I am a white native english speaker working in exclusively mandarin speaking work environments for 6 months now doing international sales and would like to connect with other formosans that are in a similar situation. I’ve worked in a few different places, mostly traditional factories, and have encountered some difficulties like loneliness, being misunderstood in general and misunderstanding orders, taking longer to figure out how to do the task given me and requiring more time of my peers than a native speaker would require, confronting the mountain of chinese characters in the basic office software, being left out when the discussion turns into taiwanese, my english ability being questioned when i verbally translate to my boss what i wrote in english, because my translation was bad. I’m just wondering if anybody has been in these situations.
Although I don’t work in an exclusively Chinese-speaking environment, I often interact with clients exclusively in Chinese and conduct sales negotiations in Chinese. I’m pretty capable in this respect, but I always make sure to take a secretary along to meetings where anything is at stake. (I don’t exactly have a personal secretary, but have access to a department secretary who is highly competent and helpful.)
I bring this up because sometimes people in sales or lower management positions in companies may have access to shared secretaries or administrative assistants but don’t think of using them or don’t feel comfortable using them. (In my observation, upper management and CEOs as a rule make intensive use of their secretaries, and part of their success in rising to those positions probably comes from their natural tendency to delegate work.)
So, if you have access to such help (though you may not have this luxury), I highly recommend you take advantage of it. Self-employed people or people working in the field might also want to consider hiring a part-time secretary to be available a few hours per week or for meetings with advance notice. A good secretary is very useful in watching your back in any business setting but especially when you’re working in a language that’s not your native tongue.
No, definitely no… I think you are definitely right. Taiwanese people think that they are better. The isulation is normal they isulate even new taiwanese employes. I have the same expressions at my work. I have worked at many other places, I love to work but since I am in Taiwan it is like a nightmare it is normal that they think your English is bad ( I am not a native) They think that you are stupid phonecalls for you will never reach you they make decissions for you even if you have told them not to do this. They don’ t tell you any meeting times and even not if you have to work on a weekend. They don’ t tell you anything if you are in an office they wil never speak any english word even if they can. They will help you in a destroying way if you say let us speak about an issue they will make phonecalls or anything else and a few days later they will began the discussion. If you are on a meeting they will began with English and then they will keep on with chinese…
It is difficult here so stay here for a couple of years and then go back…
What are you looking for? What do you want from the job? How good is you Mandarin? How good do you want it to be? What do you want going forward?
I did something similar in my 1st job out of school. Admittedly, my Mandarin was pretty good even then as I’d just come off of doing my senior thesis in Chinese. (I had to pass an exam to get the job). However, I quickly found out I had a lot to learn despite my summers working as an intern in Taiwanese factories.
What you will get out of the experience if you approach it with the correct attitude.
- A good understanding of how local company board rooms work & how decisions are really made
- You will pick & and learn to do tasks almost as fast as the locals. You will also learn how to compensate for where you are not.
- How to connect and make yourself ‘happy’ even as the outsider. (remember the overseas
colleague who got left out, not because no one liked him, but because he was slow and wasn’t much fun? - that be you) - How to properly give and receive feedback
- Your Mandarin will get very proficient, if you are patient, thick skinned and put effort to it.
To do this requires the patience of Ghandi, the empathy of Mother Teresa, and the observation of Machiavelli
Good Luck! The lessons you learn will serve you a lifetime.
I did not say that it is about your or my chinese. It is their working behavior they are not able to work with each other how they can do this with a foreigner? I am not the one who has no friends no … I am the one how is keeping the taiwanese together!
Taiwanese and Chinese are not able to work in groups. The most big companies tried to establish research compartements- but it doesn’t work because of this, They are great alone but not together, they are smart but they will never tell you anything they now. It is not the language it is their behavior, we had a lot students from asia but all of them had the same problem you can read about this behavior in many professional journals. Because of their behavior most big companies don’t like to hire them unless in their own countries.
- Untill I began with my work my colleagues where not abel to speak with each other
- They don’t know each other
I think I have explained before that even if you try to speak about one problem about your work that they will do like working, and if they want to speak they will come to you. To be the one who is better prepared or maybe they will come friday afternoon when they know you have to leave early to be the one who contact the boss…
This is something wich will not change even if you speak perfect chinese even if you are the funny guy who pay the bills…
What I’ve learned so far: Even though your Chinese might be great, they actually do willingly misunderstand certain things and then blame it on your “bad” Chinese. If you are saying something really important, say it in English and write it down!
I started this paticular string a while back and for the sake of others in my situation looking for information and support, i will share my experience. My first job was doing international sales for a tool manufacturer. All communication was in chinese which was a huge difficulty but to add to that, the particular position i took over was in complete chaos. Previous sales reps before me either quite or were fired so there was no continuity. And what the company needed was somebody with experience beable to handle the work load (but they wanted to pay the wage of a trainee) Documentation was in a giant pile. I worked 10hr days and had to endure a boss that yells at his employees. Probably went through about 5 or more of these screaming sessions where i was the one getting yelled at. I also had difficulties feeling comfortable in the work place as i was left out of most interpersonal communication. For the sake of experience i endured this for 3 months before i was fired. That was a very happy day. One year later they called me back and asked if i wanted to go back. 
Later i got another international sales job for a small manufacturer. This environment was also completely chinese/taiwanese. Unlike the crazy busyness of my previous job, this job was like a family mom and pop where the sons of the boss live upstairs with their wives and children. And aside from a few outsiders everyone was related. It was a very gossipy work group and taiwanese was the main language spoken. I do not understand taiwanese so i was left out on almost every conversation unless they were talking to me directly. This is bad cause a lot of learning (about ones work) is done by being able to listen to what co workers are saying. And my boss’s mandarin was so bad i just couldnt understand him. The boss would often have local suppliers come and chit chat, and my prescence there was almost like a joke or a conversation peice amid the tea, cigaretes and betel nut. So i quit this job. I was just about to give up finding a job working for a taiwanese company when my current manager from yet another small manufacturing company called me. We had a long talk and i told her my woes, what kind of work conditions i would like and she was willing to be flexible to accomodate me. She was willing to teach me how to do sales and allow me a flexible schedule, respect and trust. She was able to get past the lanugage barriar. (i’m still speaking exclusively mandarin at work-which i like) It is a pleasant environment and my coworkers are nice. (a work group of 4 people only) So for anybody out there charting a similar path, if you have the heart, you will find a way to approach what you want. And i see the hardships as a stepping stone to that end. Yet another manufacturer called me to see if i wanted to work for them. They had hired foreigners before that spoke mandarin. After working with them for a couple of years, they would return to their home countries and able to get higher positions. Such as one American woman who was later hired by Walmart to be a Walmarts Asian buyer.
I find that even though I can communicate in Mandarin decently, they still don’t bother to tell me certain details. I believe this is due to a certain lack of organizational skills at a basic level.
Also, I don’t find Chinese to be the most precise language, and Chinese speakers to be generally lax on details regarding communication. A lot of things are assumed (in sentences and conversations). Assumptions work often and are easy, but create problems sometimes. A prime example is the inability to use antecedents. If I had a penny for every time I picked up the phone, and some guy on the other end goes: “I need your help with that case. They are doing x, y, and z. (or even worse it’s in passive tense).” Given the large amount of cases and lots of contacts and contracts, I have to ask them: who the hell am I talking to, what case are you talking about, and who’s “they” and what happened before.
Oh boy, your experiences are very close to my own. Of course there is a certain amount of that isolation due to you being a foreigner. They use you as a 24/7 English dictionary and treat you as a mascot at best and abuse you as a whipping boy at worst. Truth is though, that the majority of companies are run like some kind of social club. You get help with your job by kissing ass with others, not because you’re good at doing it. There is a huge tendency for employees to form cliques, and for those cliques to go to war with each other, and to completely ignore anyone outside. I’ve seen companies with good products, the correct marketing mix and very motivated sales people fail simply because warring cliques interfered with everyone else’s ability to do their jobs. Basically if you have three employees, two of them are plotting how to get rid of the third. The better companies I worked for were the ones where the employees may not have been the hardest-working or the smartest, but they all got along well together and pitched in.
Although you will get it worse than others because (1) you’re an outsider and (2) your language problems, a lot of these problems will befall everyone regardless. You’re not the only who is unaware of important meetings, holidays, deadlines or other things. Everyone has to go investigate these things themselves. It’s not only your expense requests or visa applications that always seem to be in the bottom of a drawer someplace. It’s the local style to leave everything until the deadline has passed, and then run around like a headless chicken trying to work out a solution. Actually the Taiwanese are so used to working like this that planning ahead gives them allergic reactions. Some of the best crisis managers I’ve ever met were Taiwanese. Chaos holds no fear for them.
The flip-side is the old maxim that we learn more from mistakes than from successes. They don’t have to be your own failures and you don’t have to pay for the mistakes! If you can stick it out you will learn a lot and somewhere it will be very useful. Good luck!
[quote=“redwagon”]Oh boy, your experiences are very close to my own. Of course there is a certain amount of that isolation due to you being a foreigner. They use you as a 24/7 English dictionary and treat you as a mascot at best and abuse you as a whipping boy at worst. Truth is though, that the majority of companies are run like some kind of social club. You get help with your job by kissing ass with others, not because you’re good at doing it. There is a huge tendency for employees to form cliques, and for those cliques to go to war with each other, and to completely ignore anyone outside. I’ve seen companies with good products, the correct marketing mix and very motivated sales people fail simply because warring cliques interfered with everyone else’s ability to do their jobs. Basically if you have three employees, two of them are plotting how to get rid of the third. The better companies I worked for were the ones where the employees may not have been the hardest-working or the smartest, but they all got along well together and pitched in.
Although you will get it worse than others because (1) you’re an outsider and (2) your language problems, a lot of these problems will befall everyone regardless. You’re not the only who is unaware of important meetings, holidays, deadlines or other things. Everyone has to go investigate these things themselves. It’s not only your expense requests or visa applications that always seem to be in the bottom of a drawer someplace. It’s the local style to leave everything until the deadline has passed, and then run around like a headless chicken trying to work out a solution. Actually the Taiwanese are so used to working like this that planning ahead gives them allergic reactions. Some of the best crisis managers I’ve ever met were Taiwanese. Chaos holds no fear for them.
The flip-side is the old maxim that we learn more from mistakes than from successes. They don’t have to be your own failures and you don’t have to pay for the mistakes! If you can stick it out you will learn a lot and somewhere it will be very useful. Good luck![/quote]
This should be in a book somewhere R.W. maybe you can write a book called
“The Headless Chicken: Taiwanese Chaos Theory and Business Management.”
[quote=“Bubba 2 Guns”]
This should be in a book somewhere R.W. maybe you can write a book called
“The Headless Chicken: Taiwanese Chaos Theory and Business Management.”[/quote]
This is a great book with lots of stuff on how Taiwanese companies operate. I don’t recall if he gets into the crisis management aspect but he has a great handle on local corporate culture. He is under the slight misapprehension that Taiwan is some kind of pure example of Chinese culture unaltered by communism. Obviously somewhat brainwashed by the propaganda that flourished when he wrote the book and unaware of the influence of the Japanese… but that doesn’t dull his ability to capture the subtle treachery that makes up day to day life in the office.
I do like your title better though!
I love bubba’s revised title!
That book looks good indeed. But how’s this arsehole’s review. I think I’m getting the sense that someone’s found enlightment in their six months in Shanghai taking it up the Khyber for Ah Chen.
HG
That’s a pretty one-sided review, IMO. I read it some years ago and while it didn’t really break much new ground it did at least go some way toward rebutting the myth that the Chinese cannot be understood. He also wrote a good chapter on the Chinese concept of honesty and how that relates to all the other concepts they have. Pretty decent. For sure I wouldn’t buy it now as a ‘how-to-do-business-in-China’ manual but many of his anecdotes are hilarious and revealing. The author did work for some years in a Chinese-only office environment and after a similar amount of time I had a lot of deja-vu moments where one of his stories would come true in my day, or would happen to one of my friends.
Mate your word was enough for me. I included that to show what miserable bastards occupy the “must have time in China” space these days.
HG
[quote=“Huang Guang Chen”] I included that to show what miserable bastards occupy the “must have time in China” space these days.
HG[/quote]
Yeah…what bastards 
Bump.
[quote=“ally”]
Taiwanese and Chinese are not able to work in groups.[/quote]
I have to say, this is the biggest shortfall of local companies.
I too am in an all Mandarin-speaking environment. We have our own brand and “innovation” is a word that is thrown around in a lot of our marketing materials.
But how can you innovate if you don’t work together to come up with new ideas and methods?
This is a HUGE problem culturally that will only change over generations.
In the West, what are the biggest facilitators of group work? Sports teams.
The best leaders in America grew up playing team sports, working together, showing leadership, learning how to get the best from their team.
Look around in Taiwan and you see absolutely NO team interaction. Granted, there’s not a lot of space, but even the simplest basketball court consists of kids playing 1-on-1 with their cousin or brother.
Observe and you will notice this occurs at every basket around the court.
Go to New York City and see the basketball courts, or any part of America for that matter. There might be 10 different hoops scattered around, but all the action will be at the main 3 or 4.
When I first came to Taiwan I was thrown into the deep-end aswell working in local environments. Looking back it was pretty tough especially with the language, communication problems and lack of socialising. It’s an additive effect. When all the problems and issues come together they can really get you down. Working for small Taiwanese companies this can happen and they don’t really allow you time off to brush up your Chinese in many instances. Vacation time is almost non-existent, sometimes long working hours, there’s no real social clubs and often hard to meet other foreigners to share your thoughts and joke around. The missing out at the joking at work thing was huge for me. Working over Christmas can be a real bummer…
After a couple of years I met a local mentor who had returned from Canada. He had experienced difficulties fitting in in Canada and came back to Taiwan, I think he really understood what it was like to be an outsider. He was also a first rate salesman and taught me how to negotiatie and influence people, I established a good working relationship with him and eventually got to quite a high position and learned a lot, managed Asian and European sales and created two brand names in the business. Not all Taiwanese are the same and not all businesses are the same, sometimes you will meet smart and energetic people, it’s just the system they work in is very messy.
I strongly suggest that if you are not happy there is no harm in quitting your job , learning Chinese, meet other foreigners and have fun. I’ve worked with Taiwanese for almost 7 years and I’ve never made many friends at work. I don’t think it’s all my problem, it’s just Taiwanese don’t socialise like foreigners usually do (sports, pubs) and it can be hard to have male Taiwanese friends at work (they can be competitive or jealous if you have higher salary). I was in a hurry to get somewhere but as the old saying goes you can’t run before you can walk.
In the end I quit my job and went back to study Chinese basically full-time for a year and it was something I realised I should have done years ago. Learning Chinese is best done with at least half your day free, I tried it mornings 3 days a week once and while my spoken Chinese benefited a lot it just wasn’t enough for reading and writing and the homework the teacher gave me was giving me too much stress. There’s no easy way around it so just give yourself time to do it really.
Don’t stress out thinking you need to be successful overnight, you can have fun along the way, if you learn Chinese to a high standard then subsequently living and working here gets easier and more enjoyable. You won’t be bugging out trying to memorise all the important buttons on MS Word because it will be easy to read them (I’ve been there 
) Teach English part-time if you can and you can earn almost as much as before (teaching English part-time can almost be fun and it’s great to be paid exactly for the hours you work), there are plenty of scholarships available too these day for studying.
When you are tired of studying the urge will come back to you to work(or your empty bank account will push you) and you’ll have more options than ever available to you. Of course in some companies they do tend to use Taiwanese in the middle of meetings which can be frustrating so there’s no perfect solution. But the Chinese helps with most things and also makes your daily life outside work much smoother and you don’t have to rely on other people to handle everything for you.
Another idea is to look into doing an evening MBA, that would be a nice way to meet people and improve your career prospects.
The other thing about working for Taiwanese companies is the sad fact that it is very unlikely you will be a high paying position, (most companies here are family invested or run by a small coterie of key people). Even large companies can have whole depts ship out to other companies or close down without notice. So just like a poster said before, use it more to gain experience to try and jump later to a foreign company or else setup your own biz. Personally, I don’t see myself ever going back to work for a Taiwanese company, only as a temporary setup if required. I’ve just had enough, got a bit of experience and confidence now and I can see more clearly that there are better ways to pass my days!!! The realisation that I don’t have to follow my old pattern of work and don’t have to feel guilty about it is kind of mind freeing…
On another note: working in groups.
As my mentor used to say, in Taiwan 1 company starts out and eventually becomes 20 companies, in Japan 20 companies will become 1 company. I saw it again and again. One large reason for this is the way enterprises are often operated by family members (both small and large up to the scale of the Rebar Group, Cathay Finance). The family operation thing works well only when the boss is skilled and in the first generation, by second generation it often goes askew. It also doesn’t allow professionals to be promoted to the top. The key people in companies know this so often wait for an opportunity to get some capital and set up their own shop when the time is right. Even in large IT conglomerates most of the big decisions will be taken by the chairman/chairwoman (the largest single or original investor) rather than a board of directors or professionals promoted to the top.
And this process goes on and on in perpetuity. I have personally seen the formation of 3-4 companies in this way. Usually a few key members would up sticks together when they were not happy about compensation or shareholding. So the working in groups thing is erroneous, it should be said don’t work well together in BIG groups. The last company I worked in had 20 staff and worked very efficiently together with almost no system established for operations, the system kind of evolved itself. So Taiwanese companies do work efficiently at the small scale, but the problem is it is hard to compete in many industries at this type of scale because it doesn’t allow more fundamental research or product risk-taking. To get a new product approved for introduction I would almost always have to show a competitor was already doing it, then they would jump at it. It makes me laugh because I have often been told Taiwanese (Chinese) are the best businesspeople. I don’t think that’s true in the main simply because they do lack vision and teamwork to make big jumps and to be a global success. So good small business operators that are big players in the global supply chian, YES, global players who can push forward and have confidence to develop and market world beating products and services, NO.