Well, so much for my karma score on Hacker News. It was once over 18K, kids! No, seriously! This is a culture I know well, although I wasn’t born into it. The

Well, so much for my karma score on Hacker News. It was once over 18K, kids! No, seriously! This is a culture I know well, although I wasn’t born into it. The vast majority of my family are Chinese but it took me 20 years really to understand how alien their culture is to me and vice versa. You have an excellent surface knowledge of face-saving culture which is already unusual in the West. I cannot begin to explain how uniform this kind of attitude is in China, and how deep it runs. Obviously, thousands of Chinese come here every year who are better structured to handle your way of thinking, but many many of them will never learn. This employee sounds like one of them. I am not criticizing him at all. It is his obsessive application of Chinese customs that made him a success in China and probably got him to the West. At this point, I think you have to balance what other positive traits he might have against this attitude and assume he will not change. You have done your compassionate best, but I think he’s not yet ready to accept your help.