[tormeh]

I think the key to multicultural communication is to drop assumptions. There's a lot of things in our native culture that we take for granted that's not applicable elsewhere. That's alright; it would be exhausting otherwise. Elsewhere we assume that people are more dissimilar than they are.

You know the saying "strong opinions loosely held"? My advice in the general case is to assume that everyone's like you are (humans are really similar), but to drop assumptions at the slightest sign that they might be untrue. "They" eat, sleep and fuck (the last one varies on an individual but not a cultural basis). That's all you know. Anything else is an assumption that you should be ready to drop. For example: If you're eating dinner with them and they start taking food from your plate, then your new assumption is that that's normal. In that example the opposite case is harder to deal with: You start eating of their plates and after 2 minutes you realize that no one else does the same and they're all looking at you weirdly. You can mitigate this by trying to err on the side of timidness in all matters until you see what "they" do. You've worked up a lot of confidence during you adult life because you understand how society works and you've stopped making an ass of yourself regularly like in your teens; forget that - you're back to square one. Reading up on the culture is obviously of great help. I think The Economist has a series of podcasts called "Doing business in [city]" which deal with these kinds of things as well as airports and all that shit.

In your specific case you're obviously having communication problem, as you say. I'd suggest finding a way to communicate one-on-one where there's little chance of either of you losing face or being embarrassed by having your conversation shown to others. Lots of great diplomacy have been done in bathroom stalls. Anything that leaves a paper trail is a no-no. Video chat might work, but only if they assume you're not recording. I don't know about Malaysia, but in many south-east Asian cultures people are very concerned about losing face, looking dumb or even admitting that there's something they don't know. It also means that they can see that you're not lying to please an observing third party. Once you've found that venue you need to make it clear to them that the two of you are having a communication problem, and that you need to talk about it. Maybe they are assuming that you can get around the law in the US because the law can be circumvented in Malaysia? I don't know, check corruption stats for Malaysia, but that's what it sounds like to me. In many south-east Asian cultures people also speak very indirectly, so he might be well aware that you can't solve the problem with software, but he's kind of asking that you do it anyway in a wink-wink kind of way. Similarly, you saying it's impossible could have been interpreted as you being unwilling, not unable, to do it. Maybe he even thinks that you want something extra to skirt the law and you're now the unwitting part of an incredibly discreet price negotiation. The possibilities are endless.