Poles Apart: An Exercise in Ethnic Stereotyping

Over the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to travel outside of China a great deal for speaking engagements. The talks I’ve given recently are mostly about the Chinese Internet, and they’re usually aimed at dispelling myths about the Chinese Web. Last month, I visited Warsaw to give a talk. It was my first trip to Poland, and the many Poles I met were all eager to engage me about China. Warsaw’s relations with Beijing have been at times rocky over the last couple of decades; next time you’re online, look up the day the first Polish democratic election took place and you’ll understand why, in some quarters of Poland, certain attitudes toward China still prevail.

As an ethnic Chinese living in Beijing and working for a major Chinese Internet company, when I speak outside of China I’m often seen, erroneously, as a representative of China. That was once again the case in Warsaw. To clear up confusion, I try to make clear that I was born in the US and spent basically the first 30 years of my life there – that I’m actually a species of foreigner in China. But that never really changes how they see me, and soon I let it go. Inevitably, over the course of a given conversation, the referent of any “we” or “us” I utter – which always begins as “we Americans” – drifts inevitably to “we Chinese.”

That was probably for the better in this case, because many Poles I spoke to seemed eager to steer every conversation towards discussions of “national character.” I was expected to have at hand a list of traits that define the Chinese, the group to which I was presumed to belong. The political correctness so baked into my liberal American upbringing makes me instinctively resist ethnic stereotyping. We all do it, of course, but I was struck by the way national character would be invoked in answering every question I had:

Why had Poland suffered only a very minor slowdown in the recent global recession?
Because, I was told, it is in the national character of Poles to be hardworking, and to endure hardship uncomplainingly.

Why shouldn’t I bother scheduling time for Q&A after my speech?
Because it is in the national character of Poles to be dour, introverted, and uncomfortable standing out in a crowd.

Why do so many Poles persist in the belief that the plane crash that killed many cabinet and military officials earlier this year was a Russian plot?
Because Poles are given to conspiracy theory and overly romantic.

And most importantly, why didn’t I get a single laugh during a speech that I was sure I’d liberally peppered with verbal and visual zingers?
Because Poles are stoical and serious by nature. Unless they’re drunk.

When pressed on China’s national character and its explanatory value, I explained that people in China differ so much from region to region that there weren’t many attributes I’d be willing to apply across the board. I tried out only a few: Chinese are utterly pragmatic, and yet very often weighed down by historical and cultural baggage; they suffer at once from a huge superiority complex but also from a huge inferiority complex; and – again, paradoxically – they’re at once highly status-conscious and deeply frugal. These observations were taken to explain much, and to my great relief I wasn’t pressed to explain.

Some of the national-character conversations I heard from my Polish acquaintances were subtler and perhaps even insightful. I’d met Jarek Sobolewski in Beijing in July when he was traveling around East Asia. He heads up the Poland chapter of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which hosted me in Warsaw.

“In East Asia, China is like Russia, Poland is Korea, and Japan is Germany,” he said. I got the analogy instantly and was actually impressed with the fit. You have your geographically enormous, populous giant; your country stuck in the middle, often overrun culturally or militarily by its neighbors; and your industrially capable and historically rather militaristic nation.

Poles are annoyed when others (the French, say) claim famous sons and daughters of Poland as theirs (like Chopin and Marie Curie, say). That’s not unlike the way South Koreans get incensed that the ethnic and national origins of so many great innovators and innovations – basically, anything good to have emerged in East Asia in the last two millennia, as they would have it – aren’t duly credited as Korean.

Given the Poles’ general comfort with generalizations about themselves, I tried one of my own. There’s something distinct about the Polish look, I offered on several occasions – something in the shape of the cheeks, the set of the eyes, something I couldn’t quite describe but that was of course decidedly attractive. “The vacant look, you mean?” suggested another speaker, an American Internet company executive, though out of earshot of our hosts. Polish people weren’t any more generous. Not a few of them nodded knowingly at my description and said simply, “Yes. Potato.”