Solving CHINA's Unknown Unknowns (Preface)
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From the time I was old enough to imagine who I was and who I wanted to be, I always felt I was caught between two worlds.
I even wrote a song entitled "Between Two Worlds" more than twenty years ago that was probably more about girls than anything else at the time.
The song begins...
"Sometimes it seems forever, for things to come to form. Waiting for and not breaking through, and unsure what to do."
Instead of confidently discovering my niche and carving out my own path, I eternally struggled to "fit in," believing because I looked different, I was different. I would never be fully accepted, at least not by the fairer, opposite sex, meaning by girls.
As a youngster, I excelled in sports, the most useful talent for becoming "popular" for kids growing up in the deep South of Atlanta, Georgia. But my insecurities resulted in me always attending the prom, stag or solo, meaning I never had a prom date. I never got rejected for prom either, as the courage to ask someone never materialized.
After high school, I attended Georgia Tech, the finest engineering college south of the Mason-Dixon line. Still, I remained proud of skipping classes, even bragging for years that I didn't know where one of my final exams was being held because I'd never attended the class lectures.
Instead of working my way towards a successful career as an engineer, I grew my hair long, taught myself to play electric guitar, and formed a heavy metal rock band. Perhaps music is in my genes, but my interest in music stemmed from the perception that I'd have more success with girls if I were Eddie Van Halen. Nevertheless, music became a part of my persona that I would later leverage at Meetup events I organized at Blue Marlin Bar & Restaurant in the Jing'an District of Shanghai. Of course, I was never talented or dedicated enough to become a rock star, which is part of my story and how I eventually discovered my niche and place in this world.
My Chinese ethnicity and my American roots always placed me at an intersection between two conflicting worlds, and more than twenty years after my insecurities around girls finally dissipated, the geopolitics of today's world is again forcing me to consider, if not choose, between my Chinese heritage or my American values and upbringing.
Fast forward, and the second time around, I married my dream girl. She was everything I could think of or articulate wanting in a significant other. Beautiful, smart, funny, pretty, sexy. Yes, I said pretty and beautiful because if these two words have different meanings, the lady I married was both of them. She was a visiting scholar from China doing postdoctorate research a Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. She had a proverbial groupie exterior, but with credentials to make my father, a retired professor of Physics at Georgia State University, proud. In other words, she was perfect.
We had our first date in Las Vegas, which concluded with our honeymoon back in Vegas precisely one year later. My "honeymoon period," which we will discuss at length in this book, ended when the actual honeymoon began after visiting Tiffany's at Phipps Plaza in Buckhead and the DeKalb county courthouse. I lived my ultimate fantasy for an entire year, fulfilling all of my teenage dreams right up until the first night of our honeymoon at The Venetian Hotel turned into a nightmare.
As soon as my honeymoon period ended, and our real honeymoon began, her expectations of me reversed 180 degrees in the opposite direction. When we were dating, she barely acknowledged that we were even a couple. She didn't have many expectations of me because I was still an outsider in her mind.
She generally seemed impressed that I could play golf and tennis well enough to teach others, along with a talent for anything considered a physical activity. Playing the piano and guitar, singing original songs that I had written, seemed to enchant her too. But she would later show little tolerance that I had music as a hobby, even while asking me to perform whenever we had guests.
After we were married, I immediately became "family," the highest Guanxi level in Chinese culture. As conservative as she was growing up in a small, 4th tier province in Hunan, China, she immediately moved in with me upon accepting her position at Emory and transitioning to Atlanta. In her relocation from UAB to Atlanta, she had her personal effects stored in my garage while she awaited furniture to arrive at her newly rented apartment.
She never moved into her apartment but kept paying rent to retain a "safety" or backup. It wasn't because she wasn't sure how long our relationship would last. Instead, it was so I couldn't somehow leverage that fact that she was living rent-free at my house should we ever disagree. It was about having and preserving her Face or mianzi, which we'll discuss throughout this book.
In Western terms, you might think her choice to maintain an apartment was a matter of TRUST and that I hadn't earned her's yet. So let's begin by highlighting TRUST as our first cultural dichotomy. Western ideals about believing whether someone is honest or not is irrelevant in a Confucian-based hierarchical system where expectations are based on Guanxi and continual exchange of goodwill, not honesty.
Cultural dichotomies between Chinese thinking and Western thought that you will learn in the pages that follow will serve as a foundation for you to make the adjustments needed to create new, winning interaction patterns with those who don't think like you, similar to the dynamics of my marriage.
I will share as much flavor, texture, and color whenever possible because the context of my encounters and the nuances of my perceptions will fuel your imagination and hopefully enable you to "think different."
Too many of us mistrust and are afraid of China's rise, often in denial of reality. However, you can prevent and even reverse any misfortunes caused by unintentional, self-sabotaging behavior by reimagining your perceptions within the context of theirs. My blissful "honeymoon period," followed by a nightmare honeymoon, has evolved into a happy family with a son and two cats because I was able to reimagine what I thought was "right" against the context of what is most important, the relationship or the Guanxi.
Message from Gene J. Hsu, Author
I decided that I need to get very personal in writing my upcoming book, Solving CHINA's Unknown Unknowns (working title).
So I talk about my insecurities growing up, especially about girls…
It's a completely new approach for my book inspired by A PROMISED LAND by Barack Obama.
Please email me at [email protected] with any comments, especially the bad ones. Thanks! 谢谢??
PS. You can listen to the audio version on iTunes and SoundCloud