Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking Part 21

The library is to Cupertino what the mall or soccer field is to other towns: an unofficial center of village life. High school kids cheerfully refer to studying as "going nerding." Football and cheerleading aren't particularly respected activities. "Our football team sucks," Chris says good-naturedly. Though the team's recent stats are more impressive than Chris suggests, having a lousy football team seems to hold symbolic significance for him. "You couldn't really even tell they're football players," he explains. "They don't wear their jackets and travel in big groups. When one of my friends graduated, they played a video and my friend was like, 'I can't believe they're showing football players and cheerleaders in this video.' That's not what drives this town."

Ted s.h.i.+nta, a teacher and adviser to the Robotics Team at Monta Vista High School, tells me something similar. "When I was in high school," he says, "you were discouraged from voting in student elections unless you were wearing a varsity jacket. At most high schools you have a popular group that tyrannizes the others. But here the kids in that group don't hold any power over the other students. The student body is too academically oriented for that."

A local college counselor named Purvi Modi agrees. "Introversion is not looked down upon," she tells me. "It is accepted. In some cases it is even highly respected and admired. It is cool to be a Master Chess Champion and play in the band." There's an introvert-extrovert spectrum here, as everywhere, but it's as if the population is distributed a few extra degrees toward the introverted end of the scale. One young woman, a Chinese-American about to begin her freshman year at an elite East Coast college, noticed this phenomenon after meeting some of her future cla.s.smates online, and worries what the post-Cupertino future might hold. "I met a couple of people on Facebook," she says, "and they're just so different. I'm really quiet. I'm not that much of a partier or socializer, but everyone there seems to be very social and stuff. It's just very different from my friends. I'm not even sure if I'm gonna have friends when I get there."

One of her Facebook correspondents lives in nearby Palo Alto, and I ask how she'll respond if that person invites her to get together over the summer.

"I probably wouldn't do it," she says. "It would be interesting to meet them and stuff, but my mom doesn't want me going out that much, because I have to study."

I'm struck by the young woman's sense of filial obligation, and its connection to prioritizing study over social life. But this is not unusual in Cupertino. Many Asian-American kids here tell me that they study all summer at their parents' request, even declining invitations to July birthday parties so they can get ahead on the following October's calculus curriculum.

"I think it's our culture," explains Tiffany Liao, a poised Swarthmore-bound high school senior whose parents are from Taiwan. "Study, do well, don't create waves. It's inbred in us to be more quiet. When I was a kid and would go to my parents' friends' house and didn't want to talk, I would bring a book. It was like this s.h.i.+eld, and they would be like, 'She's so studious!' And that was praise."

It's hard to imagine other American moms and dads outside Cupertino smiling on a child who reads in public while everyone else is gathered around the barbecue. But parents schooled a generation ago in Asian countries were likely taught this quieter style as children. In many East Asian cla.s.srooms, the traditional curriculum emphasizes listening, writing, reading, and memorization. Talking is simply not a focus, and is even discouraged.

"The teaching back home is very different from here," says Hung Wei Chien, a Cupertino mom who came to the United States from Taiwan in 1979 to attend graduate school at UCLA. "There, you learn the subject, and they test you. At least when I grew up, they don't go off subject a lot, and they don't allow the students to ramble. If you stand up and talk nonsense, you'll be reprimanded."

Hung is one of the most jolly, extroverted people I've ever met, given to large, expansive gestures and frequent belly laughs. Dressed in running shorts, sneakers, and amber jewelry, she greets me with a bear hug and drives us to a bakery for breakfast. We dig into our pastries, chatting companionably.

So it's telling that even Hung recalls her culture shock upon entering her first American-style cla.s.sroom. She considered it rude to partic.i.p.ate in cla.s.s because she didn't want to waste her cla.s.smates' time. And sure enough, she says, laughing, "I was the quiet person there. At UCLA, the professor would start cla.s.s, saying, 'Let's discuss!' I would look at my peers while they were talking nonsense, and the professors were so patient, just listening to everyone." She nods her head comically, mimicking the overly respectful professors.

"I remember being amazed. It was a linguistics cla.s.s, and that's not even linguistics the students are talking about! I thought, 'Oh, in the U.S., as soon as you start talking, you're fine.' "

If Hung was bewildered by the American style of cla.s.s partic.i.p.ation, it's likely that her teachers were equally perplexed by her unwillingness to speak. A full twenty years after Hung moved to the United States, the San Jose Mercury News ran an article called "East, West Teaching Traditions Collide," exploring professors' dismay at the reluctance of Asian-born students like Hung to partic.i.p.ate in California university cla.s.srooms. One professor noted a "deference barrier" created by Asian students' reverence for their teachers. Another vowed to make cla.s.s partic.i.p.ation part of the grade in order to prod Asian students to speak in cla.s.s. "You're supposed to downgrade yourself in Chinese learning because other thinkers are so much greater than you," said a third. "This is a perennial problem in cla.s.ses with predominantly Asian-American students."

The article generated a pa.s.sionate reaction in the Asian-American community. Some said the universities were right that Asian students need to adapt to Western educational norms. "Asian-Americans have let people walk all over them because of their silence," posted a reader of the sardonically t.i.tled website ModelMinority.com. Others felt that Asian students shouldn't be forced to speak up and conform to the Western mode. "Perhaps instead of trying to change their ways, colleges can learn to listen to their sound of silence," wrote Heejung Kim, a Stanford University cultural psychologist, in a paper arguing that talking is not always a positive act.

How is it that Asians and Westerners can look at the exact same cla.s.sroom interactions, and one group will label it "cla.s.s partic.i.p.ation" and the other "talking nonsense"? The Journal of Research in Personality has published an answer to this question in the form of a map of the world drawn by research psychologist Robert McCrae. McCrae's map looks like something you'd see in a geography textbook, but it's based, he says, "not on rainfall or population density, but on personality trait levels," and its shadings of dark and light grays-dark for extroversion, light for introversion-reveal a picture that "is quite clear: Asia ... is introverted, Europe extroverted." Had the map also included the United States, it would be colored dark gray. Americans are some of the most extroverted people on earth.

McCrae's map might seem like a grand exercise in cultural stereotyping. To group entire continents by personality type is an act of gross generalization: you can find loud people in mainland China just as easily as in Atlanta, Georgia. Nor does the map account for subtleties of cultural difference within a country or region. People in Beijing have different styles from those in Shanghai, and both are different still from the citizens of Seoul or Tokyo. Similarly, describing Asians as a "model minority"-even when meant as a compliment-is just as confining and condescending as any description that reduces individuals to a set of perceived group characteristics. Perhaps it is also problematic to characterize Cupertino as an incubator for scholarly stand-outs, no matter how flattering this might sound to some.

But although I don't want to encourage rigid national or ethnic typecasting, to avoid entirely the topic of cultural difference and introversion would be a shame: there are too many aspects of Asian cultural and personality styles that the rest of the world could and should learn from. Scholars have for decades studied cultural differences in personality type, especially between East and West, and especially the dimension of introversion-extroversion, the one pair of traits that psychologists, who agree on practically nothing when it comes to cataloging human personality, believe is salient and measurable all over the world.

Much of this research yields the same results as McCrae's map. One study comparing eight- to ten-year-old children in Shanghai and southern Ontario, Canada, for example, found that shy and sensitive children are shunned by their peers in Canada but make sought-after playmates in China, where they are also more likely than other children to be considered for leaders.h.i.+p roles. Chinese children who are sensitive and reticent are said to be dongs.h.i.+ (understanding), a common term of praise.

Similarly, Chinese high school students tell researchers that they prefer friends who are "humble" and "altruistic," "honest" and "hardworking," while American high school students seek out the "cheerful," "enthusiastic," and "sociable." "The contrast is striking," writes Michael Harris Bond, a cross-cultural psychologist who focuses on China. "The Americans emphasize sociability and prize those attributes that make for easy, cheerful a.s.sociation. The Chinese emphasize deeper attributes, focusing on moral virtues and achievement."

Another study asked Asian-Americans and European-Americans to think out loud while solving reasoning problems, and found that the Asians did much better when they were allowed to be quiet, compared to the Caucasians, who performed well when vocalizing their problem-solving.

These results would not surprise anyone familiar with traditional Asian att.i.tudes to the spoken word: talk is for communicating need-to-know information; quiet and introspection are signs of deep thought and higher truth. Words are potentially dangerous weapons that reveal things better left unsaid. They hurt other people; they can get their speaker into trouble. Consider, for example, these proverbs from the East:

The wind howls, but the mountain remains still.

-j.a.pANESE PROVERB

Those who know do not speak.

Those who speak do not know.

-LAO ZI, The Way of Lao Zi

Even though I make no special attempt to observe the discipline of silence, living alone automatically makes me refrain from the sins of speech.

-KAMO NO CHOMEI, 12th Century j.a.panese recluse

And compare them to proverbs from the West:

Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting.

-MAXIMS OF PTAHHOTEP, 2400 B.C.E.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact-it is silence which isolates.

-THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

What lies behind these starkly different att.i.tudes? One answer is the widespread reverence for education among Asians, particularly those from "Confucian belt" countries like China, j.a.pan, Korea, and Vietnam. To this day, some Chinese villages display statues of students who pa.s.sed the grueling Ming dynastyera jins.h.i.+ exam hundreds of years ago. It's a lot easier to achieve that kind of distinction if-like some of the kids from Cupertino-you spend your summers studying.

Another explanation is group ident.i.ty. Many Asian cultures are team-oriented, but not in the way that Westerners think of teams. Individuals in Asia see themselves as part of a greater whole-whether family, corporation, or community-and place tremendous value on harmony within their group. They often subordinate their own desires to the group's interests, accepting their place in its hierarchy.

Western culture, by contrast, is organized around the individual. We see ourselves as self-contained units; our destiny is to express ourselves, to follow our bliss, to be free of undue restraint, to achieve the one thing that we, and we alone, were brought into this world to do. We may be gregarious, but we don't submit to group will, or at least we don't like to think we do. We love and respect our parents, but bridle at notions like filial piety, with their implications of subordination and restraint. When we get together with others, we do so as self-contained units having fun with, competing with, standing out from, jockeying for position with, and, yes, loving, other self-contained units. Even the Western G.o.d is a.s.sertive, vocal, and dominant; his son Jesus is kind and tender, but also a charismatic, crowd-pleasing man of influence (Jesus Christ Superstar).