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MALE-FEMALE RELATIONSHIPS ACROSS CULTURES...
Silence
Finally, the two self-construal types also differ in their concept of silence. In the
context of independent construal, silence is associated with a sense of failure:
being taciturn and reserved, detached and cold, or passive. It can egually
trigger suspicion and menace, make one feel insecure, embarrassed, awkward
or inferior.“ In contrast, for interdependent construal, which is affected by
Confucianism and Zen, silence is the embodiment of sensitivity, intuition,
communicating mind-to-mind, empathy, tact, maturity, a means of preserving
harmony and understanding meanings which “can be sensed but not phrased.”
ANALYSIS
Inorder to capture the inner tension Mary/Yu-Rhee, the main protagonist of Ann
K. Choi’s novel Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety,*° experiences as a diasporic Korean¬
Canadian, the following analysis will investigate how the aforementioned six
factors are manifest in her behavior, and how these are indicative of independent
or interdependent self-construal. For the sake of brevity, only a limited number
of examples will be presented, but which will nevertheless demonstrate Mary/
Yu-Rhee’s cultural confusion and the resulting problems in the context of
male-female relationships.
Self-disclosure
Like her Canadian peers, Mary/Yu-Rhee believes in women’s free will to
adopt a lifestyle of their own preference and choose their partner accordingly:
“The three of us [Mary/Yu-Rhee, Rubina and Linda] swore we'd never allow
our parents to decide how we‘ live our lives and, above all, whom we would
marry.””” When Mary/Yu-Rhee’s parents express their partiality towards Joon¬
Ho, a young student from Korea, whom they already envision as her fiancé, she
becomes suspicious and perceives this act as her parents’ intention to make the
choice for her: “the more my parents praised him, the less attractive he became
— which was too bad because I had been thinking more and more about him.””8
When, towards the end of the novel Mary/Yu-Rhee’s mother dies in the
fire at the convenience store, she blames herself, and believes that if she had
not spurned Joon-Ho, her spouse-to-be in an arranged marriage, the incident
Kim, Non-Western Perspectives on Human Communication, 132.
> Ibid., 135-137.
26 Ann Y. K. Choi, Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety, Toronto, Simon and Schuster Canada, 2016.
27 Choi, Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety, 24.
°8 Choi, Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety, 107.
* 163 +