Unlike in the West, where a person wearing a smile would be most likely regarded as someone who is friendly, kind and can be trusted, people in China are traditionaly encouraged to be serious looking than to show a big smile to strangers. In popular literature, people who always wear a smile or smile "without a reason" may be depicted as being silly or even harbouring an ulterior motive.
It seems certain the Beijing Olympic volunteers will have "smile" as their key motto, although a global search for their slogan has yet to reveal its final result.
When the Beijing Olympic organizers began soliciting slogans for the Games’ volunteer programme, they had specifically asked for the winning entry to reflect the idea that "volunteers’ smiles are the best name card of Beijing," which is the slogan of the ongoing campaign in the Chinese capital that is urging residents to turn Beijing into a "city of smiles."
As a result, the words "smile" and "smiling" have found their way into thousands of the contributions that the organizers have received, including "I am your smile" from an oilfield worker and "smile while working and work while smiling" from a blind masseur.
Some local university students, who will form the backbone of the volunteers in 2008, have actually been organized to take training in flashing a smile to visitors, such as learning to "smile three metres away." But the students said that it needed a lot of practice to be able to smile three metres away with ease and calm, according to local media reports.
During a recent international softball game, student volunteers found their university had set up a special room for them to discuss their experiences after work, so they would be less stressed out and could smile from their hearts.
So why does the city need to make such an effort to get people to smile ?
Unlike in the West, where a person wearing a smile would be most likely regarded as someone who is friendly, kind and can be trusted, people in China are traditionaly encouraged to be serious looking than to show a big smile to strangers. In popular literature, people who always wear a smile or smile "without a reason" may be depicted as being silly or even harbouring an ulterior motive.
This can create problems when serious-looking Chinese persons meet more friendly foreign visitors.
A young US student in Beijing recalled that once during her first month in the city she bought some chestnuts at a campus grocery store. She thanked the seller with a smile because she had tasted one and she liked it very much. The man said something long in Chinese, without any facial expression. The young woman thought he was being angry, until somebody told her that the man was actually asking her to buy more if she liked it.
And because people didn’t smile back, she soon smiled only to those Chinese who looked friendly, she told local news media.
Will the smile campaign work for the Beijing Olympic volunteers?
One student leader from a local university said nowadays he would ask somebody to make observations during the morning, afternoon and evening while he and other students worked as volunteers. The purpose was to see if the student volunteers smiled or were expressionless.
"At first, I thought you might find it difficult to smile after you became tired. But later I realized if you don’t treat smiling as a work assignment, but as a something normal, you may find it very easy to smile all the time," he said.
I think he has just found out what the smile campaign should really be about.
