su & hao

I’ve been working for one and half years. The department I’m in is called Marcoms which means marketing & communications. I don’t do marketing, I do the communications bit, but I don’t communicate very well. Talking, especially, misrepresents me. I often set out with one intention in mind, but the words, as they travel and form would twist and mutate. When they emerge, I listen to them as if they were spoken from somebody else’s mouth, with somebody else’s tone. They must be somebody else’s thoughts! It’s quite annoying.

Blessing or not, humans rely on much more than words in face-to-face communication. There is tone of voice, there is body language and there is shared knowledge. So the answer ‘no’ to the question ‘should we leave now?’, if said with much enthusiasm and a happily nodding head at a hopelessly boring party could only mean… yes.

The intricacies of such are very interesting and can be fun to think about. They are also very complex. So unless you’re studying sociolinguistics, overspeculating is paranoia.

In another realm of communication, there is writing which encompasses letters, emails, smses, etc. I like that writing can be executed with more thought and preparation but nonetheless, when I reread old emails and stuff, it is often that I think they could have been better understood if written this way or that.

Somewhere along the timeline of civilisation, the term ‘two-way communication’ was coined and seems to suggest that for communication to be successful, there is only one way to go… which is er… two-way. I imagine two people setting out from different ends of a labyrinth. They would never meet if they are moving away from each other despite given tools to communicate. They would also never meet if one party had not entered the labyrinth at all, but how nice it should be to meet someone inside.

I recently watched an interview of Hong Kong actor 黄子华 who’s known for dating women much younger than him. He was asked if communication was always a problem in his relationships because of the generation gap. He paused for a while then very slowly and seriously replied, “我到现在为止没有碰过一个人，跟我在沟通上是完全没有问题的。无论是男或女。” How interesting and smart of him (or his PR person). Well, he might have had the questions to prepare himself before the interview but … I wouldn’t have thought of saying that anyway. And in a sense isn’t it so true, for everyone?

I aim to be convincing in what I want to communicate. To inspire what I believe and detract what I do not. I think I will get better with time and practise…

So I should expect to be a very eloquent old lady.
















艺术家把两个字放到墙壁上。让读者感动的却是读者自己让自己看到的。很妙。