Don't adapt. Best part of the US for me is all the other cultures living in it. Pho soup, Ethiopian pancakes, Burmese cuisine. Please don't adapt.
Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
11–20 of 121 posts
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#12My GF works with foreign students at ASU. From what I gather there (but it might be a particularity of such large university) if you speak mandarin or cantonese, you will have staff support in your own langage to help with integration, and thousands of events every year planned to mix with other people. It should be noted that Americans tend to shun the foreign student events, but at least you'll mingle with people form other countries, and English and American cultures will be your common ground.
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#13"Confucian behaviorism is optimized for a Confucian society, and western behaviorism is optimized for western society." This is so true. Speaking Chinese/Japanese on a daily basis and regularly interacting with these two cultures, I would regularly encounter such differences. In Japan, if you speak Japanese well, eventually they stop forgiving you as "oh, he's just a foreigner", and they hold you to similar standards…
Chinese people will call you out very directly, maybe even embarrass you in front of people to the point where you are too shy to speak
I wonder if this is an inherent Chinese thing or a Maoist thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#14"Confucian behaviorism is optimized for a Confucian society, and western behaviorism is optimized for western society." This is so true. Speaking Chinese/Japanese on a daily basis and regularly interacting with these two cultures, I would regularly encounter such differences. In Japan, if you speak Japanese well, eventually they stop forgiving you as "oh, he's just a foreigner", and they hold you to similar standards…
"Japanese people will rarely call out any grammar/pronunciation error" & "In Japan, if you speak Japanese well, eventually they stop forgiving you as "oh, he's just a foreigner", and they hold you to similar standards."
There is also something else I notice: some people will decide they will not understand you because you look/are foreign no matter how hard you try or even if you don't make not many mistakes. There is a famous video about that[1] but this is not limited to Japan, I also saw it in France too with foreigners trying to speak French.
Also even in a cultural area there can be wide differences. Almost all Mandarin speakers I interact with (be they Taiwanese, mainlanders or huaqiao) seemed quite happy to talk their language with me. The Japanese not so much. I even sometimes hide my Japanese language ability and play it dumb to fit more in a group. And I plan not to expose a too great ability the day I got it unless necessary precisely too avoid being judged to harsh by the local standards.
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#15It strikes me as really odd that mocking Asians this way is acceptable, while almost any remark about black people can be interpreted as serious racism. In my opinion, people in the US are, without realizing it, very hypocritical and very stuck-up when it comes to racism. If your roommates joke that you will study all day, they are being really rude, but making fun at a cultural difference which is indeed very notica…
Humour can be used as a social prompt - someone on Tinder might make a joke about fashion if they want to make sure their date wears nice clothing, for example. It can also be used as a plausibly deniable way of telling someone you're worried about something - "I hope you're not a craigslist scammer" or "as long as my Christmas gift isn't socks or books".
I wonder if his roommates were attempting to give him some social cues about what kind of behaviour they wanted and/or trying to ease their own discomfort about living with someone from a different culture.
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#16As an aside, I find Quora much easier to read with a sans-serif font: https://imgur.com/jdu9fw4
I use the Stylish Chrome extension with this override for Quora to achieve this:
html,body,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,.box_feed,.box_feed div,p,.link.selected,blockquote {
font-family:"Tahoma", Sans-serif;
}
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#17[deleted]
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#18It strikes me as really odd that mocking Asians this way is acceptable, while almost any remark about black people can be interpreted as serious racism. In my opinion, people in the US are, without realizing it, very hypocritical and very stuck-up when it comes to racism. If your roommates joke that you will study all day, they are being really rude, but making fun at a cultural difference which is indeed very notica…
I think that points out the whole fallacy of PC culture: that Americans only will be ethnically thoughtful when being pressured into. For better or for worse, Asians get mocked simply because we are conditioned to deal with mockery with silence. I don't know whether we can just attribute that to Asians dealing with it well. But I definitely share your hopes that this quality will benefit us in the long run. One of my…
Isn't this just the perceived difference in source? i.e. mocking someone for what you believe is a positive character trait is generally seen as okay (the aforementioned "study a lot"). Another vein this happens in is with regards to Germans ("being precise").
I don't think you could say that there's a similar vein of humor with African-American culture that's developed, and that's principally historical: America's slave holding history is still an open-wound today, and its social concepts around African-Americans were widely based on making sure they were viewed as lesser.
EDIT: This isn't to say either is ultimately good. There's a pretty important difference between occasional good humor that transitions into something of more malevolent intent, but how people perceive them appropriateness very much matters.
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#19It strikes me as really odd that mocking Asians this way is acceptable, while almost any remark about black people can be interpreted as serious racism. In my opinion, people in the US are, without realizing it, very hypocritical and very stuck-up when it comes to racism. If your roommates joke that you will study all day, they are being really rude, but making fun at a cultural difference which is indeed very notica…
Humour can be used as a social prompt - someone on Tinder might make a joke about fashion if they want to make sure their date wears nice clothing, for example. It can also be used as a plausibly deniable way of telling someone you're worried about something - "I hope you're not a craigslist scammer" or "as long as my Christmas gift isn't socks or books". I wonder if his roommates were attempting to give him some soc…
Well, let's use the "Black Litmus Test" to see if it sounds more like stereotypical racism or just humor:
"In the group text, they joked that I would go out and play basketball all day, only listen to rap and hip hop, coming back late at night, and even joked that they should all move out because of me..."
Would this be an okay use of humor to ease their discomfort?
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that points out the whole fallacy of PC culture: that Americans only will be ethnically thoughtful when being pressured into. For better or for worse, Asians get mocked simply because we are conditioned to deal with mockery with silence. I don't know whether we can just attribute that to Asians dealing with it well. But I definitely share your hopes that this quality will benefit us in the long run. One of my…
Isn't this just the perceived difference in source? i.e. mocking someone for what you believe is a positive character trait is generally seen as okay (the aforementioned "study a lot"). Another vein this happens in is with regards to Germans ("being precise"). I don't think you could say that there's a similar vein of humor with African-American culture that's developed, and that's principally historical: America's s…
Very good point. I do think the hardships that the African-American community have endured are far more severe than the ones Asians in America have. But my people did endure their share of hardships as well; the first Chinese immigrants in San Francisco were used as slaves to build the railways, many working to their deaths on the tracks. The conditions were extreme, but I guess the scale was much smaller than the African-American slaves.