Item — HN Reader

I might be too sentimental (knowing that it's PR speak and therefore downplayed) the last paragraph strikes me as sheer hell.

"What I've realized is that the last few years of living in such a singular environment have taken a huge toll on my life and started affecting my health. My friends, what I consider to be my home, and my life are back in Silicon Valley, which is also much closer to my family. Seeing how much I've left behind these past few years, it is clear to me that the time has come to return,"

4 comments

Was he in China? Culture shock can be quite devastating. And you might think that after 3 1/2 years that you get used to your new environment, but it can actually get progressively worse. I was pretty lucky that when I moved to Japan I instantly felt at home. I've seen people pretty much melt down from the stress of having all their values brought into question and everything that they thought was common sense thrown out of the window. Even when you have a good gig and you love what you are doing, it can be impossible to continue. The worst bit is that it can actually be harder to return because without knowing it, you can change. And everything your remember about home is a little different. I remember the first time I went abroad, when I returned I felt that I lost my home. It took me years to find a new one.

This rings true. I'm a German living in Korea, and there's a fair number of Western foreigners here who eventually grow restless and unhappy, or even embittered. It's usually the people who came for economic reasons, without strong interest in or ties to Korean culture - they have no positives to be able to offset the sometimes very real negatives, and it slowly whittles them away. It's not smart to move somewhere if you don't have a couple of sure-fire things you know you will get joy out of on a consistent basis at the destination.

I lived nearly 5 years in Korea and it was indeed gradually driving me crazy. I didn't move for economic reasons and I was enjoying enough positives to make the negatives bearable, but in my case the lack of fulfillment at work eventually became too much. That said I have two friends who stayed in Korea but moved to a more reasonable company (Coupang) and they're having a good time.

What did you work as? A lot of Western foreigners in Korea work as English teachers, which indeed rarely offers any sort of long-term promotion path (see my longer comment).

Even outside of that it's very easy to run into a glass ceiling as a foreigner though, yeah. There's relatively few companies where you can work your way up into lead or management positions - though this is often because foreigners simply don't acquire the Korean skills they'd need to manage Koreans. There's some amount of luck and strategizing your career path involved to make it work, and that does leave you with narrow paths to the goal. Engineering and market research/business are probably the easiest fields at least.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not really blaming anyone for failing to make it work and getting out. There's a lot of wishes/desires (in choice of job, in choice of lifestyle, etc.) that are legitimately and totally incompatible with life in Korea as a foreigner, yet have nothing wrong about them.

I was a software engineer at the company that makes exploding smartphones.

I still had plenty of headroom regarding promotions, and I'd argue that Korean skills are a double-edged sword.

In big and rigid corporations, saying that you need luck is an understatement. Short of your VP being fired, it's typically impossible to make significant moves within your company.

3 months at that same company did it to me.

For me it was the work culture at the company. Problem wasn't that they expected me to work late nights, weekends and what not. By the way, they did want me to do all that, of course.

The problem, the real problem, was they just didn't get it why I wouldn't want to spend my evenings and nights, and weekends in the office fixing bugs, writing code etc. They really didn't get it. By "they" I mean my colleagues and managers there.

Language barrier was another problem. Your team might have been a bit different on this but in my team it was difficult to communicate in English. And so was outside.

But whatever the communication I could manage, esp. with people outside work, it was really really awesome. But that was too little, too seldom.

> The problem, the real problem, was they just didn't get it why I wouldn't want to spend my evenings and nights, and weekends in the office fixing bugs, writing code etc. They really didn't get it. By "they" I mean my colleagues and managers there.

Hmm. The Koreans around me do get it. They gripe about it all the time. It's just inertia holding things back. But there are changes; around me I hear more and more of former employees litigating against former employers on contract issues, and succeeding. There's still much left to do in the way of labor law enforcement, though. But it's not "헬조선" for no reason.

> Your team might have been a bit different on this but in my team it was difficult to communicate in English. And so was outside.

Of course, imagine a Korean immigrant in the US writing "it was difficult to communicate in Korean".

Thanks for sharing. Regarding Korean skills being a double-edged sword, yeah, expectations leveled against you rise with your skills, and there's a high bar before those skills really pay off meaningfully (in a job context - in private life they pay off almost immediately), so there's a tough plateau inbetween.

Super interesting that you're in Berlin now - that's where I came from.

What brought you to Korea? Did you learn some of the Korean language before moving?

Yep, I went to school in Berlin to study Korean for quite some time before the move, along with self-study before that. Basically, at some point I turned my hobbies into my career, so I needed new hobbies/outlets and ended up picking "learn Korean" for a bunch of reasons (I had done some light work on a CJK input stack and feel in love with Hangeul in a geeky sort of way, a layman's interest in linguistics, some Korean colleagues/acquaintances and a strong interest in the pop culture and history - music, movies, contrasting Korea's 20th century with Germany's, etc.).

Over time this and spending some time in the country changed the make-up of my social circle a lot (more and more people also learning Korean, or being involved with Korea somehow, e.g. ... being Korean :). Eventually I moved over and basically already had a support network of local friends and activities (people to hang out with, a weekly engineer meet-up, etc.) so it went pretty smoothly.

I've been here long enough now that the honeymoon period is definitely over and I've seen a fair amount of the pressures/stresses of life in Korea either up-close or as people close to me went through them. Yet I enjoy so much of what's going in and what's available, and the people close to me, so it's a good life.

Many Western foreigners in Korea are in a very different place. There's a large swath that came over in 2007-2011 as English teachers after the US recession, because $13.5/hour for English teaching in Seoul beat $7.50/hour at Starbucks in Des Moines, and that's all they could do with a sub-optimal undergrad degree. Yet that job offers a promotion path to almost none (along with many English schools in Korea being more or less scam businesses, not-so-wholesome) and they often don't acquire any marketable skills good for anything else while doing it, and the money made as an English teacher isn't good enough to support anything but a bachelor lifestyle in Seoul. And they often don't speak Korean and don't feel any strong ties to Korean culture. That can get pretty stressful and frustrating.

That's really interesting because it is very similar to my reasons for going to Japan. I made a semi-random choice to learn Japanese. Because I was busy with work, I couldn't really afford the time to study properly and I made the fateful decision to move to Japan so that learning Japanese would be one of my job requirements ;-)

I really think that language is a gateway to the culture. It hacks with your mind so that things you wouldn't accept without the language, seem completely reasonable with it. In Japan (and I suspect it might be similar in Korea) language is often the only real barrier for being accepted by other people in the culture. You go from being some scary foreigner, to being a semi-celebrity that everyone wants to talk to (hmmm... it probably helps that I live in the countryside ;-) ).

I'm really interested learning mandarin some day day. Can you describe how you managed to get started with Japanese? I have a 1 year old so all free time currently goes to her and the Mrs. I think I also don't work very efficiently .. so need to fix that too.

Ha ha! I really need to write this down in a central location (again... because I slowly refine my opinion). As briefly as I can put it:

Strap on the seat belt because you will be working on the language for a long time if your goal is adult level proficiency and fluency. 5 year olds have about a 5000 word vocabulary and add about 1000 words every year until they reach about 18-20 (depending on if they go to university). There are about 1500 grammar structures to learn in an average language (this last stat is pulled out of my ass, but I think it's about right).

There is no course, nor video, nor software that will get you anywhere beyond absolute beginner level. You will be lucky if you manage to talk like a 5 year old.

Very long story short (and slightly controversial): You will acquire language by comprehending input that is repeated enough times to remember it. I personally believe that you need to also have a way to test your assumptions (but my opinion is not echoed in the scientific literature -- just my opinion).

Way to success: Learn to read. It is your secret weapon. Pinyin is fine for helping you learn the readings for hanzi, but do not get into the habit of reading pinyin. There are about 3600 (IIRC) Chinese characters that you need to know to be functionally literate (there are others in use, but you will be able to devine there meanings through context). The Chinese characters are made up of building blocks and are not especially difficult to learn. They also provide a very powerful mnemonic for vocabulary. Remember that if your goal is adult level proficiency, you will need 15K+ words. The 3K characters will dramatically increase the speed at which you can learn the vocabulary because the system is very logical.

My biggest suggestion is to read. Whatever you like. However, since there is a strong tradition of manwa (comic books) in Chinese, which handily use conversational language, this would be my way to go.

Learn grammar through example. Some people like to learn grammar. You can, but you don't have to. It's a double edged sword. It helps you figure out the meaning of sentences. However, it also makes you believe that you can construct sentences using these rules and have it make sense. This is incorrect. This is why non-native speakers have all these bizarre grammar ticks when they speak.

Use spaced repetition software to help you (I recommend Anki). There should be a vocabulary list of the basic words somewhere. The first 2-3000 of these are probably worth memorising. After that you should switch your focus to learning vocabulary through context (because the meanings will be subtly different than their English counterparts). Read, read, read.

Last piece of advice is the most important and feel free to ignore everything else I've said. If you do not do this, I think it is impossible to succeed: Study every day. Better to study twice a day. Better to study three times a day. 5 minutes 3 times a day is better than 30 minutes once a day. 30 minutes once a day is better than 7 hours once a week. (And in fact, anything less than 4 times a week will have you reaching a ceiling pretty quickly and staying there forever).

Also: Never give up. Good luck!

He was living in Beijing. As a Chinese-speaking westerner who lived there for a year, I can tell you the air pollution alone is enough to do it. While reports seem mixed on whether he loved his gig like you did, I imagine his family's culture shock was probably creating a great deal of stress as well similar to how you described.

The key is to have friends. With friends anywhere is home, without friends and you feel like a stranger.

> I've seen people pretty much melt down from the stress of having all their values brought into question and everything that they thought was common sense thrown out of the window.

I'm curious as to what values are so different in China. Could you give an example, please? For my part, I've lived in Argentina, USA, France, Spain, German, and the UK. I've found that values are pretty similar. Nothing that makes me feel shockingly out of place. But they're all "European" countries, hence the question.

I lived as a student at Beida for a full year, between 96 to 97. I saw Deng die, and the return of Hong Kong.

At least at the time, three things always struck me:

1) The pollution was awful -- we were in in Qinghuadaxue for fully one month before the sky finally cleared enough that we could see the Fragrant Hills - we literally had no idea they were there. I re-visited China again in 2013 I think, and it's just worse. There can be no overstatement of how bad it is, and this is what I thought of immediately when Mr Barra mentioned his health.

2) Culturally... No one queued. Ever. For anything. At the McDonald's at Tiananmen square, you had to physically shove your way forward through a solid crowd 15+ feet deep, wave your money at the cashier, and once they had taken your money, then you could give them your order.

In 2013, I didn't see this sort of no-queueing behavior, but I had only two weeks in country that time.

3) Social mores are a little odd. You could have a conversation in a private place with a local (like, a taxi driver in cab) and they'd talk all about how awful and stupid the government was. But prostitution? No, we don't have that here. HIV? Oh, that's a foreign disease. Gay people? We don't have them here either. And about that last, I don't think this is any longer the case, but at the time in 96, there was one gay bar in the entirety of Beijing (Yi Ban Yi Ban, IIRC), and they were raided/harassed on a semi-frequent basis.

At least in 2013, the public spitting was greatly reduced, but I still saw children being guided by parents to pee on the street.

China was an amazing experience as a student, and the Chinese people I got to know directly (i.e. outside of official functions) were wonderful and welcoming. But boy howdy, there were some rough edges to public life.

I can guess what values are different in China, but since I haven't lived there it's probably better not to. Instead, I can tell you about one of the most difficult aspects of Japanese culture for most foreigners.

It's a bit strange because this is one of the things that I personally like about Japanese culture, even though it is definitely unsettling at times. People in Japan are very polite and helpful. If you meet someone, they will smile and say good morning. If you are lost, they will often go well out of their way to help you.

This friendliness is expected in the culture and people work very hard to keep it up. It extends into your personal relationships and there is a saying that you have one face that you present to everyone, one face that you show to your family and one face that you never show anyone else. The corollary is that every interaction you have with people involves an artifice to a greater or lesser extent.

If you ask someone for their opinion, they will generally try to guess what you think and give you that opinion -- because they don't want to upset you. Often when you are at work, people will be very nice to you, even if they don't like you very much. In fact, it may be the case that someone will actually hate you, but act like you are their best friend. Some of the people who have helped me the most and to whom I owe the most are people who I'm pretty sure despise me (but they are first on my list for souvenirs when I go travelling!)

In western cultures, there is a kind of tradition of clearing the air. You feel that you need to share your differences and work them out so that you can come to a better understanding of each other. This is not the case in Japan. If you suspect that there is a problem and try to work it out, the other person will be very uncomfortable. If you press the issue, they will squirm and lie about their feelings. If you press the issue even more, they will eventually break down and get very angry.

But then, having gotten angry, they will be embarrassed and upset and they will never speak another word to you for as long as you live.

To some people, this is incredibly upsetting. There is no way to determine if people genuinely like you or if they hate your guts. You will catch people out in little lies that have been constructed so that you don't have to discuss a difference of opinion. While this is done ostensibly to promote the harmonious flow of day to day life, you can get the feeling that nobody takes you seriously. Nobody is actually listening to you. Nobody cares what you think. They just smile and... well, lie to your face. And since many westerners are judgemental by culture, they imagine that they are being judged by this infuriating group of incessantly smiling jerks that are laughing at them behind their backs (when in fact, nobody cares what you think as long as you don't make trouble).

As for me... I'm living in a land of very polite people who smile and treat me well, even if they don't like me. As someone with a different way of looking at things, people take pleasure in listening to me and congratulating me on my unique view of the world. They go out of their way to help me and I return the favour. Nobody gives a damn if you agree or disagree or if you like someone or don't like someone. For me it's a kind of paradise where I can relax and throw out all the drama of western style relationships.

But even still, I can understand why some people can't deal with it.

Thanks! That's a pretty good summery I guess. But there's a lot of outright bullying going on as well. I guess this where a lot of foreigners draw their line.

I'm not sure what you mean by bullying. The biggest thing I see is that there are true value clashes. Some cultures have more difficulty than others. I see more Americans and British people having problems than some other cultures, for example.

Americans in particular often believe that Japanese attitudes are morally wrong. And it's not so much bullying as it is that Japanese cultural stances are immovable. You can throw yourself against that wall as much as you like and it is not going to budge. So if you honestly believe that some things are morally wrong and you call people out on it... well you are going to grind yourself into dust.

Although I shouldn't get too carried away, I'll tell one last story. When I worked at the high school here, my supervisor was trying to get me to work without compensation on weekend (there was a special event). All of the other teachers got a day off in lieu, but my supervisor didn't want to upset the apple cart by trying to get the same treatment for me (I was on contract, so played by different rules). This is pretty typical, and I've seen other foreigners absolutely get squashed by the system as they try to preach about worker's rights.

Instead, we had a drinking party that week. So I sat down with the department head and a bottle of nihonshu (Japanese sake) and we preceded to enjoy ourselves. At the appropriate time (just before he passed out), I casually asked him if the regular teachers were getting time off in lieu. He said, "Of course". I laughed and said something about the unfortunate lives of those who work on contract. He stood up (unstably) and assured me, "No! It's not right. We can fix this!". At which point he yelled over to the principal on the other side of the room, "We can get a day of in lieu for Mike-kun here, right? He's a good guy!" To which the principal laughed and said, "Of course, of course!".

My supervisor was clearly livid the next day as he brought the schedule and asked me when I wanted to have my day off. This is Japan.

I believe I share your stance. Probably the only approach to live your life in peace somehow. But there is a lot of real bullying going on. Maybe it is something no related to being a foreigner. Probably it is indeed the "culture". For me it is where I draw the line and it brought me some trouble. To me it would be the same as to allow sexual harrasment to happen during let's say a informal drinking party.

OK. I think I understand a bit what you mean. I tend to think of Japanese culture as having an inside and an outside. All things are negotiable if you are outside. No things are negotiable if you are inside. Everyone is allowed inside, but you must play by the rules -- all of them, with no exceptions.

Foreigners often have difficulty with this because rules in most western cultures are negotiable. You can appeal to common sense. You can argue your position and modify your environment. This is generally not possible in Japan. The idea of drawing a line, as you have described, will almost certain end in an extremely difficult position if you wish to be inside.

I think there are 2 happy places in Japan. You can decide that you aren't going to follow the rules and accept to be outside. Everyone will smile and be polite. They will be very helpful to you. They will praise you on being able to use chopsticks, etc, etc. You will forever be an honoured guest.

But not many people want to be treated as a guest in their own home, so most people want to be inside. This is also fine, but you have to learn the crazy rules and follow them exactly. You have to be OK with being reprimanded for making the slightest error. You have to slot yourself into society exactly where they put you. You have to do what is expected of you.

Where you get into trouble is when you want to be inside, but you want to pick and choose which rules that you wish to follow. Or if you wish to negotiate those rules. Or if you wish to convince others to play by other rules. That's just not going to work in Japan and I think it's why most foreigners don't stay, even though it is technically very, very easy to immigrate here. Like I said, especially if you have a very strong moral sense of right and wrong, it's going to be really, really difficult unless it happens to match exactly the sense of right and wrong in Japan (which is pretty unlikely if you were not raised in Japan).

> Culture shock can be quite devastating.

I find its not as much as being in a place where the people would never, ever accept you as one of their own. To them, you're something to be avoided and barely tolerated. This is why Westerners have a lot of trouble in China or Japan, but an American spending a few years in Germany or England or France isn't a big deal. The elephant in the room is a certain level of acceptable racism that hurts foreign workers. Some nations are better at this than others.

I can tell you that in Japan, the vast majority of problems face are cultural and language related. If you speak Japanese fluently and you know exactly what you are supposed to do, then you will have very little trouble being accepted into the culture. If you hold on to a western view point and hold western values, then you will have difficulty being accepted by most of the society.

I remember someone telling an interesting story on this topic, which I think illustrates the issue very well. If you happen into a neighbourhood that has a sumo training centre (called a heya), you will often see a sign on the wall that says, "No foreigners". Discrimination is not illegal in Japan.

An acquaintance of mine (and a foreigner) was well hooked up with a particular heya and he asked some vising friends if they wanted to visit the heya and watch the sumo wrestlers train. When they arrived at the heya, his friends saw the sign and asked if it was really OK. He replied, "If you know how to properly make an appointment, then you are Japanese as far as they are concerned."

I've been here 10 years and I'm definitely accepted by my family and my neighbours. And if there are people who don't accept me, then I will be the last person to hear about it (because that's Japanese culture). I won't say there isn't racism, but it's really on par with every other country I've lived in (Canada, US and the UK).

You think Asians do not have the same problem when they are in West? Asian are already treated as foreigners no matter how many generations

I think its easy to nitpick the flaws of western melting pot societies while ignoring that many asian societies are not remotely melting pots and citizenship is near impossible to get. The number of immigrants from Asia to the states shows that there's something desirable about its culture. How many Americans move to China or Japan and attain citizenship? Not many. Its seen as best as a temporary work gig dues to the complete lack of acceptance of foreigners and ethnocentrism there.

> citizenship is near impossible to get

The requirements for naturalizing as a Japanese citizen are actually quite reasonable both in paper and practice.

I did not even talk about the flaws the West has. It is about majority and minority. There is always a disadvantage for minority, especially psychologically. You just love to jump to conclusion that Western culture is better and other cultures are worse and find the evidence to serve your goal.

Eh, having lived in different EU counry and in a USA as well, culture shock gets to you even in those cases. It might look like the cultures are similar on the surface, but small things do get to you over time.

He was talking about things in China like

Poisonous air - "pollution levels hovering over 12 times the level recommended by the World Health Organization"

http://theweek.com/articles/672007/filth-breathe-china

Poisonous food: "Fake Chinese seasoning ring, operating for 10 years using cancerous industrial ingredients"

http://shanghaiist.com/2017/01/17/fake_seasoning_factories.p...

Dirty water: "Shanghai water supply hit by 100-tonne wave of garbage"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/23/shanghai-water...

All expats fall into this trap eventually. There is so much crazy stuff going on, we fixate on it, since it is a situation that directly effects us.

If it wasn't for the pollution and food safety issues, china wouldn't be such a bad place to live, though.

There are still other issues in China like

- censorship

- bad access to world internet

- corruption

- zenophobia/racism

- bad manners/behaviors from locals

- no weed

- food delicacies (mexican guacamole, european chocolate, real cheeseburger, etc)

What do you mean by no weed? Just like in many states where it is illegal, you just need to know people.

That may be true, but then you're taking a real risk of being thrown in a Chinese prison, maybe for years.

Actually...my friend went to an organized rave in north Beijing, the authorities stopped the bus on the way back to the city, all Chinese were drug tested, the foreigners were just ignored for some reason.

I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, but I've never heard of anyone getting even deported for drugs, let alone jailed. But remember Chinese laws are enforced selectively, so it is playing with fire.

Weed grows along the great wall in Beijing. The raves around the wall are infamous.

I don't know about the rest of it, I suspect you might well be right, but having been born in Mexico, lived in the US for 5 years and traveled to China for 2 weeks, I can tell you that "lack of food delicacies" is a much bigger issue in the USA than in China from my point of view ;)

He was in Beijing. The pollution alone is extremely tough to deal with. I just came back in August from a 9 year stint, it was fun, but you eventually have to go back; Beijing isn't the kind of place you can stay at forever.

I lived in China for over eight years and saw my health progressively get worse, finally culminating in cancer. Someone who is not a native and familiar with the dos and don'ts of China will walk into a lot of health traps - you have to walk a narrow line and watch yourself to stay healthy. I left, and my health has improved immensely.

Are you saying that China got you sick?

I definitely felt ill a lot after meals and my gastrointestinal tract was a disaster. I felt ill on days with a lot of air pollution. My immune system was always freaking out and I got lots of rashes and other ailments. As for whether the cancer was caused by my presence in China, I can never know for sure, but the type I got is extremely low in males in the US, and the location with the highest rate on earth is north east Asia, so it seems likely.