There's an old saying in China that "Every three people there must be my teacher". So [when networking] I learn more about careers or other things from people.Cathy, former Chinese international student now career professional
Credits:
Host: Wing Kuang and Dennis Fang
Producer: Wing Kuang, Dennis Fang, Bertin Huynh
Art: Joanna Hu
SBS Team: Joel Supple, Max Gosford, Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn
Transcript:
Wing Kuang
This podcast was recorded on the land of the Camarraygal people. We'd like to pay our respects to Elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country. Welcome to Chinese-ish, an SBS podcast about what it is like to be young and Chinese in today's Australia. My name is Wing, and I'm a former Chinese international student.
Dennis Fang
and I'm Dennis, a second-generation Australian Chinese. And tell me, Wing, am I your Work Bestie?
Wing Kuang
I know what you want to hear, Dennis, but sorry about it. You are not.
Dennis Fang
How can you say that?! I feel so hurt?
Wing Kuang
I mean, we never work in the same team, because part of this relationship is built through trauma bonding. In the workplace setting, that will often involve having the same manager that we both dislike, and we strengthen our relationship by ranting about this manager.
Dennis Fang
Oh yes, it's the old adage that nothing bonds two people together than a shared enemy, right?
Wing Kuang
But we too could be an exemption, because we work in media, which is a very different work environment from, let's say, a standard Corporation.
Dennis Fang
Well, let's talk to our guests from the corporate sector. First we have Cathy, a former international Chinese student and now a 30-year-old corporate hack.
Cathy
Hello, everyone. I'm Cathy.
Wing Kuang
And we also have Joe, a 29 year old Australian-born Vietnamese Chinese, starting his career as construction engineer, but now a data analyst, spending eight hours a day in front of computers.
Joe
Hey, I'm Joe, Hello.
Dennis Fang
Who's your work BFF, Cathy?
Cathy
I do have a few, we call sisters to each other, so we share some lunch time together. So by spending time together, we develop the friendship, and then they are my work best friends right now.
Dennis Fang
And Joe?
Joe
I'd probably say I've cultivated a small group of friends that I would consider some of them to be lifelong friends. In my current role, I would probably say my manager, direct manager, is probably my BFF, which is probably, I don't know if that's controversial or not, but yeah.
Dennis Fang
Are you a corporate climber, or do you choose your work BFFs through other means, like, I don't know, shared talents, shared interests?
Joe
The easiest way I've found to actually find friends at the workplace has always been through common interest. The biggest one for me has been basketball. I'm a basketball fan. I play basketball, and the quickest way to be friends with me at work is if I know you play basketball and I play basketball. It's like, it's pretty easy for me to just be friends with you. The next stage will probably be like meeting outside of work playing basketball, and then in those sessions, you end up starting talking about either work or non-work related things.
Wing Kuang
You said your manager is your BFF. So if you go on a basketball game, can you win the game?
Joe
Oh, yeah, I'm pretty competitive. So I would.
Wing Kuang
Cathy, you have worked in three different companies. Do you always have a new work bestie every time when you join a new company? And also, how about the old work besties in your previous companies? Are you still staying in touch?
Cathy
Yeah, of course, I still stay in touch with a lot of my previous co-workers. They're still my best friends. We often visit each other, or maybe we have some BBQ. We often still talk about previous colleagues, what's happening, any gossip to share. Also, I sometimes play badminton with them. And also I share some, you know, I watch a lot of K dramas, so I talk about those k dramas with them as well.
Dennis Fang
Thinking about all the friends that you've made through work, have you guys seen any connection with any sort of ethnicity? Is it easier to make friends if, you know, if the other person is also Chinese? I mean, I don't want to say that the reason that me and Wing are friends is because we're both Chinese, but ultimately, the reason why we met was because of a story about China that Wing wrote, and I found that really interesting.
Cathy
Yeah, I think that happens to me, especially when I was an international student. So when I first came to Australia, I studied at the business school. There are a lot of Chinese students. So I tend to speak in Chinese, and we do group assignments in Chinese. And then after graduation, a lot of my friends went back to China. And then I joined a new job. So I tend to seek some similarities in the background or in the culture, even when someone who is born here and who can speak Chinese, that would be very helpful for me. So I kind of feel like someone can be really close to me and talk to me and understand me better. After that, I started to make friends with people of different backgrounds.
Dennis Fang
But despite growing up in Australia, especially in my high school and in some jobs that I've had, I've seen that Asians seem to sort of group together, and then you also have sort of the white people and then the Indian people, and that's despite, you know, growing up together. Have you guys seen any of that in the workplace?
Joe
I've seen that for my group of friends, as in, like, from uni and then outside of work, but when we talk about specifically work, I actually never, I haven't really seen that from my end before, my teams and the places that I've been at have always been very multicultural. And so one of the great things about that is that we have these different backgrounds and if it's not a toxic environment, it's actually quite interesting, because people start sharing about their experiences and like their cultures. So like, for instance, Diwali, I think that's like Indian culture, we would then celebrate that as a team.
Wing Kuang
And now this conversation makes me realise that I'm a very weird person, because I always have a very clear sense of the differences between me hanging out with people I know through work and people who I know outside of work. When I hang out with people that I know through work, we always talk about work. Like, even though we work in different companies or we work in different teams, we just talk about the work, talk about the industry. It's always work related you. You seem to talk a lot with your work colleagues or your work friends and like K drama, basketball. But do you also talk about work?
Cathy
Yeah, of course, we do talk about work a lot, about what's happening in the projects, what's happening in the new products. So that's basically what we talk a lot during our coffee catch ups。
Joe
I think partly because of how much time you spend at work. So if you think about your day nine to five, or for some people longer than that - so I have, I've had days where it's like 10 to 12 hours - if you're spending that much time with people, you to some degree, have to not hate them. Otherwise your life will become very miserable very quickly. So if it's such a big part of your day and such a big part of your life, it is a very big anchor of topics to talk about.
Dennis Fang
But at the same time, you've talked a lot about how a lot of your best friends at this point even include your manager. Are there any dangers in becoming really close friends with the people you work with? Do you need to be extra careful? Are there topics you just can't touch upon?
Joe
Absolutely. Yeah, but it all comes down to trust. It's always like pushing the envelope a little bit. So you give a little, you take a little, and then eventually you go, Oh, okay, the thing I said two weeks ago, it's still with you. He hasn't shared it with anyone. That builds on the trust, and then, and then you push it a little bit more. You say something that could be vulnerable for you in the workplace, and then a few weeks later, a few months later, you're still there, and everything's still fine. So then again, that builds on an additional layer of trust. And so it's not something that happened overnight, it's something that happened over years.
Dennis Fang
Have you ever pushed too far?
Joe
That's a good question. I don't think so. I don't think so, while there's a big trust there, I'm still quite careful in what I say. I have a filter in my head before it comes out. At least I haven't felt any repercussions. So that's probably a good sign.
Wing Kuang
And how about you, Cathy, are there any topics that you're absolutely not sharing with your work friends, even though they are friends?
Cathy
Well, I definitely will not share some of my views to like a specific person, and also, I won't share anything about my political views like, how I look at certain things happening. You know, tariff wars that's recently happening. So a lot of people just might sit together and talk about politics, but I tend to avoid touching such topics.
Wing Kuang
But you would talk about this with your friends outside of work, like, who?
Cathy
Yeah, I will.
Wing Kuang
Wouldn't that make you confused if they are actually friends? Because you know that you have things you have to hide from them.
Joe
Oh, well, maybe ask you in a different way. Then if you moved on to another job, would you then talk to them once you're at the new job?
Cathy
Yeah sure.
Joe
Yeah. I think I feel like that's also a bit of trust as well, right? Because what I learned early on is that everyone at the workplace has an agenda. So when a manager comes over to you and they say, "Good job Joe, well done". Sure you can be happy about it, but you got to think about why they said that? And this is from construction when they say, "Good job Joe", sure, I would have done something for them. But what they really want is keep doing, keep doing that. Like, keep working. Like, keep working. Slaving away, because the work that you're doing is pushing the project forward, even though we're over budget, over time and all these constraints and stuff. So that's why, when you're still working with those friends from work, sometimes you really don't know what their agenda is, and so if I don't know for whatever reason, they take supposedly good friends, but there's a promotion coming up, and it's you against them that could change. And I think subconsciously, you just, you're just a lot more guarded with sensitive topics when, when you're talking to them, but you know, when you're in another company, it doesn't matter.
Wing Kuang
And let's talk about trauma bonding. So I used to do internships in China before COVID. In the companies I was with, the young women there were very likely to form these trauma bonds, because the workplace environment was just so stressful. How do you find trauma bonding in an Australian workplace?
Joe
Quite similar to the first job I had at construction, all of my friends that I made there were through trauma dumping, not specifically to do with our managers. In fact, I think the managers were sort of trauma dumping with us as well. It was more like just the environment and the situation that we were in. You can make friends, actually, very, very quickly through that, because, like I said, you become vulnerable, right? You start talking about these things that are not good. If anyone in that circle goes around and tells someone that could make you vulnerable, I don't know, to the project manager or whatever, it could be bad news for everyone in that group.
Cathy
Yeah I think a lot of friendship, like, really starts from venting to each other and trauma bonding, but then some people come and go. Maybe this is, like, just situational friends. Or some of these, they may stay and they can, like, share the same hobbies and talk about something else. So I think, yeah, that's a really quick way to start a friendship.
Dennis Fang
When I first joined the media industry, I swear I was terrified that I was the diversity hire. One of the most alarming concerns that most people have when they believe they might be a diversity hire, is the belief that they weren't hired for their skills, and therefore they are less respected in the workplace. Is that something you've ever thought about?
Cathy
If that was me, I would give someone who's in this situation advice like, really speak up. Really be loud, make people listen to you. And through time, you can really prove that your skill is competent, and then you are, like, really competent for this job. So it can prove through time.
Joe
I think that's key, right? Time. I've never really thought about those kind of things before, just because my core belief is so long as I do what is required of me, and I go above and beyond my do excellent work, then whether I'm a diversity hire or not, it doesn't matter, like at the end of the day, it's my results. And if my results are good, then that's all that really matters.
Wing Kuang
There has always been this phenomenon called Bamboo Ceiling, meaning that Asian Australians just find it really, really difficult to move up to become a manager. How do you feel about that?
Joe
Yeah, to be honest, I'm probably not the best to talk to in terms of struggling, just because I think, very fortunately, I've had quite a smooth career trajectory. My immediate managers have at every job that I've had so far, even in construction, been very supportive of me. So from the very beginning, they've always been like, you know, okay, Joe, let's sit down. Let's do your review. This is exactly what I need from you. If you can do this, then you will like the promotion. And every single time that has happened for me. When people ask me, you know, when they're struggling with, oh, they promised me this, but, but, um, they didn't end up giving it to me. Most people that I talk to struggle with this, either there's something really, really wrong in the workplace, which is when I tell them to quit, or they just haven't really been documenting well enough, you know, the conversations that they've had with the managers and the people that make their decisions.
Cathy
There's also things that are happening because, like, the workplace is very stable. The turnover rate is very low, so at this time, there's no positions for you to, like, really achieve. So everyone is like, in their original position. So I guess for us Asians, we tend to be working really quietly and really hard, and we hope, like, one day people will see our achievements, what we've done. But in fact, there's a lot of times that people wouldn't see it. Right? So as Joe had mentioned, we need to really document what we've done, what's our performance, and then what I would choose to do is like, I will present my performance, present what I've done, so make sure people know about what I've done, and make sure I have visibility.
Wing Kuang
I want to move to another topic, but it's also very related to what you just said. This is actually coming from a culture shock that I experienced. So one reason why I don't want to work in China is because the workplace culture there is notoriously toxic. It's not just about the 996 work culture, which means that you work 12 hours a day and six days a week. But also, there's this idea of guanxi.
Dennis Fang
What does that mean? I have no idea.
Wing Kuang
Literally, guanxi means relationships, and in many old western descriptions, guan xi is a bad representation of China. It's about nepotism, about excessive networking, about drinking all the baijiu at the dinner table so that you can get that business signed. But when I started working in Australia, I was really shocked to find that even though there's no guanxi being a term here in Australia, nepotism, relationship, networking, It all exists. How important guanxi is in the Australian workplace?
Joe
Super important. Very, very important. And I would say because the last three jobs that I've had have all been because of my relationships, so getting into banking and I knew a friend, he introduced me into this team. Of course, I still had to go through a whole bunch of interviews, but I ended up getting into the team, but it was through him having the initial introduction, then going from that job to a data analytics job, not a friend, per se, but I was given the opportunity to present an interesting piece of work that I did based on a course that I did on Python to an executive who worked in the industry that I wanted to get into. He found that to be quite interesting, and so I proactively reached out to him and just said, look, I really want to use coding and stuff as my day to day job. How do I get from here to there? He then set me up with a team that worked for him. And again, I had to go through the rounds of interviews. There was a coding interview, and I'm getting but again, through that relationship, he was able to give me the first introduction. And then from that job to now was my old manager from the previous job. So, aside from the very first one that I got, which was my cadetship, that was through traditional just, you know, applying and getting in every single job after that has always been a relationship.
Cathy
I think relationships are very important in Australia as well. I think it's something like parallel with guanxi. It's like, maybe not as in China, we might bring people to the banquet and drink a lot of Baijiu. So I think it happens a lot during maybe coffee chat or maybe during an elevator pitch. So at this time, you just really make people know about you. So maybe later in the project, when you do some collaborations, people tend to think, Okay, I know this person, I know a lot of the hobbies, of the personal life, about this person. So I feel closer to this person, and I feel like it is easier to work with this person. So not only about the promotions and your career path, it's also about your day to day job like, how to make your life easier, how to make your job satisfaction better, I guess.
Wing Kuang
How does that make you feel that even now you're in Australia, guanxi still matters so much to you?
Cathy
I think for me, it is actually easier, because you know, people coming from different backgrounds here in Australia. So as a Chinese, I think I can navigate both the norms of Australian networking and Chinese guanxi, so I feel I know the taste of both sides. They can run in parallel.
Dennis Fang
They currently sound quite similar. But what are the differences? What do you think?
Cathy
In China, they make guanxi something very formal sometimes, but I think it's more like the older generation. They tend to do this a little bit more. So when you have a guanxi, you think, okay, I feel more confident. I'm gonna, I'm gonna maybe get the promotion, and maybe I'm gonna get the job. But in Australia, it sometimes tends to be more casual. It's more like a personal relationship or friendship with this person.
Dennis Fang
Circling back to a former topic. So does this mean that all your networking with people, those people aren't actually your friends?
Cathy
Networking is like, I think, a way to know about new people. So some of these people might develop into lifelong friends, but some of them might not. They might be just situational, but you can also take the opportunity to learn from these people, like what experience they can share with you. So I think there's an old saying in China that "Every three people there must be my teacher". So I tend to learn more about careers or some other things from these people. So I don't avoid doing a lot of networking.
Wing Kuang
In China, the Gen Z generation is very known for "Zheng Dun Zhi Chang （整顿职场） ", which means that they are not going to put up with the guanxi or the gaslighting work. And in Australia, Gen Z workers are doing similar things. Do you feel that probably, if you are a young Chinese, working in Australia, it's just, indeed, harder for you to speak up and defend yourself in the workplace compared to, let's say, your Caucasian peer?
Joe
I don't think so. There's actually a few things you've said there, so I'll try and unpack them. So I'll split it into two different categories. One is workplace bullying, and the other is working long hours, because at least in my line of work, there are periods where you will need to work a lot longer hours per day, but then once that project, or whatever is finished, you'll have a quieter period. So long as you're not working 12,14 hours a day, every day for the whole year on year, then I think it's okay to have that sort of fluctuation. If you are then and you don't like it, then quit and find something else. But in terms of workplace bullying, absolutely will be speaking up. I don't think I have any sort of disadvantages compared to a Caucasian colleague speaking up, I feel like I have the equal rights to speak up. And if certain situations require me to speak up, then I have no hesitation to do so. But I will say one thing, certain people that I know raise concerns with HR, and just because of how, in my opinion, backwards, that industry is the complaints, you know, they have this all formalized. So from, from the PR perspective, they're like, Oh yeah, HR systems. People are getting treated well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but actually, in the behind the scenes, there are certain people that have more power than others, they seem to be protected. And so there were scenarios where certain complaints were being lodged with HR. Word spread around that actually HR was finding a way to get rid of the person that put the complaint in, even though it was very valid. And so rather than protecting the person that was getting bullied, they were protecting the person that was doing the bullying. Like I said, if you don't like it, leave. If they don't do anything about it, leave.
Cathy
Yeah. So I guess, from my perspective, I think speaking up is so important for us. I know my image in the working environment might be in the first glance, Asian female. Sometimes people will think you might be very submissive, you might be very innocent. But in fact, you need to build up a strong image like, you are competent to your work. You when you say something, it's like you really mean it, so do not ignore it. So I think it's really, really important. So in my past work experience, I had experienced one case. There's one time there's one colleague, he did something that's not on the schedule that's not required to be done, and when he was questioned by the manager, he said, "Cathy wants me to do it", but in fact, I didn't ask him to do anything related. So I really speak up for myself. I said I did not tell you to do that, and we didn't really had the conversation about this before. so why did you say thatI tell you to do that? You should correct this information to the manager, and we need to make this really, really clear. So after this, I really stand up for myself, and this person also understand he shouldn't put any blame to me. So I think after that, people know about me, people know my image. So I really, I'm really competent about the job. So I think speak up is really, really important.
Dennis Fang
So Wing and I, we have been reflecting upon the ending of the first part of our careers. I mean, we're in our very late 20s, and I think the beginning of our career is kind of over. How do you guys look back upon what you've done so far, and how does that go, compared to what you expected to happen starting your careers all those years ago?
Joe
When I first started, I was extremely naive, and I'll get to the point where I literally had a checklist of life. I was like, I have to finish high school. HSC. Could get good grades, good enough to get into university, finish university, get a girlfriend, get a full time job that pays well, and get married. That was my life tick boxes. So when I got my first, my first full time job at the cadetship in a role that I knew would lead to more money, I was super happy, because I was like, my life is complete. Because at the time, I had a girlfriend already, and that girlfriend became my wife. I sort of, you know, I was like, size of a line I'm done, Two weeks into my job. I was like, I cannot, I cannot believe I'll be doing this for the next 40 years of my life. So if you were to ask me to go back in time to give advice to that person back then to me, I'll probably say, spend your time at uni wisely, because once you start working, you won't have a lot of time left. And so whether that is doing some side hustles, whether that is learning about business or whatnot, spend time doing that, building something else so that you have the option. You don't need to be working nine to five. You can be doing something else.
Cathy
For me, I think when I first started working, I'm super ambitious. I think, okay, by what age I might become a manager, at what age I might become a director, but now I think the purpose of life could be something different. So I always had a dream that I want to travel around the world. So to achieve that goal, what job should I do? What is my plan? Do I need to get properties so that I can have more income when I quit and go traveling? So that's something I'm thinking about right now. But if I'm telling myself 10 years ago, I would really say to be confident you can really achieve a lot of things that you never could have imagined. So in fact, my MBTI was starting with an I before, but now I'm starting with an E. So life changes a lot, even my personality really changes a lot. So be really confident in what you think of and really go pursue it, and you are going to achieve it at the end.
Dennis Fang
That was really beautiful.
Wing Kuang
Thank you so much for joining us today. Cathy and Joe.
Cathy
Thank you.
Joe
Thank you for having us.
Dennis Fang
You have been listening to Chinese-ish, an SBS podcast about what it's like to be young and Chinese in today's Australia. This episode is hosted by Wing Kuang and me Dennis Fang, produced by Wing Kuang and Burton Huynh, with support from Joel supple, Max Gosford and Bernie Nyugen. The artwork is by Joanna Hu.
Wing Kuang
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