The observation about rejection
Last year, when I sent an email to the CEO of an AI start-up to request an interview, I asked, "Could I talk to you for about two hours and shadow you for a weekend to observe your life?" I was rejected by him. Several weeks later, I mentioned this experience to my class in a complaining tone and expressed my confusion. "Why are the founders of startups so busy?"
"What? You asked him to talk to you for two hours in the first email?" My American classmate Sophie opened her eyes wide and burst into laughter. "And also for two days to shadow him?"
The teacher, Liza, and a few other friends, most of whom are from the US, also laughed. "That's too much for the first email. Usually, you can be vague about the time you need. Or you can start with a short interview, and after you establish some connections with your subject, ask for more," Liza said.
Someone followed Liza, "If I received your email, I might reject you too. Giving a stranger an hour or two is a big thing."
It was at that moment I realized that perhaps people's time perception and the value they place on it are different. I had pondered this question while talking to my friend W in an old and grand temple in Shangri-La, China. He was talking about how we should maximize every minute of our lives, but my opinion was that we can be less calculated and accept that we are allowed to spend some time doing meaningless things. The value we place on our time is different.
When I worked as a journalist in China, I wouldn't hesitate to ask an interviewee to give me an hour or two in the first email. In my mind, two hours are not a long period for those conversations. And I am willing to waste two hours and do nothing in my life. But here, in the US, two hours, or even an hour, can be very long for talking to an out-of-nowhere journalist whom you have never seen before.
I don't want to generalize and arbitrarily attribute it to a cultural difference. Because in China, there are also people who value their time highly, and in the US, there are people who are generous about their time. But usually, my interview requests got rejected for reasons other than the time issue. After that discussion, I did realize that more attention should be given to the time we asked for while drafting my interview invitation email.
When I did my assignments for the photojournalism class, I had another interesting observation about rejection. I needed to take pictures of baristas, and during the assignments, I was rejected by five baristas. Three of them phrased the declination in the same way, saying, "I am not feeling right for pictures today. Usually, I would say yes, but today I am really not in the mood for pictures."
I think the emphasis they put on the sentence is "today." They tried to soften the tone by stressing this current moment when they feel unwell and gave me an illusion that if I came tomorrow, I would get some pictures of them. It seems like a way to make themselves feel less guilty and make me feel better.
I would say those phrases used to reject someone are kind of novel to me. Back in China, people rejected me by shaking their heads, giving me a suspicious look, and then falling silent or directly saying no without any other words. Here, at least in the situations I encountered that day, people rejected me in a more polite, considerate, and subtle way.
Which one do I prefer? Maybe the latter. And I also try to learn about those phrases for rejecting people in the future.