Quiet (32 page)

So it's telling that even Hung recalls her culture shock upon entering her first American-style classroom. She considered it rude to participate in class because she didn't want to waste her classmates' time. And sure enough, she says, laughing, “I was the quiet person there. At UCLA, the professor would start class, saying, ‘Let's discuss!' I would look at my peers while they were talking nonsense, and the professors were so patient, just listening to everyone.” She nods her head comically, mimicking the overly respectful professors.

“I remember being amazed. It was a linguistics class, and that's not even linguistics the students are talking about! I thought, ‘Oh, in the U.S., as soon as you start talking, you're fine.' ”

If Hung was bewildered by the American style of class participation, it's likely that her teachers were equally perplexed by her unwillingness to speak. A full twenty years after Hung moved to the United States, the
San Jose Mercury News
ran an article called “East, West Teaching Traditions Collide,” exploring professors' dismay at the reluctance of Asian-born students like Hung to participate in California university classrooms. One professor noted a “deference barrier” created by Asian students' reverence for their teachers. Another vowed to make class participation part of the grade in order to prod Asian students to speak in class. “You're supposed to downgrade yourself in Chinese learning because other thinkers are so much greater than you,” said a third. “This is a perennial problem in classes with predominantly Asian-American students.”

The article generated a passionate reaction in the Asian-American community. Some said the universities were right that Asian students need to adapt to Western educational norms. “Asian-Americans have
let people walk all over them because of their silence,” posted a reader of the sardonically titled website
ModelMinority.com
. Others felt that Asian students shouldn't be forced to speak up and conform to the Western mode. “Perhaps instead of trying to change their ways,
colleges can learn to listen to their sound of silence,” wrote Heejung Kim, a Stanford University cultural psychologist, in a paper arguing that talking is not always a positive act.

How is it that Asians and Westerners can look at the exact same classroom interactions, and one group will label it “class participation” and the other “talking nonsense”?
The
Journal of Research in Personality
has published an answer to this question in the form of a map of the world drawn by research psychologist Robert McCrae. McCrae's map looks like something you'd see in a geography textbook, but it's based, he says, “not on rainfall or population density, but on personality trait levels,” and its shadings of dark and light grays—dark for extroversion, light for introversion—reveal a picture that “is quite clear: Asia … is introverted, Europe extroverted.” Had the map also included the United States, it would be colored dark gray.
Americans are some of the most extroverted people on earth.

McCrae's map might seem like a grand exercise in cultural stereotyping. To group entire continents by personality type is an act of gross generalization: you can find loud people in mainland China just as easily as in Atlanta, Georgia. Nor does the map account for subtleties of cultural difference within a country or region. People in Beijing have different styles from those in Shanghai, and both are different still from the citizens of Seoul or Tokyo. Similarly, describing Asians as a “model minority”—even when meant as a compliment—is just as confining and condescending as any description that reduces individuals to a set of perceived group characteristics. Perhaps it is also problematic to characterize Cupertino as an incubator for scholarly stand-outs, no matter how flattering this might sound to some.

But although I don't want to encourage rigid national or ethnic typecasting, to avoid entirely the topic of cultural difference and introversion would be a shame: there are too many aspects of Asian cultural and personality styles that the rest of the world could and should learn from. Scholars have for decades studied cultural differences in personality type, especially between East and West, and especially the dimension of introversion-extroversion, the one pair of traits that psychologists, who agree on practically nothing when it comes to cataloging human personality, believe is salient and measurable all over the world.

Much of this research yields the same results as McCrae's map.
One study comparing eight- to ten-year-old children in Shanghai and southern Ontario, Canada, for example, found that shy and sensitive children are shunned by their peers in Canada but make sought-after playmates in China, where they are also more likely than other children to be considered for leadership roles. Chinese children who are sensitive and reticent are said to be
dongshi
(understanding), a common term of praise.

Similarly,
Chinese high school students tell researchers that they prefer friends who are “humble” and “altruistic,” “honest” and “hardworking,” while American high school students seek out the “cheerful,” “enthusiastic,” and “sociable.” “The contrast is striking,” writes Michael Harris Bond, a cross-cultural psychologist who focuses on China. “The Americans emphasize sociability and prize those attributes that make for easy, cheerful association. The Chinese emphasize deeper attributes, focusing on moral virtues and achievement.”

Another study asked Asian-Americans and European-Americans to think out loud while solving reasoning problems, and found that the Asians did much better when they were allowed to be quiet, compared to the Caucasians, who performed well when vocalizing their problem-solving.

These results would not surprise anyone familiar with traditional
Asian attitudes to the spoken word: talk is for communicating need-to-know information; quiet and introspection are signs of deep thought and higher truth. Words are potentially dangerous weapons that reveal things better left unsaid. They hurt other people; they can get their speaker into trouble. Consider, for example, these
proverbs from the East:

And compare them to proverbs from the West:

What lies behind these starkly different attitudes? One answer is the widespread reverence for education among Asians, particularly those from “Confucian belt” countries like China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. To this day, some Chinese villages display statues of students who passed the
grueling Ming dynasty–era
jinshi
exam hundreds of years ago. It's a lot easier to achieve that kind of distinction if—like some of the kids from Cupertino—you spend your summers studying.

Another explanation is group identity. Many Asian cultures are team-oriented, but not in the way that Westerners think of teams. Individuals in Asia see themselves as part of a greater whole—whether family, corporation, or community—and place tremendous value on harmony
within their group. They often subordinate their own desires to the group's interests, accepting their place in its hierarchy.

Western culture, by contrast, is organized around the individual. We see ourselves as self-contained units; our destiny is to express ourselves, to follow our bliss, to be free of undue restraint, to achieve the one thing that we, and we alone, were brought into this world to do. We may be gregarious, but we don't submit to group will, or at least we don't like to think we do. We love and respect our parents, but bridle at notions like filial piety, with their implications of subordination and restraint. When we get together with others, we do so as self-contained units having fun with, competing with, standing out from, jockeying for position with, and, yes, loving, other self-contained units. Even the Western God is assertive, vocal, and dominant; his son Jesus is kind and tender, but also a charismatic, crowd-pleasing man of influence (
Jesus Christ Superstar
).

It makes sense, then, that Westerners value boldness and verbal skill, traits that promote individuality, while Asians prize quiet, humility, and sensitivity, which foster group cohesion. If you live in a collective, then things will go a lot more smoothly if you behave with restraint, even submission.

This preference was vividly demonstrated in a recent fMRI study in which researchers showed seventeen Americans and seventeen Japanese
pictures of men in dominance poses (arms crossed, muscles bulging, legs planted squarely on the ground) and subordinate positions (shoulders bent, hands interlocked protectively over groin, legs squeezed together tight). They found that the dominant pictures activated pleasure centers in the American brains, while the submissive pictures did the same for the Japanese.

From a Western perspective, it can be hard to see what's so attractive about submitting to the will of others. But what looks to a Westerner like subordination can seem like basic politeness to many Asians. Don Chen, the Chinese-American Harvard Business School student you met in
chapter 2
, told me about the time he shared an apartment with a group of Asian friends plus his close Caucasian friend, a gentle, easygoing guy Don felt would fit right in.

Conflicts arose when the Caucasian friend noticed dishes piling up in the sink and asked his Asian roommates to do their fair share of
the washing up. It wasn't an unreasonable complaint, says Don, and his friend thought he phrased his request politely and respectfully. But his Asian roommates saw it differently. To them, he came across as harsh and angry. An Asian in that situation, said Don, would be more careful with his tone of voice. He would phrase his displeasure in the form of a question, not a request or command. Or he might not bring it up at all. It wouldn't be worth upsetting the group over a few dirty dishes.

What looks to Westerners like Asian deference, in other words, is actually a deeply felt concern for the sensibilities of others. As the psychologist Harris Bond observes, “
It is only those from an explicit tradition who would label [the Asian] mode of discourse ‘self-effacement.' Within this indirect tradition it might be labeled ‘relationship honouring.' ” And relationship honoring leads to social dynamics that can seem remarkable from a Western perspective.

It's because of relationship honoring, for example, that social anxiety disorder in Japan, known as
taijin kyofusho
, takes the form not of excessive worry about embarrassing oneself, as it does in the United States, but of embarrassing
others
. It's because of relationship-honoring that
Tibetan Buddhist monks find inner peace (and off-the-chart happiness levels, as measured in brain scans) by meditating quietly on compassion. And it's because of relationship-honoring that Hiroshima victims apologized to each other for surviving. “
Their civility has been well documented but still stays the heart,” writes the essayist Lydia Millet. “ ‘I am sorry,' said one of them, bowing, with the skin of his arms peeling off in strips. ‘I regret I am still alive while your baby is not.' ‘I am sorry,' another said earnestly, with lips swollen to the size of oranges, as he spoke to a child weeping beside her dead mother. ‘I am so sorry that I was not taken instead.' ”

Though Eastern relationship-honoring is admirable and beautiful, so is Western respect for individual freedom, self-expression, and personal destiny. The point is not that one is superior to the other, but that a profound difference in cultural values has a powerful impact on the personality styles favored by each culture. In the West, we subscribe to the Extrovert Ideal, while in much of Asia (at least before the
Westernization of the past several decades), silence is golden. These contrasting outlooks affect the things we say when our roommates' dishes pile up in the sink—and the things we don't say in a university classroom.

Moreover, they tell us that the Extrovert Ideal is not as sacrosanct as we may have thought. So if, deep down, you've been thinking that it's only natural for the bold and sociable to dominate the reserved and sensitive, and that the Extrovert Ideal is innate to humanity, Robert McCrae's personality map suggests a different truth: that each way of being—quiet and talkative, careful and audacious, inhibited and unrestrained—is characteristic of its own mighty civilization.