Chinese work harder?

As I mentioned in the previous post, recently I have been stressed over this one huge course project. Java based, student scheduling assistant. Well that's not the point. The point is, we are a four-man group..ok, three-man-one-woman group.

And out of the 4 people, one is a non-Chinese dude, who appears smart, and somewhat hardworking. I didn't know him that well before the project; since my friends picked him, I assumed he was at least OK.

The result was: for the past 4 days, he contributed to around..let's say...7.5% of the entire project. I'm being polite here.

He did appear he was trying hard: he came up with a clever idea of how to test this standard input/output intensive program by creating mocking projects so we only needed to do it in Java. ok ok. Except my another teammate built an ingenious tool for command line testing and the mocking part was entirely unnecessary. Today he finished the user manual, which we had to read over and correct the mistakes and add in the content he forgot/missed.

On the contrary, the other 2 teammates and me worked HARD. Every day we worked since the time we woke up, non-stop (and communicating via MSN) until 2am. EVERYDAY for the past 3 days. I adore how hard they could push themselves, and consequently I had to push myself a lot more too since I didn't want to let them down. We were like a bunch of perfectionists who would drain the last drop of our blood to make this project clean, beautiful, extensible, well structured, and matching industry standard. (I'm serious: we've had enough knowledge to make this happen)

At the end, I remember what the non-Chinese dude responded to a question we raised for a spec related question: "Who the fuck cares."

Well we did. And we worked harder.

I have another example to prove this cliche. CUTC - the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference, had a TechTeam challenge. We were given a task to design a whatever crazy-ass computer that worked in the wild. My group was consisted of 5 people: me, Dave, a Chinese girl, and 2 other non-Chinese dudes. We had 2 days to do it, and for almost 1.5 days, the 2 non-Chinese people were missing. When we met for the prototype details, a guy(deceivingly talkative, but full of bullshit) said "who the fuck cares, I don't care."

Again, we cared. In order to complete the task that met our standard, me and Dave ended up not sleeping all night to finish the presentation slides and prototype. We lost - for 2 people working for the amount of 5 people's work. I thought we did a decent job though.

One more - last semester's business software project. Group of 5, 3 Chinese, 2 non-Chinese. The 3 of us did almost all the work while the other 2 slacked or produced non-acceptable results. We all got a good mark.

I don't know what the moral of the story is. I'm not trying to be discriminative, but I do notice the difference. We have the tradition to be perfect - sometimes too rigorously following the standards. It could be the ideal we share; or the expectation of life. We ought to be more practical. Maybe this explains why the rate of education is much higher in Chinese here, why there are a lot of Chinese doctors and lawyers, and why Engineering/CS/Commerce programs are flooded by Chinese students.

I can rant about how non-Chinese groups are different, but I'm feeling weird for slacking and not doing any work. Oh well...