A table full of plates at a Chinese wedding.
Continued from The Real China: Preparations
Strange Food
From the opinions of my fellow trainees in New York, and from various voices online, I gained the sense that Chinese food was beloved only by the Chinese. I imagined a bland and unappetizing mix of foods that should not go together or be prepared the way the people liked to prepare them. I imagined unidentifiable foods in gray sauces, or all kinds of crawling creatures and animals laid out in an exotic and intimidating spread, like from a film set.
The truth was not far off, yet not so horrific. I will illustrate with a story from my English class in New York.
A fellow teacher-trainee gave the students a pamphlet to read about a farm that cared for abandoned animals and “food animals.” One student asked, “What is a food animal?”
The teacher said, “You know… cows, chickens, pigs… any animal that can be eaten as food.”
The one Chinese student in the class responded dryly to the teacher’s comment, “Every animal is a food animal.”
Chinese tastes differ depending on region, and every individual has preferences and dislikes (some as finicky as a picky diner in America or wherever), but in Chinese cuisine, all food options are very much on the table.
Turtle soup. As a guest, I was expected to eat the chewy rim of the shell. Seriously.
I didn’t think this would bother me, I tried to reason that dog and cat were animals and fit for food just like the rest, but when I saw my first red flesh-covered canine skull, I winced, and I had to turn away from the skinned dog carcass hanging upside-down in the morning market.
In China, I saw that food was often bought in the streets, from local vendors who brought their produce into town to sell on tarps they laid out in the roads and sidewalks. Or, if selling chickens, ducks, or geese, the birds were tied up with a strip of plastic strung around one ankle, held in cages, or possibly set on top of the cage or laid down in a pile on the street.
The markets were a free-form zoo of people, fruits, vegetables, live fish and fowl, crabs, crawdads, clothes, dogs (usually the live kind, wandering the streets), pet birds, and the interweaving traffic of motorcycles, honking cars, and tractors. Some markets gathered under the roof of a permanent shelter, which meant no cars or tractors and only rarely a motor scooter. A few city employees would come by every afternoon to hose off the pavement and sweep up the broad swaths of refuse, but their effort was never equal to the size and staggering smell of the mess.
And that is how I saw most people buy their daily groceries in China. They would also make trips to the supermarkets and department stores, of course, and in those the produce and meat sections could be just as wild. There would be rows of tanks for fish, turtles, frogs, crustaceans, eels, and other sea creatures (the “Seafood” and “Pets” sections in Chinese Wal-Mart overlap) and they would often be set up in stair-step levels so hoses could transfer water between them. Raw meat would be sitting out on a counter, uncovered and undated. In the streets, I saw sides of beef hanging over the side of a motorcycle truck and dragging along the pavement with its bloody tip. Also, in the street markets, cuts of red meat were suspended on hooks for sale, being picked over by the flies as they awaited a buyer.
Next to the live seafood and raw meat in the supermarkets were the dried meats and sausages. Whole ducks and geese were strung up by the neck, their flattened bodies displaying all their ribs and the dried flesh that clung to them.
I’m sure my Chinese hosts had no idea what was going through my mind when I walked with them through the markets. I often wished I could bring my mother (who will not eat whole fish because she doesn’t want her food looking at her) and my grandmother on an entertaining tour through the food markets, but I think they would become nauseous or faint. A Chinese food market is the quickest way to open a Westerner’s eyes to life outside the modern world.
Networking
China is known for having a collectivist culture, for children fervently serving their parents in reverent, Confucian obedience, for its zealous advance of the Chinese communist state, and also for its intricate network of social relationships.
The Chinese/Mandarin word for these relationships and social power is guanxi (pronounced gwan-shee, so I’ll write it out gwan-shee since I’m writing in English). In my research, I read that gwan-shee was big on the Chinese mind, and no business could be done without it. I read of foreigners coming up against roadblocks when going to the bank or city government office and being dumbfounded that no one would process their forms. The inconveniences were not an absolute policy; each place handled things differently and business often proceeded without a hitch. Still, strangers needed a mediator to introduce them to business contacts and government officials; without the social connections they would remain powerless.
This brick wall of apathy and willful ignorance plagued the local citizens, too.
When I talked with college students, I heard from them the saying that besides the results of the national college placement test (which is determined by a score tabulated by machines and faceless strangers), nothing in China was fair. If you needed a medical procedure done right away in a good hospital, you had better know the doctor or have plenty of cash to grease the social gears. I was very lucky to know Aunt Fong and always have her or a representative from my university’s Department of Foreign Affairs to escort me. Not only did they translate the language for me, they cleared the social hurdles and introduced me to the right people.
I was on the bad end of gwan-shee, too. Before my first day of teaching, I met with a bunch of teachers and government officials as they all sat around smoking and chatting. Then we had a big celebratory dinner. I found out that the meeting was between my employers at the university and the head officials of the local middle school. The university had agreed to split my teaching hours with the middle school, so I would spend the first semester teaching half of my hours at each. This turned into a nightmare, as the middle school gig involved me worthlessly straining to get 50 unwilling pupils to listen and speak, usually making a fool of myself and wasting my breath. Later, I became privy to the knowledge that the university officials were not happy with my middle school duties either, but because the head of the middle school was a powerful man with gwan-shee connections all over town, they were helpless to stop it.
After reflecting on the Chinese way and comparing it to others, I don’t think the gwan-shee system is radically unlike any other society’s way of doing business, it is only more pronounced. They assume the power of social relationships from the get-go and discuss it out in the open, whereas other nations might delude themselves that private affairs are all work and talent-based, and public systems are all equal access. I think people everywhere could agree that that is the way that things should be, but our world is not so neat or fair. Or, as they say in China, only the gaokao is fair.
People Mountain, People Sea
The Chinese idiom for their phenomenon of crowded cities is “people mountain, people sea.” I remember, as a university student taking a class on China, when my professor announced that his home country’s official population had surpassed 1.3 billion people. That figure was astounding. How could I comprehend it? What did it look like? How did 1.3 billion people translate into a daily reality? I had read about mega-cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, but what did it feel like to take the subway in these cities or walk the streets? Was it possible to find peace and quiet? Was there personal space?
“Has anyone seen my personal space? No? That’s okay, I’ll just keep milling about until I find it.”
I didn’t have a concrete expectation of what it would be like, but I knew it would be congested. I found out that the presence of crowds was a constant in Chinese life. Note that I stayed mostly near the East Coast; the further one travels west in China, the more rural and open it is. The daily reality of crowds, like the pollution, was an inescapable and unwelcome hassle impinging on every aspect of life.
In my hometown in Iowa, I can walk downtown or walk across town and cross paths only with cars on major streets and- maybe- see a few people also on the sidewalk, here and there, or out in their yards if the weather is nice. Even then, people are only outside to walk their dogs, go running, or do yard work. Almost no one goes out on foot for basic transportation. A select few go by bike instead of car, but this has caught on only with a thin-slice of the population because the majority wouldn’t be caught dead walking into a store with a bike helmet on, not to mention tight black shorts and clunky riding shoes. And, why forsake the car, that ultimate conveyor of convenience?
Of course, the situation in the U.S. is different depending on where you live, but I think the large majority of cities are less like Manhattan and more like my hometown- desolate except for cars.
In China, and I mean the full thrust of this hyperbole, people were everywhere. Imagine the United States’ population was increased fivefold and most everyone lived in a dingy apartment complex, except it was 90% less cars and many thousand times more motor scooters- that is China. The first time I went to the Carrefour department store nearest to my apartment in China, it was a typical Sunday afternoon The aisles were more congested than any stateside Wal-Mart I had ever seen between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The Carrefour only provided small, half-sized shopping carts because it would have been nearly impossible to pivot and turn a large one through the stream of people in every aisle. It became exhausting being in the midst of it, my eyes could never rest from scanning the people walking past me, and I was constantly turning my head and stepping out of the way.
Note that, even though I checked my blind spots and gave way or walked around other shoppers, the courtesy was not returned. If you are standing between a Chinese shopper (or pedestrian) and the thing they want, they will push you. Standing in a supermarket aisle, scanning the shelves for the best produce, a Chinese shopper would butt in front of me or slip in and grab their choice without saying a word to excuse themselves or acknowledge my presence. For anyone offended that wants to argue, “Not all Chinese people do that!” I have to say that pushy people pushing people was the rule and not the exception. They pushed like pigs at a feeding trough whenever there was a line or bottleneck. When I tried eating at the school cafeteria in my university, I had to vent my frustrations in the crush of students vying for the server’s attention by sarcastically asking myself if Titanic were sinking behind us.
Walking the same as they drove, the Chinese would only look at what was immediately, directly in front of them. Anything outside that five-foot cone of vision was ignored, meaning that even if I could have reasonably expected passersby to walk around me as I stood to the side of the main path and gave way, I learned from experience that boorish men would regardless still shoulder into me, and at times a thin, bossy woman might still shove me in the kidneys from behind.
Besides my apartment, there was no personal space and there were almost no private places of solitude. Often, when young Chinese students approached me to ask a question, they would lean against the side of my arm, or they would stand so close to my face that I could smell the bitter tea they had for breakfast. If I went outside for exercise or a leisurely walk by the river, I would be joined by hundreds of others who were also fleeing cramped apartments for exercise.
The Chinese, as a people, were diligent about exercise and took responsibility for their own health (not without necessity; they could not all expect quality medical care), so it was refreshing and somewhat inspiring to see so many exercise groups meeting in public places. Again, just like everywhere else, this meant park spaces got heavy use and one could expect to find crowds there daily. Only during afternoon nap time did public places clear out.
Joining an outdoor kung-fu club for “push hands” practice.
Even when the skies were filled with the dark clouds of the local farmers’ straw burning, I saw people on the running track, on the exercise equipment, and on the basketball courts. I wondered how so many people could tolerate the noxious air outside, but the odds were that even though the outside was filled with people, nine out of ten were probably taking shelter inside.
Conclusion
Truly, nothing would have completely prepared me for immersion in China. I would have to endure it- the bad and the bizarre- every day. And, in a way, that was the intent. To leave the familiar and be confronted with different ways of doing everything. I find it an irresistibly fascinating thought that other nations of people have grown up and built a civilization without any similar foundations in Western thought, belief, customs, language, or practice, and only anciently sharing culture and technology with foreign cultures through trade or conquest. But times have changed. Since opening its doors in the 1970’s and embracing modernization, China has been eager to adapt and (what’s a euphemism for copy and steal?) um, appropriate foreign business practices and technology. Outsiders like me are welcomed.
I went to China somewhat expecting everyone to be wearing gray cotton jackets and chanting Maoist liturgy, so I was a little stunned to see so many “Angry Birds” t-shirts. American culture has spread far and wide, even to China, either by way of capitalist trading or by Chinese larceny. Much of the Middle Kingdom was familiar because I had already seen the original t-shirt or television show in America, and much was familiar because an apartment building can’t vary all that much in essence from place to place.
Still, making a parallel between similar facts of life between China and the United States (e.g. food, crowds, school buildings, driving a car, any of the topics in my writing) is like stepping in front of a fun-house mirror. The reflected image is real, but it is warped.
Now that I’ve discussed the things I expected and my blood is heated after thinking of the aggressive stampedes of people, I would like to turn the focus next onto some real situations in China that I never anticipated.
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