've started actually worrying about her. I'm beginning to think that a lot of the problems some of us have with her actions, and our reactions to her posts, might just be symptoms of a truly gigantic cultural misunderstanding. That some things in our world view might be so different from hers that there is a huge invisible barrier preventing each from seeing the other at all clearly. Maybe her assimilation into Europe is superficial, and culturally she is pure chinese.

I understand that in chinese culture, relationship is all, and most of the stuff westerners see as essential in business dealings is turned entirely on its head. If I still had my RL chinese-american partner, I'd see what he/she makes of it, but we've each moved on. There was a big gap between her/him (gotta preserve ambiguity !) and me, but that was half the fun. We certainly couldn't understand each others attitudes to money.

What do we look like to her, with our cold, factual, confident accusations of greed, self-pity and even arrogance ? Maybe what we see as such things, in another culture, are primary virtues ? Maybe we just cannot bridge the gap. Maybe we make her really upset.

How can we ever know whether we are being unkind and unfair to someone of a different culture, if we can never glimpse the reality of their thought processes. And think how outnumbered she is culturally, how alone.

Yet this might all be sentimental codswallop.

I really don't see how we can progress with this. We may meet it more and more as SL grows, recruiting more and more substantial contingents from different cultures.

Surely some of you must understand lots more about this sort of thing than I do? Can anyone help us glimpse, for instance, the different attitudes to business in the west and in China ?

As you can tell, her long post actually got to me in a strange way. First indignant and almost derisive (much as other people posted in reply), then thoughtful, uncertain, now vaguely guilty about my first reaction as maybe a bit of cultural imperialism. But I genuinely dont know how I can get to the root of it all. Almost certainly she is as puzzled herself, so no point asking her.

I hope she wont feel it rude, or inappropriate for me to talk about her like this. At least I am struggling to understand.

Hee..e..lp !

I'm glad to hear that, Jsecure!

coco