Name:  Leslie Forman

Age: 27

Country of Origin: United States

Country Residing in: Chile

WEBSITE: www.leslieforman.com

 

GYW – Can you give a quick summary of how you ended up working in Chile, 5 years out of University? When did you first come to learn Spanish, come in contact with Chilean culture, etc.

LESLIE:     I learned Spanish around the same time I learned English, thanks to my wonderful Mexican babysitter, Petra. She would dress me up in lacy white dresses and serve me homemade enchiladas, and we would play Lotería — like Bingo, but with cards like la sirena (the mermaid). Petra took care of my brother and me until I was 5, and then I studied Spanish all through high school and college.

At the University of California, Berkeley, I majored in Latin American Studies, and spent all of 2005 studying abroad at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. All my classes were in 100% Spanish, from a 3-week intensive course on Chilean slang (very important in this slang-filled country) to a business simulation course to a mountaineering class with a professor who was the first South American to climb Everest. I loved my time in Chile, especially interning with a non-profit called Acción Emprendedora, which teaches practical skills like accounting, finance, and marketing to toymakers, fruit vendors, chocolatiers, and other entrepreneurs.

 

GWY – Why did you choose to leave China and move to Chile?

LESLIE: I moved to China in 2006, shortly after I graduated from Berkeley. It’s kind of a long story and for 4 of the next 5 years I worked in China, in a wide variety of industries and companies (advertising, consulting, corporate social responsibility, teaching, etc.) At the end of 2010, I quit my stressful job in Beijing. I intended to pursue all sorts of freelance projects and write a book about opportunities for young foreigners in China, but I found myself quite depressed and unmotivated and burned out.

Quite randomly, an American entrepreneur named Charlotte Thornton, who I’d met on the sidewalk in Chile as a student in 2005, emailed me about Start-Up Chile. Start-Up Chile is a program of the Chilean government has invited entrepreneurs from all over the world to bootstrap their businesses in Chile. For many years Charlotte has been working on an ambitious renewable energy project, and she invited me to join her in Chile as a Spanish-English translator and marketing specialist. I arrived in Chile in July 2011 and have since gotten involved in a few other projects too. I wrote about my decision to leave China in more dramatic detail here: Dear China: It’s Not Me, It’s You. Let’s Be Friends Forever. http://www.leslieforman.com/2011/06/dear-china-its-not-you-its-me-lets-be-friends-foreve/

 

GYW – You have a website that is quite detailed. Can you tell GYW why you started the website?

LESLIE: I launched my blog http://www.leslieforman.com/ at the beginning of 2009 as a portfolio of articles I had written for other websites, as well as a place for me to write my stories of China and beyond. I named my blog Beyond China’s Single Story, after my favorite TED Talk http://www.leslieforman.com/why-beyond-china-chile-single-story/ by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Ms. Adichie emphasizes that there is always more than one story about any given place, and she illustrates this point with many stories about her home country.

Through my blog, I have been able to keep in touch with friends and family all over the world, in a rather intellectual way. My 88-year-old grandmother http://www.leslieforman.com/2011/01/question-from-grandma-ginny-does-blogging-diminish-the-beauty-of-language/ is perhaps my most loyal reader, and she emails me detailed comments about my posts. I have also met people from all over the world that share similar interests. When I moved to Chile, I renamed my blog Beyond Chile’s Single Story, and an artistic friend http://www.leslieforman.com/2011/08/new-name-new-design-and-a-new-mission/ created a beautiful banner with the word “China” crossed out and “Chile” in its place. These days I find myself writing a lot about intersections between China and Chile.

 

GWY – What are some professional working habits where Chileans and Chinese differ?

LESLIE: The first difference that comes to mind is the way people greet one another. In Chile, both men and women greet women with a cheek-to-cheek kiss. (Men greet each other with a handshake). In China, business associates (male and female) greet each other with a soft handshake, followed by using two hands to pass a business card, and polite, congratulatory questions about the information on the card.

The second difference that comes to mind is the food and drink involved. Meetings in Chile usually involve coffee, tea, and cookies. Every office I have visited has a nana (maid) who comes in at the beginning of the meeting with a platter of store-bought cookies and takes drink orders. I don’t think I was ever served cookies at a meeting in China, but I did have business dinners at restaurants, with more dishes than we could finish, and sometimes too many shots of baijiu (Chinese rice wine).

 

GWY – What are some professional working habits where Chileans and Chinese are similar?

In both Chile and China, powerful people use personal connections used to get things done. Both countries have a specific and common word for this. In Chile, the word is pituto. In China, it’s called guanxi. I like to mention this when I’m talking about China with Chileans or Chile with Chinese, because everyone smiles and nods and acknowledges that the world is really quite small!

 

GWY – There are a few details about Chile that most people know which are the stories of the Chilean miners and cheap wine. What do you want GWY readers to know about Chileans.

Chile is a country of contrasts: rich and poor, traditional and modern, conservative and liberal, city and countryside. Chile is family-oriented. Young people often live with their parents until they get married, and weekends are filled with family barbecues, birthday parties, and more. It is a very political country, and political changes have had an enormous impact on the everyday lives of Chilean over the past forty years.

The society is divided, especially in terms of social class and opportunity. University students, high school students, Bank of Chile employees, and many other workers are currently on strike. The protests are very politicized, and almost everyone believes that the leftist political parties are supporting the protesters in order to force President Sebastián Piñera to step down. Piñera is a billionaire who made his fortune in the credit card and airline industries and people believe that he has turned the public universities into profit-making institutions in an unfair way, that has increased the gap between the rich and the poor. For a good summary of the issues involved in the protests, I highly recommend this post http://settysoutham.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/notes-from-the-chilean-revolution-2011/ and for a perspective on the spirit and aftermath of the protests, I recommend this one http://bearshapedsphere.com/2011/08/25/santiago-protests-sadness-rushes-in/

 

GYW: Thank you so much to Leslie.

To more learn about her and follow her adventures please log on to her website: http://www.leslieforman.com/