And I want you guys to immerse yourselves in the roles of these characters.

Put yourselves in their shoes, if you will.

So imagine yourselves as team leaders of a group of soldiers in a war-torn country somewhere very far away from where you're used to, with different culture, speaking different language.

You have no idea what the culture is like over there.

And as you're in the city, going house to house, clearing, looking for the enemy, you come up on the last house.

You stack up.

Your team stack up behind you.

You give the cue.

There's a guy behind you.

You kick open the door.

You go in.

You clear each room.

And then you arrive in the living room.

There is an old man, scared, with his hands up.

Your team, with your guns pointed at him, you say, put your hands up, put your hands up.

Hands where I can see them.

Now, within your team, there's a combat translator whose job is to translate, to help you guys communicate with the local population.

So then you ask this old man, you ask him, is there anyone in the house?

Is there anyone in the house?

Because as team leader, you need to know if there are any other possible threats in the house.

So this translator then translates that.

But unbeknownst to you and your team, the local culture and the language is quite different.

It doesn't go word for word in English.

In fact, the local culture and language, they never refer to women or children directly.

So what the translator ends up asking is, are there any men in the house?

Are there any men in the house?

So the old man, he's in fear.

He has, like, four or five guns pointed at him.

He's not going to lie to you.

He says, no, no, there are no other men in the house.

Then the translator translates back to you, which nobody's lying because there is no other men in the house.

But then it is at this moment that a young girl, perhaps 14-year-old, comes into the room and says, grandpa, what's going on?

Right there and then, your soldiers jump into alert mode.

This guy just says there's no one else in the house with your guns pointed at this little girl.

And you as team leader, you have a split second to make the decision, do you take the shot or not?

If you don't take a shot, it's possible that this little girl could pull out a handgun, empty 15 rounds into you and your men.

But if you take a shot, what if this girl's innocent?

What if it was just a hamburger, a dog that she's holding behind her back?

Are you willing to live with that guilt?

Do you want to go get court-martialed?

So as you can see the gravity of this situation, and many people interpret this as the mistranslation in war.

But I'd like to take it a step further.

In my opinion, I think this is more than just a issue of translation, mistranslation.

I think this is an issue of the lack of understanding for the local culture.

You see, whenever you speak with someone from another culture, another language, or there's some translation involved, it's not just an exchange of words.

There's an exchange of culture going on here.

And I think the problem here is that these soldiers over-reliance on the translator to translate, to accurately refer to them the information they need.

That's the problem.

So what I want to talk about today is intercultural communication.

Notice the keyword, intercultural.

As I previously mentioned, when you talk to someone from another culture, it's not just word for word.

There's an exchange of culture going on.

So let me illustrate that with an example, because I'm a business student here at Penn

State, I'm going to use a more business-oriented example.

From my experiences, most American businessmen tend to be, not all, but a lot of them, tend to be a lot more dominant, aggressive, confident, basically.

But you see, when you go to Asia, for example, and you tell them, hey, let's meet tonight.

Let's have a business meeting tonight.

They might interpret that as, okay, let's go out for dinner, let's have some food, let's get to know each other, build a bond.

Because in Asia, when you want to do business, you got to get to know the person you're buying and selling to and from.

You got to have that sense of trust.

But I think with a lot of Western businessmen, the value of the transaction comes first.

I want to fly to Brazil, and I want to be out by tonight.

Sign that contract, get that deal, get those rolling in, get that done.

Now imagine yourselves as now, as businessmen, or women, going to China, for example.

So going to a new place, understanding the styles of communication is extremely important.

So I remember a class I took here in Penn State, actually, Marketing 410, Personal Selling.

Great professor, by the way.

So in this class, we were taught about personal selling, how to sell stuff.

And as salesmen, or sales agents, saleswomen, you have to be confident.

So we were taught the Marketing 410 handshake.

Got to be confident.

You got to, you know, hey, how's it going?

How are you?

Now, in this class, I experienced my fair share of hand-crushing handshakes.

You know, guys, girls, you know, they got to show that confidence, that dominance over you, you know, and I experienced my fair share of that.

But if you were to do that in perhaps where I'm from, in Taiwan, or in China, or in a lot of parts of Asia, this could be viewed as aggressive, or even unprofessional, even.

So now I want to introduce a concept called contact zones.

Now contact zones are closely intertwined with the concept of intercultural communication.

Now what are contact zones?

Contact zones is first developed by Dr. Mary Louise Pratt in her Adoption of the Contact

Zones.

Now, in my own words, kind of my interpretation example is contact zone.

Contact zones are basically spaces where different cultures meet.

However, when different cultures meet, it's quite possible that conflicts may erupt because we don't understand each other.

All right?

If you look at historical examples, you know, when the Europeans first came to the Americas, what happened, you know, to the Aztecs, or what happened to the, you know, Native Americans?

This room right here is a contact zone.

All right?

Well, contact zones are historically usually on the battlefield and still is, but in today's world, with the world shrinking with social media, internet technology, neighborhoods, your Walmart, schools, classrooms have become contact zones.

Why did I say this room is a contact zone?

I'm from Taiwan.

You might be from Erie, Pennsylvania.

You might be from, or my sister in the crowd, Detroit, Michigan.

You know, I have people, friends here from China, from Italy, everywhere.

This room is a contact zone, and I am initiating intercultural communication with you guys, also to those who may be watching online.

So you may ask me at this point, Anthony, why do you care so much about intercultural communication and contact zone and all that?

Like, what does that have to do with you?

What does that have to do with me?

You see, I'm no stranger to contact zones and intercultural communication.

I grew up immersed in culture shock.

I came to the United States at the age of seven to study.

My mom was doing her PhD, so I came along, tagged along, you know, studied here.

And my English back then was pretty terrible.

I only knew how to say, you know, the word apple.

That's not going to help you much, you know, to communicate, right?

So I communicated first through the universal language of strength.

And what is that?

To put it bluntly, with my fists, because you see, as a, you know, as a little boy on the playground, you know, you have a bunch of boys that are always vying for supremacy, beating each other up.

So if you can beat up the biggest, baddest kid, you know, you instantly earn respect from the other kids.

You know, that worked pretty well for me, and it was very fun.

But that fun didn't last, you see.

In high school, I moved back to Taiwan, and boy, was that a shock for me.

You see, despite being Asian, despite being from Taiwan, I felt like an outsider within my own culture, in my own country.

Going to high school in Taiwan, the culture there is, or should I say, the majority of

Asian cultures were more about the greater good, the interest of the team, of the group, of the majority, okay?

And growing up in America, I had a strong sense of individualism.

I'm Anthony.

I'm me.

You know, that self-identity is so deeply rooted in me.

So going back home, it wasn't easy for me to get along with other kids or my teachers.

So obviously, you know, school wasn't the most smooth experience for me in high school, especially.

Imagine coming into the classroom.

Now, mind you, we had wooden desks, all right?

It's like single desks.

It's not like this.

It's connected.

So single desks, wooden desks.

You know, I would come in the classroom.

My desk would be a pile of wood.

You might think, that's not that bad.

A pile of wood, if you just put it back together, right?

Cool.

Pile of wood with shampoo dumped over it.

So now I got to drag these pieces of wood, take it outside, wash it up, bring it back into the classroom, dry it, put it back together.

Yeah, I wasn't exactly focused on school that much, you know, having to do this almost every day.

And I also realized that I'm in high school now.

I can't just beat up whoever I wish, you know?

I got to be more civilized now, too, also in this different culture.

So I talked to the teacher.

You know, that's, I think, like, the most reasonable thing to do.

So I talked to my teacher.

But I think, as you may have already guessed, my teacher basically said, just bear with it, you know?

You're one person.

Let's not flip over the whole classroom trying to find out who the culprit is.

Although I knew who the culprit was.

I know who hated me the most in the classroom, right?

But see, I've always wondered how different things would have turned out back then if

I had tried to understand the culture way from the beginning, to initiate that intercultural communication with my classmates and my teachers way from the beginning.

Would things have been different back then?

But that's all in the past now.

So let's move on to the next two important steps of my life.

So after high school, I was in the Taiwanese Army, in the military.

And then I also was I also worked in a biotech firm that had me traveling overseas.

This is all before college coming here.

So I worked in a biotech firm that had me traveling overseas quite a bit.

And these two experiences taught me a lot about why it is important to be able to communicate with people who are different than you.

So in the Army and the military, you've got to have trust, you've got to have that bond with the guy next to you.

Because you're entrusting your life to him, and he's doing the same to you.

So if there's no trust, that teamwork's not going to be there.

In business, if you can't communicate efficiently with people who are different from you, and most of your clients are going to be different from you, by the way.

So if you can't do that, it oftentimes means no deal, no money, all right?

It means failure.

So at this point, you might be wondering, okay, Anthony, this sounds really complicated.

How exactly do I go about doing this?

Well, I'm here to tell you, it's actually not that hard.

Intercultural communication, how to effectively initiate it, how to go about doing it, it all starts with being humble.

Setting aside your personal opinion, being humble, being courteous, being nice, and most importantly, be genuine.

You see, when you want to approach someone, you want to talk to them, you've got to be genuine, like actually interested in this person.

Because people aren't dumb.

People can sense it if you're not actually interested in what they have to say, right?

All of that, you know, back when I was working, all of that, hey, how's it going?

How's your day?

I'm not actually interested in what you have to say.

I just want to get you to sign that deal.

So actually being interested is really important.

And this is something that I see a lot here on campus.

You might be walking, and then you hear a group of kids that's foreign, right?

They come from another country.

They're talking their own language.

I'll take Chinese, for example, because I speak Chinese, Mandarin.

So you might hear a group of Chinese that's talking.

You can go up to them and just say, oh, wow, what language is that?

Or, you know, what are you guys talking about?

You know, at first, they might be a little stunned, you know, think you're weird or whatever.

You can also take this a little step further.

Do a little research before approaching them.

You know, how do you say hello in Chinese, nǐ hǎo?

Next time, you can go up and say, hey, nǐ hǎo, right?

And you can ask, you know, ask them about, hey, you know, what's a good authentic restaurant, you know, around here?