nicolax

I grew up and lived in China until grad school, and now work as a designer in the Valley. The trends this article identified are largely true, but the speculations are not accurate or to the point, as other comments have pointed out.

I've been wondering about this phenomenon too, and here are some hypotheses: - As someone who's fluent in both languages, I find Chinese text much more skimmable than English. Chinese is a compact language, and you make sense of it by recognizing the shape of characters, which is much easier than recognizing long combinations of letters. It's not too bad to skim a wall of Chinese text to find the information you want. Though this could be biased by the fact that Chinese is my native language.

- Cities in China, as well as Japan, are densely populated. If you walk on the streets, all kinds of visual stimuli come at you: flashing ads, colorful banners, a lot of people in various styles etc. It seems we grow up being used to dense visuals, compared to say, Americans who grew up in the spread-out suburbs.

- Most people in China are not design-minded. The most popular post on Zhihu (Chinese equivalent of Quora) in 2015 discusses the general design and aesthetics level in China, why our streets are so ugly with all the poorly-designed banners etc. We don’t have a tradition of recognizing the importance of design, or developing a sense of good design. Japan, on the contrary, has a much longer tradition on that. Therefore, people are much more likely to live with poor web designs, and companies are not incentivized to redesign.

As a Chinese student who applied to US grad schools 2 years ago, this story is interesting and somewhat sad to me, even though I always know such ghostwriting exists in China.

Unlike the wealthy Chinese students described in this story, my family is poor--even paying the application fees is no easy. Besides, I really don't like being unauthentic and cheating. I wrote all the essays myself, without buying any guides or paying anyone. Just like in this story, I searched every corner of my world and put in pieces that most represent myself. The writing process took me 3 months, which was an incredible learning experience.

In the spring when I was doing a video chat with a professor from UBC, she asked me whether I had any native speaker to help on my writing (legit to ask, I should say). One month later, I got a personal email from the chair of NYU Tisch school of Arts, that he's moved and impressed by my essay. It was reassuring the efforts paid off (at least it stood out from the fake authenticity). That fall I came to Stanford.

Thanks to Chinese education, Chinese students are usually very weak on independent thinking, we're trained to give standard answers and follow certain scripts. Applying for schools abroad is a good opportunity to re-think and re-learn. But apparently all the "consulting" services, ghostwriters have provided again, crutch to rely on and scripts to follow. After coming to the US, as they probably haven't thought clearly about why they came here, many Chinese students fail to make the best use of their time here. It can also water down the quality of education programs, as some of the students are under-qualified or not motivated.

I wonder why this is a new topic then. Isn't it pretty established in either Lean Startup or Design Thinking that when building product, we should talk to/interview/research the people who will be using it? Especially in Design Thinking, it's required to do needfinding, which is talking to the barber in this case. And solutions in the brainstorming stage are certainly not confined within software.

We just need to be constantly reminded that our perception and reasoning about the world is subjective and often conscious. As designers, or product builders, we should be willing to understand other people's reasoning, putting aside ours.