Greenberg’s rationale was that English was the language of the aviation world. When the pilots sat in the cockpit and worked their way through the written checklists that flight crews follow on every significant point of procedure, those checklists were in English. When they talked to Air Traffic Control anywhere in the world, those conversations would be in English.
“If you are trying to land at JFK at rush hour, there is no nonverbal communication,” Greenberg says. “It’s people talking to people, so you need to be darn sure you understand what’s going on. You can say that two Koreans side by side don’t need to speak English. But if they are arguing about what the guys outside said in English, then language is important.”
Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country’s cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity to step outside those roles when they sat in the cockpit, and language was the key to that transformation. In English, they would be free of the sharply defined gradients of Korean hierarchy: formal deference, informal deference, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain. Instead, the pilots could participate in a culture and language with a very different legacy.
The crucial part of Greenberg’s reform, however, is what he didn’t do. He didn’t throw up his hands in despair. He didn’t fire all of his Korean pilots and start again with pilots from a low–power distance culture. He knew that cultural legacies matter—that they are powerful and pervasive and that they persist, long after their original usefulness has passed. But he didn’t assume that legacies are an indelible part of who we are. He believed that if the Koreans were honest about where they came from and were willing to confront those aspects of their heritage that did not suit the aviation world, they could change. He offered his pilots what everyone from hockey players to software tycoons to takeover lawyers has been offered on the way to success: an opportunity to transform their relationship to their work.
After leaving Korean Air, Greenberg helped start up a freight airline called Cargo 360, and he took a number of Korean pilots with him. They were all flight engineers, who had been number three, after the captain and first officer, in the strict hierarchy of the original Korean Air. “These were guys who had performed in the old environment at Korean Air for as much as fifteen to eighteen years,” he said. “They had accepted that subservient role. They had been at the bottom of the ladder. We retrained them and put them with Western crew. They’ve been a great success. They all changed their style. They take initiative. They pull their share of the load. They don’t wait for someone to direct them. These are senior people, in their fifties, with a long history in one context, who have been retrained and are now successful doing their job in a Western cockpit. We took them out of their culture and re-normed them.”
That is an extraordinarily liberating example. When we understand what it really means to be a good pilot—when we understand how much culture and history and the world outside of the individual matter to professional success—then we don’t have to throw up our hands in despair at an airline where pilots crash planes into the sides of mountains. We have a way to make successes out of the unsuccessful.
But first we have to be frank about a subject that we would all too often rather ignore. In 1994, when Boeing first published safety data showing a clear correlation between a country’s plane crashes and its score on Hofstede’s Dimensions, the company’s researchers practically tied themselves in knots trying not to cause offense. “We’re not saying there’s anything here, but we think there’s something there” is how Boeing’s chief engineer for airplane safety put it. Why are we so squeamish? Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.
14.
Back to the cockpit.
“Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot.” No pilot would say that now. But this was in 1997, before Korean Air took its power distance issues seriously. The captain was tired, and the engineer’s true meaning sailed over the captain’s head.
“Yes,” the captain says in response. “They are very useful.” He isn’t listening.
The plane is flying toward the VOR beacon and the VOR is on the side of a mountain. The weather hasn’t broken. So the pilots can’t see anything. The captain puts the landing gear down and extends the flaps.
At 1:41:48, the captain says, “Wiper on,” and the flight engineer turns the wipers on. It’s raining now.
At 1:41:59, the first officer asks, “Not in sight?” He’s looking for the runway. He can’t see it. He’s had a sinking feeling in his stomach for some time now. One second later, the Ground Proximity Warning System calls out in its toneless electronic voice, “Five hundred [feet].” The plane is five hundred feet off the ground. The ground in this case is the side of Nimitz Hill. But the crew is confused because they think that the ground means the runway, and how can that be if they can’t see the runway? The flight engineer says, “Eh?” in an astonished tone of voice. You can imagine them all thinking furiously, trying to square their assumption of where the plane is with what their instruments are telling them.
At 1:42:19, the first officer says, “Let’s make a missed approach.” He has finally upgraded from a hint to a crew obligation: he wants to abort the landing. Later, in the crash investigation, it was determined that if he had seized control of the plane in that moment, there would have been enough time to pull up the nose and clear Nimitz Hill. That is what first officers are trained to do when they believe a captain is clearly in the wrong. But it is one thing to learn that in a classroom, and quite another to actually do it in the air, with someone who might rap you with the back of his hand if you make a mistake.
1:42:20. FLIGHT ENGINEER: Not in sight.
With disaster staring them in the face, both the first officer and the engineer have finally spoken up. They want the captain to go around, to pull up and start the landing over again. But it’s too late.
1:42:21. FIRST OFFICER: Not in sight, missed approach.
1:42:22. FLIGHT ENGINEER: Go around.
1:42:23. CAPTAIN: Go around.
1:42:24:05. Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS): One hundred.
1:42:24:84. GPWS: Fifty.
1:42:25:19. GPWS: Forty.
1:42:25:50. GPWS: Thirty.
1:42:25:78. GPWS: Twenty.
1:42:25:78. [sound of initial impact]
1:42:28:65. [sound of tone]
1:42:28:91. [sound of groans]
1:42:30:54. [sound of tone]
END OF RECORDING
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rice Paddies and Math Tests
“NO ONE WHO CAN RISE BEFORE DAWN THREE HUNDRED SIXTY DAYS A YEAR FAILS TO MAKE HIS FAMILY RICH.”
1.
The gateway to the industrial heartland of Southern China runs up through the wide, verdant swath of the Pearl River Delta. The land is covered by a thick, smoggy haze. The freeways are crammed with tractor trailers. Power lines crisscross the landscape. Factories making cameras, computers, watches, umbrellas, and T-shirts stand cheek by jowl with densely packed blocks of apartment buildings and fields of banana and mango trees, sugarcane, papaya, and pineapple destined for the export market. Few landscapes in the world have changed so much in so short a time. A generation ago, the skies would have been clear and the road would have been a two-lane highway. And a generation before that, all you would have seen were rice paddies.
Two hours in, at the headwaters of the Pearl River, lies the city of Guangzhou, and past Guangzhou, remnants of the old China are easier to find. The countryside becomes breathtakingly beautiful, rolling hills dotted with outcroppings of limestone rock against the backdrop of the Nan Ling Mountains. Here and there are the traditional khaki-colored mud-brick huts of the Chinese peasantry. In the small towns, ther
e are open-air markets: chickens and geese in elaborate bamboo baskets, vegetables laid out in rows on the ground, slabs of pork on tables, tobacco being sold in big clumps. And everywhere, there is rice, miles upon miles of it. In the winter season, the paddies are dry and dotted with the stubble of the previous year’s crop. After the crops are planted in early spring, as the humid winds begin to blow, they turn a magical green, and by the time of the first harvest, as the grains emerge on the ends of the rice shoots, the land becomes an unending sea of yellow.
Rice has been cultivated in China for thousands of years. It was from China that the techniques of rice cultivation spread throughout East Asia—Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. Year in, year out, as far back as history is recorded, farmers from across Asia have engaged in the same relentless, intricate pattern of agriculture.
Rice paddies are “built,” not “opened up” the way a wheat field is. You don’t just clear the trees, underbrush, and stones and then plow. Rice fields are carved into mountainsides in an elaborate series of terraces, or painstakingly constructed from marshland and river plains. A rice paddy has to be irrigated, so a complex system of dikes has to be built around the field. Channels must be dug from the nearest water source, and gates built into the dikes so the water flow can be adjusted precisely to cover the right amount of the plant.
The paddy itself, meanwhile, has to have a hard clay floor; otherwise the water will simply seep into the ground. But of course, rice seedlings can’t be planted in hard clay, so on top of the clay, there has to be a thick, soft layer of mud. And the claypan, as it’s called, has to be carefully engineered so that it will drain properly and also keep the plants submerged at the optimum level. Rice has to be fertilized repeatedly, which is another art. Traditionally, farmers used “night soil” (human manure) and a combination of burned compost, river mud, bean cake, and hemp—and they had to be careful, because too much fertilizer, or the right amount applied at the wrong time, could be as bad as too little.
When the time came to plant, a Chinese farmer would have hundreds of different varieties of rice from which to choose, each one of which offered a slightly different trade-off, say, between yield and how quickly it grew, or how well it did in times of drought, or how it fared in poor soil. A farmer might plant a dozen or more different varieties at one time, adjusting the mix from season to season in order to manage the risk of a crop failure.
He or she (or, more accurately, the whole family, since rice agriculture was a family affair) would plant the seed in a specially prepared seedbed. After a few weeks, the seedlings would be transplanted into the field, in carefully spaced rows six inches apart, and then painstakingly nurtured.
Weeding was done by hand, diligently and unceasingly, because the seedlings could easily be choked by other plant life. Sometimes each rice shoot would be individually groomed with a bamboo comb to clear away insects. All the while, farmers had to check and recheck water levels and make sure the water didn’t get too hot in the summer sun. And when the rice ripened, farmers gathered all of their friends and relatives and, in one coordinated burst, harvested it as quickly as possible so they could get a second crop in before the winter dry season began.
Breakfast in South China, at least for those who could afford it, was congee—white rice porridge, with lettuce and dace paste and bamboo shoots. Lunch was more congee. Dinner was rice with “toppings.” Rice was what you sold at the market to buy the other necessities of life. It was how wealth and status were measured. It dictated almost every working moment of every day. “Rice is life,” says the anthropologist Gonçalo Santos, who has studied a traditional South Chinese village. “Without rice, you don’t survive. If you want to be anyone in this part of China, you would have to have rice. It made the world go around.”
2.
Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6. Read them out loud. Now look away and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.
If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly. If you’re Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two-second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6—right almost every time because, unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.
That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene’s book The Number Sense. As Dehaene explains:
Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is “si” and 7 “qi”). Their English equivalents—“four,” “seven”—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.
It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen. But we don’t. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty and sixty, which sound like the words they are related to (four and six). But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound like five and three and two, but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the “decade” first and the unit number second (twenty-one, twenty-two), whereas for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen). The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.
That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty. American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don’t reach forty until they’re five. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.
The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens-nine.
“The Asian system is transparent,” says Karen Fuson, a Northwestern University psychologist who has closely studied Asian-Western differences. “I think that it makes the whole attitude toward math different. Instead of being a rote learning thing, there’s a pattern I can figure out. There is an expectation that I can do this. There is an expectation that it’s sensible. For fractions, we say three-fifths. The Chinese is literally ‘out of five parts, take three.’ That’s telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It’s differentiating the denominator and the numerator.”
The much-storied disenchantment with mathematics among Western children starts in the third and fourth grades, and Fuson argues that perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn’t seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated.
Asian children, by contrast, don’t feel nearly that same bafflement. They can hold
more numbers in their heads and do calculations faster, and the way fractions are expressed in their languages corresponds exactly to the way a fraction actually is—and maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and maybe because they enjoy math a little more, they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle.
When it comes to math, in other words, Asians have a built-in advantage. But it’s an unusual kind of advantage. For years, students from China, South Korea, and Japan—and the children of recent immigrants who are from those countries—have substantially outperformed their Western counterparts at mathematics, and the typical assumption is that it has something to do with a kind of innate Asian proclivity for math.* The psychologist Richard Lynn has even gone so far as to propose an elaborate evolutionary theory involving the Himalayas, really cold weather, premodern hunting practices, brain size, and specialized vowel sounds to explain why Asians have higher IQs.† That’s how we think about math. We assume that being good at things like calculus and algebra is a simple function of how smart someone is. But the differences between the number systems in the East and the West suggest something very different—that being good at math may also be rooted in a group’s culture.
In the case of the Koreans, one kind of deeply rooted legacy stood in the way of the very modern task of flying an airplane. Here we have another kind of legacy, one that turns out to be perfectly suited for twenty-first-century tasks. Cultural legacies matter, and once we’ve seen the surprising effects of such things as power distance and numbers that can be said in a quarter as opposed to a third of a second, it’s hard not to wonder how many other cultural legacies have an impact on our twenty-first-century intellectual tasks. What if coming from a culture shaped by the demands of growing rice also makes you better at math? Could the rice paddy make a difference in the classroom?