A few days back I was wrestling with this question: when someone born and raised in the US is having a conversation with someone born and raised from a non English speaking country, who should do more work as to making sure the conversation goes smooth? Here is how I answered this question in a previous post and after listening to Malcom Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The story of Success, I figured why I answered this question the way I did: those who are born in the west (US,…) believe that it is up to the speaker to make sure everyone else understands what she is saying and those who are born in Asia (China,…) believe that it is up to the listener to understand what’s being said.
I answered this question as someone who has similar cultural background as someone from Asia!
Maybe there isn’t one answer to questions like these, maybe it’s not either/or, maybe it’s both/and,… choosing between binary answers might not be the right way to go about cultural, social, identity questions.
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