Conflict of Culture
文化的不同 － 师节的冲突
Understanding local knowledge is a must when moving country or even moving to another city in the same country. It's one thing for me to say, moving between two countries both of which share the same language, culture, "special relationship" and hell, even two current wars. But how can you begin to grasp it when you move half way around the world from an Asian country to an American superpower? Where the language, mentality and social relationships of people are completely different, how can you truly understand local knowledge?
In my lab, the postdocs, the PhD students, the PIs are a representation demographic of the world's fastest developing nations - China, India and Poland and to a lesser extent Japan. They come in search of a publication or two, some maybe want to stay on to do further research and write their own grants, some want to go back home after a year. They all arrived in the US within the last twenty years and spent their developmental years in separate cultures and countries.
Our lab collaborates and talks and jokes and we all work in a friendly atmosphere most of the time. But dig a bit deeper and you realize the simmering petite tensions between everyone and the lines are drawn neatly between people from each nation. Every now and then a couple of people will make a vague lewd remark in their own language about a third party standing right next to them and laugh out loud and that foreign party won't have the faintest idea what just befell them. Had they heard it in English they would surely punch back at them that instant.
Today, there was a flash point in the office, when someone accidentally saw another person's complaint in an e-mail (written in English and stupidly left open on a shared computer) about their misuse of an animal order - I'm not going into details and to be frank, I don't know and don't care. This e-mail accusation, supposed to be kept private, hit them hard and they just let go in an out pour of anger on the perpetrator, who, you guessed it, is a visiting postdoc from another country for just a year. Their argument carried on for some time and eventually led the two of them back to the bench where they continued a shouting match of "I think you're stupid!", "No, I think you're stupid, yes you are!" across opposite sides of a shelf and ended in one person turning off the others' vacuum pumps while the other was in the middle of an experiment. All very immature and unprofessional, when you consider those involved were two MIDDLE-AGED WELL-ADJUSTED CAREER WOMEN.
Until you consider the deeper context that the two adversaries are from fundamentally different countries with different thinkings - one from an Asian country where the rule is to hold in frustrations to yourself, or to e-mail them to your local iron-fist councilman and the other hails from a former dictatorship who emigrated to the US twenty years ago and is not afraid of voicing their discontent with fire and wrath. For people like this to sort out their grievance, they would need to step over cultural differences, or else undergo another Cultural Revolution. But sometimes as a visitor to a foreign culture, you just can't do anything.
In my lab, the postdocs, the PhD students, the PIs are a representation demographic of the world's fastest developing nations - China, India and Poland and to a lesser extent Japan. They come in search of a publication or two, some maybe want to stay on to do further research and write their own grants, some want to go back home after a year. They all arrived in the US within the last twenty years and spent their developmental years in separate cultures and countries.
Our lab collaborates and talks and jokes and we all work in a friendly atmosphere most of the time. But dig a bit deeper and you realize the simmering petite tensions between everyone and the lines are drawn neatly between people from each nation. Every now and then a couple of people will make a vague lewd remark in their own language about a third party standing right next to them and laugh out loud and that foreign party won't have the faintest idea what just befell them. Had they heard it in English they would surely punch back at them that instant.
Today, there was a flash point in the office, when someone accidentally saw another person's complaint in an e-mail (written in English and stupidly left open on a shared computer) about their misuse of an animal order - I'm not going into details and to be frank, I don't know and don't care. This e-mail accusation, supposed to be kept private, hit them hard and they just let go in an out pour of anger on the perpetrator, who, you guessed it, is a visiting postdoc from another country for just a year. Their argument carried on for some time and eventually led the two of them back to the bench where they continued a shouting match of "I think you're stupid!", "No, I think you're stupid, yes you are!" across opposite sides of a shelf and ended in one person turning off the others' vacuum pumps while the other was in the middle of an experiment. All very immature and unprofessional, when you consider those involved were two MIDDLE-AGED WELL-ADJUSTED CAREER WOMEN.
Until you consider the deeper context that the two adversaries are from fundamentally different countries with different thinkings - one from an Asian country where the rule is to hold in frustrations to yourself, or to e-mail them to your local iron-fist councilman and the other hails from a former dictatorship who emigrated to the US twenty years ago and is not afraid of voicing their discontent with fire and wrath. For people like this to sort out their grievance, they would need to step over cultural differences, or else undergo another Cultural Revolution. But sometimes as a visitor to a foreign culture, you just can't do anything.
posted by Lost in Americana at 4:28 am
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