Half a month into my new job: 8 lessons to share

Hola, hello guys, I have started my brand new job on the 1st September and it is a lot to take in - I've joined a Peruvian company which has huge operations in Latin America and have the ambition to expand beyond Latin America. I am the first non-Latino member of the team and it is quite daunting. I left my old job in June after falling out with my former colleagues in a big way. I am grateful to have waltzed into a new job so quickly after having taken the summer off. I remember once blogging about being the only Asian in a white British company a while ago - try being the only non-Latino in a Latin American company. How did this guy from Singapore end up in this position then? Allow me to share with you my feelings on eight key themes on this transition and also what it is like to be in a Spanish-speaking company.

1. To function in a Spanish speaking work environment 

Spanish is my fourth language after English, French and Mandarin and my Spanish skills have some way to go. It's one thing to be fluent in Spanish (which I think I am) but it is another matter to be the only guy in the team who doesn't speak it as a mother tongue and first language. I am speaking in Spanglish most of the time - so when I don't know the word in Spanish, I would just use the English word. So for example, I said, "Si va a hacer un training ahora con el share screen necesito cambiar a mi laptop, porque estoy haciendo esta Zoom call en mi teléfono y el screen es demasiado pequeña." I just couldn't recall the word for 'screen' in Spanish right there and then and now I know the word is "pantalla" - there are some gaps in my vocabulary that will be filled over the next few months and knowing the word for screen in French 'ecran' wasn't useful at all in this case. So whilst my Spanish doesn't really need to be perfect, I'm not working as a translator who is going to be sacked if I can't recall the word for 'screen' but my biggest challenge is listening comprehension. I have all these people who are listening to me form these sentences in Spanish and they think, "he clearly speaks Spanish" but when they speak, I get about 75% if they slow down and it falls to like 40% to 50% if they are speaking quite quickly, it can fall to below 20% if they are speaking amongst themselves. So it has been so frustrating at times - I don't need you to switch to English, but can you all just slow down for me and speak a lot more clearly for me so I can bump my understanding up to close to 80%? When I understand that much, then I can use the context to fill in the remaining 20% and we are in business, I can take part in a meeting without making everyone speak English just for me.

So one of the ways I am improving my listening comprehension is by watching the news in Spanish with BBC Mundo now, I consume a lot of news via Youtube anyway, hence I have now switching to consuming my news in Spanish but I am doing it with Spanish subtitles - I choose to have the subtitles  in Spanish (and NOT English) because I can then both see and hear the Spanish words, allowing me to both store the information as a sound file and a word file in my head. For example, I came across the word "destacar" which means to stand out or to be the highlight. Being able to see and spell the word makes it easier for me to remember the word, rather than simply hearing it. I avoid subtitles in English because it would be way too tempting to simply default to reading the English subtitles and using that to understand the video rather than forcing myself to listen to the Spanish. Giving myself the luxury of Spanish subtitles is a good compromise as my friend Jane (who is also a polyglot and speaks several languages) pointed out that now that I have learnt a new word, then I would want to use it not just in conversation, but when I write in Spanish and thus I would need to know how to spell it. I have already completed an online Spanish course but there's only so much that a Spanish course can do - if I was living in a Spanish speaking country, I would be bombarded with Spanish vocabulary in everyday life doing ordinary activities like getting my groceries from the supermarket or taking the bus across town. As I have lived in France and Belgium before, my French vocabulary is far superior to my Spanish at the moment, so I'm aiming to make my Spanish as good as my French, which is my second language. That may take a while but I'm working very hard on it. 

2. Why make life so difficult for yourself? 

There are two social movements that have made the headlines this summer from the UK and China, they are essentially the same thing despite having different names: in UK it is known as the 'quiet quit' and whilst in China it is known as '躺平/lying flat'. They refer to simply doing the bear minimum to get by in your job rather than trying your best to excel - in fact in China, there's another variation of that called '摆烂/ let it rot', which means embracing a deteriorating situation rather than making any effort to improve it. I must admit, as much as I enjoyed two months of summer holidays for July and August, simply doing all the things I enjoy like travelling, learning languages, doing gymnastics and just getting a lot of sleep; I found getting back to work challenging and I can see the appeal of 躺平 - the job that I have taken on is hard enough already, but now I have to do it in Spanish. There's a famous saying that comes to mind: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers performed together a lot in the 1930s and were famous for their elaborate dance routines (see the video below), it was pointed out by a choreographer that Ginger Rogers was doing everything "backwards and in high heels". Yeah, so if my previous job was difficult, I was working in a British company where my ability to speak Spanish was seen as a bonus when dealing with Latin American clients. Now I'm working for a Peruvian company where everything has to be done in Spanish, when I logged onto my email for the first time - the default settings were in Spanish and that was the moment when I was like, okay, time to do everything backwards and in high heels. I can't help but to feel quite stressed at that moment, but it's a question of whether one chooses to rise to the challenge or goes for the 躺平 response, "if your job is already very hard, why make life even more difficult for yourself by doing it all in your fourth language, Spanish?"

Being put in this position reminds me of what I wrote about a few weeks ago when my nephew was talking about getting an upgrade in his PES status - you see, my nephew is currently in the army and because of his PES E status, he is relegated to only doing admin tasks which he finds boring (and quite understandably so). He is an intelligent young man who has just done very well for his A levels and on top of that, he is also physically fit - thus I can see why he is looking around the army and wondering why he is being treated like an idiot or a cripple incapable of anything of importance when he has much to offer. I was aghast when he wanted to do more and my reaction was, no no be content with being able to get away with doing as little as possible; it almost sounds like a 躺平 attitude on my part and actually, that's in sharp contrast to what I am putting myself through. I could have done a far easier job where I wouldn't be taken out of my comfort zone but instead I have always gone out of my way to go above and beyond what was asked of me. That's why I was headhunted for my current role, the moment that company knew that I was leaving my old job, they rushed in with a job offer before I had even contemplated looking for a new job. I had come to their notice because of the way I spoke Spanish as a foreign language - in Peru, it is pretty standard for well-educated people to be bilingual in Spanish and English but that those two languages were considered sufficient to do most of their business in. The fact that I have mastered so many more languages made me stand out from the crowd and they then began to see other areas in my life where I often went above and beyond what was required of me - making me the kind of guy they wanted on their team, so they didn't want a colleague who was just going to coast his way through the working week, doing just the minimum. 

3. My working hours (and my mother's painfully working class mindset) 

London is six hours ahead of Peru in summer time and will be five hours ahead of Peru in winter time. This means that I have a very relaxed morning, I get up when I want because my Peruvian team doesn't get into the office before 9 am in Peru which is 3 pm for me, which means that my mornings are spent on my own schedule rather than having to respond to requests from my team. The emails and messages start coming in after lunch and don't stop till late into the night, but there's a shared understanding that if it is something very urgent, then yeah I will drop whatever I am doing and deal with it but if it isn't that urgent then I will respond when I can. After dinner, I am usually just surfing the net, blogging, watching Youtube videos or playing games like Globle and Wordle, so I don't mind dealing with some work stuff if and when it comes my way. I am thus very flexible with my work schedule which means I can take the morning off if I have stayed up late working the night before. Now when I tried to explain this to my mother, she doesn't get it because she is painfully working class. Allow me to make a comparison to a very working class job: a waiter in a restaurant has to respond to instructions very quickly, there and then, on the spot. So if the manager says, "take this pizza to table 12 now", the instruction has a real sense of urgency because the diners have been waiting for this pizza for a while since they have placed the order and would get unhappy if they are kept waiting - furthermore, if the waiter deals with other tasks first whilst letting the pizza go cold, the diners are going to complain if the pizza isn't hot enough. Thus that pizza has got to go from the kitchen to table 12 as soon as possible and that is the waiter's job - it is time sensitive, but otherwise simple.  

Now the nature of my job is very different: I am given far more complex tasks to complete - whilst the waiter's tasks may be extremely urgent, the moment he successfully delivers a piping hot pizza to the happy customers at table 12, that task is complete. It is an extremely simple but repetitive task, as he now has to run back to the kitchen to see what is the next order that needs to be served. Working class jobs typically consists of a series of relatively simple tasks that need to be done over and over and over again in a timely and efficient manner. In sharp contrast my job is nothing like the waiter's, the complex nature of the challenges that I am given often mean that it will take me weeks, if not months to deliver on some of these projects. My team understands that and thus they are not harassing me in the middle of the night to get something done quickly, Thus imagine how I feel when my mother thinks that I have to be working every night until the last member of staff leaves the office in Peru - that's not the case at all as I don't work like that waiter in the pizza restaurant. The waiter is given very specific instructions to carry out and if there are no customers (say if it is raining very heavily that day), then the waiter will have little or nothing at all to do during that shift. Whereas in my case, if I have no work, then it would be up to me to come up with new, ingenious ways to help the company make more money. But my mother simply doesn't get it - she thinks that I literally have to be running around, busy doing stuff when I am on the clock when really they are paying me for my ideas, my expertise and creativity, rather than my time to do stuff like the waiter. 

We are so addicted to our devices these days, I'm usually on my laptop when I am working otherwise when I am away from my desk, I'm on my phone constantly being fed content off the internet. I do have my thinking time when I am away from my devices such as when I do sports, when I am in the bath or when I am cooking - ironically, that's when I am actually remarkably productive. I like my baths - they are very relaxing and I fill my bathroom with loads of plants to create the perfect ambiance. So a great idea actually came to me when I was literally just lying in my bath because whilst I wasn't physically even moving, my brain was active and could organize a lot of the information I had been bombarded with over the last few days - lying in a bath of hot water means I wouldn't have my phone with me as I wouldn't want to risk dropping my phone in the water. If I was a waiter in a pizza restaurant, then I would not be paid whilst I was at home doing activities like taking a bath - but given the nature of my job, yes my employers are more than happy for me to work from home, in whatever I like as long as I remain productive and if that means taking a bath in the middle of the day for some thinking time, then they're completely fine with that. My mother doesn't get that, but then again, a lot of working class people slog day and night, working long hours only to barely be able to make ends meet whilst I am just relaxing in my bath, half-asleep, listening to soothing music in the name of brainstorming the best ideas? Yeah, you can see how a working class person like a waiter or my mother would struggle to understand how I get any work done at all at this rate. 

4. That sense of reward - you reap what you sow. 

I remember a conversation I had back with a woman I had met at work about what kind of sports we do to keep fit and whilst I still practice gymnastics, she preferred activities which required virtually no skill at all, such as walking or a beginner's yoga class where she just had to do follow her yoga instructor's instructions whilst doing very basic breathing exercises. I rolled my eyes as I thought, you're paying someone to teach you how to breath properly? That's the first reflex that new born babies do when they tumble out of their mother's womb and take their first breath but of course, that lady did know how to breathe, she was just paying the yoga instructor to praise her for knowing how to do so. The reason why I still pursue a difficult sport at the risk of injury (I am 46 mind you) is the sense of reward I get when I learn a new skill or I perform one that I know how to do really well, such as by sticking the landing perfectly. I would punch the air in satisfaction and get a round of applause from my fellow gymnasts when that happens, but I get the equivalent at work when I have a breakthrough - remember, I am now doing everything in Spanish and sure there are times when I feel like I am really struggling but there are also times when I also want to punch the air in satisfaction with a big smile on my face because I have just pulled off something that would have already been hard enough in English, but I have just done it all in Spanish. By the same token, I do wonder how much job satisfaction that yoga instructor gets when she has to go into each class, praising all these fat middle aged women for knowing how to breathe? It is not a hard job (as long as you can fake that sincerity when giving out praise) but that kind of work simply isn't rewarding at all - you reap what you sow and I am busy sowing. Indeed, I think that woman takes the concept of 躺平 rather literally when she goes to her yoga class. 

5. Saying yes a bit too quickly

Ah well, let me get this off my chest - after I had told a contact I had in the industry that I had started this new job, he was quite surprised because he said that I hadn't come to him for a job the moment I was on the market. "I would have given you a job on the spot, but instead you went to these other guys and even then I would have said to you, how much are they offering you and I would have given you a better offer, but now you've already started there." This was actually for a bigger rival company and I suppose I could have looked a bit harder for a better job rather than accept the first good offer that came along - I wasn't motivated enough to put myself through that tedious process of hunting for a new job. I had a job offer, the money was good, I liked the company, I liked the people - I didn't think I was going to find something much better and of course, even if that other company offered more money - at this stage, it is a moot point. Given the way I had left my previous job on bad terms, in my mind, I was just keen to accept that offer and move on with my life. In any case, I was told that "the door is always open if you change your mind", so that's good to know and I'll take that vote of confidence! After all, the world is in such a mess at the moment: there is the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, a truly awful summer of heatwaves and droughts that really damaged crops and pushed food prices up even more in Europe. I think the technical term is 'clusterfuck' to describe a situation where you're fucked in more ways than one and I suppose that's the context: whilst ordinary working class people in the UK are worried about being able to pay their electricity bill, I'm being indecisive about which one of the two (very well-paid) jobs to pick from? I guess in that context, I've made my choice - I'm not going to think about "what if I had gone to work for that other company" and just focus on the job I have.  

6. I can do it, it just takes twice as much effort and time. 

I did a training seminar today where I had quite a lot of people from all over Latin America join in a Zoom training session which I hosted on the topic of fixed income products. It was a training session of a rather technical nature but it wasn't the technical content that posed a problem for me - it was that I had to speak entirely in Spanish and I was warned NOT to use English as it might leave some of those in the audience isolated and they may just drop out of the Zoom call. As it was a topic I knew really very well, I probably wrote the training content in about two hours but then I spent two days translating it into Spanish and practicing it, so I could sound credible and confident delivering it in Spanish. I am still haunted by what happened in Shenzhen back in 2018 when I messed up at an event - I knew in my head exactly what I had to say in English and I had grossly overestimated my ability to simply translate it all into Mandarin whilst on stage. I messed up on the first sentence and it was shambolic how badly I had performed there. The stupid thing was that if I had simply spent a day rehearsing it properly and had memorized everything I needed to say in Mandarin, then I would have been absolutely fine. Thus after that incident, I knew just how much more hard work I needed to do in order to do a presentation in a language that was not English. That presentation in Spanish actually went really smoothly but that was because I had worked my ass off to make sure I was totally prepared to deliver when it mattered. Oh I had to sacrifice hours of sleep just to go through that script over and over again and hopefully as my Spanish improves over time if I had to do this all the time - the amount of preparation time I will need to prepare myself would decrease after a few months.  

7. Having the motivation to improve my Spanish

My mother said something that I totally disagreed with when I started this job - she claimed that my Spanish would improve because I would be exposed to it all the time. I had to remind her that my father is 84 years old and had been exposed to English all his life, especially since his three children all speak English as a first language. At least I make a real effort to always switch to Mandarin when I speak to my father but one of my sisters can't even do that as her Mandarin is so limited that she simply cannot express herself in Mandarin anymore beyond the very basics, so she would just speak to my father in English as she is nearly monolingual these days. But does my father speak English despite having been exposed to it for so many decades? Nope, it just washes over him as he has no intention to ever learn it - in fact I know he really hates the English language so much. This was because when he worked in a primary school as a Chinese teacher, he was forced to use English sometimes to communicate with the Indian and Malay students who didn't speak Mandarin; on some occasions, the Indian and Malay students would laugh at the way my father struggled to speak basic English. It left him utterly humiliated and his response to that was, "I hate English! I'll never ever speak English ever again!" rather than, "I'll work hard and improve my English and that way, nobody would ever make fun of my English again."Likewise, my sister has been exposed to Mandarin all her life via my father yet she stopped making any effort to learn or even use any Chinese at all the moment she finished her last Chinese language exam at school. I can only shake my head in disbelief that my father and sister live under the same roof but can barely communicate in the same language. They are totally exposed to each other's language all these years but have made zero improvement in either.

That's why when my mother suggested that my Spanish would improve by simply being exposed to it, I shook my head in disbelief - she clearly has no idea just how ridiculously hardworking I am when it comes to improving my Spanish. I have a real desire to want to improve my Spanish and I can see how having to use it constantly at work everyday is going to make me improve - my incentive would be monetary of course but there will also be a massive sense of satisfaction and pride in seeing my Spanish improve so much in a short period of time. I have bosses, colleagues and a massive number of clients who speak to me in Spanish, I want to get along with them, impress them and make them like me. But  unfortunately in my father's case, he's not interested in communicating with his daughter and quite frankly, if my sister actually cared to talk to my father properly, she would have made some effort to try to speak to him in Mandarin given that she did study Chinese at school all those years ago. But the fact that neither of them have any real desire to speak to the other party means that they have neither the incentive nor the motivation to try to make a greater effort when it comes to using the right language to communicate with the other party. Mastering a new language takes a ridiculous amount of very hard work but if you have the right motivation and believe that it will be worth the effort, then yes, of course you would do whatever it takes to become fluent. Thus it is sad to see that I have far more desire to communicate with my new colleagues whom I have known for two weeks, than my sister and father who have little desire to communicate despite being father and daughter. Now I think that's so seriously messed up, but that's my family for you. 

8. I am still acting, I can fit it in!

I scored a part in a Christmas ad for a British supermarket and I had thought I had to take three days off for filming the ad but actually, given that I work from home, I was able to keep on working despite the fact that I had to be on set for crazy long hours. I was picked up at 5 am from my home, on set in South London by 6 am, in costume by 7 am and ready to shoot by 8 am then we would keep filming till 6 or 7 pm. The key reason why shoot days are so fucking insane when it comes to their hours is because of cost. Yes the cast and crew do get paid more for working up to 16, even 18 hours a day but the production companies have worked out that it is cheaper to make everyone work crazy long days (and pay them whatever overtime pay they are due for that) and make the shoot duration as short as possible. The fact is if they capped working times at nine or ten hours a day, then they could turn a three day shoot into a five or six day shoot and it would make costs go right up, given that they would have to pay for the catering, venue hire, specialist equipment hire, costume hire, transport etc for many more days. I had my laptop with me so whilst everyone else was napping and chatting, I was working between takes and when I finally got home at 8 pm, I would then catch up on any work that needs to be done till 1 or 2 am in the morning, get about three hours of sleep and then get back on set the next day. It was possible to do it but I was so sleep deprived by the end of this week, I felt ill from the exhaustion. Still, it was good to know that it can be done and I have enough flexibility to juggle my schedule to fit everything in, even if it meant sacrificing my sleep in order to do two jobs at the same time. I enjoy acting and so I'm relieved that it all turned out okay. 

Personally, a huge motivation for me to want to share my experiences is my reaction against a lot of misinformation I had been fed in Singapore when I was growing up there. There was a lot of talk about how racist white people were and it would be impossible to get a good job in the West - well, I want to share my story as the boy from Ang Mo Kio who wasn't just content with being the only Asian in a British company, I'm now the only non-Latino in a Latin American company. What frustrates me is the way so many Singaporeans refuse to accept any notion of personal responsibility for their lack of success when it comes to their careers: if they fail to get a good job or progress in their career, they will try to blame someone else rather than take a long hard look in the mirror and try to figure out where they have gone wrong, why they have failed. I'd like to think that I'm a good example of how you can be of an ethnic minority, openly gay and still manage to achieve success whilst working with companies from all over the world as long as you're intelligent, capable, highly skilled, creative, multilingual and are willing to work extremely hard. I believe that a lot of these Singaporeans come up with all this hateful, racist rhetoric about people from other countries because they simply don't have the social skills, language skills and business knowledge to deal with people outside their local social circles in Singapore. It is not easy to get a well-paid job in another country, particularly if it involves a foreign language or two but if you have what it takes, then the practicalities of business take over: if you can help the company make money, then the company will gladly want to hire you. This is I want to add my story to the narrative out there, to try to balance out all the stupid, misleading crap that stupid Singaporeans have been saying over the years, about how really scary the world outside Singapore can be. 

So there you go, that's it from me on this topic. What do you think? Have you ever been an ethnic minority or any other kind of minority in your work place before? Have you ever been in a work environment where you had to operate in a language other than English? Have you ever worked with South Americans before and what were your experiences like? Have you ever had to master a foreign language for work and what kind of challenges did you face operating in a foreign language? And why are Singaporeans so pessimistic about working with people from other countries? Would you accept a job offer if it meant having to learn another language? Please do leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.