The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap by Gish Jen

The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap Reviews

• 
  Graeme Roberts

  Gish Jen writes beautifully, her warm voice full of empathy, humor, and honesty in describing the East-West culture gap. She was born in the United States, but I expected that she would identify with the Chinese culture of her parents; I was entranced that she seems to see herself as an all-American girl who happened to be the daughter of Asian parents. She did go through a quintessential Asian experience, however, in having to endure her mother's silence for a month after she dropped out of Stanford Business School to attend the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. That was apparently mild by Tiger Mother standards!
  
  As an Australian married to a Taiwanese woman I have experienced many of the cultural differences and misunderstandings she talks about. When one of our daughters married a young Indian-American man recently we found ourselves warmly welcomed into two large Indian families with a host of new cultural expectations to understand and negotiate.
  
  This is a big subject, and an important one. I hope that more fine minds address it. Ms. Jen describes East-West cultural differences in several ways, including Interdependent vs. Independent, the Flexi-Self vs. the Big-Pit Self, and Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft, respectively. Big-Pit Self refers to the pit of an avocado as a metaphor for the big ego of individualistic, independent Westerners. I wish she had defined the German terms, although I already had a sense of their meanings.
  
  The book refers to literature, art, and education to illustrate many cultural differences, in addition to social science research and personal anecdotes and opinions. Although I was constantly fascinated, I felt that the narrative lacked overall coherence. It piles on the differences in various ways without explaining them as the title promises. Explaining how East-West cultural differences originated and developed would require history and a deeper understanding of the intertwined biological and cultural evolution of homo sapiens. I hope that Ms. Jen takes that as her next challenge.
• 
  John Pistelli

  One time, teaching a course on the graphic novel, I described the differences in artistic form and storytelling technique between manga and Western comics. A student raised her hand and offered the opinion that the contrast between the two modes reflected the difference between individualist Western culture and collectivist Eastern culture. The student was Asian-American and so presumably permitted such an observation. I am professionally committed, I believe, to promulgating anti-essentialism; therefore I did not feel I was permitted to agree with it. Like the Holy Trinity, anti-essentialism is a mystery beyond human experience, as you have to be an essentialist—naïvely believing in the unity of your personality, the power of your conscious intention, and the stability of matter—just to walk across the room, so I did not press the point very hard, but I did caution against overly broad generalizations. All the same, cultural difference exists and is even visible to the naked eye: there should be some way to discuss it without undue reductionism or stereotype.
  
  Novelist Gish Jen's nonfiction study The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap attempts a nuanced and well-informed exploration of this divide between Western and Eastern culture about the importance that should be accorded the individual—though Jen does dismiss "collectivist" and "individualist" as terms with too much Cold War bias and prefers to speak in the more neutral language of independence vs. interdependence instead.
  
  The Girl at the Baggage Claim takes its title from its opening anecdote: an Asian woman applies to a prestigious Western academy and demonstrates her English-language proficiency in a Skype interview with the school authorities. Yet after she is accepted for enrollment, it is discovered at the airport that "the girl at the baggage claim" is not the girl they interviewed. The young woman had asked her sister, whose English was better than her own, to substitute for her in the Skype interview, and evidently saw no problem in doing so. What ideas about the self and society allowed her to think this appropriate behavior? Jen's book is essentially a comparative study of Western and Eastern sensibility attempting to explain and defend the latter to puzzled Westerners (and Jen, a first-generation American, as I am [on my mother's side], considers herself one such Westerner).
  
  Jen divides West and East by two concepts of the self—the flexible, interdependent self of the East, embedded in its social environment and alive to its context, and the "avocado pit" self of Western individualism, self-assertive and self-esteeming. This book draws extensively on social-psychological studies to prove this split in sensibility, though the rapidity with which such studies seem to be debunked and
  the replication crisis affecting the field makes me wonder how persuasive this is. Her many examples from the arts are perhaps more convincing—to me, a humanist rather than a scientist—though obviously more impressionistic. The book concludes with a plea to synthesize the two sensibilities in an "ambidependent" self that would combine the freedom of the Westerner with the responsibility of the Easterner, and it is difficult to argue with this argument for nuance and complexity.
  
  This book is a work of somewhat breezy, TED-like pop-nonfiction, though, and it definitely creaks under the complexity of its task. For one thing, Jen often admits that her binary barely holds—that, essentially, only well-off Americans fit the mold of the "avocado pit" individualist, while almost everyone else in the world, including most Europeans and many Americans (such as Catholics or the working class), exhibit higher interdependence. Attributing cultural difference to economics, Jen suggests that the source of divergent cultural sensibilities goes back to the differences among rice farming, wheat farming, and nomadism; but she also says that such difference is perpetuated through time by habit and "contagion." Even so, it does make one wonder how much culture on this model can really change if it is so determined at its source by economics? On the other hand, to note one detail that troubled me, it is surely ironic that she keeps mentioning Emerson and Thoreau as examples of Western or American individualism, when their Transcendentalist philosophy entails that what the individual actually expresses is nature and the world-spirit streaming through every particular soul. "Self-Reliance" as promoted by Emerson and Thoreau is a complicated dialectical notion bearing many surprising similarities to Taoist thought—and this is not even to note that both authors were early Western devotees of Indian, Persian, Arab, and Chinese thought. Like all binaries, independence and interdependence have a way of becoming each other in the mystic union of opposites foretold by many thinkers and writers, Western and Eastern alike.
  
  Jen also makes things politically easier for herself than she probably should in defending interdependence. At one point, she mentions as an example of excessive American individualism the preference for choice in all things, alluding to ice cream flavors—but would she mock so readily the increasingly multiplicity of genders? Her critique of self-esteem-based education, meant to foster the student's individual expressivity, raises similar questions (though I agree with her at least provisional defense of prematurely discredited pedagogical methods like memorization). For better or worse, American individualism does not merely implicate targets agreed upon by the liberal literati, like rampant consumerism or such Republican clichés as the greedy businessman or the gun-toting bigot; it encompasses also figures and causes who would be sympathetic to this book's target audience—think of the role played by heroic individualism in African-American culture from the emancipatory slave narratives onward; or the assertion of individual preference and identity in queer culture—and I would have liked to see Jen deal with these harder questions of cultural politics. (In this context, it might be notable that the latest Chinese word to break into Western awareness is
  baizuo , or "white left," a term that like "social justice warrior" is used to mock cultural liberalism as so much whining and opportunistic—i.e., "virtue-signaling"—hypocrisy.)
  
  Jen's comments on the arts, though, are welcome and suggestive, even if, as with the rest of the book, somewhat over-generalized. She argues that the great artist in Western culture is the genius, a grand individual expressing his or her vision in startlingly original terms, while the great artist in Eastern culture is the master, who has so totally merged his or her sensibility within craft, nature, and tradition that the resulting work has an air not of disruption but of smoothness and calm. She allows that this ideology of mastery may make the East a culture of excessive copying (in her own Westernized view) when she discusses plagiarism in academia and dwells at length on
  Dafen Oil Painting Village with its teeming replicas of classic paintings. But she also claims that mastery, in its emphasis on tradition and learning, is an aesthetic that can be a corrective to the West's enervating pursuit of novelty and transgression. Without referring to any binary of East/West, I have had similar thoughts when encountering arguments that seem to want to mandate avant-garde aesthetics for any writer with serious literary ambitions—see, for instance, my comments
  here, wherein I defend seemingly "traditional" novelists like Jonathan Franzen and Kazuo Ishiguro for using recognizable and even sociable literary forms to communicate their difficult truths, rather than willfully defying tradition and the reader with overt radical gestures like subtracting punctuation marks or paragraph breaks or whatever. It is just too simple to dismiss as hidebound complacency any use of traditional forms in art, and Jen's defense of mastery over genius helps to articulate why this is so.
  
  In conclusion, The Girl at the Baggage Claim, while perhaps suffering from its pop-nonfiction simplifications, is nevertheless well worth reading as much for Jen's own genial, wise sensibility as for the examples and data she marshals.
• 
  Bryn (Plus Others)

  Why was this book so annoying? I'm not sure; I think because it was all over the place; Jen talks about herself and her life, she talks about psychology and sociology and culture, and most of all she talks about an 'American self' that I mostly do not recognise at all. I wish this book had been ONE thing: Jen's memoir about her own experiences growing up as an Asian-American and her decisions about child-raising? That would have been fine. Jen's take on the differences between traditional life in China & life in the U.S. and how those things are changing in the 21st century? Also fine. But what she's trying to do here is a Malcolm Gladwell like popular cultural-history/sociology/psychology thing with some arguments for Better Ways To Be and some arguments about why it's hard to be one particular way or why expecting people like X to do things like Y is not a good idea. Which can be an interesting book, but she really, really doesn't pull it off.
  
  Also, as some other reviewers have noted, many of Jen's examples seem to read counter to the point she's trying to make. She argues a lot that typical individualistic American people believe in a 'big pit' essentialist self, whereas typical interdependent Asian people (which seems like an amazingly broad category to generalise about) believe that circumstances matter more than individual experience -- but then gives examples in which (to my eye) the circumstances are being ignored in favour of a belief that everyone's essential experience is identical, and argues that this demonstrates interdependence. Is my confusion about this an example of the cultural gap that she's talking about? I wish I could sit down with her and her book and ask her a lot of questions, because I do think she is trying to say *something* but a lot of the time I couldn't figure out what -- which made for a very frustrating experience as a reader.
• 
  Alison Hardtmann

  The Girl at the Baggage Claim is Gish Jen's book explaining the East-West culture gap, by examining the differences between interdependent and independent people. We're all somewhere along a continuum, but in the West, and especially the US, we value independence and uniqueness, while in the East, using China as the main example, interdependence with one's family and community is stressed. Jen was raised by parents who had immigrated to the US from China, and now teaches at both American and Asian universities, giving her a perspective that takes in Eastern and Western cultures as both an insider and an outsider.
  
  Having lived in five countries, albeit all in the West, I'm fascinated by how the culture we are raised in shapes how we perceive the world. We make unconscious value judgements all the time, based on nothing more than what we're used to and as the world becomes an increasingly global place, we desperately need to make the effort to understand cultural differences and how to work with and around them.
  
  Jen does go a little academic at times with her subject matter, but it's clearly one that she understands and finds fascinating.
• 
  William Mego

  From the beginning, an otherwise entertaining and informative work by an author I know to be intelligent and engaging is rendered unreadable by pages of graphs purporting to show conjecture and interpretation as objective data. There are many books which do this, and sadly, many people have difficulty distinguishing truth in such cases. I'll not contribute to the mess by detailing further. With apologies, I cannot recommend this book.
• 
  Steve

  A lot of interesting and illuminating stuff - I feel like I learned a lot. Good thoughts about individualistic vs communalist cultures, how they see each other, and some of the pros and cons of each. BUT I think the writing style is just too weird for me. She uses a metaphor of an avocado and its pit for individualists - ok, I get that, it’s a vivid metaphor that the individualist has this overwhelmingly big and inflexible self tucked away inside. But then she continues to refer to “big pit people” through the whole book. I found that jarring for a while, then it just got annoying. I think she’s got some really great ideas, and she uses some excellent literary quotes to illustrate her arguments, I just wish some of the terminology was a bit more conventional so I could focus on the ideas instead of the odd writing.
• 
  erforscherin

  I like the author’s thesis and see where she’s coming from, but as a child of immigrants myself, I couldn’t help wondering how much of the behaviors or thought-patterns she points out are not rooted in differences between Eastern and Western cultures, but rather American vs. non-American cultures. I would have loved to see more research comparing not just Americans to Asians, but also to European, South American, and African countries.
• 
  Corinne

  Tienanmen Tank Man
  - "is it possible that he sees the soldiers are ordinary, too - as mere humans gone wrong, which is why he is knocking on their hatch?" p5
  "This conception of people as being shapred by their situations, as opposed to having sole control of their destinies..." p6
  
  "If given a picture of an object in a field, big pit selves will tend to focus on the object, while flexi-selves will do the opposite. They will focus on the context, and imagine the object-and-its-context as a single, indivisible unit. " p23
  
  Interest in patters..."What repeats? If a family unity repeats again and again - as, of course it does, with two parents again and again producing children - then there is a principle of the cosmos there, with which this self believes it is better to be aligned. Historical patters are natural patterns, and that human society should be modeled on natural principles. As for how one finds these principles, that is not through experimental manipulation but by patient observation and intuitive insight." p25
  
  "What else does being WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Developed) mean? It means that , focused on self-definition and self-determination as we are, Americans can be, as a nation, choice-crazy.? p 158
  
  "...increased choice and increased affluence have been accompanied by decreased well-being in the US and most other affluent societies. Why? FOMO - Fear of Missing Out. We torture ourselves with the road not taken - with a fear that we've chosen wrong." p 160 "More choice may not mean more control. Perhaps there comes a point at which opportunities become so numerous that we feel overwhelmed. Instead of feeling in control, we feel unable to cope." p 161
  
  flexi-self communities tend to conceive of the social world as a kind of endless cast party; for the big-pit person life is a kind of endless audition - a world in which it will be up to them to define, to fend for themselves. "No wonder big pit parents anxiously pad their children with self-esteem." p 2013-4
  
  "...One Asian student asked me, Aren't Americans just fitting in by standing out? In asking this she anticipated the most interesting line of a Las Vegas resort ad, a line that enjoins the viewer to 'misfit right in' with 'just the right amount of wrong.' Is this not group-think? Has individualism in America become conformity with another name?" p 217
  
  Ambidependence
• 
  Kate

  A lot more cultural psychology theory than I expected - I was hoping for more practical examples and anecdotes. Would be a good university textbook. Interesting, but not what I was expecting.
• 
  Keith

  disappointing
  
  I thought this book would give some genuine insight into differences between East and West but it's mostly just impressions.
• 
  Leanne

  The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap, Gish Jen unpacks the way differing underlying concepts of self inform the various storytelling traditions around the world. Throughout her career as a writer, Jen has made a case for fiction that combines both Eastern and Western craft. In the West, she says, this concept is something she calls the “big pit self,”
  
  a self unlike any other in the world, assertive and full of self-esteem, and yet anxiously protective of its self-image and obsessed with self-definition. Why is it, exactly, that Americans must have fifty flavors of ice cream when other cultures are happy with ten? Why do we talk about ourselves so much? Why are we consumed with the memoir? Why is personal growth so important? Does self-esteem come at a price? And why do we see work the way we do, and how did we get this way?
  
  In contrast to the “pit self,” Jen explores a notion of self that is far more prevalent outside the Western world, the interdependent “flexi-self” associated with collectivistic societies. In this case, the boundary between self and world is “nowhere near so absolute. It is, rather, porous and fluid—a dotted line.” It would only be natural that this latter sense of self would inform the writing traditions of those countries. And so, the American workshop can be encouraging or stifling depending on one’s background. Because, as Salesses argues, the workshop is all about societal expectation. Being so firmly founded in cultural norms and ideology, it will not promote artistic rule-breakers or genre-defilers.
  
  
  
  For more, please see my essay at the Millions.
• 
  Nicole

  This is a good book as long as you don't mind that "east" is limited primarily to East Asia.
• 
  Michael

  I found this an interesting book, perhaps one that would be best suited as a suite of related essays. The discussion is not, despite the title, about the "East-West Culture Gap" per se. It is really more about the distinction between the highly individualistic sense of self that typifies the West — in her case, mostly the United States — which she calls the "big pit" self, as in an avocado with a large, well-developed core; and the interdependent sense of self typical of East Asian society, particularly although not exclusively China. As an ABC, an American-born Chinese daughter of immigrants, this is an obvious focal area for exploration, and individual discussions and chapters really stand out, especially a discussion on how East Asian and Western students recall and focus on different aspects of their own personal narratives. Western students focus on individual details and a self-focused narrative; East Asians focus on interdependent, relationship-driven long-term trends and patterns. A further fascinating piece is on how artists and scholars in the West focus on individual works of genius; this is contrasted with the Asian art traditions in which skilled mastery of existing forms and works is emphasized, and individual recognition is either frowned upon, or seen as largely irrelevant.
  
  There are a host of similarly interesting and well-fleshed-out vignettes, many of them focused on the educational system and highly-motivated students from Asian and North American society. As a university professor it's unsurprising that she is focused on these subjects, but it makes me wonder if she could have looked at struggling, low-income youth in China and America as well, to see if their cultural gaps are similar.
  
  (By the way, as she acknowledges, the psyches of kids from prosperous Western nations are by no means 'typical' psychologies; they are WEIRD — "Western, educated, industralized, rich, and developed," so the extension of Western psychology to students from Asia and Africa and Latin America was intrinsically flawed.)
  
  As to the girl at the baggage claim? She is a red herring, or whatever the equivalent of red herring is in Mandarin. She is a prop, a stand-in — a real person, as it turns out, but more of a hook on which Jen hangs a whole host of perhaps-unrelated thesis statements.
  
  The author's name, by the way, is a bit hilarious once I figured it out. Her Chinese name is Ren Bilian; her English name is Lillian Jen. The pen name, "Gish," is frequently confused as something "Asian" and thus she was frequently called "Geesh" by well-meaning Anglos. But it doesn't take a genius to figure out that she was called "Lillian Gish" as a girl, after the actress, and took "Gish" as her pen name accordingly.
• 
  Andrew

  Sloppy arguments, especially the parts about American history, and I didn't like her writing style (that is admittedly subjective).
  
  But I'm still glad I read it because there were so many interesting ideas; and she was able to explain elements of deep culture, which are so foundational that they are nearly impossible to see when you live in the culture.
• 
  Denise

  We love to divide people into groups. Of course it is hard-wired into us as primates, mammals, vertebrates even, to distinguish between Us and Them. My mom, with Marx, swore there are only two kinds of people: regular people, and evil greedy rich people. In my young-mother days we tried to discern if we were winters, autumns, springs or summers. My daughter-in-law used to like Meyers-Briggs as a distinguisher - multiple combinations of four spectra where except for I my personal letters changed every time I took the test. Fiske has four ways of relating: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing, which can be mixed and matched depending on who you are relating to. His student Haidt has five (or is it six) moral foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation (and maybe Liberty/Oppression). If you are a Liberal, a Conservative, or a Libertarian, your moral mileage might vary. And on it goes.
  
  There's value in setting up these explanations of inexplicable behavior, and in knocking them down. Know Thyself, after all. Jen, who is a novelist daughter of Asian immigrants, posits that Americans have a relatively unusual way of seeing the world, individualistic as opposed to collaborative. She backs it up with a lifetime of close observation and a boatload of dubious psychological studies. It was just in the news that New York is finally going to destroy their merit-based magnet high schools rather than allow them to remain 80% Asian, disparate outcomes obviously resulting from privilege and not from culture. Not so fast, Jen tells us.
  
  The parts of this book I liked most were the historical nuggets: the art copying village, the city-wide noise bans during the high-stakes college entrance exam, why rice farming is communal, "thank you" as an insult. I might understand my youngest son's in-laws and my middle son's best friend's parents a little better now. Scrutinize the Inscrutable East. Learn something new.
• 
  Christopher Pitts

  Good selection of case studies and insightful, nuanced observations. My one gripe with this book is that it's spun as East vs. West, or collectivist vs. individualist. This is not accurate. It is a very specific study of two cultures, and two cultures only: the United States and China.
  You cannot make observations about Americans and apply them to Europeans--sure, there are sweeping generalities that you can make here (everyone benefited from the Enlightenment), but all in all, Europeans are really, really different from Americans (and indeed, from themselves), just as other Asians are really, really different from the Chinese. Having lived in both France and China for a combined fifteen years, I would say that there were many moments when I felt more lost in France than I did in China. To argue that the French, for example, value individualism over the collectivist extended family is just not true. If anything, the French are more in the middle when it comes to individualist versus collectivist values.
  In the same vein, I had Korean, Japanese, and Indian classmates in Taiwan and the PRC who felt equally adrift trying to navigate the complexities of Chinese society.
  To be fair, the author does acknowledge this issue. Ultimately, it is arguably impossible to carry out a true study of the "East-West culture gap" because there is too much diversity and too many variables beneath the big geographical umbrella terms.
  Pet peeve aside, I enjoyed reading this.
• 
  Susan Grodsky

  Gish Jen has good ideas on a good topic. She'd be a wonderful person to meet for coffee: warm, funny, quirky, and very very smart.
  
  That said, the book has frustrating flaws. Why, for example, is her description of the fundamental attribution error -- an important part of her argument -- so sketchy that I had to consult Wikipedia for a clear explanation? I know she can write very well. Why didn't she?
  
  Another example: why does she construct this story of the girl at the baggage claim in the preface, then keep me guessing on the resolution until the epilogue? It's only there, after slogging through hundreds of pages, that I finally deduced that the entire story was fiction.
  
  How is this fair, exactly? After all, Gish Jen promised me in the preface that I would understand the logic of the girl at the baggage claim being not being the girl she was supposed to be. She promised me that I would understand why a Chinese family might pull a bait and switch operation on an American school and why they would expect it to succeed.
  
  And then in the epilogue, I find out that there was no girl at all, and no Chinese family determined to deceive Milton
  Academy. The whole story was fiction. So the bait and switch was Gish Jen pulling a deception on me.
  
  Gish Jen is a graceful and expressive prose stylist, but I don't like being deceived.
• 
  RJ Koch

  Too intellectual for me. Felt like I was reading a text book. Made it to about page 40 when I gave up and then I skimmed a little and read a Goodreads review or two. The Big Pit Avocado independent self of the west vs. the Flexi Self, interdependent and collectivist of the East. Not sure I learned anything. We each have parts of both? Chinese sons bring Mother bottled water.
  
  Self definition or self sacrifice. Interdependent self is accomodating. Stereotypes: Asians are good at math. 1989 Tiannanmen tank man.
  
  Americans blame themselves. Israelis blame the system. English lang. paper blame personal characteristics, short fuse, etc. Chinese point to external factors, recently fired, postal supervisor was his enemy. The West = lone dissenter, Winston Smith who stands up to Big Brother in 1984 George Orwell. USA = rugged individualism.
  
  Japanese get divorced too now. Or don't marry. Rate has risen 3X since 1960, a marker of individualism. Rice culture. All agriculture encourages flexi selves. Trade and hunting fostered big pit selves.
  
  Q: were they immoral to have the sister who spoke better English do the Skype college entrance exam interview for the other sister?
• 
  Katie

  Interesting non-fiction book about East/West cultural differences, specifically focused on the strong Western individualistic tendency vs. the Eastern tendency to move in groups and not necessarily express strong ego-focused opinions (this is all, obviously, very general and stereotypical). The author examines the implications of these cultural differences in terms of art, culture, education, and family.
  
  She does a good job of looking at each "side" in a new and different light, portraying the "other" side as having advantages that one might never have thought of.
  
  I did think at times her conclusions were a bit of a stretch, but that's often true of a non-fiction author trying to prove a point. Overall, it made me reconsider aspects of behavior that I'd always previously considered stifling or overly-conformist. It sure makes one, as a Westerner, feel appropriately silly and humble about our navel-gazing tendencies. There are 7 billion of us...we're not special!
• 
  Judith

  The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap by Gish Jen takes its title from the story of an Asian girl whose fluent English-speaking sister made her application and took her interview for her at a prestigious American prep school. In view of the recent scandals about rich American parents who bribed and deceived admissions staff to gain advantage for their children, the East-West contrast may seem less sharp in that than in some of her other stories, but she is well supplied with anecdotes that support her description of collectivist Asians vs. individualist Americans and she draws on relevant research to support her points. Her image of the Western self as “a kind of avocado, replete with a big pit on which it is focused,” was not a helpful illustration for me. On the other hand, her chapter on American history, from the Calvinists to the Cold War, was priceless.
• 
  Anthony Locke

  Jen compares and contrasts the alleged east versus west cultural distinction, which includes many stories about her Asian American experience. She describes an old cultural distinction of individual vs. collective in a number of fresh ways. I was particularly interested in her description of the Gaokao process (Chinese high school exit/college placement exam) contrasted with Western education. She also discusses some family differences as well, including, interestingly enough, some of the differences in how each culture processes time, events, and memories. There were not a ton of immediate ministry implications, but it helped me process some of the tensions of being an Asian American where the pull toward one side or the other can be particularly strong and vary in different seasons of life.