{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie","description":"Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas people and movements who have shaped rehtorical history. Before we get started, big announcement: Rerecordings are over! We\u2019ve re-recorded over 80 episodes here in the studio thanks to the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas. That\u2019s an incredible feat and now that we\u2019re done, there\u2019s no more reruns, at least for a while. We\u2019ve had new ones interspersed yeah, but now it\u2019s all new from here on out. The other news is that having defended my dissertation and finished my time here at the University of Texas --boo!--I\u2019m headed to the University of Houston Clear Lake --yippie! That means this might we one of the last episodes we record here at the booth at the University of Texas. Well, I hope it\u2019s a good one!   Today we\u2019re talking about LuMing Mao\u2019s Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie. This book is not, as you might suspect, a treatise on how to decipher phrases like \u201cYour smile is your best asset\u201d or \u201cDefeat your enemies by making them friends.\u201d Instead, Mao is talking about what the fortune cookie represents. It might surprise you to know that fortune cookies are not the traditional end of meals in China. They aren\u2019t even the dessert when you go to a Chinese restaurant in Europe. The fortune cookie is an American-Chinese invention, combining an ancient way to pass notes undetected with the American proclivity towards dessert at the end of a meal (18). In this sense, \u201cLike the Chinese fortune cookies, the making of Chinese American rhetoric is born of two rhetorical traditions, and made both visible and viable at rhetorical borderlands as a process of becoming\u201d (18). That\u2019s the meaning of Mao\u2019s Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie--we\u2019re not talking about Chinese rhetoric, and no American rhetoric, but something distinctively Chinese American All of this adds up to being more or less fluidly comfortable with these different elements. This might sound like a cheesy platitude about tolerance and strength of immigrants, but it\u2019s more complex than that, argues Mao. \u201c\u2018Togetherness-in-difference\u201d--rather than harmony-in-difference--...becomes constitutive of the making of Chinese American rhetoric,\u201d he writes (29). Instead of trying to be perfectly assimilated, this \u201ctogetherness-in-difference\u201d highlights a distance between non-Western rhetoric and the other Americans around them. First, we need to \u201crecognize that there will be times when instances of incommensrablity become irreducible\u201d (28) Second this is not a matter of celebrating diversity because, as Mao says, \u201cthere is nothing to celebrate\u201d--the emergence of Chinese American rhetoric is a rhetoric of survival based on as the scholar Mao cites, Ang says \u2018the fundamental uneasiness\u2019 of interconnection. Third, Mao points out \u201cat rhetorical borderlands where there is more than one... rhetorical tradition, if nothing else, the basic question of commununication never goes away in terms of who has the floor, who secures the uptake, and who gets listened to\u201d (29). Much of the book then focus on what these differences in rhetoric are and how we are to interpret them. For example, Mao talks about the (in)famous Chinese indirection. While the American academic writing values clarity, Chinese indirection communicates through \u201csubtle, direct strategies, through innuendoes and allusions\u201d (61). Many American writers, especialy those who teach first-year composition and English as a foreign language, or work in writing centers, find themselves slashing through sentences and paragraphs and repeated asking, \u201cWhat are you trying to say here?\u201d This deficiency model ignores the rich possiblities of indirection.   Okay, so get comfortable, because here\u2019s a long quote from Mao: \u201cChinese indirection should not be seen, without discrimination, simply as an example of a non transparent style of communication or, worse still, of indecision and incoherence. Chinese indirection, be it realized or articulated by repeated appeals to tradition\/authority or y recurrent parallel statements with or without a transparent profession of ideas, takes on new meanings or associations within its (newly-developed) context. To put the matter another way, the contextualized nature of the chinese language and the dominance of correlative thinking of the chinese language and the dominance of correlative thinking in Chinese culture both constitute a central context to understand the rhetoric of Chinese indirection more completely and provide a metadiscourseive language to talk about and reflect upon it more felicitously\u201d (71). But remember the Chinese fortune cookie? Chinese American rhetoric doesn\u2019t have a list of characteristics, but \u201cborder residents can behin to take advantage of this oportunity to develop and try out new ways of speaking, and to reconstitute rules of relationships and patters [sic] of communication\u201d (75).   Another section talks about the mysterious and misunderstood concept of \u201cface.\u201d Americans will use phrases like \u201csaving face\u201d or \u201closing face\u201d Mao points out, but they are talking about \u201cthe myth of the individual, of the individual\u2019s need either to be free or to be liked\u201d in contrast to the \u201cpublic, communical orination, which underpins the original concept of Chinese face\u201d (38). For one thing, there are two kinds of \u201cface\u201d: lian, which refers to moral dignity, integrity and shame and mianzi, which is more about what you do with your life, your position in society. Usually when Westerners think about losing face, they mean mianzi--prestige and position. Lian, though, the moral integrity, is consistered far more important and far worse to loose than mianzi (39). But Westerns think about pride, not the \u201cever-expanding circle of face-giving and -receiving in one\u2019s own community and beyond\u201d (43). This balance of self and community gets even more complicated as Chinese Americans negotiate and transform multiple communities. The urge to \u201cyi\u201d-- immigrate, move, transform-- re-emphasises that \u201ctogethenessr-in -difference\u201d-- to \u201cmoliblize and put to practice a hybrid rhteoric that ...openly cultivates not a harmonious fusion,\u201d but recognizes inherent tensions and potential\u201d (50)?   This double-mindedness is not just a cultural sophistic exercise, but a robust theory that has implications in communities, in classrooms and in families. Mao closes his book with a sustatined case study of a statement prepared by Chinese Americans and others to protest the racist statements of a Cincinnati city councilman. Mao doesn\u2019t just consider the document itself in this hybridity, but the process of putting together the document, of addressing the Westerner-American city council as well as the Chinese American community they are representing. Mao ends with three practical suggestions from his case study. First \u201cwe try to assert our agency and to establish our residency\u201d to \u201cspeak out more openly about thee experiences\u201d (141), and second \u201clearn ow to place ourselves in the other\u2019s position and \u2018word the world through the other\u2019s eyes\u201d... \u201cincorporating both self and other into a relaionship of interdependence and interconnectedness\u201d (141-2). Finally, he calls for Chinese American scholars to \u201creconnect to our own rhetorical history\u201d... as it \u201cenables us to resist both the discourse of assimilation and the discourse of deficiency or difference\u201d (142).   Reading this book reminded me of some of the other scholars who have felt pulled in two different traditions, like \u201cBootstraps\u201d which was in an earlier episode. Well, I hope you don\u2019t feel pulled in two different directions about this podcast. If you like us, please leave a message on iTunes or send us a message at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com, especially as I begin to figure out how Mere Rhetoric will continue at my new institutional home. And let me give one last thank you to the University of Texas for a great year of recording! ","author_name":"Mere Rhetoric","author_url":"http:\/\/mererhetoric.libsyn.com","html":"