Talk to Me: Communication in a Modern World | Ryan Chan | TEDxDoughteryValleyHS
My talk is about cross-cultural communication. That sounds pretty simple, right? It's just a talk between two cultures. But I believe there's something a lot more important than just talking about what your ethnicity is, what your race is, what are your beliefs. And so this talk, I hope, will help you guys to understand what are the true what does it truly mean to talk to another culture. In honor of Miss Pike, I am citing my sources. So, this is not originally my idea. This was given uh as a speech by Dr. Gary Weaver. He was a professor at uh American University at the school of international services. And I was at a summer class for global youth leader glo global youth conference leader conference and he gave this wonderful speech about how culture impacts our lives daily and what culture really is. and it really struck me as something important and so I thought it would be something worth talking about now. So first off what is cultural cross-cultural communication? We already know that but the more important question is why is it important? I mean it's a big word and everything and sure it seems important but what does it really mean? So to illustrate this I'll give an example. So let's say an American man and a Middle Eastern man are at a party. The American man wants to talk to the Middle Eastern man. So in American culture, the space for personal space is about this much space about six to about 6 to 12 in of space. That seems reasonable. But in the Middle East, the personal space is this much, almost twice that distance. So what does this mean? The American man goes to approach the Middle Eastern man. The Middle Eastern man thinks he's coming a little too close. So he takes a step back. The American man says, "Wait a minute. Is he ignoring me? Let me let me try and talk to him more." So he takes a step forward. The Middle Eastern man says, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're coming way too close, buddy." And so he takes a step back. The American man takes a step forward. Middle Eastern man takes a step back. Forward, back, forward, back, forward, back, forward, back. Until the Middle Eastern man trips over the punch bowl and everything spills over and the night is ruined. What happens when they go home? The American man goes home and he goes to his mom and says, "Middle eastern people, they just don't want to talk. They are cold people. They don't even want like to appreciate good conversation." The Middle Eastern man goes home. What does he tell his mother? Man, Americans are so pushy. Like, this person just kept getting in my face. He wouldn't leave me alone. And I tripped over the punch bowl and I got embarrassed in front of all my friends. What's up with that? So, what happened here? It was just a miscommunication of personal space. That's all it was. And yet, because of this event, both people walk away with a misinterpretation of what the other culture was. And so, this is why cross-cultural communication is so important. It's not just about speaking the other person's language or knowing enough about their religion to get it right on an exam or something. It's about truly understanding where that person comes from so that these kinds of miscommunications don't impact our world today. Now that we're on the topic of culture, there's something very important we need to talk about. Generalizations versus stereotypes. Raise your hand if you are Asian in this audience. Good. I dare you to prove me wrong if I said most of the people in this audience are Asian. But the point is that generalizations are patterns that we see in the world that sometimes they're based on facts and some are more true than others. But when we start applying a generalization too much, well, let's say I said that, oh, of all the Asians in this audience, probably all of them want to get into an IV league college. Heck, let me go a little further. Maybe all of them just want to be smart for the sake of being smart. Maybe all of them just want to take our jobs. Whoa. when did that escalate? Why did I make that jump? It's not fair to me to make those jumps. And so that's where we get this racism and prejudice and discrimination. It's when we take generalizations and we broaden them to the point where they're just not true. So here's the dilemma. If we're going to communicate effectively about cultures, we have to make generalizations or else we have nothing to go off of. But at the same time, we can't take these generalizations and place them over everybody because then that's just wrong. We're just making false assumptions about other cultures. This was a nice graphic that Mr. Weaver described to me to illustrate what culture really is. Now, Dr. Re Weaver described culture as an iceberg. Sure, there looks like there's a lot on top, but what we really need to know is the bottom stuff because that's the stuff that's going to sink the Titanic. So on the top we see what we normally think of. Appearance, dress, dialect, food, customs, pretty normal stuff. So let's dig deeper and we get to beliefs. Religion, history, makes sense. Some touchyfey stuff. But normally we just stop there. Now Dr. Weaver says that there's actually a layer under that that is even more important. Values. Values are the heart of what cultures are. What are values? Tada. This is the grand value scale. And this makes up almost all of the cultures in the world. The simple phrases to be and to do. To be usually relates to eastern cultures. To do usually relates to western cultures. How does that work? Think about it. Americans and the western society, we like to do things. We like to act. We don't like to sit by and just let things happen. No, we want action. We like independence. We like to strive for our own future. We like that class mobility. But what about in the east? Eastern cultures generally, we want to be something. We want to be in that status. We want to be in harmony with our world. We want to reflect on the past to improve ourselves. And so what's interesting is that we may think that these are very far apart, but a lot of these ideas inter intersect with each other. Like take the Midwest, which let's face it, I lived in the Midwest for 10 years and I was one of three Asians in an all-white school. Like that culture just inside the United States is completely different from the culture in California. And so so what? Why is that important? Well, if we're going to talk about cultures, we have to ignore the beliefs. We have to even ignore those kinds of things. Not really ignore them, but more of they're not the most important things that we need to address. The most important thing we need to know about someone when we're talking about culture is what do they value? Are they someone who wants to be something or are they someone who wants to do something? And the truth is neither side is correct. It's fine to be something. It's fine to do something. There's no wrong or right culture. Culture is just the lens. It's a way for us to look at people, look at our world, and interpret it. And so when we're talking about other cultures, it's important to acknowledge this. This is kind of the call to action of my presentation. This is the place where we can start a cultural revolution. In this day and age of social media and the internet, we all become so caught up in the idea that I can talk to someone in China 20, 50 miles away, hundreds and thousands. But even if I speak Mandarin or even if I speak Cantonese, even if I speak their language, I know everything about their history, I don't necessarily know what they value. Just because someone's from China doesn't necessarily mean that they value their family more than anything. If we talk to people more, if we try and understand these values, our world can be such a better place. Misinterpretations like the one that I showed you of the American man and the Middle Eastern man. Those things can escalate very quickly. And the way we can avoid that is if we really know what we're talking about on a valuetovalue basis. We need to start respecting other people's values and we need to know how to talk to other people effectively. Thank you.