Twitter Interview With Jack Yan

Twitter Interviews – #CKinterview

Today’s Cross-Cultural Interview is with Jack Yan. You can also find him on Twitter: @jackyan.

Today I am happy to interview a long time Twitter friend from New Zealand, Jack Yan. Check him out on Twitter @jackyan and you’ll quickly see how busy Jack is online. I like following Jack on Twitter because he engages with interesting ideas.  He is always abreast of the latest trends… and it is very interesting to see these new trends through the eyes of someone with a culturally open mindset. Jack has diverse interests and runs:

1. A media company
2. A typeface company
3. A branding consultancy

These are not the only thing keeping Jack busy; he is also invested in his community and is now running for Mayor of Wellington.

Read what Jack has to say about his cultural skills and his wide international experience below. Stay tuned for the Twitter Interview later today where Jack with share his answers to the 10 culture questions. If you are not on Twitter then, don’t worry, this post will be updated shortly afterwards and you’ll be able to read the tweets here.

The transcript of the Cross-Cultural Twitter Interview with @jackyan is now below.

This is a 2 part interview:

• Part 1 – The Blog Interview to get to know Jack
• Part 2 – The Twitter Interview where Jack answers 10 Cross-Cultural & International Questions

Jack Yan – Part 1

Here is the first part of the interview with Jack.

Jack, For those who don’t know you, can you please tell us something about yourself?

Jack Yan: I was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to New Zealand just before my fourth birthday in 1976. I started my own company in 1987, doing really basic things like hand-lettering and proofreading. But it wasn’t really enough for me, so I kept growing the business. It is now Jack Yan & Associates, still a small company, but we have fingers in many pies. I do all the boring admin stuff, but occasionally can get to have some fun.

I have had stints in the US, France and Sweden that total to a couple of years.

I speak two dialects of Chinese. One is Cantonese, which is native to Hong Kong. The second is Taishanese, which is comprehensible to most Hong Kong people, but it is slightly different—for years, this was the language of most Chinatowns. English, I obviously speak. I also speak French, and I have a very basic grasp of Swedish and German (not enough to watch TV but enough to read the papers).

Strangely enough, other than my own culture, which I am very close to, I feel a great affinity with the Swedes. But I identify myself as a New Zealander when I travel, and it’s the culture that I can get most easily “in to”. Sometimes I feel I understand what it’s like to be a New Zealander more than some people who have been born here and have lived here all their lives, probably because I hold an idealized, romantic idea of the concept.

Immigrants who choose their nationality never take it for granted, which is something that anti-immigrant politicians fail to grasp consistently. They seem to have this adversarial image that immigrants come and change the cultural mix of their nation. This is a fallacy on quite a few levels. It (a) exposes their lack of confidence in the strength of their own nation; and (b) exposes their closed-mindedness, for anyone who has dealt with any immigrant knows the love that most of us have with our adopted nations. In fact, many go so far toward integration that they lose their original cultures, which has its down sides, too.

I happily say that my ethnicity is Chinese but I can’t claim Chinese nationality. The fact is I was born when Hong Kong was a British colony, and I grew up in New Zealand. I have two passports: a British one and a New Zealand one. So if I say I am ‘Chinese’, do people assume this to be my ethnicity or my nationality? It’s entirely dependent on the context.

I don’t subscribe to communist ideologies, which is probably not uncommon for descendants of Chinese who escaped the revolution in 1949, or chose to leave Red China in later years. I feel a cultural bond with all Chinese people individually, and if there were a sporting match between, say, someone from the People’s Republic of China and Japan, I would always cheer for the former.

However, that’s different from saying I fully understand the context in which they grew up between 1949 and today. And being a staunch anti-communist, both from upbringing and out of choice, would people automatically group me with members of the Communist Party if I said I am Chinese?

So if the question is about my nationality, then it is either British or New Zealand, and more often the latter. To any other question, I am Chinese.

To me, being Chinese today is being someone who appreciates our history, Confucian philosophy and the Republic as founded by Dr Sun Yat-sen. If China is to be united, it would be under these tenets. Yet I see so much divisiveness from my own people because of the rifts of the last century, in particular from communists themselves, when we have five millennia before that which unites us.

How did you pick up your cross-cultural skills?

Jack Yan: I was exposed to Anglo culture from a young age, living in a British colony. There were two Chinese-language TV channels, and two English-language ones. So learning English and being aware of a separate culture was normal in colonial Hong Kong. There was no “picking up”, at least not consciously, though I did grow up with the image (stereotype) of the mischievous white boy—that it was generally regarded among Chinese that whites were less well behaved, for example. I heard this when starting school in New Zealand and that I needed to be guarded against them. While the stereotype fitted a few members of my class, it certainly did not apply to the majority. Children, too, bear so few prejudices—the above was probably the only one I was exposed to—that bridging cultural gaps was effortless.

I was also fortunate that I attended a school that was multicultural. St Mark’s Church School, in Wellington, New Zealand—to which I maintain very close ties to this day—was where many diplomats and expatriates sent their children. It was just normal to have friends from Switzerland or the UK. My father worked for the local Grundig concessionaire so I knew what German was at age five and learned the months of the year. I was also given the choice to learn Japanese or French at age six—St Mark’s offered these as foreign languages—and my parents explained to me that being multilingual was an advantage in life.

In the mind of a six-year-old, I deemed Japanese to be an inferior form of Chinese (though my parents really pushed for me to learn Japanese so I could maintain my writing skills, since Japanese kanji is derived from Chinese), and insisted on French. It was odd reasoning at the time, but I don’t regret having made that choice, since in my lifetime I have been to France seven times and Japan once.

Perhaps since then, I have never found it that difficult to cross cultures. It was just normal. And, the anti-immigrant politicians will be shocked to hear, my appreciation of New Zealand culture remained intact.

How do you use your cross-cultural skills in your business?

Jack Yan: I confront it every day because I hear from people of all cultures. If I get an email from France, I might switch into French to respond to it. And many of my cousins live in the United States, so I always understood American culture. Schooling helped as well: St Mark’s purchased, being a private school, American textbooks, which we read in addition to those mandated by the New Zealand Government. However, my cross-cultural experience has not come from work. It has come from upbringing: I was already someone who crossed cultures easily by the time I began my work in 1987.

I will say that the advent of the internet and the World Wide Web was a great catalyst, however. I was already fascinated, around age nine or ten, by the telex, and how one could have conversations with someone on the other side of the world. Bulletin boards were the next step and I got in to using modems fairly early, inspired in part by movies like War Games and TV series like Whiz Kids. Bear in mind that online communications, then, were quite respectable, and there were no child predators or freaks like that.

When the internet and the web surfaced, I took to them immediately. It was like being the proverbial kid in the candy store. So technology helped fuel my desire to work internationally, and turned whatever I was doing into an inter¬national business, but I like to think that even if the internet did not exist, I would have found a means to go global. I never considered that I could function as a single-nation businessman, and maybe that’s in part due to New Zealand being a small country population-wise. My market was always going to be limited if I looked at only the domestic one.

Can you tell us about your blog?

Jack Yan: Actually, I was very late to blogging. My impression of blogging in, say, 2001, was that it was for amateurs who lacked the skills or resources to create a proper website. And since we had those resources, I took quite a snobbish view to blogs then.

I got in to blogging to support Beyond Branding, a book I co-authored with my colleagues at the Medinge Group. There was a belief (which I agree with) that the blog would be a way to show we believed in the principles of the book, which was about transparency and integrity. That was in 2003, but I was, at best, a once-a-quarter blogger. People like Johnnie Moore did the lion’s share of blog posts there, and it was only till 2005 that I got in to blogging regularly, partly to have my own space during a time when I had some negative employees at my company. It was a way to vent, and there was a lot to vent about when you have negative influences around you!

I started my own blog in January 2006, and was fairly prolific the first year, but I have become a weekly blogger in the last year or so. It was called The Persuader, not after The Hidden Persuaders, but The Persuaders TV show—the one you might know there as Amicalement Votre. It was, and probably still is, my favourite television series, and it was a cheeky homage to Roger Moore and Tony Curtis, but without the marijuana!

I initially met fellow bloggers and those who were interested in marketing, which was no surprise given Beyond Branding’s scope. It was always inter¬national, but there were a few posts, sometimes political, that were domestic. (If you read through, you’ll find that I have been interested in politics for a long time.)

However, I do not have a favourite blog post. Blogging is cathartic, and once I got what I needed to out of my system, I moved on.

I have a couple of lists I’m building here on this blog, and wonder if you have anything you would like to share.

I have a few lists, such as my blogroll, and I have kept links’ sections on our websites. We’ve even kept the links for the sites we agreed to exchange links with—even when they dishonoured their side of the bargain. (A few of those probably need to disappear.) Feel free to take what you need from our lists.

I’m building up a few resources here on this blog, and wonder if you have any insights to help me add to them.

Have you come across any cultural stereotypes that bother you?

Jack Yan: All the time. There is an idea that Chinese people in this country are not interested in politics. That is total BS. The under-representation is not to do with disinterest from my race, but more to do with discouragement. When I went to business school, people automatically asked if I was studying accounting. It was as if it was unacceptable for a Chinese man to study anything but at a business school. These assumptions hold back all but the most determined. We, like any race, can get dissuaded by societal expectations, and a few of us have to trail-blaze for the rest.

Another one that I find fascinating is that business people of colour aren’t supposed to promote themselves as much as whites. I encounter it here. There are people who are actually bothered by the amount of promotion I do for my company, even though it is no more and no less what someone in my position would do. Fortunately, there are fewer and fewer people who believe this is the case: it’s something that seems to be restricted to folks who are over a certain age. They seem to be offended that I have the same rights that anyone else does in speaking my mind.

The third cultural stereotype is that of the “second banana” oriental. Look at the media—shows like Flash Forward, for instance. John Cho is the willing sidekick to Joseph Fiennes. American media have failed to produce shows that have an oriental—an “Asian–American”—as the lead, other than the odd ones such as Martial Law, Vanishing Son and All American Girl. That’s three I can name in, ooh, forty years. I am sure that is hardly representative of the Asian–American population. And the Americans are not the only group.

If indeed we were in a colourblind society, the proportions would reflect the population. They do not. But when you have stereotypes like this, no wonder people get upset when their constructed worlds are shattered.

When I announced I would run for mayor, I had people ask me—including people I admire—‘Wouldn’t you rather run for council?’ In some cases, this question is warranted, because their motives are good: they want me to understand the inner workings of the council before I take on the top job. Never mind that some of the best mayors we have had in this city had zero council experience prior to their elections. I personally believe that anyone who has had their pulse on the city and understands interpersonal and interdepartmental dynamics will be able to fathom the workings of council very readily.

However, other people ask this question because of the “second-banana” principle: that they would rather see me as the sidekick. To those very few people, I hope they will change their views if Wellington chooses to elect its first non-white mayor. Even if it’s not me, and it’s someone else either at the 2010 election or later, it would destroy a few stereotypes.

Do you have a favorite show that could help people understand cultural issues?

Jack Yan: No one movie, but take a look at how one’s own culture is portrayed by foreigners and that might give you an insight on how your own culture unfairly portrays others. We talked about the second-banana idea above—no wonder Chinese people thought the world of Bruce Lee in The Green Hornet when prior to that, the most-seen Chinese character on American television was Hop Sing off Bonanza. But if you see how Anglo cultures are portrayed in, say, 1980s’ Hong Kong cinema—occasionally inaccurately, I might add—you might note that cultural misunderstandings flow both ways.

Do you have a book you could recommend to help others improve their cultural insights?

Jack Yan: Sicco van Gelder’s Global Brand Strategy is an excellent title that I would recommend, and it comes from first-hand experience in many cases. Sicco is one of the best thinkers in the business.

Thank you for sharing! This will help me to build those lists.

And finally… Is there anything else you would like to share?

Jack Yan: I think I’ve been pretty deep on my own background above, but I would love to perfect Swedish. I would also love to learn the native Māori language here in New Zealand. I have made some efforts in the case of the latter, since it is the national language of this country, but I have to say it is not easy, since the structure is very different to Chinese! But I feel a great deal of patriotism toward the Māori language and culture; the familial traditions of Māoridom are not dissimilar to the principles found in Confucianism. I also think it is ridiculous in a country where Māori is the official language that it does not appear on street signs or banknotes—something that I’ll use the mayoral platform to push for. Anyone who has been to Hong Kong or Canada knows that bilingual official documents are perfectly normal, and it has bothered me for some time that Māori appears only in limited places.

I would not mind returning to Sweden for a holiday, and French Polynesia draws me, too. Now there is one place which prides itself on its native languages alongside French. But these are places to which I would go to feel familiar with my surroundings. Last year, I went to India for the first time and loved the experience. I would not mind going somewhere where I have not been: parts of Africa and South America fascinate me.

Jack, it is great to know a bit more about you. And I’m really curious about the answers you will give us when I put you on the hot seat for the 10 Cross-Cultural Questions on Twitter later today.

Jack Yan – Part 2 – The Twitter Interview

This is an interview series of the people I recommend you follow on Twitter for the cross-cultural and international business insights in their tweets.

More Twitter Interviews

• Charmayne Paul – @psitutor
• Lucy Chatburn – @pocketcultures
• Doreen Iannuzzi – @DoreenatDMS
• Donna Jackson – @wisequeen
• Chris Cotter – @CotterHUE
• Silvia Cambié – @XCulture
• Bill Ward – @DR4WARD
• Thierry De Baillon – @t_de_baillon
• Seshu – @PicSeshu
• Neil Urquhart – @culturematters
• Klaus & Flavia Westerwelle – @transdomo
• Donagh Kiernan – @dkiernan
• Christian Hoeferle – @hoeferleconsult
• Caroline – @ohh_la_la
• Deborah Swallow – @DeborahSwallow
• Steve Roesler – @steveroesler
• Matthew Bennett – @matthewbennett

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