Social Grace and Cultural Sensitivity – East Meets West

Nothing makes a mother prouder than seeing a daughter growing up nicely from an immature, rebellious, selfish American youth into a mature, understanding and culturally aware world-class citizen.

My daughter Kristin did not much care for the Chinese side of her heritage as a child living in a small town in upstate New York, despite my best effort. But after she entered into Cornell University down a few blocks from where we are to study social sciences, things have changed: She has not only opened her mind to the intellectual learning of a great college, but also embraced the diversity and her own Chinese ethnicity in full force.

For this summer, through some personal contact, she found herself a counselor’s job with a bi-lingual summer camp in the city of DaLian, in northern LiaoNing Province. She is spending a total of 2 months in China, touring Eastern cities and teaching English to little kids ranging in ages from 7 to 12. This is her first trip abroad alone, not as a tourist, but as a cultural ethnographer (sort of).

I’m all in favor of her adventure into my homeland, getting to know my people and their ways of life (although I myself have only seen China for the first time last year.) My secret hope was that she might learn to appreciate the struggles of her mother adapting to America in her earlier years coming from Taiwan, much like China today.

We are in constant touch with each other, and I am writing down what she sees and hears, and the change of her perceptions of China and Chinese people for all to share.

Susie Li
7/25/2007

Social Grace

“How is it possible for such an ancient people as Chinese to degenerate to such a state of ugliness - crass, noisy, uncivilized, uncooperative, boastful, dirty, unforgiving? Not only have we been bullied by foreigners; we’ve been bullied by our own kind – from tyrannical emperors to corrupt officials and ruthless mobs.” So said Bo Yang, the satirical Taiwanese writer, in the 70s.

You would think things have improved now that China is fast forwarding to the 21st century. Not quite. Even in many of China’s most modern cities, Kristin has noticed the lack of basic etiquette and prevalence of disgusting old habits. With the 2008 Olympic just around the corner, these may be the very behavior that Westerners who come to visit would use to define China (how about barbaric, for example):

Kristin was prepared for people spitting; but SPITTING IN PEOPLE’S FACE? Oh please, that is rude!

Her Chinese acquaintances are not shy from picking their noses or picking the dead skin off their feet in public.

No one lines up for anything in China. No one respects law, and perhaps, there are no laws.

Chinese love money. While they have it, they’ll flaunt it, quite crudely. Unfortunately, there are a lot of newly rich Chinese who have not learned the virtue of modesty…

There are one billion Chinese in China. It is competitive out there. People will lie, cheat, or cut corners to gain every bit of advantage over others. What you get are street fights, car crashes and mob scenes.

Education of the Young

Kristin suffers from the consequence of China’s one child policy: She has one class of 6-7 years old kindergarteners under her charge. Most of them are boys; a lot are brought up by their grannies (who do the spoiling) while parents are working; and all of them are spoiled and undisciplined. Her experience has firmed up her own belief, “Two is better than one.”

The conservative Confucianism discourages independent thinking and encourages fear of authority. Chinese parents demand homework and progress everyday from schools for their kids. By the time the kids graduated from schools, they have been molded into robots, capable of only studying and surviving exams – no creativity, no questioning the authority, no free will, no social skills.

“No wonder those Chinese students at Cornell seemed so boring,” Kristin remarked.

“What else could they do? They were not comfortable with English. They were at least good for going to the library!” I replied.

Cultural Sensitivity

I told Kristin that China is going through the growing pain: thrusting first from an agrarian society into Communism where everyone lost everything, everyone was poor; then thrusting again into capitalism. There may be enough time for economic adjustment, but hardly enough time for mental adjustment. It will take some more time (30 more years?) and many citizens traveling overseas to bring home societal changes.

She assured me that she is adapting well and enjoys her new friendships and surroundings in DaLian. She is equally at ease living in the downscale hostels in Beijing Hutong as using the squat-down toilets (It is more sanitary according to her.) In her calculating mind, she is already planning for next year back in China for a longer stay, more cities, more learning, and better Mandarin Chinese.

Writing and A Speech

I’m human like all other Chinese immigrants, except I am a better writer. Like others, I came to America with just enough English to get by. But over the past 10 years, through small steps I have undertaken to better myself as a writer, and continuous improvement and persistence, I have attained a certain level of proficiency and confidence in my writing. I am no genius. If I can write elegantly, so can my fellow Chinese, in English even.

I was invited to give a speech at my local Toastmaster Club recently. Before, I sat down and quickly drafted a script titled, “The 1% Solution”, which meant to be motivational. The speech went well, not super spectacular. (Hey, at least I delivered my speech without the crutch of the ubiquitous Powerpoint.)

However, the speech evaluator gave me a fine pointer: “Susie, you gave good examples. But you ought to add your personal experiences to the examples. That would make the speech more effective, more human.”

So, what would be my own experience that I have successfully applied “the 1% solution” to? It must be my writing. Writing is something I know about, that I have worked very hard at (still continuously), and my loyal companion through the early years of boredom, loneliness and solitude. It all began with a simple passion for learning, whether about my newly adopted country, its people, or its art and culture and literature. I write only when I am inspired, or when I have this hidden life inside me blazing to come out. As far as style is concerned, I am not a prolific writer, but a constant gardener. Beautiful language motivates me to write, as I read the following passage from W. Somerset Maugham:


“We went along very slowly. and the sound of the paddle in the water was the only sound that broke the silence. It was delightful to think that I had all those hours before me to enjoy the sense of well being, and I thought to myself how, when I was once more in Europe, imprisoned in stony cities, I would remember that perfect night and the enchanting solitude. It would be the most imperishable of my memories. It was a unique occasion, and I said to myself that I must hoard the moments as they passed.”

- in Maugham’s “The Gentleman in the Parlour” (1930): near City Hue, on the Huong River in Vietnam.

So here is my revised speech, including a piece of my writing life.

Susie
July 10, 2007

The 1% solution

I believe in the 1% solution. Say, you have a big ambition, whatever it is - to lose weight, to be a better communicator, to improve on customer service, to improve on your kids’ test scores. To improve what you do by 20% sounds very hard, if not impossible.

People talk about breakthrough solutions, silver bullet kind of thing. The reality is more like the Toyota way: You get 1% improvement with each improvement cycle; you’ll get 20% improvement by going through 20 improvement cycles, not by finding one 20% solution.

Let me give you some examples:

(1) Michael Bloomberg is famous for being an effective, pragmatic city manager of the great New York City. What he does best is to break down big problems into little ones, and hold people accountable for solving each of the little problems. Over the years, he managed to ban smoking in bars, take over the broken school system and put it on track, and make a name for himself.

(2) I like writing. For some people, writing is cathartic, therapeutic to the wounded soul - You essentially write away your sorrows. For others, writing reinforces the positive experiences, even improves on them to make them sharper, more shapely and memorable, such as my reminiscences about my recent meeting with my high school friends from long ago. For me, writing is for both.

I started out small, by writing diaries. I AM a string of my memories. Life is rather empty and uninteresting without memories. But memories are fleeting, so I took notes. If I didn’t take notes, I won’t remember how I lived, how I did, how I thought, good things and bad things that happened to me, in my life. I would be nothing without my memories. The other day, my dear friend Agnes gave me a golden advice that I was compelled to write down lest I should forget, “Some Buddhist teachings urge women to renounce themselves to become men creatures. Why? Is it chauvinism? I think not. In the Buddha’s time, men had careers and fulfilled lives out of their homes, but women didn’t.”

Recreating memories is interesting – It can be an act of imagining, which fuels my writing. The more I remember to write things down, the more it’s about me the writer, and not necessarily about the reality. For example, my first love may have never existed; but in the back of my mind, I believe it did, and it became more beautiful than life.

Imagine this: You ran into someone on the train. Suddenly you remember that she was your high-school crush. You had only one kiss with her, and that was it. Now you remember back, and that one last kiss was sweeter than never, romantic as hell.

I can give you thousands of reasons why I write and how I would like to write, but it all started small: a passion, reading, observing, note-taking, diary-writing, and last but not least, years and years of persistent practicing.

(3) Merrill Vargo, who is the consultant of the Springboard Schools, talks about what she advises schools to do to raise their kids’ test scores. Vargo says, there is no single solution for improving a school's performance, but a lot of little ones.

The problem with the test score may be: A lot of kids in elementary schools these days don’t have English; they go to school hungry. So what do you do: You give the English vocabulary-building classes; you serve snacks before tests; you send books home for parents to read to their children. These are the 1% solutions. They do not require you to fire all the teachers, or reconstitute the school administrations.

Sometimes all schools have to do is simply to reprioritize. Life is full of trade-offs. If you've got a student body that is struggling to learn English, their lives depend on their getting good at that. And if you need to walk away from the music classes, the art classes, to have the English classes, you may need to do that. That's not the best of all possible worlds, but that may be the best choice in the real world. It sounds awful. But it’s pragmatic.

We are not starting from scratch; we are starting from where we are.

So, if you want to be a better reader, a better writer, or a better communicator someday, you start by doing small projects, practicing it, and sticking to it. Over a period of time, you learn the tricks of the trade, the mistakes to avoid, and your strengths and weaknesses. You keep tinkering with your work until you get what works best for you and your audience.

But don’t just talk about it. Get up and do it.