2013 Chinese Speech Contest: 1st Place (Douglas Muhlestein)

Douglas Muhlestein of Harvard University won first place in the advanced category of the 3rd Annual University Chinese Bridge Speech Contest sponsored by the Confucius Institute at UMass Boston. He competed with 17 other finalists on March 23, 2013 with his speech "Between The Four Seas, All Men Are Brothers" and also read Chinese poetry. To learn more about the Confucius Institute, visit: http://www.umb.edu/confucius

The transcript for Muhlestein's full speech is below. (Note: only some of the speech is shown in this video):
Hello, my name is Douglas Muhlestein. I am a sophomore at Harvard University. My topic today is, "Between the four seas, all men are brothers." In 2010, I went to Taiwan to live there for two years. The moment I got off the airplane, I was surrounded by unfamiliar things. To me, the language, food, advertising, and traffic were all really weird. Even the air smelled funny. I asked someone in our organization, "What's that smell?" He responded, "That's Taiwan!" I really felt like I was Lost on Planet China.

I'll share some examples. The first time I tried to give a Taiwanese friend a gift, he rejected it. I was sad and angry. If he was my friend, why would he reject my gift? In America, accepting gifts is the most basic part of politeness. And every time I invited people to do something with me, if they didn't would to do it, they wouldn't just tell me no, but they would think up terrible excuses. It seemed like not a single person in that place would talk straight with me. Also, I saw a ton of families whose kids were never home. Because their parents sent them out to cram school, they never had any time to play with their parents. Is this kind of behavior really acceptable?

I still tried to make friends and understand the Taiwanese people, but I kept feeling like we were just fundamentally different, and there was no way to establish a relationship of mutual understanding.

After a while I met an older gentleman named Chen GuangHua. He is a retired congressman, and is extremely dignified and polite. I went over to his house all the time to read and hear his stories about the Taiwanese government. I met his wife, son, and grandchildren. He gradually taught me about Taiwanese culture. Yes, sometimes our ways of expressing politeness were different, and our cultures might have different traditions regarding the education of children, but these differences aren't what's important. Although sometimes Easterners' and Westerners' actions are opposite each other, they stem from the same basic desires. Regardless of whether or not we immediately accept gifts, or how much we emphasize children's education, we all want good friends and a happy family. Every culture has different ways of expressing these desires, but in our hearts, we're all the same. I'll be forever grateful to Chen GuangHua for helping me to understand these things. No matter what culture we're from, "between the four seas, all men are brothers."