Conflict


First of all, I am sorry for this late post. I am in the midst of application season and totally missed the deadline for this assignment. 

Living in an absolutely zero conflict may be awesome. Complete peacefulness is what I have always acquired, hoping not to see any turbulence that disturb my life. Fortunately, through my parents I have developed a skill as to how to politely address my point of view while objecting another person’s and how to gain respect others in schools and in social settings. I was definitely not liked by everyone, but I am certain that not that many people hated me at the same time, or at least they did not care, which is something I am thankful for. I have always been the type of person who cares a lot about how others think about me, so I always do act accordingly and try to read the atmosphere of the room. I am also confident that I do not usually offend others with my words or actions both consciously and unconsciously.

I still have a story to share regarding a conflict, which happens very rarely, that is also somewhat ongoing. As an international student, I arrived Champaign a week prior to the first day of school to attend international student’s orientation. Everyone was broken into teams to learn a little more about the school and get to know members in the group better and closer. Through a series of icebreaker, I learned that there was another girl in the room who is also studying math. After the first session, there was a break and she approached me to say hi. We soon became common topics to talk about as I told her that, although I am not from China, I have l learned Chinese more than half of my life, so I have no problem communicating with her in Chinese.

Even after the school started, although our dorms were far apart, I frequently went to meet her, and she introduced me to her friends whom she made within her dorm. She was the first friend I made in college and we hang along so well that we decided to live together in a two-bedroom apartment to lower the cost of living in our sophomore year. We also travelled together on spring break and thanksgiving break, as students are asked to leave their dorm during the break. She was, and still is, a nice mate, because she is a very thoughtful and caring friend.

The conflict, continuous discomfort and not an explicit fight, came soon when we started to live and shared majority of our time together. In winter Olympic short track game, both Korea, where I come from, and China, where my roommate comes from, were in the final. Unfortunately, the Chinese team was disqualified after a conflict between a Korean athlete and Chinese athlete. I may have read articles that favors Korean team’s opinion and my roommate read hers. She approached me later night and talked to me about this incident casually, with no serious note at all. But I also did not want to just agree on what she had to say but show her an article by IOC that clearly shows why China was penalized. There was no actual “fight” between us because of this incident, but I could feel the atmosphere was cold and unusual.

Another conflict that I can think of right away is a recent incident happening in Hong Kong regarding China’s intervention in HK government. As Korea went through series of protests and sacrifices to overthrow corrupted government in 1980’s, Korean media portrays Hong Kong’s fight as a movement, people fighting for freedom. On the other hand, this is not the case in Chinese students’ perspective. My roommate came back from China, angry that she had to change flights because of Hong Kong’s “riots” and how violently the protestors are. I could not agree with her, but I also did not say much word with her, because I did not want two of us to be uncomfortable.

I believe I avoid sensitive topics between us so that we can live the life that we are living right now. I have lived with her since 2017 and we did not have a major fight that stopped us from not renewing the lease. Also, not talking about these sensitive topics does not affect our lives at all, which is why this is a way for me to “resolve” the conflict. Also, my roommate is definitely the nicest roommate I can ever ask for. As long as I do not make her feel uncomfortable, she does not do so either. That is why we were able to live with each other for so long without major conflict.

(I understand that my example of conflict portrays a topic that may be controversial. I am willing to delete the content if anyone finds it disturbing or if such topic goes against what we should post or not.)

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanNovember 19, 2019 at 5:13 AM

    Conflict in a living situation, growing up with family, or later with roommates, may be different than conflict in work situation. With family members, they remain your family during and after. With the roommates, I suppose it might have gotten so intolerable for you that you ended up moving out, but there's the financial part of paying the rent, finding another apartment and maybe finding other roommates. This may have meant it was impossible for you to sever under the circumstances. If so, that would dictate the behavior you described. In the work context, having one part sever is a possibility and might be the efficient thing to do, if the situation gets bad enough.

    It would be good if in the real world being a nice person meant you could avoid conflict. I'm afraid that it is at best a partial solution. There are then issues of whether you can resolve disagreements in some way rather than simply avoiding them. While it is not quite the same thing, my extended family has people with quite varying views of U.S. national politics. I have seem some fracture among family members when that becomes the topic of conversation. So, for the most part, I try to avoid those discussions. But that is not always possible.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Joan Robinson Econ 490 fall 2019November 20, 2019 at 11:14 PM

      I said my roommate is a nice roommate, because I know without the different political and cultural point of views, we have a lot in common and have no problem living with each other. We could have moved out after a yearlong lease if we believed each others are intolerable. But in the mean time, I cannot blame her for having a different point of view as I do, as this is all originated from the different background and education we received.

      Also, this is the third year I am living with her. I now know what topics to avoid and how our perspective may differ. While I was curious of her thoughts in the first year living with her regarding her political and cultural perspectives and may have asked some sensitive questions, I now fully acknowledge those curiosity do no good for our relationship and I cherish this relationship a lot.

      I also forgot to mention in my post about what the others' reactions were after opening this conflict up. Because people around me mostly share my culture, they tend to support my point of view and understand my rationales, which is not surprising. I believe it is the same in my roommate's case, if she was telling others about the conflict.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Team Production

            If first would like to mention that I liked what we are doing for this particular blog posts. I found all three articles very intriguing and all of them allowed me to think more about the situations and experiments. For that being said, I have a lot to share regarding opportunism and fairness.              There are certainly some examples I can pull out from my past team project experiences where gift exchange was evident. When I was in high school, I attended international “program” of a local private school, where all the classes were held in English for those who want to study abroad. Because the school was not an international “school”, there were many local students who were exposed to English curriculum less (From what I know, international schools are strictly for international students, or students with a foreign passport and I was a fo...
Read more

Reflection

Reflecting on the four blog posts I have written, I was able to tie and find a keyword link the prompts together. I have to confess that I was very much confused at first. I did not understand how each course taught tied to the weekly blog posts, although I put in much thought into writing one. I thought of the tasks as separate topics. I believe I was not eager enough to learn what the linkage and the purpose of each assignment was carefully. However, now I know that there are common themes and the one that stood out to me the most is called transaction cost. It is much obvious now that we have talked about it in class and through the explanation of how each lecture lead to another one. The first blog post, which was about transaction cost in organization, is itself clearly delivering the idea of transaction coast. This is the blog post that introduced me to what a real-world transaction cost is: an extra work that I have to commit to on top of the responsibiliti...
Read more

Principal Agent Model

Just like a lot of other classmates’ blog posts, I do not think I had a situation like this in my life where I had to be in the triangle situation with two principals. However, I have a friend who is four years older than me and she told me about what makes her feel drastic about her work that I believe fits well into a triangle principals-agent model. My friend works as the journalist of a top news channel in Taiwan. After graduating from college, she accepted the offer as it was what she was passionate in and was a decent paying job. She wanted to deliver the news on camera of the matters that needed people’s attention to, so that through her, those in need can be helped. Every morning, her team had an internal meeting on the topics that each journalist will do research on and also on the topics that will be broadcasted that evening. Then the manager of the team would have a meeting with the department head with all other managers in the company. I learned f...
Read more