professional asian silence
July 26th, 2006 by boon
Asian people hardly speak up in a crowd. They only make noise when they want something they desperately want, or when they are specifically asked a question.
I do a bit of teaching and tutoring now and then. One sure way to get little response is to open a general question to the crowd. Questions like “how do you feel?” and “any questions?” are very common in generating this kind of silence.
You occasionally get an odd one, but one that never seems to shut up.
Foreigners have told me that they observe this behavior as well, and I’ve had one person tell me that he heard we were punished for answering questions wrongly. This is quite true in most Malaysian primary and secondary schools, and quite common in college too.
A lot of us couldn’t understand why Kara, an foreign exchange student, was ticked off at a literature lecturer about fielding baited questions, when it should have been more of an open discussion. This lecturer was commonly viewed by most students as having a liberal style, unlike most asian educators. It took me awhile to observe that Kara was right. He was indeed fielding baited questions…. but how else to generate response from the crowd?
“Asian silence” is now common also in the marketplace. I used to work for a telco solutions company, and I was in a meeting in which no one talked except for one guy (and me of course), and it was supposed to be a discussion. My opinions and feedback generated some negative vibes. All I did was suggest better documentation (as opposed to none) and a source control system.
I work for an MNC now, and asian silence is still very real despite cajoling and encouragement from team members and leadership to speak up our views and opinions. People will take time to come out of their shells, but not too long, I hope. It is degenerative like an invisible cancer. Like my boss said to all of us, if you don’t speak it out, no one knows about it, and you run in circles in your own opinions. It doesn’t help anybody.