I should be studying, but I need a break. So you just have to bear with my crap.
I was just thinking about the issue of interacting with non-Asians whilst studying overseas, and in particular, the perception that the locals aren't very friendly. There are very insular people of all races and cultural backgrounds around. They also do not (hopefully!) represent the entire racial/cultural group.
But maybe we should look from the other side of the story. I have heard about the "other side" of the Singaporean story, and let's just say that insularity is the mildest of the gripes. To give you a flavor of the story, I refer to a comment that a friend has just made about a particular country that is not Singapore:
The land of "by the book" or "where's the book?"
But anyway. Sometimes, if you appear to be part of an insular group, it's difficult for people outside the group to approach you. Just think of the ways the PRCs are viewed in Singapore. My JC class was more than 50% PRC, and not all of them fit the stereotype. About half of them are really cool people who are great to hang out with, who are willing to look beyond cultural barriers to mix with the Singaporeans (yes there are cultural barriers, I'm sure most of us know this by now), and count amongst my closest JC friends. Although it did nothing for my Chinese language ability. Except that now I can pretend that I've a mainland Chinese accent.
The other half fit the stereotype perfectly, and I don't particularly fancy having one-way conversations, if at all. So I didn't really get to know most of this half after spending 2 years together as a class.
This semester M took a first-year graduate physics class. The demographic of the physics dept is quite interesting actually. Contrary to popular opinion about Asian ability in math and science, the undergrad physics students, and especially the best students, are almost all white. So naturally most of his friends in the dept are white. I won't be too surprised if people who don't know him think that he's Asian-American. There are a lot more Asians amongst the grad students, and mostly from East Asian countries. I'm not sure whether there's any polarization, or what degree of polarization there is in the dept, but his lab has only one other Asian (and it's a huge lab), whilst there's a lab where the only non-Asian is the PI. Most labs are probably in-between.
Anyway, he says that there's a sizable group of Asians in this class that he took, who mostly kept to themselves, or at least gave the appearance of doing so. He has his group of friends who are mostly white taking the class with him. He found it difficult to communicate with this Asian group, despite coming from a similar cultural background. If he found it difficult, how do you think the non-Asians will perceive this group?
Extrapolate this to "Singaporean group" and "Department of X Engineering", and it might explain why some Singaporeans find the Americans (or any other non-Asian) unfriendly. It might not be that they're unfriendly. They just might not "know" how to interact either. Interaction, after all, is a two-way thing.
