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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 KoreanCanadian, 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 JoonHo, 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 +
