Lemon things with English communication

when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

(Although I don’t understand why lemon is necessarily a bad fruit, lemonade does sound more tempting than lemon. I refer those “not necessarily bad things” as “lemon things”)

One of the frustrating things about being an international student here is about communication. Growing up in China, I learned a lot of “manners” as to understand what do people ACTUALLY mean. Say you are having dinner with your boss and a client, and the boss asked you to buy a pack of cigarettes. Well, that never means you need to go out and find a shop! Your boss is indicating that he would like to talk about something private without your presence.

I believe the Americans have such tricky things too. Although I have tons of experience observing and learning from others’ behaviours in China, the training set I got here seems to be mostly unlabelled and I could not make much progress since unsupervised learning is too hard. Meanwhile, I found the really basic things, e.g. correctly read a number that is more than 5 digits, to fully understand others’ reasoning in the lab meeting as they speak, have become challenging. IIRC the first time I ever cried in the US is simply a result of a series of communication failures - I cannot understand why I cannot even do the simple things well and when that happens for several times I just clasped.

Working from home is definitely not good to practice communication, but recently I realized that such “lemon things” carry some blessings. First, talking in text makes understanding easier for me, and I would have a physical message to check when you want to refer to it later. The other side is that I am less likely to feel embarrassed from a slack message than in-person communication, which makes me more brave to ask for / talk.

One recent embarrassing instance is about “I would”:

Q: (facing a problem) How to best ….? J: I would …

I thought J was offering help and I just waited for something to happen. Until several weeks ago I realized something was wrong, and I asked him what does “I would” mean. It turns out that they omit a clause “If I were you” and it should be me that carries out the action.

The last and perhaps the best thing that comes along with such lemons is that I took the chance of being ignorant to be 100% candid about what I feel. I don’t have to hedge or indicate or guess based on how others think, since I don’t even know how those things work! This saves me tons of energy. And kudos to the great group of understanding managers and mentors, I conveyed my message.

There are several other attempts that my friends in the finance sector tried during the COVID period to network with online catchups. I should also try to do that some time since it wouldn’t feel too bad to become a joke to someone I knew from Linkedin.

When life gives you lemons, keep them because, hey, they are free lemons!

Written on November 21st , 2020 by Qing Zhang