Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking Part 22

It makes sense, then, that Westerners value boldness and verbal skill, traits that promote individuality, while Asians prize quiet, humility, and sensitivity, which foster group cohesion. If you live in a collective, then things will go a lot more smoothly if you behave with restraint, even submission.

This preference was vividly demonstrated in a recent fMRI study in which researchers showed seventeen Americans and seventeen j.a.panese pictures of men in dominance poses (arms crossed, muscles bulging, legs planted squarely on the ground) and subordinate positions (shoulders bent, hands interlocked protectively over groin, legs squeezed together tight). They found that the dominant pictures activated pleasure centers in the American brains, while the submissive pictures did the same for the j.a.panese.

From a Western perspective, it can be hard to see what's so attractive about submitting to the will of others. But what looks to a Westerner like subordination can seem like basic politeness to many Asians. Don Chen, the Chinese-American Harvard Business School student you met in chapter 2, told me about the time he shared an apartment with a group of Asian friends plus his close Caucasian friend, a gentle, easygoing guy Don felt would fit right in.

Conflicts arose when the Caucasian friend noticed dishes piling up in the sink and asked his Asian roommates to do their fair share of the was.h.i.+ng up. It wasn't an unreasonable complaint, says Don, and his friend thought he phrased his request politely and respectfully. But his Asian roommates saw it differently. To them, he came across as harsh and angry. An Asian in that situation, said Don, would be more careful with his tone of voice. He would phrase his displeasure in the form of a question, not a request or command. Or he might not bring it up at all. It wouldn't be worth upsetting the group over a few dirty dishes.

What looks to Westerners like Asian deference, in other words, is actually a deeply felt concern for the sensibilities of others. As the psychologist Harris Bond observes, "It is only those from an explicit tradition who would label [the Asian] mode of discourse 'self-effacement.' Within this indirect tradition it might be labeled 'relations.h.i.+p honouring.' " And relations.h.i.+p honoring leads to social dynamics that can seem remarkable from a Western perspective.

It's because of relations.h.i.+p honoring, for example, that social anxiety disorder in j.a.pan, known as taijin kyofusho, takes the form not of excessive worry about embarra.s.sing oneself, as it does in the United States, but of embarra.s.sing others. It's because of relations.h.i.+p-honoring that Tibetan Buddhist monks find inner peace (and off-the-chart happiness levels, as measured in brain scans) by meditating quietly on compa.s.sion. And it's because of relations.h.i.+p-honoring that Hiros.h.i.+ma victims apologized to each other for surviving. "Their civility has been well doc.u.mented but still stays the heart," writes the essayist Lydia Millet. " 'I am sorry,' said one of them, bowing, with the skin of his arms peeling off in strips. 'I regret I am still alive while your baby is not.' 'I am sorry,' another said earnestly, with lips swollen to the size of oranges, as he spoke to a child weeping beside her dead mother. 'I am so sorry that I was not taken instead.' "

Though Eastern relations.h.i.+p-honoring is admirable and beautiful, so is Western respect for individual freedom, self-expression, and personal destiny. The point is not that one is superior to the other, but that a profound difference in cultural values has a powerful impact on the personality styles favored by each culture. In the West, we subscribe to the Extrovert Ideal, while in much of Asia (at least before the Westernization of the past several decades), silence is golden. These contrasting outlooks affect the things we say when our roommates' dishes pile up in the sink-and the things we don't say in a university cla.s.sroom.

Moreover, they tell us that the Extrovert Ideal is not as sacrosanct as we may have thought. So if, deep down, you've been thinking that it's only natural for the bold and sociable to dominate the reserved and sensitive, and that the Extrovert Ideal is innate to humanity, Robert McCrae's personality map suggests a different truth: that each way of being-quiet and talkative, careful and audacious, inhibited and unrestrained-is characteristic of its own mighty civilization.

Ironically, some of the people who have the most trouble holding on to this truth are Asian-American kids from Cupertino. Once they emerge from adolescence and leave the confines of their hometown, they find a world in which loudness and speaking out are the tickets to popularity and financial success. They come to live with a double-consciousness-part Asian and part American-with each side calling the other into question. Mike Wei, the high school senior who told me he'd rather study than socialize, is a perfect example of this ambivalence. When we first met, he was a high school senior, still nestled in the Cupertino coc.o.o.n. "Because we put so much emphasis on education," Mike told me then, referring to Asians in general, "socializing is not a big part of our selves."

When I caught up with Mike the following autumn, in his freshman year at Stanford, only a twenty-minute drive from Cupertino but a world away demographically, he seemed unsettled. We met at an outdoor cafe, where we sat next to a coed group of athletes erupting regularly in laughter. Mike nodded at the athletes, all of whom were white. Caucasians, he said, seem to be "less afraid of other people thinking that what they said was too loud or too stupid." Mike was frustrated by the superficiality of dining-hall conversation, and by the "bulls.h.i.+tting" that often subst.i.tuted for cla.s.s partic.i.p.ation in freshman seminars. He was spending his free time mostly with other Asians, partly because they had "the same level of outgoingness" he did. The non-Asians tended to make him feel as if he had to "be really hyped up or excited, even though that might not be true to who I am."

"My dorm has four Asians in it, out of fifty kids," he told me. "So I feel more comfortable around them. There's this one guy called Brian, and he's pretty quiet. I can tell he has that Asian quality where you're kind of shy, and I feel comfortable around him for that reason. I feel like I can be myself around him. I don't have to do something just to look cool, whereas around a big group of people that aren't Asian or are just really loud, I feel like I have to play a role."

Mike sounded dismissive of Western communication styles, but he admitted that he sometimes wished he could be noisy and uninhibited himself. "They're more comfortable with their own character," he said of his Caucasian cla.s.smates. Asians are "not uncomfortable with who they are, but are uncomfortable with expressing who they are. In a group, there's always that pressure to be outgoing. When they don't live up to it, you can see it in their faces."

Mike told me about a freshman icebreaking event he'd partic.i.p.ated in, a scavenger hunt in San Francisco that was supposed to encourage students to step out of their comfort zones. Mike was the only Asian a.s.signed to a rowdy group, some of whom streaked naked down a San Francisco street and cross-dressed in a local department store during the hunt. One girl went to a Victoria's Secret display and stripped down to her underwear. As Mike recounted these details, I thought he was going to tell me that his group had been over the top, inappropriate. But he wasn't critical of the other students. He was critical of himself.

"When people do things like that, there's a moment where I feel uncomfortable with it. It shows my own limits. Sometimes I feel like they're better than I am."

Mike was getting similar messages from his professors. A few weeks after the orientation event, his freshman adviser-a professor at Stanford's medical school-invited a group of students to her house. Mike hoped to make a good impression, but he couldn't think of anything to say. The other students seemed to have no problem joking around and asking intelligent questions. "Mike, you were so loud today," the professor teased him when finally he said good-bye. "You just blew me away." He left her house feeling bad about himself. "People who don't talk are seen as weak or lacking," he concluded ruefully.

To be sure, these feelings were not totally new to Mike. He'd experienced glimmers of them back in high school. Cupertino may have an almost Confucian ethic of quiet, study, and relations.h.i.+p-honoring, but it's subject to the mores of the Extrovert Ideal all the same. At the local shopping center on a weekday afternoon, c.o.c.ky Asian-American teenage guys with spiky haircuts call out to eye-rolling, wise-cracking girls in spaghetti-strap tank tops. On a Sat.u.r.day morning at the library, some teens study intently in corners, but others congregate at boisterous tables. Few of the Asian-American kids I spoke to in Cupertino wanted to identify themselves with the word introvert, even if they effectively described themselves that way. While deeply committed to their parents' values, they seemed to divide the world into "traditional" Asians versus "Asian superstars." The traditionals keep their heads down and get their homework done. The superstars do well academically but also joke around in cla.s.s, challenge their teachers, and get themselves noticed.

Many students deliberately try to be more outgoing than their parents, Mike told me. "They think their parents are too quiet and they try to overcompensate by being flauntingly outgoing." Some of the parents have started to s.h.i.+ft their values too. "Asian parents are starting to see that it doesn't pay to be quiet, so they encourage their kids to take speech and debate," Mike said. "Our speech and debate program was the second largest in California, to give kids exposure to speaking loudly and convincingly."

Still, when I first met Mike in Cupertino, his sense of himself and his values was pretty much intact. He knew that he wasn't one of the Asian superstars-he rated himself a 4 on a popularity scale of 1 to 10-but seemed comfortable in his own skin. "I'd rather hang out with people whose personalities are more genuine," he told me then, "and that tends to lead me toward more quiet people. It's hard to be gleeful when at the same time I'm trying to be wise."

Indeed, Mike was probably lucky to enjoy the Cupertino coc.o.o.n for as long as he did. Asian-American kids who grow up in more typical American communities often face the issues that Mike confronted as a Stanford freshman much earlier in their lives. One study comparing European-American and second-generation Chinese-American teens over a five-year period found that the Chinese-Americans were significantly more introverted than their American peers throughout adolescence-and paid the price with their self-esteem. While introverted Chinese-American twelve-year-olds felt perfectly fine about themselves-presumably because they still measured themselves according to their parents' traditional value systems-by the time they got to be seventeen and had been more exposed to America's Extrovert Ideal, their self-regard had taken a nosedive.

For Asian-American kids, the cost of failing to fit in is social unease. But as they grow up, they may pay the price with their paychecks. The journalist Nicholas Lemann once interviewed a group of Asian-Americans on the subject of meritocracy for his book The Big Test. "A sentiment that emerges consistently," he wrote, "is that meritocracy ends on graduation day, and that afterward, Asians start to fall behind because they don't have quite the right cultural style for getting ahead: too pa.s.sive, not hail-fellow-well-met enough."

I met many professionals in Cupertino who were struggling with this issue. A well-heeled housewife confided that all the husbands in her social circle had recently accepted jobs in China, and were now commuting between Cupertino and Shanghai, partly because their quiet styles prevented them from advancing locally. The American companies "think they can't handle business," she said, "because of presentation. In business, you have to put a lot of nonsense together and present it. My husband always just makes his point and that's the end of it. When you look at big companies, almost none of the top executives are Asians. They hire someone who doesn't know anything about the business, but maybe he can make a good presentation."

A software engineer told me how overlooked he felt at work in comparison to other people, "especially people from European origin, who speak without thinking." In China, he said, "If you're quiet, you're seen as being wise. It's completely different here. Here people like to speak out. Even if they have an idea, not completely mature yet, people still speak out. If I could be better in communication, my work would be much more recognized. Even though my manager appreciates me, he still doesn't know I have done work so wonderful."

The engineer then confided that he had sought training in American-style extroversion from a Taiwanese-born communications professor named Preston Ni. At Foothill College, just outside Cupertino, Ni conducts daylong seminars called "Communication Success for Foreign-Born Professionals." The cla.s.s is advertised online through a local group called the Silicon Valley SpeakUp a.s.sociation, whose mission is to "help foreign-born professionals to succeed in life through enhancement in soft skills." ("Speak you [sic] mind!" reads the organization's home page. "Together everyone achieve [sic] more at SVSpeakup.")

Curious about what speaking one's mind looks like from an Asian perspective, I signed up for the cla.s.s and, a few Sat.u.r.day mornings later, found myself sitting at a desk in a starkly modern cla.s.sroom, the Northern California mountain sun streaming through its plate-gla.s.s windows. There were about fifteen students in all, many from Asian countries but some from Eastern Europe and South America, too.

Professor Ni, a friendly-looking man wearing a Western-style suit, a gold-colored tie with a Chinese drawing of a waterfall, and a shy smile, began the cla.s.s with an overview of American business culture. In the United States, he warned, you need style as well as substance if you want to get ahead. It may not be fair, and it might not be the best way of judging a person's contribution to the bottom line, "but if you don't have charisma you can be the most brilliant person in the world and you'll still be disrespected."

This is different from many other cultures, said Ni. When a Chinese Communist leader makes a speech, he reads it, not even from a teleprompter but from a paper. "If he's the leader, everyone has to listen."

Ni asked for volunteers and brought Raj, a twentysomething Indian software engineer at a Fortune 500 company, to the front of the room. Raj was dressed in the Silicon Valley uniform of casual b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt and chinos, but his body language was defensive. He stood with his arms crossed protectively over his chest, scuffing at the ground with his hiking boots. Earlier that morning, when we'd gone around the room introducing ourselves, he'd told us, in a tremulous voice from his seat in the back row, that he wanted to learn "how to make more conversation" and "to be more open."

Professor Ni asked Raj to tell the cla.s.s about his plans for the rest of the weekend.

"I'm going to dinner with a friend," replied Raj, looking fixedly at Ni, his voice barely audible, "and then perhaps tomorrow I'll go hiking."

Professor Ni asked him to try it again.

"I'm going to dinner with a friend," said Raj, "and then, mumble, mumble, mumble, I'll go hiking."

"My impression of you," Professor Ni told Raj gently, "is that I can give you a lot of work to do, but I don't have to pay much attention to you. Remember, in Silicon Valley, you can be the smartest, most capable person, but if you can't express yourself aside from showing your work, you'll be underappreciated. Many foreign-born professionals experience this; you're a glorified laborer instead of a leader."

The cla.s.s nodded sympathetically.

"But there's a way to be yourself," continued Ni, "and to let more of you come out through your voice. Many Asians use only a narrow set of muscles when they speak. So we'll start with breathing."

With that, he directed Raj to lie on his back and vocalize the five American English vowels. "A ... E ... U ... O ... I ..." intoned Raj, his voice floating up from the cla.s.sroom floor. "A ... E ... U ... O ... I ... A ... E ... U ... O ... I ..."

Finally Professor Ni deemed Raj ready to stand up again.

"Now, what interesting things do you have planned for after cla.s.s?" he asked, clapping his hands encouragingly.

"Tonight I'm going to a friend's place for dinner, and tomorrow I'm going hiking with another friend." Raj's voice was louder than before, and the cla.s.s applauded with gusto.

The professor himself is a role model for what can happen when you work at it. After cla.s.s, I visited him in his office, and he told me how shy he'd been when he first came to the United States-how he put himself in situations, like summer camp and business school, where he could practice acting extroverted until it came more naturally. These days he has a successful consulting practice, with clients that include Yahoo!, Visa, and Microsoft, teaching some of the same skills he labored to acquire himself.

But when we began talking about Asian concepts of "soft power"-what Ni calls leaders.h.i.+p "by water rather than by fire"-I started to see a side of him that was less impressed by Western styles of communication. "In Asian cultures," Ni said, "there's often a subtle way to get what you want. It's not always aggressive, but it can be very determined and very skillful. In the end, much is achieved because of it. Aggressive power beats you up; soft power wins you over."

I asked the professor for real-life examples of soft power, and his eyes shone as he told me of clients whose strength lay in their ideas and heart. Many of these people were organizers of employee groups-women's groups, diversity groups-who had managed to rally people to their cause through conviction rather than dynamism. He also talked about groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving-cl.u.s.ters of people who change lives through the power not of their charisma but of their caring. Their communication skills are sufficient to convey their message, but their real strength comes from substance.

"In the long run," said Ni, "if the idea is good, people s.h.i.+ft. If the cause is just and you put heart into it, it's almost a universal law: you will attract people who want to share your cause. Soft power is quiet persistence. The people I'm thinking of are very persistent in their day-to-day, person-to-person interactions. Eventually they build up a team." Soft power, said Ni, was wielded by people we've admired throughout history: Mother Teresa, the Buddha, Gandhi.

I was struck when Ni mentioned Gandhi. I had asked almost all the Cupertino high school students I met to name a leader they admired, and many had named Gandhi. What was it about him that inspired them so?

Gandhi was, according to his autobiography, a const.i.tutionally shy and quiet man. As a child, he was afraid of everything: thieves, ghosts, snakes, the dark, and especially other people. He buried himself in books and ran home from school as soon as it was over, for fear of having to talk to anybody. Even as a young man, when he was elected to his first leaders.h.i.+p position as a member of the Executive Committee of the Vegetarian Society, he attended every meeting, but was too shy to speak.

"You talk to me quite all right," one of the members asked him, confused, "but why is it that you never open your lips at a committee meeting? You are a drone." When a political struggle occurred on the committee, Gandhi had firm opinions, but was too scared to voice them. He wrote his thoughts down, intending to read them aloud at a meeting. But in the end he was too cowed even to do that.

Gandhi learned over time to manage his shyness, but he never really overcame it. He couldn't speak extemporaneously; he avoided making speeches whenever possible. Even in his later years, he wrote, "I do not think I could or would even be inclined to keep a meeting of friends engaged in talk."