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July 7, 2014

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Home » Opinion » Chinese Views

China-West cultural divide can rear head suddenly

By Yao Min-G | July 7, 2014, Monday | Print Edition

IT was 2am a few nights ago, and my friend Yuling called me and cried out for help on the phone. “Min-G, I pissed off my clients and they reported it to my boss,” she said, her voice slightly more confused than panicked. “But I don’t know how and why.”

Yuling works for a big consulting firm in the US, and she recently came to help with a project in Shanghai, which was her first step to consider whether she wants to “move back” to Shanghai.

It would be moving back only in the sense that she was carried in her mother’s womb to Los Angeles nearly 30 years ago, and had since only paid three-day or one-week short visits every five or so years to her extended family here.

Her parents made her go to Sunday Chinese school and to speak Chinese at home. Her Mandarin has a tiny accent and her Shanghainese is the same as my 80-year-old grandmother’s. The case was simple. She was to meet her clients at the airport and have a primary discussion about the project on a Friday evening. The flight was delayed for three hours, so they ended up arriving at almost 9pm.

“It wasn’t meant to be a formal meeting anyway, since we don’t have all the materials yet,” she explained to me. “It was kind of a routine meet-and-greet thing.” The clients, two middle-aged Chinese men of average build, looked exhausted so Yuling kindly offered an alternative plan. “Let’s leave the more detailed discussions to Monday, so you can have some good rest tonight.” The part she didn’t say to them was that “so we can all be more efficient,” she told me.

The two men seemed okay, but two hours later Yuling got a call from her boss, who just got a “kind inquiry” from the clients: “Is the consultant not familiar with Chinese work environment? Do you think she is the right person for this job?”

A case that went the opposite way took place only a few weeks earlier with my Chinese friend Elaine, who has been working for the Shanghai office of a global manufacturer for two years.

They had a new department head from the US who invited them to talk about any issues. “So I went,” she told me. “I’ve worked in a foreign company long enough to know something about American culture. I know I have to be more aggressive and I really want a pay raise.”

In order to get a pay raise, she told her boss, “I recently got an invitation from another company that offered me a salary that is higher than my current compensation. I wonder if you could give me some suggestions on my career planning.”

That strategy worked last time, when she worked with a Chinese team. Her new American boss, in China for her first job, went silent for a few seconds, and asked, “Are you saying you are going to quit?”

Almost 70 years ago, Chinese philosopher Feng Youlan (1895-1990) explained why it is so difficult for Western students to study Chinese philosophy, even when they have excellent Chinese language skills. “Chinese philosophers were accustomed to expressing themselves in the form of aphorisms, apothegms or allusions, and illustrations.”

Over the years, cultural and economic exchanges have rocketed the bilateral understanding to levels that Feng would not have anticipated, but the same issue that puzzled Western philosophy students is no less today when ordinary Westerners face their Chinese peers, who grew up reading, reciting and living these Chinese philosophers’ ideas.

And Chinese, many of whom learn about Western culture through movies, TV dramas and documentaries, are also still puzzled, and sometimes, like my friend Elaine, shocked by unexpected reactions and misunderstandings.

Chinese Views


 

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