a not-so-nice difference

Usually I write here about the cultural differences I find endearing or entertaining, but I encountered one yesterday that was, as the Dutch would say, not so nice.

We have a new Toastmasters chapter here at work. Last night we had our charter ceremony, and I was in charge of setting up the meeting schedule as well as serving as Language Evaluator (I get to criticize and commend pronunciation, grammar and word choice) and Table Topics Session Master (Table Topics are short impromptu speeches, in response to a question posted by the Session Master).

As part of the ceremony, we had the site General Manager speaking – our top guy at this location. He’s an excellent speaker himself, with native or near-native fluency in both Chinese and English, and gave a good presentation on how giving a good speech is like preparing a Chinese banquet (because presentation, sensory details and content are all important.

The problem is that he began with a “joke” about the importance of communication: “Q. What’s the difference between your wife and a terrorist? A. You can negotiate with the terrorist.”

No, I didn’t think it was funny either.

Apparently the Toastmaster VIP guests in front of me did, though. I’ve asked a couple of my coworkers who were there last night, and while they don’t seem to have found it terribly side-splitting, they weren’t offended either. (One just said, “Well, it was to illustrate his point, about how important communication is.”

I’m still debating whether to say something to the GM, but probably won’t as he’s known to not take criticism well. If I thought I wasn’t the only one offended I’d definitely say something – as it is, I may still just mention that it not a great idea to make jokes like that to a mixed and international audience.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

Clarification on yesterday’s post

I should make it clear that I thought telling the “terrorist” joke was just stupidity, not a cultural difference. (The speaker spent a lot of his adolescence in the US, has worked all over the world, was telling us that in giving a speech, you need to know who your audience is – he really should have known better.) The cultural difference I mentioned is in the fact that no one else I talked to found the joke offensive either. The first person I asked is a male manager, a single guy probably in his late 30s who also spent his teen years n the US – he understood why I was annoyed but said that he hadn’t really thought about it at the time. At that point I wasn’t sure whether the difference was culture or gender, so I asked a woman in my group. She is highly intelligent, thoughtful, very competent, well traveled – she’s been to nearly as many US states as I have and has an aunt and a sister who live there. She didn’t find the joke offensive either, and she’s the one who said it was just meant to illustrate the importance of communication.

So that’s why I think not being annoyed by the stereotyping of wives as nagging shrews is a cultural difference. (Wives, in Taiwan, seem to have quite a lot of power and authority within the marriage – whar I see here is far different than what I hear from my Korean colleague, for example. It may be that they’re not annoyed by such jokes because they’re so confident the stereotype isn’t true.)

Out of curiosity, last night I recounted the whole story to the guys we went out to dinner with – two Americans and one Dutch guy. I thought I knew how the Americans would react but wasn’t sure about the Dutch. The Dutch man (maybe 40, married, small children) and the younger American (early 30s, has a Taiwanese girlfriend) reacted about as I’d expected: a grimace and the pained laugh you give when you do think a joke is sort of funny but you also either find it offensive yourself or know it will really bother other people. The other American (late forties, maybe, married) surprised me with the vehemence of his reaction: he went off on a short diatribe about how obnoxious the joke was and how he’d have expected better of the manager who told it.

Anyway, no real point here, but I didn’t want to give the impression that I think Taiwanese people go around telling sexist jokes all the time.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.