Ilya Marushchak - Against the yellow background. Zero tolerance

However, it’s crucial to use different reasons for these “bombshells”. If you repeat yourself every time, they will finally classify you as a caddish fellow and won’t deal with you again. This isn’t what you need.

Another very important thing is that you can’t be real friends with your boss or your subordinate employee. It doesn’t conform to local hierarchical models so it doesn’t exist. Well, it can exist just for show, in order to take advantage of this behaviour pattern (because you are a resource). Please do remember, if someone has much higher or much lower job position than you do, or they are much older or younger than you are, or they have different marital status, don’t even dream about sincere informal communication and friendship on equal terms. You will never have it from “the opposite side”. If you are the one who has a “higher position” you won’t be rejected out of pure politeness but they will try to take advantage of you in any possible way. If you are “lower” it’s much worse because they’re going to manipulate you. Some exceptions are possible in romantic relationships, but I guess I might be mistaken because I don’t have such experience. My personal observations rather indicate that even love affairs here should be subject to “civilization of status” rules.

There is one more aspect you should be aware about. Foreigners often feel perplexed and even offended because of not knowing it. Traditionally, Asians never say a firm “no”. When during the conversation you hear “yes” from time to time it doesn’t necessarily mean that they agree with you. It just means they are listening. Never rely on such “yes” even if it seemed very definite to you. Any “yes” from an Asian person is, first of all, a sign of politeness and attention. It’s neither consent nor a decision. Don’t ever forget that.

Here is an example. You are talking to an Asian friend or a colleague and saying “Let’s go to the cinema on Friday? There is a show at 11; I’ll buy the tickets. We could meet at 10—40 at the cinema.”

Your companion replies “Yes, of course, let’s go. What an excellent idea!”

After these words you see the green light – you are ready to buy the tickets and wait for your friend at the cinema as agreed. But for your Asian friend it was just an abstract idea that can potentially be turn into reality. He might come if he doesn’t have anything else to do, if he doesn’t forget, if he finds the film interesting, if, if, if… In none of the cases he will inform you about it. He could say “yes” just because he felt uneasy to refuse.

If you want to put this abstract idea into action you will have to get minimum two more “yes” from your friend before the event. Otherwise, it won’t even occur to him that you have really planned it. He would think it was just blabbering.

But that’s small beer that will hardly do any harm to your relationships.

You might have really dire consequences for yourself personally and for your relationship if you express or imply that you have some problem that you are currently unable to solve.

Remember what you have just learned? It is impolite to say “no” in Asia. You are in the “civilization of status”. That means that whoever you talk to they will immediately offer you their help. First, they think so because they automatically regard your story as a call for help. Second, it will “elevate” them in their eyes (or maybe not only in theirs) because since you are asking them for help you trust them and think they can manage something you can’t manage by yourself.

From this point forward you’ve got new problems in your life. These problems can be of different severity level. The worst you can do is to wait for your problem to be solved, especially, if you have a deadline.

There are some exceptions though. For example, you mention your problem in front of someone who is an expert in this field. It’s easy to understand from the conversation. It is also fine if someone introduces you to someone else so that you could ask for advice. You’re lucky then. Unfortunately, 90% of cases have the same above-mentioned script with slight alterations.

You assume that after you discussed the problem and your friend told you he would help, you will get the result at some point. It makes sense from your point of view. But in most cases nothing happens. Most probably, no one was even going to deal with your problem in spite of cordial assurances of support. If you got it right and never disturbed the person with your request again, it’s like nothing had ever happened. You simply had a conversation. He might have improved his status though by mentioning to his friends how powerful he is – even foreigners ask him for assistance!

If you start reminding about yourself and asking what has been already done or what you can do to contribute, you automatically activate another program. Finally, according to this new script, you will be the one to blame for not solving the problem. It is you who has given all the wrong explanations, you haven’t provided the necessary information or documents, or you have sent wrong documents, to a wrong person, at a wrong time, at a wrong place… You have basically done everything wrong.

As a result, you just wasted so much time of such a busy and important man, but he is so generous and kind-hearted that he holds no grudges. He is even willing to invite you for lunch with his friends in order to tell them all the details about how he wanted to help this stupid foreigner, but the foreigner was so useless that simply ruined everything himself.

At this stage all you want is to cut off contact with this person. Sometimes you are even tempted to apply some physical action. Unfortunately, it will happen every time you would like to ask someone for help.

There is only one way out. You will hardly ever change your skin so much. It’s quite hard to avoid such conversations all the time. It’s not necessary to avoid them though. When someone insists on helping you, tell them that everything been already sorted out or is going to be sorted out shortly, so no need to bother such an important and busy man. But in case something goes wrong you will surely ask him for help. It’s enough to show that you obey courtesy rules. By the way, after you say it, you can easily ask about your companion’s opinion about possible solutions for this problem that he himself would have chosen. If he seems to be professional in this field you can choose to really ask him to help you.

I think it’s enough for a general idea of local communication style. If something seems too general and “universal” to you, don’t get upset. Later on I will make more specific examples of building communication bridges under very different circumstances.

I hope the most important thing you have got out of this chapter is how not to be a hostage to your own communication model. We will learn how to take advantage for ourselves later. Now remember how not to harm yourself. When you live with the permanent lack of communication and native cultural environment even the slightest psychological discomfort can easily turn to craving for the familiar mindset. Sometimes you’ll be wildly eager to give the finger to everything, pack your things and be off to the airport.

But if you want to be a success in such a hot place as Asia you need to learn how to keep your head cool all the time.

In this chapter I will switch from general to specific. I hope you already have a general idea about communication in Asia and now we can start looking into practical application of some recommendations that will help you get the maximum profit.

Imagine you work in an Asian company. You’re lucky if this is a large international company with a lot of foreign employees. In this case you can skip this chapter. But if you’re one of the few foreign specialists under the direction of Asian executives, it makes everything different. In this case you will have to work hard, both literally and metaphorically.