Dear Mary
Q. I am now working from home and am therefore in situ when my Korean cleaners arrive each week. What is the correct way to behave in this situation? Although their English is limited, they are clearly intelligent; both their children have won scholarships to excellent schools. I fear that my current mode — making them cups of tea — is getting on their nerves.
M.S., Rozelle, NSW, Australia A.You are disconcerting these cleaners by acting in a way that their cultural background will not have prepared them for. Whereas in the West the polite fiction is ‘we are all good friends’, in the East the polite fiction is ‘I have respect for you — particularly if I am being paid to work for you’. The fact that you make tea for these cleaners does not fit into this framework. From now on you should limit your social contact with them to enquiring how their children are progressing, before you retire to your desk to allow them to tackle unmolested the work for which they are being paid.
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