Recalling a Speech Event

After learning about speech events, I thought I’d share about my experience when I went to Texas:

Going to Texas to visit my relative was a huge culture shock for me, simply because I wasn’t used to the overt friendliness of everyone there. I think what contributed to this extreme friendliness was the fact that it was a small town that my aunt stayed in, only a population of about 3000 people. What surprised me and my cousins the most was the fact that when we went into shops, everyone (I’m not kidding—everyone) greeted us in an extremely friendly manner. They’d say things like “Hi! How’re you today?” or “Hi there! How’s things going” which really caught us off guard. You just don’t find people like this in Singapore! The first few times, we didn’t really know how to respond to them, because we just weren’t used to it, so we employed a strategy of smiling and giving generic answers of “Oh I’m fine, thanks”, but didn’t really reply or engage in a conversation with them. It took us awhile to get accustomed to such friendliness and thereafter, we loosened up and started to converse more with the salespeople. The salespeople there were genuinely interested in helping and getting to know us, especially since we were 4 Asians from a country they had never been to. Friendliness seems to be a part of their culture, particularly in that town where everyone sort of knew each other. The customers that I observed actually welcomed the help and advice/suggestions of the salespeople, while in Singapore I suspect a lot of us would be quite annoyed with a salesperson hovering over our shoulders.

That was in 2004, before I ever learnt anything about speech acts or gave much thought to how different cultures beget different rules and norms.

Now, looking back, I can see that the first few times I encountered these Texan salespeople, I must have violated some culturally implicit rule by not replying equally cheerfully and instead attempting to maintain the distance of customer-salesperson. To them, I must have seemed quite (in Singapore Colloquial English terms) ‘dao’. However, I soon got used to their way of interaction and, because I was a minority, I think I started to change the way I would behave to suit the majority. As such the rules for interaction in Texas would probably have been being friendly, keeping a smile on one's face, while doing the converse would have been considered rude or impolite.

Comparing my experience there with Singapore, I can see that the values of a society lead to different interactional norms and rules. However, I wouldn’t say this is a truism for all of the service industry in Singapore, because some of the smaller retail outlets/restaurants are actually very much inclined towards getting to know their customers rather than selling as much as they can. Still, a large majority of Singapore seem to behave in this manner.