Quiet (33 page)

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 cocoon. “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 café, 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 “bullshitting” that often substituted for class participation 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 classmates. 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 participated 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 assigned 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 relationship-honoring, but it's subject to the mores of the Extrovert Ideal all the same. At the local shopping center on a weekday afternoon, cocky Asian-American teenage guys with spiky haircuts call out to eye-rolling, wise-cracking girls in spaghetti-strap tank tops. On a Saturday 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 class, 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 shift 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 cocoon 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 passive, 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 class is advertised online through a local group called the Silicon Valley SpeakUp Association, 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 class and, a few Saturday mornings later, found myself sitting at a desk in a starkly modern classroom, the Northern California mountain sun streaming through its plate-glass 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 class 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 button-down shirt 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 class 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 class 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 classroom floor. “A … E … U … O … I … A … E … U … O … I …”