When 'Guess' Parents Have 'Ask' Children
How the Ask versus Guess divide explains the complicated reality of growing up Asian American
Aug 27·7 min read
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"Uncle, can I take your plate to the kitchen?" That's what my cousin asked my father after a grand dinner to welcome her family to our home upon their arrival from Taiwan. So polite, my mom said. Such good manners, my dad added.
My eight-year-old sister and I, then 10, didn't say anything — we just excused ourselves and ran off to the living room to get our weekly dose of The Incredible Hulk. Our teenaged cousin soon joined us, her hands still damp from helping to wash the dishes. She had many questions about the large green man occupying our attention.
The next evening, after my cousin's family had left, my father unexpectedly told my sister and I that bedtime would be early, with no TV — and declined to explain why. From his perspective, the message was painfully clear: We should have been volunteering to wash the dishes every night, the way our cousin did.
This incident was typical of our relationship with our parents, in a household with few explicit rules or clearly stated boundaries. While my mother and father had plenty of goals and expectations for my sister and me, they generally believed it was each of our individual responsibilities to figure out how to fulfill them in order to avoid endless shame.
Part of the reason for my parents' lack of guidance when it came to what they wanted from us was that they were busy as heck, and had been from the moment they'd arrived in America in the mid-'60s. As immigrants, they also often found it hard to communicate at our native-speaking English pace and fluency, lapsing into their native Taiwanese when they did feel compelled to critique us in detail, which was inevitably only after we'd failed to live up to their oblique standards.
Most of the time, however, overwork or language barriers weren't to blame. My parents simply didn't think it was necessary to tell us precisely how to behave, because they assumed we should just know, based on subtle, passive-aggressive signals and ambient context — after all, that's how they'd grown up themselves.
I was reminded of all this by the recent Facebook resurgence of a Metafilter conversation from all the way back in 2007 (to paraphrase Game of Thrones, what's on the internet can never truly die, but rises again, harder and stronger) in which the poster, Andrea Donderi, under the username "tangerine," shared her intriguing theory that the world is divided into two mindsets: "Ask" versus "Guess."
In her framework, people with Ask mindsets feel empowered to directly request things from those around them — they have, in her words, the "expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer." Askers can seem blunt and aggressive, pushy and presumptuous. But for those on the other side of the fence, they appear to navigate life with clarity and confidence.
People with Guess mindsets, meanwhile, resist making clear black-and-white statements, and "avoid putting a request into words unless [they're] pretty sure the answer will be yes." It's not necessarily that they prefer ambiguity or are looking to dodge confrontations (although the latter is certainly a motivation for many Guessers). Often it's simply that they reflexively assume the existence of, per Donderi, "a tight net of shared expectations" that provide structure for a fluid marketplace of relationship transactions. In this social commodities exchange, rules are unwritten and often unspoken, driven by custom, convention, and practicality rather than overtly delineated rules and blueprints. You don't ask about things, because you're supposed to already know, or at least be able to infer what you're supposed to know from the circumstances around you.
My Taiwan-born parents are Guessers. As you might imagine, my younger sister and I, born and raised in New York, grew up surrounded and shaped by Askers. And that's where the question of Ask versus Guess is most intriguing to me. Because Donderi's post didn't just refer to Ask and Guess mindsets — it talked about Ask and Guess cultures, implying that Askiness and Guessiness is embedded into the way that entire societies operate, and transmitted to us as part of our national, racial, and ethnic cultural DNA.
Which led me to wonder: Could the complicated tensions that shaped my adolescence be explained, in part, by the fact that my parents and I were on opposite sides of a cultural Ask/Guess fence?
The most broadly used tool for looking at differences between cultures is the Hofstede Cultural Dimensions model, developed by the Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede in 1980. Hofstede's work analyzed data from hundreds of thousands of surveys, ultimately concluding that the value systems of different nations could be quantified using a handful of basic traits: Power Distance Index (PDI), defined as degree to which hierarchical authority and status inequity are accepted in a society; Individualism (IDV), defined as the degree to which people in a society operate as loosely knit discrete units, versus tightly woven collective groups; Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI), a society's tolerance for ambiguity; and Masculinity (MAS), which Hofstede defined as "a preference in society for achievement, heroism, assertiveness, and material rewards for success." (Hofstede later added two other traits, Long Term Orientation in 1989 and Indulgence in 2010; also, some researchers have begun substituting "Task-Orientation" for Masculinity, recognizing the flagrant sexism in the gender assumptions made by the name.)
An analysis of Hofstede's data shows that the dimensions in which Asian and Western cultures are collectively most different are Power Distance and Individuality. Asian societies are across the board more likely to have a high degree of PDI (a mean score of 71.2) and a low degree of IDV (a mean of 25.2); in Western cultures, the reverse is true (46.8 and 76.5, respectively). There's no consistent East-West variance when it comes to the other two dimensions.
Here's how that might impact one's propensity to be an Asker or a Guesser: Societies where those in authority are seen as remote and absolute would be less likely to encourage the development of Ask mindsets. And societies that are more collectivist in nature, focusing on the well-being and harmony of the group rather than the desires of the individual, would be more likely to have Guessing baked into the way they operate.
So there's potentially some substance behind the conventional wisdom that Asian countries generally have Guess cultures, and Western ones, Ask cultures. That doesn't mean all people from Asia are Guessers, or all people from Western countries are Askers — but it does suggest the ends of the spectrum on which people from these cultures likely cluster.
On a whim, I used Hofstede's PDI and IDV data to develop a guerrilla Askiness/Guessiness cultural index. The results came out like this:
Based on this scoring, the "Askiest" countries in the series turned out to be the U.K., Australia, Netherlands, and the U.S.; the "Guessiest" country was Indonesia, followed by China, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. In the middle of the chart were five countries whose status as Ask or Guess countries is ambiguous. Japan is usually perceived as a quintessential Guess country, but that may be a case of failing to understand how Japanese society works. Yes, Japanese society may seem enigmatic and elliptical to outsiders, but it also has a culture that demands extreme and explicit clarity when it comes to roles, definitions, and interpersonal relationships, and people are rarely afraid to directly inquire about how to behave, or to bluntly point out when social customs are abrogated.
Like the other four countries that sit in the center, which I'd call "contextual" cultures, Japan's Ask versus Guess lean likely depends on what aspect of its society you're considering.
That said, it's not particularly surprising to me that the U.S. lands squarely on the "Ask" end of the spectrum, and Taiwan is firmly embedded on the "Guess" side. America is a country where the "squeaky wheel" is said to "get the grease," after all. Taiwan's version of the saying, which is common to many Asian countries, is "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down."
To mix a lot of metaphors, when my sister and I squeaked, we expected grease, and got the hammer instead. My parents, meanwhile, expected us to nail their intentions without them having to hit us over the head with them — and were frustrated to see us just spinning our wheels in confusion.
I'm on the other side of the divide now, with two kids who are more Asky than I'd ever dared to be as a child, who are as frustrated by my relative Guessiness as I was by that of my parents. What that's forced me to do is to lean into providing explanations even when I think they're unnecessary, and to consciously make explicit what I think should be implicit. Taking your shoes off before stepping into the house seems like common sense to me, not just custom. But many of their friends don't do it, so it prompted an ongoing conversation about hygiene and comfort and politeness among us that can often be exasperating (and that took a global pandemic to finally resolve).
At the same time, I've pushed them to be more mindful of silent expectations, the invisible lines connecting them to others — not just to be aware of how they should behave, but to cultivate empathy, mindfulness, and cultural sensitivity.
It's a work in progress — for them, as for all of us in American society — but so far, it seems to be working… I guess.
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