It’s tough, when you come to a new country, to fully divorce
yourself from your pre-assembled ideas about it. Obviously this is something that the more
worldly among us can do without issue, but newly-minted expats like myself have
a little more trouble doing this. That,
or I’m trying to excuse my inabilities.
Everyone has pre-conceived notions
of China and the Chinese people, largely because they have met the
far-travelling all photo-capturing masses on their international sojourns –
though if truth must be told it’s only the teen girls from our school that seem
interested in being in endless pictures with us foreign devils. Perhaps it would be useful to re-examine some
of the preconceptions I had before coming to the PRC.
1. The Chinese are terrible drivers.
This is a bit of a misleading supposition, because it is
fueled by seeing the Chinese outside of their natural environment: China. When you see them pull some kind of
improbable stunt-driving move that results in a minor fender-bender while
driving in Canada/the US/etc. it is easy to just suppose that the Chinese can’t
operate a motor vehicle with the same panache as your standard Euro/Canadian/Yank/etc.
What you don’t realise it that if they were driving in China,
what they did would make perfect sense.
Traffic flows in a much more legally-relaxed way here. Stuck behind a line of cars? Jump your car
into the oncoming lane to perform a breathtaking sextuple pass that just dekes
back into a traveling lane in time to avoid death. The road got you down? The sidewalk is right there, those people
aren’t cars and, as such, will definitely move.
The Chinese are in no way terrible drivers: they are just
used to driving in a situation without traffic laws that need to be
obeyed. When you port that into a law-abiding
society their crazy moves become inherently dangerous, because nobody is
expecting them, is all.
2. The Chinese are always ‘this close’
to breaking into unison street dances.
This is something everyone mentions when you say you are
going to China… and something that is demonstrably true. In the sweltering evenings right after I
arrived it was very normal to see anywhere between 6 and 60 middle aged/old
Chinese people doing unison street dances.
Why has always been a bit unclear…but the obvious answer of wholesome
exercise you don’t have to pay for is likely the solution.
The students, when I asked about this, were quite sure that I
could just join in if I felt the urge and could suss out the moves, but I’ve
yet to join the terpsichorean fray. I
think I’d rather stand out in a group of a couple dozen 60-70 year old Chinese
women, actually.
3. China is LOUD.
If you’ve been in a restaurant frequented by any reasonable
number of Chinese people, you will have noticed the general tenor being
something along the lines of a fortissimo.
It is due in part to the delicate tonal qualities needing to be quite
apparent in order to make sense, and also to the general conviviality of such a
situation, but still always struck me as being a bit excessive. Would visiting China itself rob me of my idea
that the Chinese were simply loud as hell?
No, no it would not.
China is a land of loud noises, from the 5:30AM fireworks barrages to
the mechanised voices screaming at you about how somebody nearby is selling
corn on the street. My students assured
me that it was fully possible to communicate at a whisper level in mandarin…but
were only able to keep it up for about a minute. The only assumption I can make is that the
entire country is suffering from at least mild hearing loss due to the general
din, and thus feels compelled to be heard above it. Keep in mind that I spent some years in a
rock band/going to loud concerts for fun…and I am still constantly cringing
away from shrilly yelling students/vendors/bus brakes/etc.
More generalizations to come some
other time; I’ve got to go do some cooking next to my thundering exhaust hood
on the hotplate that emits an eerily painful high-pitched keening sound. Huh? Did somebody say something?
No comments:
Post a Comment