One of the meanings of friendship.
Friendship is one of important aspects in everyone's life. Just imagine for a while what would happen if we do not have friends for the rest of our life? To live without friends as companion must be tough and difficult. As relationships develop an intimacy, friends share more personal and private information (Martin & Nakayama, 2012, p. 395). Most people have friends from different backgrounds, races, religions, and others because nowadays we are living in a very diverse community. The value of friendship for each group or society is also different depending on cultural contextual.
We have friends from different background, ethnicity, religion, sex, and race.
I have a great friend named Kee Hee. Even though we have a lot of differences, we could get along very well until now. Both of us come from different ethnicity and region. My race is Malay while she is a Chinese. The Malays are the race of people who inhibit the Peninsular Malaysia and portions of adjacent islands of Southeast Asia, including the east coast of Sumatra, the coast of Borneo, and smaller islands that lie between these areas (Zain, 2012). People could tell our differences just by looking at our physical appearances and skin colors. She has a very fair skin while I am a little bit tan. One of dialectical tensions experienced by both of us is privileged-disadvantage dialectic. Because she is a Chinese, she could speak Mandarin very well. When I hang out together with her friends, I always feel inferior because I could not understand what they are talking about. Luckily, she is willing to translate them into English so that I could understand their conversation. People may be simultaneously privileged and disadvantaged, or privileged in some contexts and disadvantaged in other (Martin & Nakayama, 2012, p. 391).
My close friend, Kee Hee is a Chinese.
We both also have different personalities and interests. My major is psychology while she is majoring in political science. I like reading and observing so I decided to major in psychology. She likes politic very much that she always talking about it every time we meet each other. Even though I am not really interested in politics, I do gain a lot of updates about politic from her. Because we both are majoring in different areas, we always have many ideas and thoughts to be shared together. We share a lot of things including personal problems and secrets. I have to agree that self-disclosure is what brings us closer from day to day. Self-disclosure is revealing information about oneself (Martin & Nakayama, 2012, p. 399). Currently we are separating for a while because she chose to study in Illinois. But we do keep in touch through Facebook and sometimes we make video call through Skype to maintain our friendship.
References
Zain, S. (2012). A history of Malay Peninsula. [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.sabrizain.org/malaya/malays.htm
I was just wondering if you found it easier to be friends with her, than it is with someone who is completely different, such as any friends you have who are white or American. Does that make a difference?
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