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american career advice for people raise by chinese people

I almost never talk about race because I don’t feel un-american enough to participate in the conversation (a messed up dynamic for another time), yet I STILL find myself getting tripped up by my cultural baggage occasionally. I see a lot of advice for underrepresented people at work, but not anything specific for those raised with/in the vicinity of traditional Chinese values (which are great in certain contexts, like winning at school, but don’t necessarily translate to great career habits for success in the American workplace). This read will probably seem very obvious and unrelatable to people who haven’t been on the receiving end of chinese parenting, but if you are curious, take a peek \o/

pure intelligence is insufficient

You might have been trained to habitually deprioritise iterating on your communication and creativity skills in favour of polishing your mental computational power to the point that you never get around to building your emotional API. Of course you have to actually be competent, you must have skills and knowledge, you must be able to build the thing, but that’s not enough.

Communication is important for collaboration. Teamwork makes systems work. Your team and your company is a system, in fact humans are the fucking most challenging distributed system of arbitrary computers. If you can’t communicate well, you are at worst tripping up the corporate machine, at best not allowing everyone to collaborate and work at full potential. Do not stave experience points from your communication slots!! You are probably smart enough. Other skills are likely severely under-provisioned.

(Creativity is also useful rather than useless as might have been advertised to you, but there’s also plenty of ways to be successful without being creative. I just wanted to add a shoutout to creativity because it’s definitely a juicy bonus that is often overlooked, and I’m not just talking art and drawing and shit but also being able to adapt to interesting constraints, etc.)

(related: this smashing slide deck about being glue on how the invisible parts of bringing projects together are highly valuable but would probably be completely invalidated by a standard chinese-american parent)

displaying vulnerability is ok!! good, even.

Maybe you were raised in a way where don’t feel safe to fail publicly, that punished you severely for displaying vulnerability and taught you to heavily curate a version of truth through white lies by omission, but in a (reasonably non-toxic) workplace, communicating failure is a good thing: it displays trust, and trust is the foundation on which good teamwork is built. Also communicating when expectations change or you need help will help your teammates get you the resources that you need. Despite your instinct, you will not be severely punished for not completing the objective exactly as stated, your teammates trust that scope expands and contracts, situations outside your control will happen, and that you are an adaptive human being who can roll with it.

your brain is probably trained to overfit for bragging (you can be humble and point at the good work you have done)

Advocating for yourself is very important in the workplace, it is NOT just a slick trick that smooth-talking lazyasses use to hide their incompetence, despite what you may have intuited from the way you saw adults gossip about each other at dinner parties. Hinting that you accomplished a lot and deserve recognition is not necessarily rude. If you are lucky people might see you did a good job and give you promotions and recognition, but probably not, the system is counting on you to self-report and you are doing your team a disservice by not emitting updates. Maybe you were raised in a way where you saw adults ridiculing other adults for talking about the good things in their lives. Gratuitously putting yourself down harms the team environment because people get in the habit of viewing themselves and other negatively. Yes you can talk about your accomplishments in a way that comes off as bragging, BUT you can also do so completely professionally, in fact you must.

“when I have a good thought about someone I should tell them directly”

People find feedback helpful, because then they can adjust their behaviour directly based on your expectations, but also they can’t read your brain. did you know that when you have some thoughts of someone, you can usually just tell them? this goes for both critiques and gratitude. a one-on-one setting is best (private message, email, going for a walk). it probably feels super fucking uncomfortable the first time you open your mouth and tell someone in a professional setting, “hey, this question you asked in the public channel was really useful to me, thanks for putting it out there when no one else would, I really appreciate the honesty”. even realising this is a way that one can communicate might be a wild shot. I mean, it took me years to even learn to tell people I date that I like and appreciate them, and then additional years on top of that to be able to show appreciation to coworkers, but it is very rewarding and will make you very popular \o/

americans love loud people, they like energy

Maybe if you were raised female by Chinese people this sounds familiar (about group contexts): “don’t make a fuss”, “don’t stand out”, “don’t draw attention to yourself”, “lay low and just get your work done”.

Hilariously my traits that have been identified as dealbreakers for ever finding a husband are the ones that I get the most positive feedback for in my adult life. People I collaborate with tell me they like that I am loud and outspoken (I care a lot, I bring passion/energy) (ugh this feels so weird to write, SEE?? I should not feel bad about being good at something, but I do). ok I still don’t have a husband, but my coworkers seem to like me enough.

maybe that was useful stuff to think about?

dammit I was supposed to write a blog post for work, but instead I wrote one on my tumblr (’: oh well, this has been on my mind a lot lately. especially with all this talk stuff with crazy rich asians reminding me that I have such a complicated relationship with my origins. It’s pretty cool to reflect on how far I have come in my ability to put words to feelings and communicate in a highly well-adjusted manner, but I would not wish that wild and painful journey on anyone (hopefully it’s not genetic).

footnotes:

this is assuming a reasonably functional workplace, without crazy amounts of toxic dynamics (those kinds of places)

also I figure this might be applicable to multiple east asian cultures, but I can’t advice on it b/c I only have one to draw experience from. your milage may vary \o/ anyway most of it is good general advice. GOOD LUCK, JOB HARD

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