I read a passage today that really got me thinking. And we all know how dangerous that can be.
Unfortunately, Malcolm Gladwell is an author that consistently jump-starts the intellectual, pondering Molay.
This time it was his book Outliers: The Story of Success. I won’t spoil it for you except to say that it compels the reader to challenge traditional notions of success - that someone is just naturally brilliant, talented, etc. Gladwell doesn’t deny a certain level of skill or talent or interest in a given individual. Yet, he begins to analyze some of the circumstances in which success is born and thrives, which are intriguing to say the least.
The passage that got me this evening was his discussion about culture and language. He talks about power hierarchies that are part of the culture in many Asian countries versus Western. Even more interesting is Gladwell's discussion about the differences in the way each culture uses language:
“Western communication has what linguists call a 'transmitter orientation' – that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously…But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said."
Are you fascinated yet? I’m guessing not. But for me, this passage really clicked and brought me back to my confused cultural roots. Although I was born and brought up in the U.S., my parents came from India. I think India, in the case of Gladwell’s observation above, is similar to most other Asian countries.
Like many others of my background, we were exposed to the American culture but we also absorbed the culture that our parents transplanted from India. We were brought up in a bubble of Indian culture (frozen in time by our parents), only to exit that protective world and be face to face with a very different way of life. So when I was reading Gladwell’s passage, I was imagining a kid like me growing up stuck between the cultures of transmitter and receiver. Literally, stuck inside the phone! Don’t cry for us….. yet.
Anyway, with this notion in mind and growing up in the mighty West, most of the time, the culture of transmitter won out. It was only after college that I realized that I had to un-train my deferent, self-effacing, respectful ways that I was brainwashed to believe in by my parents. To make it out there, I needed to thump my chest, market myself, and never take no for an answer!
Although I’m still fighting old tendencies of cultural expression, I’ve made a lot of progress, and Gladwell’s sentence about Asian cultures placing emphasis on the listener for making sense of what is being said, almost seems foreign.
BUT then in a cruel twist of something, our dear Gladwell comes full circle to say something I don’t think I’ve ever heard uttered so eloquently by a westerner. After citing an exchange between a Korean employee and his supervisor, Gladwell says:
“There is something beautiful in the subtlety of that exchange, in the attention that each party must pay to the motivations and desires of the other. It is civilized, in the truest sense of the word: it does not permit insensitivity or indifference.”
WHAT THE??? I am trying to get over years of eastern cultural brainwashing just so it can start being understood now?
Okay, now you can cry…. Or at least hit the transmitter and receiver ends of the phone against the wall for me. J
