Introduction

I took part in a humanities writing online class this semester. As a history learner, I am interested in humanities and sociology. Once I have seen this course in an official account of WeChat, my eyes were caught by it immediately. The course description and its core idea that mainly would convey to us had the greatest appeal on me, demonstrating that I would go through a lot of great pieces to answer a driving question: Is there a definitive truth in our daily language?

In the class, I need to apply a lot of history and thinking knowledge. The ability of deconstruction was highly utilized and practiced. What’s more, I read many master pieces from different philosophers, such as Said, Butler and Nietzsche. The teacher had led me to examine a number of concepts of this kind, such as history, memory, nation, and gender. In doing so, I traced the development of social criticism over the course of three centuries, and arrived at the problem of nihilism. During the course, as the reason of reading several materials that may be related to stereotypes and western supremacy from other countries, I found that I have developed my intercultural understanding by reading and writing.

Through reading Madman written by Xun Lu and writing a response to it, I have comprehended that the destruction due to society and people’s mind from feudal ethic code, which is still criticized by scholars today, in the ancient China. By looking closely into Orientalism, I have learned some historical events at that time. More importantly, I can recognize the limitations of holding orientalism and the reason that westerners will have misunderstandings to the orient.

I simply chose three of my original writings in this course as my evidence (artifact) to support my development of intercultural understanding.

Reflection

My growth:

• Cultural self-awareness(knowledge): Through reading the Madman and other compositions written by Xun Lu, I recognized the deep constrain of Chinese people in the past under the rule of feudal ethic code. At the same time,
• Cultural worldview framework: Although orientalism is a kind of idea that may not be friendly to the orient, through reading Orientalism written by Said, I would gradually consider about western history and politics while assessing orientalism.
• Cultural curiosity: I was impressed by orientalism. So I asked myself why orientalism is antihuman since I have read some about that in the book. Thus I started to do self-driven study and write a response to my own question based on elaborating the comparison of the west side and the east side.
• Cultural openness: Since I have recognized that the problem of orientalism is limiting people from interactions. SO, during the virus-19, I contacted my Japanese friend to care about the situation in Japan now. While texting, I intentionally throw away the stereotypes that Japan was not friendly to China, as the influence of my family. I was talking to her just like we were all Chinese. I did not show any disrespect to her country and culture. On the contrary, we were talked about something we were together experiencing friendly, caring about others.

Things that I need to improve:

• I would like to develop my cultural empathy since I have contacted my Japanese friend.
• I have a lack of communications of negotiations under different culture backgrounds. Most of the time, I did not have the chance to take part in a formal or inform negotiation with culture differences. However, this is very important to practice all the skills from intercultural understanding . I should look for more opportunities like this kind.
• I still need to keep reading more books on this topic to avoid that I will be restrain by concepts just from one book. That will have no difference with making stereotype. Only by widely reading, experiencing and practicing, my intercultural understanding will improve. I do not think that I have read or experienced enough.