Chinese Students Flock to U.S. B-schools

Neither of these awkward moments can match the faux pax she encountered in the much more bewildering world of women’s fashion, though. In September, she wore a pretty red dress on campus, attracting a lot of attention and compliments. The next day, she decided to wear it again. “In China, it’s fine to wear the same shirt three days in a row or four days in a row if you don’t get it sweaty,” she says. Aghast, a Chinese friend tracked her down to tell her that Americans rarely wear the same thing twice in a row and women–well, they might not wear the same dress twice in a year. “They’ll think you’re not sanitary or they’ll think you didn’t go home the night before!” her friend told her.

Misunderstandings about cultural codes often cross back over to the MBA experience. For instance, it was tough for Wu to keep track of the steady flow of recruiters streaming onto Kelley’s campus. She’d never heard of many regional companies. In class, the deep portfolios of brands belonging to corporations such as Kraft and General Mills are also foreign. She spent one session trying to figure out whether Lucky Charms, the cereal, was a type of fortune cookie or a traditional Chinese threaded pendant.

Lewis Yao had a similar experience in his brand management class when they discussed how first-born products aren’t always the most successful. “Dr. Pepper,” which came to market a year before Coke, left him bewildered. As did “Greasy Goose,” Sidney Frank’s Grey Goose, which is a legendary example of how to build a brand. In China, America’s whiskey labels such as Johnny Walker as well as Absolut and Bacardi are most popular. Grey Goose, not so much. “You really have to know the culture,” he says.

Yao is getting the hang of it. He’s learned that Marlboro’s Rocky Mountain ads are meant to appeal to urban smokers or those stuck in tight spaces. It’s particularly resonant to him, perhaps, because of the traffic jams that plague Beijing from time to time – including a recent one that stretched more than nine days. He’s embraced the open roads of Michigan, taking five-hour drives down to Chicago or up to north in his yellow Mazda 6. Sometimes he’ll head to Meijer, a big box store, just to take a study break around midnight when nothing else is open. Lewis enjoys the peaceful quiet of Ann Arbor and says it’ll take some getting used to when he does head back to the mainland. When he went home last Christmas, he was surprised at what could best be called reverse culture shock. “I heard more horns in one hour than I did in two months” in Michigan, he exclaims. “There were people everywhere.”