Death and the depths of emotion
One odd thing about the highly 'psychologised' westerner is that he or she continues to be so influenced by Freud, while psychology professors can go through their entire career without giving him a passing thought. Take the standard western way to grieve, for example. This is in the news because of Pope John Paul II's passing: we saw plenty of people weeping and hugging in St Peter's Square, on TV. The popular view is that one should not avoid the pain of loss; the more you block it out, the worse it will be later. Freud called it the 'work of mourning'.
The hook here - a particular favourite of Freud's and one that has left an indelible mark on the western mind - is the metaphor of hydraulics: the human being as a steam engine. It just feels so instinctively right to the western mind to think of grief as bursting to get out and, if bottled up, libel to explode at some improper time or place.
A whole industry on the periphery of psychology uses this hydraulic image as its main premise. You can replace grief in a counselling client with most any emotion - anger, frustration, regret disappointment, pride or guilt - and the 'letting off steam' parallel works.
The typical Chinese tends to see expressing intense, negative emotions as shameful. His or her metaphor of choice is the human being as a holistic system - hence, the high incidence of somatic symptoms among the bereaved in Hong Kong. From the hydraulic angle, expressing your emotions will make you feel better; from the organic one, it can make you ill.
This does not mean that Chinese do not show grief. It is just that it is more rigidly channelled into specific times and in ritualised forms. Chinese practices are aimed at honouring and comforting the deceased, continuing a relationship with him or her on the way towards the spiritual realm. Typical western mourning, religious beliefs notwithstanding, is all about mastering one's sense of abandonment and accepting the finality of loss. Another chief contrast between some mainland attitudes and average American ones is the relative relevance of the death of a child. In the US, losing a child is widely regarded as the hardest grief to bear. Because of the cushioning effect of extended Chinese families and the significance of filial piety towards one's ancestors, the death of a Chinese child probably does not have that uniqueness.
Intense Chinese grieving rituals and (from a western point of view, psychosomatic) reports of poor health - interspersed with what looks like 'grief avoidance' - seem to be a fairly effective recipe for rapid recovery. In the US, there are plenty of resilient people who 'automatically' alternate deep mourning with distracting emotional experiences. Another typical pattern, though, is having few collective grieving opportunities, prolonged rumination and slower recovery. Much of this depends on what an individual is like and his or her circumstances - but those factors have less impact in the Chinese collective cocoon.
I will avoid coming to the fashionable conclusion that collectivism is the social vaccination against all ills. But westerners would do better to drop the over-simple hydraulic metaphor. A more contemporary perspective might be to look at grieving as a process of reconstruction, which requires the active engagement, and at times detachment, of the bereaved and those in his or her immediate circle.
Broadly speaking, people are stuck in their ways. Social healing and continued connection with the deceased seem to be the Chinese way of coping with death. Westerners choose to confront emotions and face the 'fact' of an immutable end.
Jean Nicol is a psychologist specialising in issues of cultural identity and change in an era of globalisation
