I struggled the most with the middle panel with lots of relationships. I’m not sure if it’s clear, but those are in order from closest to farthest. What you see is a small sample of my various relations. I caught myself planning to draw the whole family tree, and stopped. I think what I have can be improved for clarity, but it serves for now. Jono says it’s time for me to break out of the 1-page limit. What do you think?
Notes on relationship titles:
- There are 8 different relationship titles for “first cousin”, and uncles/aunts-in-law also have separate relationship titles depending on who they’re married to.
- These also extend to job titles. For example, taxi-drivers, cooks, and various craftsmen are 师傅. I don’t remember the one for venders. There’s also a whole structure of 书记 and 局长 type government titles, but those are super-confusing to me.
- Last time I was in Beijing, I discovered that 老师 (teacher) was being used to address administrative staff on college campuses, and I was pretty miffed — it felt like the title of “teacher” was being cheapened.
- The generational respect is pretty strong. Even now, I feel uncomfortable addressing friends’ parents by first name, which makes me seem formal and aloof in America.
- Being able to claim a closer relationship is related to your “connections”. For example, being able to call the Deputy Director of something “Big bro” is indicative of a closer relationship, and hence, more mutual benefits because family are supposed to be there for each other. Even if it’s “family”.
Argh, I still hate Chinese relationship names… I understand why they’re valuable and important, but they’re so hard for me to remember!
I love the last panel with happy Ms. Xia teaching the kids about Stalin and Lenin.
This comic does feel a little compressed, and I would have liked to see the more-than-one-page-long version. But it does convery its message pretty clearly.
Americans are kinda notorious for first-naming right outta the gate. It makes it rather diffcult to get a good idea of the organizational structure of a place. (Always fun when trying to sort out the members of an interview committee…)
When I was younger, I also struggled with what to call friends’ parents. Becca’s dad was Mr. H, which was a good compromise on formality/familiarity. Nina’s students call her Mrs. S.
I’d say it’s pretty common in California that American kids call their friends’ parents by first name, but not at all universal. It varies a lot by region. In Wisconsin, almost all kids used first names, or possibly title plus first letter of the last name (“Dr. O”) with their friends’ parents, but I was super uncomfortable about it, because that’s not how my parents had taught me to address adults. My parents are both from St. Louis, which is basically southern in this regard, and the whole region tends to be stricter about intergenerational respect. It caused some awkwardness when I was a kid. The same way that lack of formality can cause offense, overformality can cause offense too, and it could lead to somewhat comical situations in which parents were repeatingly correcting me, saying “No, no, Pren, call me Shirley, don’t call me ‘Mrs. Dettman.”