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I Scolded My Chinese Colleague For Sleeping On Her Desk
My cultural fail in China
Culture shock
My first job was as a manager of a European logistics company in Shanghai. I was hungry, driven, and eager to get results. I had a fancy office overlooking the famous Yuyuan Garden and the world was my oyster.
One day, shortly after I had started working, I came back from a business lunch. As I returned to the office, I noticed the assistant, a girl from Shanghai, was sleeping, resting her arms on her head. Coming from a Western world, I was horrified.
‘What would clients think?’
‘How lazy of her!’
‘This is so rude and disrespectful!’
I had all these judgments, and without a warning or a conversation, I scolded her and asked her not to sleep in the office again. I said it was rude and unprofessional. She blushed and apologized. She never slept again on the desk, and I never gave it much thought.
Shanghai became home for a few years. I visited dozens of cities, from Hangzhou to Suzhou, the Chinese Venice. I traveled to Wenzhou and up north to Tianjin and Dalian. I walked along the Chinese Wall, both in Beijing and in the west in the Gobi desert. I saw baby Pandas in Chengdu and met Muslim Chinese for the first…
