These Taboos You Might Not Know

When we talked about cultural awareness in communication, the first thought that jumped into my head was a joke. A few years ago, a well-known Finnish IT company celebrated the completion of one of their projects and gave each employee gifts and souvenirs which include a green hat. For a while, this green hat became a joke in our group of friends as one of my friends received it. Maybe you will think of what is wrong with the green hat, Luigi from Super Mario has a green hat since his birth. But for a Chinese, no matter man or woman will never accept a green hat as a gift. In China, it is a cultural taboo.

The same gift-giving taboo also includes giving clocks, knives, chrysanthemums, etc. Here I will briefly tell the implication of ”green hat” and ”clock”. When people do business with the Chinese, they should pay special attention to it.

Green hat in Chinese means cuckold. It is an allusion from passed down Chinese traditional stories. Today it mostly implies that one partner has an affair with other people, and the other partner is said to be cucked or be greened in Chinese.

Give a clock in the Chinese language have the same pronunciation as bury a parent or attend a funeral. It is seen as bad luck and a curse to the other if you give someone a clock.

In addition to the above, numbers are also something sensitive no matter in daily life or business. For example, because homophony and death are the same, many people think that number 4 is not auspicious. Conversely, the homophony of 8 is a fortune. It is a symbol of wealth, power, and good luck. No wonder the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games was set to 8 p.m. on August 8th, 2008.