Lost meanings in cultural contact: Stories from Chinese students’ outdoor recreation

“Pretty mountains, pretty rivers, pretty boring”. New Zealand may be famous for its outdoor beauty, but this quote sums up a key problem that Chinese students face: New Zealanders don’t tell the stories behind our outdoor culture. As countries turn an eye to opening post-Covid, New Zealand could risk missing out on attracting international students back unless more effort is put into showing what the outdoors means in a Kiwi context.   

Academic Kiko Qin’s research centres around enhancing cultural understanding by studying cultural differences within the context of leisure study. Her current research focuses on undergraduate and postgraduate Chinese students’ outdoor recreation experiences, which could provide practical insight for organisations interested in the international students’ market.  

Experiencing local culture is a huge draw for international students when choosing where to study. In New Zealand, outdoor recreation has become one of the popular options for international students wanting to “taste” Kiwi culture, mostly because of the tourism campaigns around it and the massive involvement from the host society.  

For example, if you visit the 100% Pure New Zealand tourism website, the photos on the front page reflect an impression of “outdoors”. You can see people walking on mountain paths, rafting in rivers, fishing on boats, or biking along tracks. There’s even a shot of a bathtub installed outside.  

Images - such as this one taken in Fiordland - encompass part of outdoor recreation within a New Zealand context. Image: Tourism NZ

But the challenging thing is most outdoor recreation happens in public spaces which are used more for recreation than as cultural delivery sites. This means while locals might have an emotional attachment to an outdoor place, it is a mere physical landscape to newcomers. In this human-place contact, places lack the ability to explain themselves. 

Outdoor recreation also exists in different cultural layers for locals and Chinese students. Locals regard outdoor recreation and settings as part of their lives, which are in what’s called the implicit assumptions layer of culture: for locals, outdoor recreation doesn’t need much context to be understood. The phrase “outdoor recreation” has an embedded local meaning to Kiwis and they understand things like the equipment and skills needed, and any physical requirements.  

But it’s a totally different story for Chinese students.  

To them, outdoor recreation in New Zealand is a new cultural experience, which requires a high context background to understand. China has a different landscape and cultural tradition from New Zealand and what Kiwis assume is “common” is not necessarily coded in Chinese students’ cultural system.  

Of course, they understand how common outdoor recreation is as a leisure option. But it is the particularity in outdoor recreation that is difficult to process. This different thinking towards outdoor recreation creates an asymmetric communication scenario that causes Chinese students to generate their own version of outdoor recreation in New Zealand: “pretty mountain, pretty river, pretty boring,” as one participant summed up. 

Chinese students admire the natural beauty of New Zealand.  

There were sparkles in their eyes when they described the beauty of nature to me. The breath-taking pink clouds, the dark sky decorated with millions of twinkle stars, and the trees in different shapes all over the place. 

"Pretty mountains, pretty rivers, pretty boring" is how one student summed up New Zealand. Image: Tyler Lastovich/Unsplash

But they also felt confused: “Is that all?”  

Are these mountains, rivers, and birds themselves the only way this idea of ‘outdoor’ represents New Zealand? Or are there more local meanings embedded in outdoor recreation? Like the Ayers Rock, which is not just a geological miracle but also holds ancient Aboriginal myths told under the name of The Uluru. What are the Kiwi stories behind their outdoor enthusiasm? These questions hover in outsiders’ heads without explanation from the host society. Eventually aesthetic fatigue is formed, and the outdoors is summarised as “boring”. 

What a pity the cultural meaning of nature is lost due to communication glitches. It is even sadder that when these students went home, “boring” is the way they described New Zealand. 

Let’s gear up to show them what Kiwi culture is. 

Let’s start to talk.  

It won’t be easy. Gerry Philipsen, Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of Washington, has suggested a concept called “the distinctiveness of speech codes”. It means each culture has a different speech code, or way of communicating, that is unfamiliar to outsiders. But he also hinted a way out of this distinctiveness, with the “three general cultural communication forms”: ritual, myth, and social drama.  

If we could find similarities across these three communication forms, we could find a shared foundation for communicating.  

By addressing the similarity between cultures, we can raise the resonance among different people, generating a foundation for cultural communication—for example, the story of Rākaihautū, the creator of the Lake Tekapo (or Takapō). In Māori myth, he uses his magic stick, the Kō, to dig up the lake.  

According to Māori myth, Lake Tekapo was dug up with a magic Kō - something academic Kiko Qin argues is similar to the idea of a magic wand, found in legends across different cultures. Image: Wikimedia Commons/Krzysztof Golik

This simple symbol of a magic stick can be observed across different cultural groups: Moses had one to separate the sea, and Harry Potter had one to defeat a man without a nose. In China, the Monkey King has one to defeat the evil.  

If we can integrate these kinds of cultural symbols into outdoor settings, it will improve the cultural communication ability of outdoor places and raise the awareness of local culture among outsiders.  

In the case of outdoor recreation, the current situation of cultural communication is a one-way pattern: differences are noticed -> they’re questioned -> but they remain unsolved. Students understand the beauty of Lake Tekapo but have many questions: What’s the church for? Why not a marae?  

Little of these questions have been solved or even noticed by locals. If we could add a cultural mediator to help communication between international students and outdoor places, this situation could be changed. A cultural mediator could be anyone from individuals such as classmates or homestay family members, to institutions like universities - or even statues and architecture which could deliver cultural elements intentionally or unintentionally. Utilising this role properly, we could generate a sustainable circle of Kiwi cultural experience as “noticed-questioned-informed-solved-accumulated-noticed”. 

The Church of the Good Shepherd on the shores of Lake Tekapo may look pretty, but poor communication about cultural significance means some visitors to New Zealand are missing out.

The importance of a cultural mediator was hinted at in my research as Chinese students addressed the influence from their homestay families, universities, and student clubs. Their main source for participating in outdoor recreation was field trips organised by these groups, which formed their impressions of local outdoor experiences.  

No matter whether these groups were aware or not, they played the role of cultural mediator. In this case, we should start to value the function of cultural mediators. Perhaps, we could start with increasing their cultural awareness of their habitat. 

Efficient communication has a two-way benefit. First, it could improve the local experience of international students. International students are not only an economic generator but also spread word of mouth regarding the image of New Zealand. Helping them to grasp the culture of New Zealand is a good way to spread a positive impression of Kiwis. It will become even important in a competitive post-Covid environment.  

Second, it is a cultural reflection for the local community as well, because the cultural communicating process could also be a process for locals to enhance their cognition of Kiwi identity.  

- Asia Media Centre