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The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap
A provocative and important study of the different ideas Easterners and Westerners have about the self and society and what this means for current debates in art, education, geopolitics, and business.
Never have East and West come as close as they are today, yet we are still baffled by one another. Is our mantra "To thine own self be true"? Or do we believe we belong to something larger than ourselves--a family, a religion, a troop--that claims our first allegiance? Gish Jen--drawing on a treasure trove of stories and personal anecdotes, as well as cutting-edge research in cultural psychology--reveals how this difference shapes what we perceive and remember, what we say and do and make--how it shapes everything from our ideas about copying and talking in class to the difference between Apple and Alibaba. As engaging as it is illuminating, this is a book that stands to profoundly enrich our understanding of ourselves and of our world.
Never have East and West come as close as they are today, yet we are still baffled by one another. Is our mantra "To thine own self be true"? Or do we believe we belong to something larger than ourselves--a family, a religion, a troop--that claims our first allegiance? Gish Jen--drawing on a treasure trove of stories and personal anecdotes, as well as cutting-edge research in cultural psychology--reveals how this difference shapes what we perceive and remember, what we say and do and make--how it shapes everything from our ideas about copying and talking in class to the difference between Apple and Alibaba. As engaging as it is illuminating, this is a book that stands to profoundly enrich our understanding of ourselves and of our world.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2017
114 people are currently reading
1413 people want to read
About the author
Gish Jen
40 books422 followersGish Jen grew up in New York, where she spoke more Yiddish than Chinese. She has been featured in a PBS American Masters program on the American novel. Her distinctions also include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship, and a Radcliffe Institute fellowship. She was awarded a Lannan Literary Prize in 1999 and received a Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, she has published in the New Yorker and other magazines.
John Updike selected a story of Jen's for The Best American Short Stories of The Century. Her newest book, Tiger Writing, is based on the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization, which she delivered at Harvard University in 2012.
John Updike selected a story of Jen's for The Best American Short Stories of The Century. Her newest book, Tiger Writing, is based on the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization, which she delivered at Harvard University in 2012.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 77 reviews
April 3, 2017
Gish Jen writes beautifully, her warm voice full of empathy, humor, and honesty in describing the East-West culture gap. She was born in the United States, but I expected that she would identify with the Chinese culture of her parents; I was entranced that she seems to see herself as an all-American girl who happened to be the daughter of Asian parents. She did go through a quintessential Asian experience, however, in having to endure her mother's silence for a month after she dropped out of Stanford Business School to attend the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. That was apparently mild by Tiger Mother standards!
As an Australian married to a Taiwanese woman I have experienced many of the cultural differences and misunderstandings she talks about. When one of our daughters married a young Indian-American man recently we found ourselves warmly welcomed into two large Indian families with a host of new cultural expectations to understand and negotiate.
This is a big subject, and an important one. I hope that more fine minds address it. Ms. Jen describes East-West cultural differences in several ways, including Interdependent vs. Independent, the Flexi-Self vs. the Big-Pit Self, and Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft, respectively. Big-Pit Self refers to the pit of an avocado as a metaphor for the big ego of individualistic, independent Westerners. I wish she had defined the German terms, although I already had a sense of their meanings.
The book refers to literature, art, and education to illustrate many cultural differences, in addition to social science research and personal anecdotes and opinions. Although I was constantly fascinated, I felt that the narrative lacked overall coherence. It piles on the differences in various ways without explaining them as the title promises. Explaining how East-West cultural differences originated and developed would require history and a deeper understanding of the intertwined biological and cultural evolution of homo sapiens. I hope that Ms. Jen takes that as her next challenge.
As an Australian married to a Taiwanese woman I have experienced many of the cultural differences and misunderstandings she talks about. When one of our daughters married a young Indian-American man recently we found ourselves warmly welcomed into two large Indian families with a host of new cultural expectations to understand and negotiate.
This is a big subject, and an important one. I hope that more fine minds address it. Ms. Jen describes East-West cultural differences in several ways, including Interdependent vs. Independent, the Flexi-Self vs. the Big-Pit Self, and Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft, respectively. Big-Pit Self refers to the pit of an avocado as a metaphor for the big ego of individualistic, independent Westerners. I wish she had defined the German terms, although I already had a sense of their meanings.
The book refers to literature, art, and education to illustrate many cultural differences, in addition to social science research and personal anecdotes and opinions. Although I was constantly fascinated, I felt that the narrative lacked overall coherence. It piles on the differences in various ways without explaining them as the title promises. Explaining how East-West cultural differences originated and developed would require history and a deeper understanding of the intertwined biological and cultural evolution of homo sapiens. I hope that Ms. Jen takes that as her next challenge.
July 14, 2017
One time, teaching a course on the graphic novel, I described the differences in artistic form and storytelling technique between manga and Western comics. A student raised her hand and offered the opinion that the contrast between the two modes reflected the difference between individualist Western culture and collectivist Eastern culture. The student was Asian-American and so presumably permitted such an observation. I am professionally committed, I believe, to promulgating anti-essentialism; therefore I did not feel I was permitted to agree with it. Like the Holy Trinity, anti-essentialism is a mystery beyond human experience, as you have to be an essentialist—naïvely believing in the unity of your personality, the power of your conscious intention, and the stability of matter—just to walk across the room, so I did not press the point very hard, but I did caution against overly broad generalizations. All the same, cultural difference exists and is even visible to the naked eye: there should be some way to discuss it without undue reductionism or stereotype.
Novelist Gish Jen's nonfiction study The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap attempts a nuanced and well-informed exploration of this divide between Western and Eastern culture about the importance that should be accorded the individual—though Jen does dismiss "collectivist" and "individualist" as terms with too much Cold War bias and prefers to speak in the more neutral language of independence vs. interdependence instead.
The Girl at the Baggage Claim takes its title from its opening anecdote: an Asian woman applies to a prestigious Western academy and demonstrates her English-language proficiency in a Skype interview with the school authorities. Yet after she is accepted for enrollment, it is discovered at the airport that "the girl at the baggage claim" is not the girl they interviewed. The young woman had asked her sister, whose English was better than her own, to substitute for her in the Skype interview, and evidently saw no problem in doing so. What ideas about the self and society allowed her to think this appropriate behavior? Jen's book is essentially a comparative study of Western and Eastern sensibility attempting to explain and defend the latter to puzzled Westerners (and Jen, a first-generation American, as I am [on my mother's side], considers herself one such Westerner).
Jen divides West and East by two concepts of the self—the flexible, interdependent self of the East, embedded in its social environment and alive to its context, and the "avocado pit" self of Western individualism, self-assertive and self-esteeming. This book draws extensively on social-psychological studies to prove this split in sensibility, though the rapidity with which such studies seem to be debunked and the replication crisis affecting the field makes me wonder how persuasive this is. Her many examples from the arts are perhaps more convincing—to me, a humanist rather than a scientist—though obviously more impressionistic. The book concludes with a plea to synthesize the two sensibilities in an "ambidependent" self that would combine the freedom of the Westerner with the responsibility of the Easterner, and it is difficult to argue with this argument for nuance and complexity.
This book is a work of somewhat breezy, TED-like pop-nonfiction, though, and it definitely creaks under the complexity of its task. For one thing, Jen often admits that her binary barely holds—that, essentially, only well-off Americans fit the mold of the "avocado pit" individualist, while almost everyone else in the world, including most Europeans and many Americans (such as Catholics or the working class), exhibit higher interdependence. Attributing cultural difference to economics, Jen suggests that the source of divergent cultural sensibilities goes back to the differences among rice farming, wheat farming, and nomadism; but she also says that such difference is perpetuated through time by habit and "contagion." Even so, it does make one wonder how much culture on this model can really change if it is so determined at its source by economics? On the other hand, to note one detail that troubled me, it is surely ironic that she keeps mentioning Emerson and Thoreau as examples of Western or American individualism, when their Transcendentalist philosophy entails that what the individual actually expresses is nature and the world-spirit streaming through every particular soul. "Self-Reliance" as promoted by Emerson and Thoreau is a complicated dialectical notion bearing many surprising similarities to Taoist thought—and this is not even to note that both authors were early Western devotees of Indian, Persian, Arab, and Chinese thought. Like all binaries, independence and interdependence have a way of becoming each other in the mystic union of opposites foretold by many thinkers and writers, Western and Eastern alike.
Jen also makes things politically easier for herself than she probably should in defending interdependence. At one point, she mentions as an example of excessive American individualism the preference for choice in all things, alluding to ice cream flavors—but would she mock so readily the increasingly multiplicity of genders? Her critique of self-esteem-based education, meant to foster the student's individual expressivity, raises similar questions (though I agree with her at least provisional defense of prematurely discredited pedagogical methods like memorization). For better or worse, American individualism does not merely implicate targets agreed upon by the liberal literati, like rampant consumerism or such Republican clichés as the greedy businessman or the gun-toting bigot; it encompasses also figures and causes who would be sympathetic to this book's target audience—think of the role played by heroic individualism in African-American culture from the emancipatory slave narratives onward; or the assertion of individual preference and identity in queer culture—and I would have liked to see Jen deal with these harder questions of cultural politics. (In this context, it might be notable that the latest Chinese word to break into Western awareness is baizuo , or "white left," a term that like "social justice warrior" is used to mock cultural liberalism as so much whining and opportunistic—i.e., "virtue-signaling"—hypocrisy.)
Jen's comments on the arts, though, are welcome and suggestive, even if, as with the rest of the book, somewhat over-generalized. She argues that the great artist in Western culture is the genius, a grand individual expressing his or her vision in startlingly original terms, while the great artist in Eastern culture is the master, who has so totally merged his or her sensibility within craft, nature, and tradition that the resulting work has an air not of disruption but of smoothness and calm. She allows that this ideology of mastery may make the East a culture of excessive copying (in her own Westernized view) when she discusses plagiarism in academia and dwells at length on Dafen Oil Painting Village with its teeming replicas of classic paintings. But she also claims that mastery, in its emphasis on tradition and learning, is an aesthetic that can be a corrective to the West's enervating pursuit of novelty and transgression. Without referring to any binary of East/West, I have had similar thoughts when encountering arguments that seem to want to mandate avant-garde aesthetics for any writer with serious literary ambitions—see, for instance, my comments here, wherein I defend seemingly "traditional" novelists like Jonathan Franzen and Kazuo Ishiguro for using recognizable and even sociable literary forms to communicate their difficult truths, rather than willfully defying tradition and the reader with overt radical gestures like subtracting punctuation marks or paragraph breaks or whatever. It is just too simple to dismiss as hidebound complacency any use of traditional forms in art, and Jen's defense of mastery over genius helps to articulate why this is so.
In conclusion, The Girl at the Baggage Claim, while perhaps suffering from its pop-nonfiction simplifications, is nevertheless well worth reading as much for Jen's own genial, wise sensibility as for the examples and data she marshals.
Novelist Gish Jen's nonfiction study The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap attempts a nuanced and well-informed exploration of this divide between Western and Eastern culture about the importance that should be accorded the individual—though Jen does dismiss "collectivist" and "individualist" as terms with too much Cold War bias and prefers to speak in the more neutral language of independence vs. interdependence instead.
The Girl at the Baggage Claim takes its title from its opening anecdote: an Asian woman applies to a prestigious Western academy and demonstrates her English-language proficiency in a Skype interview with the school authorities. Yet after she is accepted for enrollment, it is discovered at the airport that "the girl at the baggage claim" is not the girl they interviewed. The young woman had asked her sister, whose English was better than her own, to substitute for her in the Skype interview, and evidently saw no problem in doing so. What ideas about the self and society allowed her to think this appropriate behavior? Jen's book is essentially a comparative study of Western and Eastern sensibility attempting to explain and defend the latter to puzzled Westerners (and Jen, a first-generation American, as I am [on my mother's side], considers herself one such Westerner).
Jen divides West and East by two concepts of the self—the flexible, interdependent self of the East, embedded in its social environment and alive to its context, and the "avocado pit" self of Western individualism, self-assertive and self-esteeming. This book draws extensively on social-psychological studies to prove this split in sensibility, though the rapidity with which such studies seem to be debunked and the replication crisis affecting the field makes me wonder how persuasive this is. Her many examples from the arts are perhaps more convincing—to me, a humanist rather than a scientist—though obviously more impressionistic. The book concludes with a plea to synthesize the two sensibilities in an "ambidependent" self that would combine the freedom of the Westerner with the responsibility of the Easterner, and it is difficult to argue with this argument for nuance and complexity.
This book is a work of somewhat breezy, TED-like pop-nonfiction, though, and it definitely creaks under the complexity of its task. For one thing, Jen often admits that her binary barely holds—that, essentially, only well-off Americans fit the mold of the "avocado pit" individualist, while almost everyone else in the world, including most Europeans and many Americans (such as Catholics or the working class), exhibit higher interdependence. Attributing cultural difference to economics, Jen suggests that the source of divergent cultural sensibilities goes back to the differences among rice farming, wheat farming, and nomadism; but she also says that such difference is perpetuated through time by habit and "contagion." Even so, it does make one wonder how much culture on this model can really change if it is so determined at its source by economics? On the other hand, to note one detail that troubled me, it is surely ironic that she keeps mentioning Emerson and Thoreau as examples of Western or American individualism, when their Transcendentalist philosophy entails that what the individual actually expresses is nature and the world-spirit streaming through every particular soul. "Self-Reliance" as promoted by Emerson and Thoreau is a complicated dialectical notion bearing many surprising similarities to Taoist thought—and this is not even to note that both authors were early Western devotees of Indian, Persian, Arab, and Chinese thought. Like all binaries, independence and interdependence have a way of becoming each other in the mystic union of opposites foretold by many thinkers and writers, Western and Eastern alike.
Jen also makes things politically easier for herself than she probably should in defending interdependence. At one point, she mentions as an example of excessive American individualism the preference for choice in all things, alluding to ice cream flavors—but would she mock so readily the increasingly multiplicity of genders? Her critique of self-esteem-based education, meant to foster the student's individual expressivity, raises similar questions (though I agree with her at least provisional defense of prematurely discredited pedagogical methods like memorization). For better or worse, American individualism does not merely implicate targets agreed upon by the liberal literati, like rampant consumerism or such Republican clichés as the greedy businessman or the gun-toting bigot; it encompasses also figures and causes who would be sympathetic to this book's target audience—think of the role played by heroic individualism in African-American culture from the emancipatory slave narratives onward; or the assertion of individual preference and identity in queer culture—and I would have liked to see Jen deal with these harder questions of cultural politics. (In this context, it might be notable that the latest Chinese word to break into Western awareness is baizuo , or "white left," a term that like "social justice warrior" is used to mock cultural liberalism as so much whining and opportunistic—i.e., "virtue-signaling"—hypocrisy.)
Jen's comments on the arts, though, are welcome and suggestive, even if, as with the rest of the book, somewhat over-generalized. She argues that the great artist in Western culture is the genius, a grand individual expressing his or her vision in startlingly original terms, while the great artist in Eastern culture is the master, who has so totally merged his or her sensibility within craft, nature, and tradition that the resulting work has an air not of disruption but of smoothness and calm. She allows that this ideology of mastery may make the East a culture of excessive copying (in her own Westernized view) when she discusses plagiarism in academia and dwells at length on Dafen Oil Painting Village with its teeming replicas of classic paintings. But she also claims that mastery, in its emphasis on tradition and learning, is an aesthetic that can be a corrective to the West's enervating pursuit of novelty and transgression. Without referring to any binary of East/West, I have had similar thoughts when encountering arguments that seem to want to mandate avant-garde aesthetics for any writer with serious literary ambitions—see, for instance, my comments here, wherein I defend seemingly "traditional" novelists like Jonathan Franzen and Kazuo Ishiguro for using recognizable and even sociable literary forms to communicate their difficult truths, rather than willfully defying tradition and the reader with overt radical gestures like subtracting punctuation marks or paragraph breaks or whatever. It is just too simple to dismiss as hidebound complacency any use of traditional forms in art, and Jen's defense of mastery over genius helps to articulate why this is so.
In conclusion, The Girl at the Baggage Claim, while perhaps suffering from its pop-nonfiction simplifications, is nevertheless well worth reading as much for Jen's own genial, wise sensibility as for the examples and data she marshals.
August 23, 2017
Why was this book so annoying? I'm not sure; I think because it was all over the place; Jen talks about herself and her life, she talks about psychology and sociology and culture, and most of all she talks about an 'American self' that I mostly do not recognise at all. I wish this book had been ONE thing: Jen's memoir about her own experiences growing up as an Asian-American and her decisions about child-raising? That would have been fine. Jen's take on the differences between traditional life in China & life in the U.S. and how those things are changing in the 21st century? Also fine. But what she's trying to do here is a Malcolm Gladwell like popular cultural-history/sociology/psychology thing with some arguments for Better Ways To Be and some arguments about why it's hard to be one particular way or why expecting people like X to do things like Y is not a good idea. Which can be an interesting book, but she really, really doesn't pull it off.
Also, as some other reviewers have noted, many of Jen's examples seem to read counter to the point she's trying to make. She argues a lot that typical individualistic American people believe in a 'big pit' essentialist self, whereas typical interdependent Asian people (which seems like an amazingly broad category to generalise about) believe that circumstances matter more than individual experience -- but then gives examples in which (to my eye) the circumstances are being ignored in favour of a belief that everyone's essential experience is identical, and argues that this demonstrates interdependence. Is my confusion about this an example of the cultural gap that she's talking about? I wish I could sit down with her and her book and ask her a lot of questions, because I do think she is trying to say *something* but a lot of the time I couldn't figure out what -- which made for a very frustrating experience as a reader.
Also, as some other reviewers have noted, many of Jen's examples seem to read counter to the point she's trying to make. She argues a lot that typical individualistic American people believe in a 'big pit' essentialist self, whereas typical interdependent Asian people (which seems like an amazingly broad category to generalise about) believe that circumstances matter more than individual experience -- but then gives examples in which (to my eye) the circumstances are being ignored in favour of a belief that everyone's essential experience is identical, and argues that this demonstrates interdependence. Is my confusion about this an example of the cultural gap that she's talking about? I wish I could sit down with her and her book and ask her a lot of questions, because I do think she is trying to say *something* but a lot of the time I couldn't figure out what -- which made for a very frustrating experience as a reader.
August 12, 2017
The Girl at the Baggage Claim is Gish Jen's book explaining the East-West culture gap, by examining the differences between interdependent and independent people. We're all somewhere along a continuum, but in the West, and especially the US, we value independence and uniqueness, while in the East, using China as the main example, interdependence with one's family and community is stressed. Jen was raised by parents who had immigrated to the US from China, and now teaches at both American and Asian universities, giving her a perspective that takes in Eastern and Western cultures as both an insider and an outsider.
Having lived in five countries, albeit all in the West, I'm fascinated by how the culture we are raised in shapes how we perceive the world. We make unconscious value judgements all the time, based on nothing more than what we're used to and as the world becomes an increasingly global place, we desperately need to make the effort to understand cultural differences and how to work with and around them.
Jen does go a little academic at times with her subject matter, but it's clearly one that she understands and finds fascinating.
Having lived in five countries, albeit all in the West, I'm fascinated by how the culture we are raised in shapes how we perceive the world. We make unconscious value judgements all the time, based on nothing more than what we're used to and as the world becomes an increasingly global place, we desperately need to make the effort to understand cultural differences and how to work with and around them.
Jen does go a little academic at times with her subject matter, but it's clearly one that she understands and finds fascinating.
November 11, 2017
From the beginning, an otherwise entertaining and informative work by an author I know to be intelligent and engaging is rendered unreadable by pages of graphs purporting to show conjecture and interpretation as objective data. There are many books which do this, and sadly, many people have difficulty distinguishing truth in such cases. I'll not contribute to the mess by detailing further. With apologies, I cannot recommend this book.
August 19, 2019
A lot of interesting and illuminating stuff - I feel like I learned a lot. Good thoughts about individualistic vs communalist cultures, how they see each other, and some of the pros and cons of each. BUT I think the writing style is just too weird for me. She uses a metaphor of an avocado and its pit for individualists - ok, I get that, it’s a vivid metaphor that the individualist has this overwhelmingly big and inflexible self tucked away inside. But then she continues to refer to “big pit people” through the whole book. I found that jarring for a while, then it just got annoying. I think she’s got some really great ideas, and she uses some excellent literary quotes to illustrate her arguments, I just wish some of the terminology was a bit more conventional so I could focus on the ideas instead of the odd writing.
November 16, 2017
I like the author’s thesis and see where she’s coming from, but as a child of immigrants myself, I couldn’t help wondering how much of the behaviors or thought-patterns she points out are not rooted in differences between Eastern and Western cultures, but rather American vs. non-American cultures. I would have loved to see more research comparing not just Americans to Asians, but also to European, South American, and African countries.
March 27, 2018
Tienanmen Tank Man
- "is it possible that he sees the soldiers are ordinary, too - as mere humans gone wrong, which is why he is knocking on their hatch?" p5
"This conception of people as being shapred by their situations, as opposed to having sole control of their destinies..." p6
"If given a picture of an object in a field, big pit selves will tend to focus on the object, while flexi-selves will do the opposite. They will focus on the context, and imagine the object-and-its-context as a single, indivisible unit. " p23
Interest in patters..."What repeats? If a family unity repeats again and again - as, of course it does, with two parents again and again producing children - then there is a principle of the cosmos there, with which this self believes it is better to be aligned. Historical patters are natural patterns, and that human society should be modeled on natural principles. As for how one finds these principles, that is not through experimental manipulation but by patient observation and intuitive insight." p25
"What else does being WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Developed) mean? It means that , focused on self-definition and self-determination as we are, Americans can be, as a nation, choice-crazy.? p 158
"...increased choice and increased affluence have been accompanied by decreased well-being in the US and most other affluent societies. Why? FOMO - Fear of Missing Out. We torture ourselves with the road not taken - with a fear that we've chosen wrong." p 160 "More choice may not mean more control. Perhaps there comes a point at which opportunities become so numerous that we feel overwhelmed. Instead of feeling in control, we feel unable to cope." p 161
flexi-self communities tend to conceive of the social world as a kind of endless cast party; for the big-pit person life is a kind of endless audition - a world in which it will be up to them to define, to fend for themselves. "No wonder big pit parents anxiously pad their children with self-esteem." p 2013-4
"...One Asian student asked me, Aren't Americans just fitting in by standing out? In asking this she anticipated the most interesting line of a Las Vegas resort ad, a line that enjoins the viewer to 'misfit right in' with 'just the right amount of wrong.' Is this not group-think? Has individualism in America become conformity with another name?" p 217
Ambidependence
- "is it possible that he sees the soldiers are ordinary, too - as mere humans gone wrong, which is why he is knocking on their hatch?" p5
"This conception of people as being shapred by their situations, as opposed to having sole control of their destinies..." p6
"If given a picture of an object in a field, big pit selves will tend to focus on the object, while flexi-selves will do the opposite. They will focus on the context, and imagine the object-and-its-context as a single, indivisible unit. " p23
Interest in patters..."What repeats? If a family unity repeats again and again - as, of course it does, with two parents again and again producing children - then there is a principle of the cosmos there, with which this self believes it is better to be aligned. Historical patters are natural patterns, and that human society should be modeled on natural principles. As for how one finds these principles, that is not through experimental manipulation but by patient observation and intuitive insight." p25
"What else does being WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Developed) mean? It means that , focused on self-definition and self-determination as we are, Americans can be, as a nation, choice-crazy.? p 158
"...increased choice and increased affluence have been accompanied by decreased well-being in the US and most other affluent societies. Why? FOMO - Fear of Missing Out. We torture ourselves with the road not taken - with a fear that we've chosen wrong." p 160 "More choice may not mean more control. Perhaps there comes a point at which opportunities become so numerous that we feel overwhelmed. Instead of feeling in control, we feel unable to cope." p 161
flexi-self communities tend to conceive of the social world as a kind of endless cast party; for the big-pit person life is a kind of endless audition - a world in which it will be up to them to define, to fend for themselves. "No wonder big pit parents anxiously pad their children with self-esteem." p 2013-4
"...One Asian student asked me, Aren't Americans just fitting in by standing out? In asking this she anticipated the most interesting line of a Las Vegas resort ad, a line that enjoins the viewer to 'misfit right in' with 'just the right amount of wrong.' Is this not group-think? Has individualism in America become conformity with another name?" p 217
Ambidependence
June 22, 2017
A lot more cultural psychology theory than I expected - I was hoping for more practical examples and anecdotes. Would be a good university textbook. Interesting, but not what I was expecting.
March 20, 2017
Think of your favorite college professor: knowledgeable about his or her field, of course, thoughtful about the research, able to synthesize the work of others into a syllabus — and thoroughly engaging for the uninformed undergraduate (that's me, or you) who has signed up for the course and is willing to get excited about the material.
Gish Jen is a novelist, and a good one, not a PhD in cultural psychology or sociology. But her life, like her novels, has clearly been in part about the large and small fascinating and diverging ways in which East and West, particularly China and the United States, look at so many aspects of how we fit into our world. And she makes "The Girl at the Baggage Claim" a thoroughly fun, thought-provoking and scholarly romp through this compelling subject.
Yes, scholarly: Jen isn't a researcher, but she relies in part on studies by a number of them. (She's clearly immersed herself in the subject.) And thought-provoking: You will find yourself reconsidering your assumptions about art, about education, about entrepreneurship, about citizenship and government. And let's face it, reconsidering assumptions is at the heart of what education is about, whether we are children or college students or old enough to have grandchildren in college.
And Jen makes the journey fun, both through her obvious talent as a writer and her delight in uncovering the fascinating nuggets that she's uncovered along the way.
Gish Jen is a novelist, and a good one, not a PhD in cultural psychology or sociology. But her life, like her novels, has clearly been in part about the large and small fascinating and diverging ways in which East and West, particularly China and the United States, look at so many aspects of how we fit into our world. And she makes "The Girl at the Baggage Claim" a thoroughly fun, thought-provoking and scholarly romp through this compelling subject.
Yes, scholarly: Jen isn't a researcher, but she relies in part on studies by a number of them. (She's clearly immersed herself in the subject.) And thought-provoking: You will find yourself reconsidering your assumptions about art, about education, about entrepreneurship, about citizenship and government. And let's face it, reconsidering assumptions is at the heart of what education is about, whether we are children or college students or old enough to have grandchildren in college.
And Jen makes the journey fun, both through her obvious talent as a writer and her delight in uncovering the fascinating nuggets that she's uncovered along the way.
August 19, 2017
I have now finished this book. I added this book to my list of "to read" books for this year because I heard the author speak at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her description of the book, and her use of art in the eastern world and western world to illustrate her point, made me want to read it.
I was not disappointed--she does an excellent job of explaining the difference between the way in which "easterners" and "westerners" conceive of the self and thus family, culture, and society. I'm looking forward to being able to finish it.
I was not disappointed--she does an excellent job of explaining the difference between the way in which "easterners" and "westerners" conceive of the self and thus family, culture, and society. I'm looking forward to being able to finish it.
November 27, 2018
Huge disappointment. Was hoping for true insight into a would be fascinating and timely subject but found the book to be a collection of unqualified and unsubstantiated personal opinions rather than scientific research. Very few references to other sources or specific examples for most claims. As well, a tenuous understanding of quality writing along with rough editing skills at best. Not worth reading.
April 8, 2017
disappointing
I thought this book would give some genuine insight into differences between East and West but it's mostly just impressions.
I thought this book would give some genuine insight into differences between East and West but it's mostly just impressions.
October 9, 2020
This is a good book as long as you don't mind that "east" is limited primarily to East Asia.
Read
July 30, 2023Intriguing social observations, not un-charming at times, suffer from over growths blurring main themes too often, can't say it comes together as solid research work.
List of some maybe key or interesting discussions by chapter:
Preface:
“A professor friend recently commented that the difference between her American students and her Chinese students was not whether they plagiarized but whether they knew to hide it; American students, she said, were better about changing the font.”
What do you think of this remark after reading the book? What aspects does it capture comparing Asian and American cultures?
Part I: We Edit the World
Chapter 1: How do you feel about the framing of 17th century Chinese artist Xiang Shengmo’s Self Portrait. Does NYT’s cropping make it more appealing to you? Why and why not?
Chapter 2: What are some examples of the ‘copy culture’, what is your reaction to those copycats in cityscape? What’s the difference in ‘lin’, ‘mo’, and ‘fang’ in Chinese tradition?
Chapter 3: What is the model developed by Stanford psychologist Hazel Rose Markus? (Two selves) How does this lead to divergent view points and how is this difference captured in brain scan?
How did you fare on those tests (And Which Are You, Still Other Tests)? Stigma of Collectivism? When it comes to individualism, what are some exceptions in Western world? What historical aspects may explain the origin of Western individualism?
Chapter 4: What is the Asian Paradox? Does the rice culture help to explain this phenomenon? How does interdependence explain different handling of human rights related situations?
Part II: The Flexi-Self
Chapter 5: What is flexi-self? What are some contrasting social examples from independent and interdependent cultures? Why did ‘Thank You’ offend the Indian uncle? What is the ‘dark side’ of flexi-self?
Chapter 6-7: What do you make of the phenomenon of Dafen painting village? What’s the difference between master and genius? How do you find the business innovation at Alibana and Xiaomei? What is China’s style of innovation?
Chapter 8: Gaokao, historical roots? What are the parents role in China’s Gaokao? How do you find the essay questions in Gaokao test? What is the idea behind ‘following the natural bend of things’ (Bruce Lee)?
Chapter 9: What is the "Li"? What’s the difference in Chinese vs western text books? How is "Li" manifested in China and other Asian nations’ social and cultural lives? Does rote memory work?
Part III The Big Pit Self
Chapter 10: What is Joe Henrich’a WEIRD model? How do east and west differ in their attribution of personal achievements? How does this affect perception of happiness? How is this related to fixed va growth mindset? Does the East have the concept of self esteem?
Chapter 11: How does Calvinism influence Americans? What are the Kokkaido studies and what do they inform us? What is a positive rebel and how are they valued in American life?
Part IV Meeting and Mixings
Chapter 12: Why aren’t Asian students as open in sharing their thought process or speaking about themselves? What do you think of ‘The knower does not say, the sayer does not know’ (Daodejing)? Where did American autobiographical culture come from? Historically? Social motivations? How does Asian mom speak differently from American mom to their kids?
Chapter 13-14: What’s the benefit of being ambidependene? How do we cultivate such characteristics? What is the point revisiting Chinese historical art work vs western contemporary art work?
Epilogue:
Title story, the girl at the baggage claim revisited
List of some maybe key or interesting discussions by chapter:
Preface:
“A professor friend recently commented that the difference between her American students and her Chinese students was not whether they plagiarized but whether they knew to hide it; American students, she said, were better about changing the font.”
What do you think of this remark after reading the book? What aspects does it capture comparing Asian and American cultures?
Part I: We Edit the World
Chapter 1: How do you feel about the framing of 17th century Chinese artist Xiang Shengmo’s Self Portrait. Does NYT’s cropping make it more appealing to you? Why and why not?
Chapter 2: What are some examples of the ‘copy culture’, what is your reaction to those copycats in cityscape? What’s the difference in ‘lin’, ‘mo’, and ‘fang’ in Chinese tradition?
Chapter 3: What is the model developed by Stanford psychologist Hazel Rose Markus? (Two selves) How does this lead to divergent view points and how is this difference captured in brain scan?
How did you fare on those tests (And Which Are You, Still Other Tests)? Stigma of Collectivism? When it comes to individualism, what are some exceptions in Western world? What historical aspects may explain the origin of Western individualism?
Chapter 4: What is the Asian Paradox? Does the rice culture help to explain this phenomenon? How does interdependence explain different handling of human rights related situations?
Part II: The Flexi-Self
Chapter 5: What is flexi-self? What are some contrasting social examples from independent and interdependent cultures? Why did ‘Thank You’ offend the Indian uncle? What is the ‘dark side’ of flexi-self?
Chapter 6-7: What do you make of the phenomenon of Dafen painting village? What’s the difference between master and genius? How do you find the business innovation at Alibana and Xiaomei? What is China’s style of innovation?
Chapter 8: Gaokao, historical roots? What are the parents role in China’s Gaokao? How do you find the essay questions in Gaokao test? What is the idea behind ‘following the natural bend of things’ (Bruce Lee)?
Chapter 9: What is the "Li"? What’s the difference in Chinese vs western text books? How is "Li" manifested in China and other Asian nations’ social and cultural lives? Does rote memory work?
Part III The Big Pit Self
Chapter 10: What is Joe Henrich’a WEIRD model? How do east and west differ in their attribution of personal achievements? How does this affect perception of happiness? How is this related to fixed va growth mindset? Does the East have the concept of self esteem?
Chapter 11: How does Calvinism influence Americans? What are the Kokkaido studies and what do they inform us? What is a positive rebel and how are they valued in American life?
Part IV Meeting and Mixings
Chapter 12: Why aren’t Asian students as open in sharing their thought process or speaking about themselves? What do you think of ‘The knower does not say, the sayer does not know’ (Daodejing)? Where did American autobiographical culture come from? Historically? Social motivations? How does Asian mom speak differently from American mom to their kids?
Chapter 13-14: What’s the benefit of being ambidependene? How do we cultivate such characteristics? What is the point revisiting Chinese historical art work vs western contemporary art work?
Epilogue:
Title story, the girl at the baggage claim revisited
August 24, 2022
The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap, Gish Jen unpacks the way differing underlying concepts of self inform the various storytelling traditions around the world. Throughout her career as a writer, Jen has made a case for fiction that combines both Eastern and Western craft. In the West, she says, this concept is something she calls the “big pit self,”
a self unlike any other in the world, assertive and full of self-esteem, and yet anxiously protective of its self-image and obsessed with self-definition. Why is it, exactly, that Americans must have fifty flavors of ice cream when other cultures are happy with ten? Why do we talk about ourselves so much? Why are we consumed with the memoir? Why is personal growth so important? Does self-esteem come at a price? And why do we see work the way we do, and how did we get this way?
In contrast to the “pit self,” Jen explores a notion of self that is far more prevalent outside the Western world, the interdependent “flexi-self” associated with collectivistic societies. In this case, the boundary between self and world is “nowhere near so absolute. It is, rather, porous and fluid—a dotted line.” It would only be natural that this latter sense of self would inform the writing traditions of those countries. And so, the American workshop can be encouraging or stifling depending on one’s background. Because, as Salesses argues, the workshop is all about societal expectation. Being so firmly founded in cultural norms and ideology, it will not promote artistic rule-breakers or genre-defilers.
For more, please see my essay at the Millions.
a self unlike any other in the world, assertive and full of self-esteem, and yet anxiously protective of its self-image and obsessed with self-definition. Why is it, exactly, that Americans must have fifty flavors of ice cream when other cultures are happy with ten? Why do we talk about ourselves so much? Why are we consumed with the memoir? Why is personal growth so important? Does self-esteem come at a price? And why do we see work the way we do, and how did we get this way?
In contrast to the “pit self,” Jen explores a notion of self that is far more prevalent outside the Western world, the interdependent “flexi-self” associated with collectivistic societies. In this case, the boundary between self and world is “nowhere near so absolute. It is, rather, porous and fluid—a dotted line.” It would only be natural that this latter sense of self would inform the writing traditions of those countries. And so, the American workshop can be encouraging or stifling depending on one’s background. Because, as Salesses argues, the workshop is all about societal expectation. Being so firmly founded in cultural norms and ideology, it will not promote artistic rule-breakers or genre-defilers.
For more, please see my essay at the Millions.
September 14, 2017
I found this an interesting book, perhaps one that would be best suited as a suite of related essays. The discussion is not, despite the title, about the "East-West Culture Gap" per se. It is really more about the distinction between the highly individualistic sense of self that typifies the West — in her case, mostly the United States — which she calls the "big pit" self, as in an avocado with a large, well-developed core; and the interdependent sense of self typical of East Asian society, particularly although not exclusively China. As an ABC, an American-born Chinese daughter of immigrants, this is an obvious focal area for exploration, and individual discussions and chapters really stand out, especially a discussion on how East Asian and Western students recall and focus on different aspects of their own personal narratives. Western students focus on individual details and a self-focused narrative; East Asians focus on interdependent, relationship-driven long-term trends and patterns. A further fascinating piece is on how artists and scholars in the West focus on individual works of genius; this is contrasted with the Asian art traditions in which skilled mastery of existing forms and works is emphasized, and individual recognition is either frowned upon, or seen as largely irrelevant.
There are a host of similarly interesting and well-fleshed-out vignettes, many of them focused on the educational system and highly-motivated students from Asian and North American society. As a university professor it's unsurprising that she is focused on these subjects, but it makes me wonder if she could have looked at struggling, low-income youth in China and America as well, to see if their cultural gaps are similar.
(By the way, as she acknowledges, the psyches of kids from prosperous Western nations are by no means 'typical' psychologies; they are WEIRD — "Western, educated, industralized, rich, and developed," so the extension of Western psychology to students from Asia and Africa and Latin America was intrinsically flawed.)
As to the girl at the baggage claim? She is a red herring, or whatever the equivalent of red herring is in Mandarin. She is a prop, a stand-in — a real person, as it turns out, but more of a hook on which Jen hangs a whole host of perhaps-unrelated thesis statements.
The author's name, by the way, is a bit hilarious once I figured it out. Her Chinese name is Ren Bilian; her English name is Lillian Jen. The pen name, "Gish," is frequently confused as something "Asian" and thus she was frequently called "Geesh" by well-meaning Anglos. But it doesn't take a genius to figure out that she was called "Lillian Gish" as a girl, after the actress, and took "Gish" as her pen name accordingly.
There are a host of similarly interesting and well-fleshed-out vignettes, many of them focused on the educational system and highly-motivated students from Asian and North American society. As a university professor it's unsurprising that she is focused on these subjects, but it makes me wonder if she could have looked at struggling, low-income youth in China and America as well, to see if their cultural gaps are similar.
(By the way, as she acknowledges, the psyches of kids from prosperous Western nations are by no means 'typical' psychologies; they are WEIRD — "Western, educated, industralized, rich, and developed," so the extension of Western psychology to students from Asia and Africa and Latin America was intrinsically flawed.)
As to the girl at the baggage claim? She is a red herring, or whatever the equivalent of red herring is in Mandarin. She is a prop, a stand-in — a real person, as it turns out, but more of a hook on which Jen hangs a whole host of perhaps-unrelated thesis statements.
The author's name, by the way, is a bit hilarious once I figured it out. Her Chinese name is Ren Bilian; her English name is Lillian Jen. The pen name, "Gish," is frequently confused as something "Asian" and thus she was frequently called "Geesh" by well-meaning Anglos. But it doesn't take a genius to figure out that she was called "Lillian Gish" as a girl, after the actress, and took "Gish" as her pen name accordingly.
July 6, 2021
I'm not Western, so I feel I have some objectivity here. This is well-written but poorly argued distortion of East/West differennces.
Jen heavily whitewashes and sugar-coats Chinese culture in her attempt to make the differences more palatable to Americans. I completely agree with Jen that the underlying distinction between Eastern and Western countries can be summarized as valuing the "we" over the "I". Both have advantages and disadvantages, but Jen seems less willing to recognize the disadvantages objectively and instead develops a notion of a "flexiself". She argues if the harmony of "we" takes presidence over "I", then the self must be malleable and shape shifting.
The "flexiself" is a very charitable way (and making a word up helps) of saying, you will occupy the roles as assigned for the sake of the larger organism. Some of her anecdotes used to explore flexible selfhood also present examples of when the promotion of "we" fails. For example, she brings up the case of two sisters where one was flexible enough to take admission exams on behalf of the other. Wow! So flexible. Cheating on admissions tests is definitely promoting "we" over "I".
Another ridiculous anecdote... Dafen has painting factories where people make Van Gogh replicas all day long. She claims the artists don't prescribe any notion of self-hood to these paintings. Hmm, do you think you'd consider the umpteenth copy you made of someone else's painting your art? She also argues that the lack of such replicas in western culture and the existence of these factories in China signifies some self-hood value differential in art rather than a difference in government enforcement of intellectual property rights. I'm sure the guys who make fake Rolexes are also practicing united self hood...
Jen heavily whitewashes and sugar-coats Chinese culture in her attempt to make the differences more palatable to Americans. I completely agree with Jen that the underlying distinction between Eastern and Western countries can be summarized as valuing the "we" over the "I". Both have advantages and disadvantages, but Jen seems less willing to recognize the disadvantages objectively and instead develops a notion of a "flexiself". She argues if the harmony of "we" takes presidence over "I", then the self must be malleable and shape shifting.
The "flexiself" is a very charitable way (and making a word up helps) of saying, you will occupy the roles as assigned for the sake of the larger organism. Some of her anecdotes used to explore flexible selfhood also present examples of when the promotion of "we" fails. For example, she brings up the case of two sisters where one was flexible enough to take admission exams on behalf of the other. Wow! So flexible. Cheating on admissions tests is definitely promoting "we" over "I".
Another ridiculous anecdote... Dafen has painting factories where people make Van Gogh replicas all day long. She claims the artists don't prescribe any notion of self-hood to these paintings. Hmm, do you think you'd consider the umpteenth copy you made of someone else's painting your art? She also argues that the lack of such replicas in western culture and the existence of these factories in China signifies some self-hood value differential in art rather than a difference in government enforcement of intellectual property rights. I'm sure the guys who make fake Rolexes are also practicing united self hood...
October 14, 2020
I really wanted to like this book. The author is an accomplished writer but she is not an anthropologist, psychologist or a sociologist, she is a writer of fiction. Most of the book reads as an overly kind excuse for the flexi-self, mainly from mainline China, at the expense of the big-pit American view of the self. The scholarship is mainly anecdotal and stories that are carefully chosen to prove her bias. The studies she does cite are again only chosen to prove a point she has already decided is true, this is not an exploration. Her writing is so informal that it is confusing and sometimes her examples are extremely trite (the New England Patriots as an example of a collective culture, really? From an author who lives in Boston, hmmm). However, with all that said and with the bias against the American view of the self that comes through the book, I feel that there is something here. She is one of only a few that might be able to explore this difference between the East and West views of the self. But ultimately the book fails to deliver, perhaps it could succeed IF it was given a really hard and complete edit.
February 15, 2020
A tedious, didactic book that relies on the reductionist binary of the “avocado pit” self and the “interdependent” self, which represent West and East respectively. While this was probably not her intention, Jen winds up reinforcing orientalist ideas. Essentialism is boring. The more interesting question might be why so many books like this keep getting published.
March 25, 2021
I would recommend this book to Westerners as in introduction to East-West differences in culture and psychology…with a few caveats:
At one point, Jen makes an extremely low appeal to Western political sensibilities, comparing the stereotype (that this book effectively confirms) of the Chinese being incapable of original creation without imitation to the descriptions of Jews featured in Nazi ideology. The great irony of this comparison, of course, is that it is not the West that has any practical ability (or incentive) to round up every Han Chinese and send them all off to concentration camps; it is the Chinese government that has been doing just that - to ethnic minorities and dissidents. To suggest that to generalize ~20% of the total human population as uncreative imitators is comparable to Nazi ideology’s portrayal of a long-persecuted minority is just as absurd as the President of the United States claiming that he is the victim of a “witch hunt.”
Jen fails to demarcate the limits of the interdependent self. It is obvious to anyone who has ever been to China and interacted with the locals there, for example, that the fluidity of the self of the Chinese comes to a dramatic stop at the borders of their country. The interactions between Chinese may be fluid, but the fluid egos of the Chinese become exoskeletal whenever brought into contact with laowai. Many questions directed at foreigners notoriously start with “We Chinese (…), and what about You (Americans/Brits/Canadians etc.)?”
If Americans, for example, see themselves as little “pits” occupying a world with fluid borders (the borders of the United States taking a vague and permeable form in Americans’ minds), Chinese self-identity is more akin to a giant body of water with a concrete perimeter around the country.
Jen mentions the possibility of solipsism in independent-self (“big pit”) cultures, but does not mention the possibility of large-scale solipsism in “inter-dependent self” cultures. As Alec Ash wrote in his essay on the origins of support for Trump among Chinese (nationalists), “{…} the predominant attitude to international politics in China remains solipsistic. If foreign policy directly affects China, fervent passions can be aroused; if it is complex or incidental, the majority of people just don’t care.” https://chinachannel.org/2020/09/29/a...
Accordingly, any generalization the Chinese make about themselves as a whole should be taken in the context of inter-Chinese relations.
Throughout history, the Chinese have either seen themselves (in relation to others) with shame (out of a sense of inferiority) or with arrogance (out of a sense of superiority), but they seem to have never seen themselves as fundamentally the same as the rest of humanity – to them, a foreign country might as well be another planet; China is a world of its own- the only world (of import). The Chinese sure as hell have a “big pit;” it’s just that that big pit is one of a much larger (= national) scale than those of most Western societies (= individual).
It is an unfortunate and fatal consequence of interdependent-self cultures that the sense of self can easily be manipulated. We see this now in China, for example, where the egos of individuals have been manipulated in such a way that the border of the individual has become synonymous with the borders of their country. Chinese individuals are taught that this abstraction called the PRC is literally themselves, in the flesh and blood and bones. An abstraction is anthropomorphized into an immortal human - taking various forms such as The Mother, The Father, or the Idol - to whom mortal Chinese individuals must dedicate their lives.
At one point, Jen makes an extremely low appeal to Western political sensibilities, comparing the stereotype (that this book effectively confirms) of the Chinese being incapable of original creation without imitation to the descriptions of Jews featured in Nazi ideology. The great irony of this comparison, of course, is that it is not the West that has any practical ability (or incentive) to round up every Han Chinese and send them all off to concentration camps; it is the Chinese government that has been doing just that - to ethnic minorities and dissidents. To suggest that to generalize ~20% of the total human population as uncreative imitators is comparable to Nazi ideology’s portrayal of a long-persecuted minority is just as absurd as the President of the United States claiming that he is the victim of a “witch hunt.”
Jen fails to demarcate the limits of the interdependent self. It is obvious to anyone who has ever been to China and interacted with the locals there, for example, that the fluidity of the self of the Chinese comes to a dramatic stop at the borders of their country. The interactions between Chinese may be fluid, but the fluid egos of the Chinese become exoskeletal whenever brought into contact with laowai. Many questions directed at foreigners notoriously start with “We Chinese (…), and what about You (Americans/Brits/Canadians etc.)?”
If Americans, for example, see themselves as little “pits” occupying a world with fluid borders (the borders of the United States taking a vague and permeable form in Americans’ minds), Chinese self-identity is more akin to a giant body of water with a concrete perimeter around the country.
Jen mentions the possibility of solipsism in independent-self (“big pit”) cultures, but does not mention the possibility of large-scale solipsism in “inter-dependent self” cultures. As Alec Ash wrote in his essay on the origins of support for Trump among Chinese (nationalists), “{…} the predominant attitude to international politics in China remains solipsistic. If foreign policy directly affects China, fervent passions can be aroused; if it is complex or incidental, the majority of people just don’t care.” https://chinachannel.org/2020/09/29/a...
Accordingly, any generalization the Chinese make about themselves as a whole should be taken in the context of inter-Chinese relations.
Throughout history, the Chinese have either seen themselves (in relation to others) with shame (out of a sense of inferiority) or with arrogance (out of a sense of superiority), but they seem to have never seen themselves as fundamentally the same as the rest of humanity – to them, a foreign country might as well be another planet; China is a world of its own- the only world (of import). The Chinese sure as hell have a “big pit;” it’s just that that big pit is one of a much larger (= national) scale than those of most Western societies (= individual).
It is an unfortunate and fatal consequence of interdependent-self cultures that the sense of self can easily be manipulated. We see this now in China, for example, where the egos of individuals have been manipulated in such a way that the border of the individual has become synonymous with the borders of their country. Chinese individuals are taught that this abstraction called the PRC is literally themselves, in the flesh and blood and bones. An abstraction is anthropomorphized into an immortal human - taking various forms such as The Mother, The Father, or the Idol - to whom mortal Chinese individuals must dedicate their lives.
August 29, 2018
"[I] is not to 'thine own self' that a flexi-self must be true. It is to the family, to the Torah, to the South, to the country, to the Hippocratic Oath. It is to the spirit of Bach, or the Soldier's Creed. A flexi-self finally belongs to a great cause or great institution or great tradition, and is committed to its survival." (50)
"Real artists live on the margins. Real artists break the furniture in hotel rooms. Real artists destroy people around them as well as themselves, as everyone knows. Except, that is, that everyone doesn't. In our reverence for the genius, we stand in sharp contrast to many cultures, including the Chinese, who have by and large knelt to the figure of the master." (83)
"One thing about training is that it takes elbow grease. That is, it is compatible with the sort of flexi-self perseverance that goes with the Undaunted Scholar. And it is compatible, too, with the dogged determination with which flexi-selves believe even sheer stupidity can be overcome. Witness the myriad of Chinese sayings along the lines of 'Diligence makes up for stupidity' and 'Stupid birds get an early start.'" (136)
"We see a difference in communication style when it comes to essay-writing, too. ... If left to their [Chinese students'] own devices, they say that they would structure their essays differently -- relying more heavily, in interdependent fashion, on their audiences' ability to enter their work. IN other words, they would open with a kind of mystery, and hide the main point, leaving it to their readers to intuit it themselves, with the whole picture -- and pattern -- emerging gradually." (197)
"All this was about restoring some bit of her ever-dwindling agency and control. I thought she might like to feel more independent and self-sufficient. But of course, she refused the water service -- for the whole point, as her stupid American daughter should have known, was to get my brothers to come visit. She wanted to be running out of water, or to be in danger of it; and she wanted to be able to tell them that -- that their mother was in her house alone, in need of something." (251-2)
"Real artists live on the margins. Real artists break the furniture in hotel rooms. Real artists destroy people around them as well as themselves, as everyone knows. Except, that is, that everyone doesn't. In our reverence for the genius, we stand in sharp contrast to many cultures, including the Chinese, who have by and large knelt to the figure of the master." (83)
"One thing about training is that it takes elbow grease. That is, it is compatible with the sort of flexi-self perseverance that goes with the Undaunted Scholar. And it is compatible, too, with the dogged determination with which flexi-selves believe even sheer stupidity can be overcome. Witness the myriad of Chinese sayings along the lines of 'Diligence makes up for stupidity' and 'Stupid birds get an early start.'" (136)
"We see a difference in communication style when it comes to essay-writing, too. ... If left to their [Chinese students'] own devices, they say that they would structure their essays differently -- relying more heavily, in interdependent fashion, on their audiences' ability to enter their work. IN other words, they would open with a kind of mystery, and hide the main point, leaving it to their readers to intuit it themselves, with the whole picture -- and pattern -- emerging gradually." (197)
"All this was about restoring some bit of her ever-dwindling agency and control. I thought she might like to feel more independent and self-sufficient. But of course, she refused the water service -- for the whole point, as her stupid American daughter should have known, was to get my brothers to come visit. She wanted to be running out of water, or to be in danger of it; and she wanted to be able to tell them that -- that their mother was in her house alone, in need of something." (251-2)
June 11, 2018
We love to divide people into groups. Of course it is hard-wired into us as primates, mammals, vertebrates even, to distinguish between Us and Them. My mom, with Marx, swore there are only two kinds of people: regular people, and evil greedy rich people. In my young-mother days we tried to discern if we were winters, autumns, springs or summers. My daughter-in-law used to like Meyers-Briggs as a distinguisher - multiple combinations of four spectra where except for I my personal letters changed every time I took the test. Fiske has four ways of relating: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing, which can be mixed and matched depending on who you are relating to. His student Haidt has five (or is it six) moral foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation (and maybe Liberty/Oppression). If you are a Liberal, a Conservative, or a Libertarian, your moral mileage might vary. And on it goes.
There's value in setting up these explanations of inexplicable behavior, and in knocking them down. Know Thyself, after all. Jen, who is a novelist daughter of Asian immigrants, posits that Americans have a relatively unusual way of seeing the world, individualistic as opposed to collaborative. She backs it up with a lifetime of close observation and a boatload of dubious psychological studies. It was just in the news that New York is finally going to destroy their merit-based magnet high schools rather than allow them to remain 80% Asian, disparate outcomes obviously resulting from privilege and not from culture. Not so fast, Jen tells us.
The parts of this book I liked most were the historical nuggets: the art copying village, the city-wide noise bans during the high-stakes college entrance exam, why rice farming is communal, "thank you" as an insult. I might understand my youngest son's in-laws and my middle son's best friend's parents a little better now. Scrutinize the Inscrutable East. Learn something new.
There's value in setting up these explanations of inexplicable behavior, and in knocking them down. Know Thyself, after all. Jen, who is a novelist daughter of Asian immigrants, posits that Americans have a relatively unusual way of seeing the world, individualistic as opposed to collaborative. She backs it up with a lifetime of close observation and a boatload of dubious psychological studies. It was just in the news that New York is finally going to destroy their merit-based magnet high schools rather than allow them to remain 80% Asian, disparate outcomes obviously resulting from privilege and not from culture. Not so fast, Jen tells us.
The parts of this book I liked most were the historical nuggets: the art copying village, the city-wide noise bans during the high-stakes college entrance exam, why rice farming is communal, "thank you" as an insult. I might understand my youngest son's in-laws and my middle son's best friend's parents a little better now. Scrutinize the Inscrutable East. Learn something new.
April 15, 2023
Overview:
Different cultures think differently about how each individual fits in their society. Cultures influence how much control each individual thinks they have to shape events. Whether the individual chooses every decision, to decisions being a product of the situation and influenced by the community. Cultures that are individualistic prioritize oneself and contrast themselves to others. Cultures that are interdependent flexi-self do not have clear personal boundaries, for the boundary is fluid within their group, but do have a boundary for an outgroup. Individualistic cultures prioritize individual achievement and effort. Flexi-self cultures prioritize the context and community that facilitated the achievement.
Different ways of understanding can create misunderstanding when interpreting the decisions of people from other cultures. A cultural clash. Each type of culture has its advantages and disadvantages. The dichotomy between individualistic and flexi-self has deviations for individuals within the cultures can think differently. People and organizations can also become ambidependent, by making decisions and interpreting them using both types of understandings.
Caveats?
The book is composed of mostly examples. Lacking a systematic analysis of the ideas. The focus is primarily to explain flexi-self cultures such as China, while often contrasting it with individualistic cultures such as America. These examples themselves are diverse ways to understand the concept of a flexi-self, they do not necessarily add value to the concept of flexi-self.
Different cultures think differently about how each individual fits in their society. Cultures influence how much control each individual thinks they have to shape events. Whether the individual chooses every decision, to decisions being a product of the situation and influenced by the community. Cultures that are individualistic prioritize oneself and contrast themselves to others. Cultures that are interdependent flexi-self do not have clear personal boundaries, for the boundary is fluid within their group, but do have a boundary for an outgroup. Individualistic cultures prioritize individual achievement and effort. Flexi-self cultures prioritize the context and community that facilitated the achievement.
Different ways of understanding can create misunderstanding when interpreting the decisions of people from other cultures. A cultural clash. Each type of culture has its advantages and disadvantages. The dichotomy between individualistic and flexi-self has deviations for individuals within the cultures can think differently. People and organizations can also become ambidependent, by making decisions and interpreting them using both types of understandings.
Caveats?
The book is composed of mostly examples. Lacking a systematic analysis of the ideas. The focus is primarily to explain flexi-self cultures such as China, while often contrasting it with individualistic cultures such as America. These examples themselves are diverse ways to understand the concept of a flexi-self, they do not necessarily add value to the concept of flexi-self.
July 6, 2022
Good selection of case studies and insightful, nuanced observations. My one gripe with this book is that it's spun as East vs. West, or collectivist vs. individualist. This is not accurate. It is a very specific study of two cultures, and two cultures only: the United States and China.
You cannot make observations about Americans and apply them to Europeans--sure, there are sweeping generalities that you can make here (everyone benefited from the Enlightenment), but all in all, Europeans are really, really different from Americans (and indeed, from themselves), just as other Asians are really, really different from the Chinese. Having lived in both France and China for a combined fifteen years, I would say that there were many moments when I felt more lost in France than I did in China. To argue that the French, for example, value individualism over the collectivist extended family is just not true. If anything, the French are more in the middle when it comes to individualist versus collectivist values.
In the same vein, I had Korean, Japanese, and Indian classmates in Taiwan and the PRC who felt equally adrift trying to navigate the complexities of Chinese society.
To be fair, the author does acknowledge this issue. Ultimately, it is arguably impossible to carry out a true study of the "East-West culture gap" because there is too much diversity and too many variables beneath the big geographical umbrella terms.
Pet peeve aside, I enjoyed reading this.
You cannot make observations about Americans and apply them to Europeans--sure, there are sweeping generalities that you can make here (everyone benefited from the Enlightenment), but all in all, Europeans are really, really different from Americans (and indeed, from themselves), just as other Asians are really, really different from the Chinese. Having lived in both France and China for a combined fifteen years, I would say that there were many moments when I felt more lost in France than I did in China. To argue that the French, for example, value individualism over the collectivist extended family is just not true. If anything, the French are more in the middle when it comes to individualist versus collectivist values.
In the same vein, I had Korean, Japanese, and Indian classmates in Taiwan and the PRC who felt equally adrift trying to navigate the complexities of Chinese society.
To be fair, the author does acknowledge this issue. Ultimately, it is arguably impossible to carry out a true study of the "East-West culture gap" because there is too much diversity and too many variables beneath the big geographical umbrella terms.
Pet peeve aside, I enjoyed reading this.
July 28, 2017
Gish Jen has good ideas on a good topic. She'd be a wonderful person to meet for coffee: warm, funny, quirky, and very very smart.
That said, the book has frustrating flaws. Why, for example, is her description of the fundamental attribution error -- an important part of her argument -- so sketchy that I had to consult Wikipedia for a clear explanation? I know she can write very well. Why didn't she?
Another example: why does she construct this story of the girl at the baggage claim in the preface, then keep me guessing on the resolution until the epilogue? It's only there, after slogging through hundreds of pages, that I finally deduced that the entire story was fiction.
How is this fair, exactly? After all, Gish Jen promised me in the preface that I would understand the logic of the girl at the baggage claim being not being the girl she was supposed to be. She promised me that I would understand why a Chinese family might pull a bait and switch operation on an American school and why they would expect it to succeed.
And then in the epilogue, I find out that there was no girl at all, and no Chinese family determined to deceive Milton
Academy. The whole story was fiction. So the bait and switch was Gish Jen pulling a deception on me.
Gish Jen is a graceful and expressive prose stylist, but I don't like being deceived.
That said, the book has frustrating flaws. Why, for example, is her description of the fundamental attribution error -- an important part of her argument -- so sketchy that I had to consult Wikipedia for a clear explanation? I know she can write very well. Why didn't she?
Another example: why does she construct this story of the girl at the baggage claim in the preface, then keep me guessing on the resolution until the epilogue? It's only there, after slogging through hundreds of pages, that I finally deduced that the entire story was fiction.
How is this fair, exactly? After all, Gish Jen promised me in the preface that I would understand the logic of the girl at the baggage claim being not being the girl she was supposed to be. She promised me that I would understand why a Chinese family might pull a bait and switch operation on an American school and why they would expect it to succeed.
And then in the epilogue, I find out that there was no girl at all, and no Chinese family determined to deceive Milton
Academy. The whole story was fiction. So the bait and switch was Gish Jen pulling a deception on me.
Gish Jen is a graceful and expressive prose stylist, but I don't like being deceived.
July 29, 2017
Too intellectual for me. Felt like I was reading a text book. Made it to about page 40 when I gave up and then I skimmed a little and read a Goodreads review or two. The Big Pit Avocado independent self of the west vs. the Flexi Self, interdependent and collectivist of the East. Not sure I learned anything. We each have parts of both? Chinese sons bring Mother bottled water.
Self definition or self sacrifice. Interdependent self is accomodating. Stereotypes: Asians are good at math. 1989 Tiannanmen tank man.
Americans blame themselves. Israelis blame the system. English lang. paper blame personal characteristics, short fuse, etc. Chinese point to external factors, recently fired, postal supervisor was his enemy. The West = lone dissenter, Winston Smith who stands up to Big Brother in 1984 George Orwell. USA = rugged individualism.
Japanese get divorced too now. Or don't marry. Rate has risen 3X since 1960, a marker of individualism. Rice culture. All agriculture encourages flexi selves. Trade and hunting fostered big pit selves.
Q: were they immoral to have the sister who spoke better English do the Skype college entrance exam interview for the other sister?
Self definition or self sacrifice. Interdependent self is accomodating. Stereotypes: Asians are good at math. 1989 Tiannanmen tank man.
Americans blame themselves. Israelis blame the system. English lang. paper blame personal characteristics, short fuse, etc. Chinese point to external factors, recently fired, postal supervisor was his enemy. The West = lone dissenter, Winston Smith who stands up to Big Brother in 1984 George Orwell. USA = rugged individualism.
Japanese get divorced too now. Or don't marry. Rate has risen 3X since 1960, a marker of individualism. Rice culture. All agriculture encourages flexi selves. Trade and hunting fostered big pit selves.
Q: were they immoral to have the sister who spoke better English do the Skype college entrance exam interview for the other sister?
September 8, 2023
The premise was interesting, but I had to stop reading. The weight of the argument often rested on psychology studies: studies that are probably not replicable, and thus probably not true. Reading while basically tossing out all the evidence and then trying to figure out what might still be true was a slog.
[Edit: I almost forgot that Jen reveals that Annie Dillard didn't actually have a tom cat rub blood on her, as Tinker at Pilgrim Creek would suggest. That story was taken from someone else (!!)
"But she has also conceded that her tremendous opening line with its heraldic wildness—'I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest'—was appropriated. Writes Saverin, When I asked about the tomcat in the first sentence, she told me she’d heard a similar story from 'some poor graduate student' named Frank McCullough over lunch at the Hollins snack bar."]
[Edit: I almost forgot that Jen reveals that Annie Dillard didn't actually have a tom cat rub blood on her, as Tinker at Pilgrim Creek would suggest. That story was taken from someone else (!!)
"But she has also conceded that her tremendous opening line with its heraldic wildness—'I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest'—was appropriated. Writes Saverin, When I asked about the tomcat in the first sentence, she told me she’d heard a similar story from 'some poor graduate student' named Frank McCullough over lunch at the Hollins snack bar."]
October 6, 2017
Interesting non-fiction book about East/West cultural differences, specifically focused on the strong Western individualistic tendency vs. the Eastern tendency to move in groups and not necessarily express strong ego-focused opinions (this is all, obviously, very general and stereotypical). The author examines the implications of these cultural differences in terms of art, culture, education, and family.
She does a good job of looking at each "side" in a new and different light, portraying the "other" side as having advantages that one might never have thought of.
I did think at times her conclusions were a bit of a stretch, but that's often true of a non-fiction author trying to prove a point. Overall, it made me reconsider aspects of behavior that I'd always previously considered stifling or overly-conformist. It sure makes one, as a Westerner, feel appropriately silly and humble about our navel-gazing tendencies. There are 7 billion of us...we're not special!
She does a good job of looking at each "side" in a new and different light, portraying the "other" side as having advantages that one might never have thought of.
I did think at times her conclusions were a bit of a stretch, but that's often true of a non-fiction author trying to prove a point. Overall, it made me reconsider aspects of behavior that I'd always previously considered stifling or overly-conformist. It sure makes one, as a Westerner, feel appropriately silly and humble about our navel-gazing tendencies. There are 7 billion of us...we're not special!
May 10, 2019
The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap by Gish Jen takes its title from the story of an Asian girl whose fluent English-speaking sister made her application and took her interview for her at a prestigious American prep school. In view of the recent scandals about rich American parents who bribed and deceived admissions staff to gain advantage for their children, the East-West contrast may seem less sharp in that than in some of her other stories, but she is well supplied with anecdotes that support her description of collectivist Asians vs. individualist Americans and she draws on relevant research to support her points. Her image of the Western self as “a kind of avocado, replete with a big pit on which it is focused,” was not a helpful illustration for me. On the other hand, her chapter on American history, from the Calvinists to the Cold War, was priceless.
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