Active listening and/or Non-verbal communication
Observe the interaction between 2 or more people
In this blog post, I will talk about how people interaction may be affected by culture, gender or age.I still remember about the time when I traveled to Paris for my year-end vacation and an incident happened at Charles De Gaulle Airport. I witnessed this group of mainland china tourists. They were loud and could be heard clearly in the midst of this busy airport. One of tourist pointed out to the exit sign and shouted "那个"(ni ge). The word held a very similar pronunciation to the English word “nigger”.However, in the vicinity, there was an African American man waiting for his baggage. On hearing the word he felt offended and proceeds to scold and make rude gestures to the group of the Chinese tourists. Confusion among the Chinese tourists arose. The eldest man among the group joins for a verbal argument with the American. I remember the Chinese man rebuke the American man by saying "In my country, people treat the elderly with respect unlike you!"
Let me pause the story here and explain their lack of active listening and non-verbal skills. Culture barrier may have played a part in this chaotic situation. As the elderly Chinese man was blocked by his culture of younger generation treating their elderly with respect, his is blinded to make any good judgment. The American man fails to clarify his doubts with someone, which is part of active listening and proceeds for an argument. The American man also made rude gestures to Chinese group as his non-verbal skills to further display his unhappiness which is a good use of non-verbal skills but for reasons.
Resuming the story. A Malay lady managed to break off the argument. She explained about the misunderstanding in their respective languages. Even though her spoken Chinese were choppy she managed to diffuse the situation. The situation ended with both parties apologizing to each other. It only reading the news about this incident that I realize the lady was from Singapore! Now we will analyze how she manages to resolve the situation taking the fact her knowledge of the Chinese language was poor. The main reason is because that she has the good cross-cultural understanding which helps out during the explaining. She used hand gestures, pointing at the exit sign and explaining the meaning of "那个" and how it offended the American man. From this, we can recognize lady is using her nonverbal skill to further complement her explanation.
Hi Wei Quan,
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your post, I find it confusing as you should just talk about the mainland tourist and the african american instead of adding an addition character. This make your post slightly complicated to explain. And a better explanation for your scenario will be about cultural.
When travelling to other country, we have to adapt to their culture. For example, the sign ‘OK Sign’ is mostly considered on of the good hand gestures which means that everything is alright or O.K. However, in France it mean an insulting sign as it though to mean ’your anus’. Thus we must alway take note not our non-verbal gesture in other countries. As language is a reflection of culture, and different cultures have very different ways of assigning meanings to words.
ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
teckcheng
Hi wei quan, reading your post gave me an thought about how easily anyone can get mad over such a thing. However, luckily there was that Malay lady who can help solve the issue if not i do not think such a issue will be resolve easily. like what you mention there, i feel that the old Chinese man should have not place his ideal upon the next generation and at the same time the american man should have proceed to the nearby counter and ask for help if there was such and incident occurring in the airport. This could have been prevented if there was no cultural barrier.
ReplyDelete