It was never just a simple MCQ(multiple choice question), which answers are Attending, Maybe Attending or not. With historical evidence up to 200 years, RSVP is a popular form of events invitation in the Western community. However, as a Malaysian, I'm sad to say many Asians (Malaysian Chinese, which includes myself) don't exercise it, or not even what a RSVP is in the first place.
RSVP stands for Répondez S'il Vous Plaît in French, which means "Please Respond" in English. You might be questioning, so what makes RSVP so important that I need to write a post about it. Well, it's because in my opinion, RSVP combines a lot of good habits that the Western community practices that worth Asians to learn.
(Well, 因為我純粹想學學看用英文，我可以寫出什麼大便來，而且我的一些對象，是不會看中文的）
1. Simple - any place that can hold 4 words "RSVP" basically will be a medium for your invitation
2. Environmental Friendly - without a physical "invitation card" (you can simple sent 10000000's of RSVP in Facebook without using a single piece of paper)
3. Efficient
Even the reason of existence of RSVP have something for Asians to learn of. It existed to have a more accurate estimation of attendees, so that preparation of F&B and the flow of the event will be appropriate, reducing wastage to the minimum. A habit of Chinese is to always prepare as much as possible, wasting the food is better then loosing our face (ok la, loosing our dignity).
Another point is: there must be a reason supporting RSVP to exist until today. In my opinion, it still exist because people respected it, they add the word "IMMEDIATELY" behind "Please Respond" unconsciously whenever the see the mighty-4-word RSVP (OK, this is a super brainless Chinese-English direct translate, I apologize for my poor language). Whenever a RSVP was received, they treat it as an obligation to response immediately. Often after a few days, summing up the "Attending"s and the "Not Attending"s you can get the numbers of RSVP you sent initially. However, Asians normally reply only if they are "planning to attend" or when their best friend begins to feel angry about them not responding.
I think there's something to do about social influence. In Chinese society, people emphasized on the "number of attendees" of the event. The event can be boring, quality of service might be lower than average, as long as there's a lot of people involve in the event (我不懂怎麼解釋“華人注重大場面”). Therefore, inviting people to attend an event often become begging people to attend. For the Westerns, the number of attendees were normally limited, therefore people felt proud when the received an invitation (RSVP), because they knew they were exclusively invited and therefore they will reply RSVP as soon as possible.
This is a virtuous cycle: people feel satisfy about the event > follow rules of RSVP next time > the next event become more successful. Therefore my friend, please decide whether attending or not, make your decision and that's all you need to do.
RSVP, Please Do This Immediately
This article is generally a translation of my another blogpost "什麼是RSVP" and also as a practice
feel free (and i think you must really be very free) to correct my grammar mistakes and teach me how should I write
you can send me an email or just leave a comment here
AND
please stop laughing at my english
HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
