Minor epiphany, and perhaps an obvious one, but I’ve realized the common denominator in the behavior of most of my coworkers. They go to extremes to be deferential and face-saving to one another, except when I’m involved. Then they think nothing of making me look bad in front of others, and occasionally seem to go out of their way to do so. It hit me: Chinese culture is all about kissing the asses of other Chinese people. As a foreigner, you’re not part of that. In fact, if a colleague can walk over you to kiss the ass of another Chinese person in the workplace, he scores bonus points!
Go to their leader (there always is one) and make friends with him/her. Then you will be part of the pack and they wont mess with you. It works !!
Nice idea and maybe it would work elsewhere. But in my experience, it’s the leader who’s falling over himself the most to kiss the asses of his underlings. If he’s in a managerial position, having the foreigner around is convenient when he needs to push the underlings for results: “You need to work harder. But I’m your friend! It’s the foreigner’s fault!”
My experience working in TAiwan has been:
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dont make friends with the leader you will be an outsider and your work will be hard.
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make friends with the leader and get him/her on your side. Your work will be easy and you will have plenty of help.
Some situations are tougher then others, granted. And if the leader is the chief antagonist, you have to work doubly hard to secure his/her backing.
Work on your language skills. The minute you can give as good as you get, and with the appropriate amounts of subtlety, you’ll find you won’t be trespassed against nearly as often, unless you’re the sort of person that subconsciously invites that kind of behaviour in your own culture/country as well.
Realize this: Even if you spoke Mandarin fluently, you’ve not grown-up with the interpersonal politics from day one. Thus engaging in it is like bring a knife to a gun fight, i.e, you will always lose. This is a culture that is willing to fight a war over semantics.
My tactic was to keep my nose clean, make sure what I did is a success, share the credit, learn valuable skills and transfer them into a better environment as fast as I could. Once I moved back into an MNC, I found that I was well equipped to stay out of trouble from a politics point of view thanks to the learnings I had working for local firms.
Sage advice all around. And don’t anyone ever evene suspect you feel the way you do. The resentful foreigner will be thrown to the dogs.
I’m so happy to be out of it! Now I just get into the office, do my work and go home. Everyone is really nice to me and helps me because I don’t have much experience. Then I go home. Sometimes people invite me to go to social events outside work time. If I make a mistake, someone smiles and shows me what to do instead. I have the same working hours but I get 25 hours’ work a week, not 50. My boss is cheerful and loves her job. People sometimes bake cakes on Fridays.
[quote=“tommy525”]My experience working in TAiwan has been:
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dont make friends with the leader you will be an outsider and your work will be hard.
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make friends with the leader and get him/her on your side. Your work will be easy and you will have plenty of help.
[/quote] -
Shut the fuck up.
I get a lot of cakes from the girls and nobody is nasty to me because if they try my wife kicks their butt.
Yeah, once was successful Product Manager and when the Product was in the stage where everything runs smooth the greatest loser of the sales team who was the friend of the company chairman got my job and I got his!
Well, might not be related to me being a foreigner, surely I was not good in office politics without mandarin (meaning: I was a total looser in it) and so all I did was to say “ups, no, I am not Sales, I quit!”
Now wife bulldogs protects me and I have fun.
Life’s good.
Without being able to participate in office politics it sucks.
Just remember the golden rule: Don’t dick on other foreigners.
If you ever have the chance to drop another foreigner in it to enhance your position at work, don’t do it. By all means, play the face game if you must, but don’t play dirty.
Same here. They buy the cakes, though, rather than bake them, except for Elizabeth, who lived in France for four years and bakes the most delectable madelaines. I can’t imagine working in the kind of environment some of you guys complain about. It would drive me apeshit!
Same here. They buy the cakes, though, rather than bake them, except for Elizabeth, who lived in France for four years and bakes the most delectable madelaines. I can’t imagine working in the kind of environment some of you guys complain about. It would drive me apeshit![/quote]
Well, my co in Taiwan had just gone feral because of bad management. It was outrageous. Nothing was every done because the bosses were all expats who couldn’t understand Chinese.
Nothing to be done but leave. Oh, and tell everyone I know.
I find that locals can be extremely cruel to each other too, for example, once they get out of the office the men immediately start to mock the women in appearance and general behavior in any social activity (like say KTV, ie the only social activity).
You however are a foreigner, they hold as much regard for you as they would a dog. An overbearing sense of ethnic pride and self-worth has been instilled in everyone from day one, and you don’t fit the bill, hence you don’t matter.
At the end of the day that is the putong attitude here. Sure us foreign devils have made great friends and some of us have even found wonderful spouses, real salt of the Earth types, but they are the MINORITY. To the majority of people here, waiguorens are blacks, and Taiwan is 1963 Alabama.
It won’t change, so the best thing to do is work around it.
Quite apart from the utter and complete ignorance you display with that racist crap, I also find it highly offensive. You really have THAT little awareness of where you live and the people around you? No WONDER people look down on you!
Quite apart from the utter and complete ignorance you display with that racist crap, I also find it highly offensive. You really have THAT little awareness of where you live and the people around you? No WONDER people look down on you![/quote]
here ya go bud, from your racist pal! CHEERS!
-YO, Sandman, over here!
-uh, huh, sorry, just posting online…
Precisely. Your own little world, with your head in the sand. 
Hmmmm…
From someone who argues it’s good to be functionally illiterate since the rest of the world is just a bunch of mouth breathers and only wants to hang in the pub with the people he already knows. 
Not that I agree with the statement that Taiwan is like 1963 Alabama. I wouldn’t even know what that is like, being long unborn.
[quote=“Elegua”]Hmmmm…
From someone who argues it’s good to be functionally illiterate since the rest of the world is just a bunch of mouth breathers and only wants to hang in the pub with the people he already knows.
[/quote]
Don’t believe everything you read on the Intarweb. 
[quote=“TomHill”]Just remember the golden rule: Don’t dick on other foreigners.
If you ever have the chance to drop another foreigner in it to enhance your position at work, don’t do it. By all means, play the face game if you must, but don’t play dirty.[/quote]
Why does it matter if it’s a foreigner or not?