This really reminds me of this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769385
Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
101–110 of 121 posts
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#102"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…
Thanks for the read, Kenny! I can't imagine the constant transition between western, Chinese, then Japanese culture, though I'm sure it must be very rewarding to you through it all!
Thanks for the post as well. As you can imagine it takes a lot of effort, but is definitely very rewarding as you gain a lot of valuable world perspective. :)
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#103"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 i…
"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."
I have encountered this as well. It also happens more frequently from foreigners who have learned English (perhaps even better than your studying of language X) and they just don't want to talk to you in their language.
Fortunately, most people are not like this, and from my experience of both Japanese/Chinese people, they are very open to communicate with you in their language.
With the only exception being that you have to speak a bit more Chinese before English speaking Chinese people will agree to speak Chinese regularly with you, versus Japanese where they will speak Japanese to you from almost day one if you want. (which is a blessing and problem since you won't understand much) haha
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing odd or hard to understand about it. The rule for mockery or jokes in the US is generally "you don't punch down." No cop has ever flipped out and shot an unarmed Asian kid based on stereotypes about how hard asians study. There is no such thing as "driving while Asian." Asians make more money on average than even white people, they live longer, etc. They are well represented in higher academia and hig…
"unintegrated" is the key word. If a Chinese guy comes to America and walks the integration path, from just visiting, to being hyphenated, to eventually becoming mainstream American, there is no cultural stress or taboo against that from his own people because the Chinese culture is not going to run out of participants anytime soon. However black Americans have had the weird status of being majority in some states wi…
Can you be as specific as you can about what aspects of black culture you think need to be integrated away? What's the baseline culture you think they should be integrating towards?
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference in Japan is you can have zero accent and speak fluently and just by looks some Japanese will have some kind of mental block understanding and/or acknowledging your Japanese. Examples: I can call some business on the phone and people won't know I'm a foreigner. No accent. I've gotten in a cab late at night, talked to the driver for 10 minutes, and then had him freak out went he turned around to collect…
I share the same experience in Japan. Once a blue moon someone will just not be able to process a white face speaking Japanese. I think it's because languages are all about expectations. If some piece of information has primed me to hear one version of a homophone the other meanings never even pop into my head. I've noticed a related effect while watching videos on youtube recently. I'm a native British English speak…
As Bruce Willis said in Fifth Element, I only speak two languages, English and bad English. Yet I've had the funny experience of "translating" between Vietnamese English and Bosnian English.
But yeah, when native-born Anericans act like your English is unacceptable, they're being assholes.
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#106The main problem I've had with Chinese students is rampant cheating and lying, including with help from Chinese professors. I dated a Chinese girl in my PhD program for a bit and she showed me it all first hand, including a Chinese professor giving exams to his Chinese students ahead of time. She giggled about it and didn't see a problem; to her, it was just an easy way to get ahead.
During undergraduate, I participated in international competitions twice, both times with a Chinese girl on the team I led and who both times tried to collude with competing teams in China (who were colluding with each other) until I yelled at her to either stop or get out of the room and let the rest of the team finish without her.
I've seen this in two out of two institutions, and have had this confirmed by friends at other schools.
In the first big boy job I got, we hired a Chinese guy who ended up having lied on his resume about being able to code. At my last position, I've admonished the Chinese guy on my team at least once for copy pasting others' code into PRs without understanding it (which would never even occur to me to do because it is so obviously wrong), and have once caught flat out lying about having done something, apparently because he thought I wouldn't check his work.
All of these cases have been with people who went to high school or undergrad in China. The ones I've met who grew up here seem to be better about it.
So, personally, I look down on what I've seen of Chinese culture for this reason. Not people - culture; when I work with someone that grew up in China, I check for cheating and lies, because of what I've seen of the culture. With people that grew up outside China, I don't worry as much.
I expect I'll get a negative response to this, and I don't care. I'm criticizing a culture, not a race, and these are my life experiences with that culture. It's possible I've just had an extremely unlikely series of uncounters, but, tautologically, that is extremely unlikely.
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#107It 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…
Are you okay with being treated differently for being Asian though? I don't see how being silent to mockery helps us at all. Americans are well aware of how African-Americans feel about stereotypes and racially charged language, but can casually mock Asian-Americans because of the subservient attitude a lot of us display. Please don't just take mockery with silence, let people know how you feel because they won't know otherwise.
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#108The main problem I've had with Chinese students is rampant cheating and lying, including with help from Chinese professors. I dated a Chinese girl in my PhD program for a bit and she showed me it all first hand, including a Chinese professor giving exams to his Chinese students ahead of time. She giggled about it and didn't see a problem; to her, it was just an easy way to get ahead. During undergraduate, I participa…
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Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
That Asians don't encounter racism in the aspect of salary inequality is false. Yes, on average Asians earn more. However, once you control for education or examine individuals with the same qualifications, Asians actually earn less than whites.
Diminishing returns may play a role in this. To use extremes, if 1% of a population has a PHD then holding a PHD may be a proxy for other desired things. If 99% of a population has a PHD then it's less useful as a proxy. PS: On it's own a few years of post secondary education don't actually mean much, so a large chunk of the value is as a proxy.
Here's an article to support the claim that Asian-Americans are less represented in the executive /administrativelevels of a lot of companies/schools. http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21669595-asian-americ...
Re: Adapting to American culture as a Chinese student
#110The Japanese have the word Gaikokujin (Foreigner) but it doesn't really mean that. It really only applies to whites or blacks. If you're American of Oriental ancestry they dont really see you as gaikokujin. Also, you get treated way differently. I'm a Hispanic American so I mostly got the gaikokujin treatment but my friends of Chinese ancestry got something different when we were studying in Japan for 2 years.