Shortly before I moved to China, one of my Asia-savvy coworkers had given me a brief run-down of what he knew to be typical Chinese cultural attributes. One of these that he talked about was the general hesitancy among the Chinese to ask questions. “It’s an issue of face,” he explained. “Asking questions shows you don’t know something, and makes you lose face.” My later experiences and discussions would prove his impression to be generally accurate, but it turns out he only gave me part of the story. I later learned from my reading and from discussions with my Chinese colleagues that this particular manifestation of face (or miàn zi* in Mandarin) was drummed into Chinese students all throughout school. Students were actively discouraged from asking questions in class**. To ask a question of a teacher in class is a miàn zi double-whammie: The student loses miàn zi by indicating that he or she doesn’t know something, and also causes a loss of miàn zi for the teacher by suggesting that he or she didn’t explain something well enough. The fact that this is in a group setting really makes miàn zi an issue, since miàn zi is largely a public construct.

One of my former employees, who I’ll call Lee, is a very traditional guy, and as such he seems to exhibit a lot more of the “standard” Chinese behaviors than many other coworkers. In meetings, he would sit, stiff as a board, as if being lectured to, and would not speak unless directly addressed. Whenever I would ask, “Any questions?” I wouldn’t hear a peep from him. He would sometimes ask me questions in less formal settings during the day, but always with some obvious level of discomfort. Oddly enough, an IM conversation we had with proved to be a turning point in our working relationship, and demonstrates the whole question-aversion issue perfectly. I was in Taiwan, and was logged onto MSN Messenger. Some time in the afternoon, he logged on and asked me a few questions about a technical issue he was wrestling with. I answered them, he thanked me, and logged off. About 5 minutes later, he suddenly reappeared online, and the following chat ensued.

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Lee: Maybe I am silly.

Greg: Why are you silly?

Lee: Because I ask too many questions.

Greg: Why does asking questions make you silly?

Lee: Because I just should not ask so many questions.

Greg: You know, in the US, we have a saying:

Greg: “There are no stupid questions, only stupid people who do not ask questions.”

Greg: Ming bai ma? (This is Mandarin for ‘Do you understand?’)

Lee: Yes!!!

Greg: I believe this is true.

Lee: OK!

Greg: To me, asking questions shows that you are motivated and want to learn.

Lee:

Greg: But I know it is not this way in China, right?

Greg: Asking questions is bad for mian zi.

Lee:

Lee: HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS??!!!

Greg: I’ve been reading books on Chinese culture.

Lee: OH, maybe you can teach me about Chinese culture!

Greg: We can teach each other a lot of things.

Lee: Yes I hope for a long time.

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After this conversation, Lee never showed any apparent hesitancy whatsoever to ask me a question again. This still surprises me. Given how deeply ingrained one would expect this kind of behavior to be, the fact that Lee could discard it after one chat session seems remarkable. Maybe he was so able to adjust because I’m a westerner, and he already suspected that the Chinese rules of miàn zi didn’t apply with me. My making this explicit clearly released him from this set of rules. Maybe it’s a simple case of expectation-setting; I, as his superior (a role he takes VERY seriously, by the way), had made clear my expectation that he would ask questions if he was to prove himself to be a motivated employee. He therefore had no choice but to snap to it. Maybe it was something else entirely. Who knows? In any event, this was one of several instances with my Chinese coworkers where addressing cultural differences respectfully and explicitly paid rich dividends. Sometimes, I’ve been the one to adjust my behavior, and sometimes they have, as in this instance. Other times, neither of us needed to adjust, we just better understood where the other one was coming from. This process is what made my whole Asia stint the cat’s pajamas for me.

* I’ll have a lot more to say about miàn zi in later posts.
** Interestingly (perhaps), the Mandarin word for “question”, wèn ti, is also the word for “problem”. There is no way to distinguish the two meanings except through context.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 7:07 am and is filed under Culture, Anecdotes. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.