Hello Habitus

My thoughts on cross-cultural collaboration and how it informs my own writing has grown from this semester of work. At the beginning of the course, I was overwhelmed by the number of new phrases and ideas being discussed. I had never heard the word ‘habitus’ used and suddenly it was everywhere. Learning about the concept and seeing how other people’s habitus has informed their work, made me feel like my own was not wide enough to inspire anything interesting. A lot of the readings we studied had complex ideas and were written by people who had experienced a number of important and interesting things in their habitus. I found these readings really dense and hard to understand at first, but listening to others in the class discuss them brought up fresh perspectives and simplified the ideas for me. Speaking about the readings for the oral presentation forced me to think deeply about them. I found the ‘City of Protest’ reading really interesting as it presented a side of Hong Kong that I hadn’t considered. The importance of freedom of speech to Hong Kong’s citizens made me assume that my HKBU partner would have strong views. When I interviewed her she had many opinions on the way Hong Kong’s society interacts, she was extremely honest. She also talked about mainland China, and expressed her view that it is a very hierarchical society where you are judged based on who your parents are. I was glad that I had chosen a reading about Hong Kong as I had no idea about the culture surrounding free speech there. The exercises we did in class were based on ideas and questions about cultural identity and habitus. These raised questions about our own work and made us think about what really causes us to write the way we do. I think a lot of people felt the way I did about writing on different cultures to our own. We talked about political correctness and how this has made it harder in some ways to collaborate cross-culturally, as we are afraid of offending others. The guest speaker who wrote about Indonesian history made me rethink my hesitations about doing this myself. Her thorough research and personal experience in the culture made her work come from a place of respect rather than appropriation. Taking away the fear of being wrong in my writing made me able to admit my ignorance of other cultures, and know that it is okay not to know everything because I am willing to learn. The readings from the semester were able to discuss other cultures truthfully without being disrespectful. I think this has set an example for me of how to write about other cultures in a way that is not overly pc, nor offensive, but instead informative and sincere. A large part of the course involved interviewing others and using this to write a creative piece. In my first interview, my questions were very brief and didn’t dig too deep into the subject. This lead to a lack of inspiration for a creative piece, so I knew I had to push my boundaries and ask questions that might make me feel uncomfortable. My second interview was with a partner who right from the start had no boundaries, so this made it easy to follow his lead and look at the interview from a creative perspective. This leads me to write a short piece that I was proud of. When it came to interviewing our Hong Kong collaborators, I had no idea what to expect. When I got the first email from my partner I was relieved by her friendliness and enthusiasm. This made me comfortable in creating a friendship with her, and her initial openness made me write a number of personal questions. When we did the interview over Skype, there was some initial confusion about what we actually had to do. She had a different assignment brief to me so we were both approaching the interview differently. Asking the questions was harder than I thought, it felt awkward doing it over Skype because she couldn’t hear me very well. I also should of put more thought into writing clearer questions because they were a bit vague. My partner was really great in her answers and even sent me more thorough responses over facebook messenger. I found her answers really poetic without her really trying. She was such a deep thinker that instead of writing fiction, which I am more comfortable with, I decided to write a poem. I was surprised by my attachment to poetry this semester. I don’t usually like writing poetry and have little experience doing it. But with both of my out of class interview partners, I found their words to really stayed with me. Because they were both really reflective and smart people, I found their words suited to a poem. I was happy with being able to go out of my comfort zone by choosing this medium, which I did not think would have happened at the start of the semester. I think that my idea of habitus has opened up, as I am more willing to listen to others experiences and respectfully use them in my work. I am also feeling more confident in exploring ideas that appear complicated at first. Many of the readings from the semester I never would of read and thought about if it wasn’t for a class. However, my ability to understand and be influenced by them will hopefully remind me later on to not give up on concepts and ideas that are unfamiliar and difficult at first.