Clarification on yesterday’s post

[dichroic]

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.

Comments

[adrian_turtle]

I heard exactly that joke at a regional ASQ conference in the spring of last year. It was delivered by a man in his 40s from the outer suburbs of Boston, to general laughter that did not sound embarrassed to me.

[dichroic]

*sigh*

[adrian_turtle]

I went looking for my notes from the aforementioned conference, thinking that speaker had made a bunch of jokes about wives as nagging shrews--helpless, demanding, and unreasonable. Like Dilbert's pointy-haired-boss, clearly meant to have a stronger emotional charge and not be specific to a particular kind of job because it can hit anybody after coming home from work. (I'm sure you've seen that concept of "anybody," sneaking in when a guy isn't thinking about it.) I hadn't written most of the jokes down, just appalled speculation about the speaker's marriage.

I found my notes on the keynote address, which I think *did* reveal big cultural differences. The nominal topic was the global supply chain, and the speaker talked about what he'd learned from his extensive QA work with Asian suppliers. His racism was very disturbing. I don't mean he was disrespectful or othering about language barriers, foreign educational systems, or differences of manners. I mean he described the populations of large countries as stupid, lazy, and dishonest. I looked around in horror and saw people nodding in agreement. What made it especially awful was the idea that this creep was being held up as an expert to advise other Americans about how to deal with Asians.

[dichroic]

The funny thing is that I think I *do* tend to stereotype a bit, based on my actual experience working in TX, AZ, and now Taiwan - but my stereotypes go the other way. The Latinos I worked with in TX had a tendency to be the sort of people who work intensely hard and send money home to Mom; the Taiwanese tend to be very earnest and also hardworking (but don't send money home, just have Mom come live with them.

Obviously these stereotypes are no more universally correct than the other sort, but at least when I say I see a tendency it's based on observation.

I suppose his were too; all I can say is that it's very, very easy to look stupid when you don't speak a language with perfect fluency - and that works both ways. I have a funny feeling people here often think of American expats as nice, but not all that bright, poor dears.