The Real China: Preparations

When I was a boy, I thought Chinese people were straw hat-wearing duck herders who grew their rat tails long and delivered their punishments swiftly, reed in hand, on any delinquent ducklings caught lollygagging. I also told my parents that I wanted to eat all the rice in China. I did love steamed rice.

All this farmer is missing is a switch and a misbehaving duck with which to whip it with.

My ideas about China changed as I grew, of course, yet with my departure for the Far East mere months away, I had the impression that my imaginings were still somewhat cartoonish and definitely murky. I had made a large commitment in coming to live there for at least a year. What was I really getting into?

My arrival and first day of classes were scheduled for September 1st. At the moment, Lent was beginning and I was headed to New York City. I had enrolled in a four-week intensive course through a satellite school of the University of Cambridge to prepare myself to teach English as a Second Language (ESL). My ESL-experienced friend recommended this as the best preparation for its respected reputation and straightforward teaching lessons. So that was that, my decision was made easy. Only, I would have to travel quite a ways from my Midwestern abode to get to a school.

Making ready for the culture shock of China in the not-a-little shocking confines of New York City, I spent my stay there as a detached observer, touring only a few places over the weekends and mostly studying and preparing lessons for my student-teaching. Coming from a small city in Iowa, sharing a subway train with someone talking to themselves (or to the voices in their head), surrounded by the most colorful mass of humanity on earth, and being routinely given a dead stare or evil eye by all service employees and most passersby made me wonder what was wrong with America’s most famous city. And yet, by the end of my stay, I had learned to enjoy my temporary home. Would I learn to appreciate the weird, the irritating, and the wild in the world’s most populous country, the same as I had in America’s most crowded city?

While at the ESL teacher training course, I met some English teachers with experience and tried to pump them for opinions on their time abroad.

Sitting with two teachers who had lived in China, I asked them about the food and other areas of life there. I received the same response from both: a shell-shocked grimace and a slow shake of the head.

“What does that mean?” I nervously questioned.

They struggled to find words to describe the food, so one just cautioned me that I would probably lose 10 to 15 pounds there.

“It’s that bad, huh?” I commented.

They shook their heads lamentably again. “I would find a place that you like, where you know the menu, and just go there to eat. That’s what I did. Find a restaurant you can trust and stick with it.”

It went unspoken, I think because their grief was ineffable and intricately connected to the many complicated facets of life in China, but I suspected a deep reserve of bad feelings, expressed wordlessly, towards the country neither seemed eager to return to.

In our student-teaching classes, my fellow trainees and I taught lessons to city residents and foreign tourists on an “English holiday” who wanted a free English class. It was kind of like a discount haircut from beauty school students, only we couldn’t make anyone ugly, only bored. One student, an enthusiastic and jovial man named Hui (rhymes with “way,” that is, “h’way”), came from Nanjing, and he had me believing I would get along great with his countrymen back in China.

Hui at a rock garden in his hometown, Nanjing.

On the first day of class, I observed Hui during another teacher’s lesson and nearly interrupted it with guffaws. Each student had drawn a card with a mystery occupation, and their partner had to ask them questions to determine their identity (example: Construction Worker. “Do you work in an office?” “No.” “Do you work outside?” “Yes.” “Are you a construction worker?” “Yes.”) Hui was partnered with a young Japanese woman who looked terrified to be standing up and facing her classmate instead of listening to a teacher talk.

Hui was eagerly rattling off questions and getting shot down by her negative responses, but having the time of his life nonetheless. Her card read “Ballet Dancer,” probably the trickiest of all the occupations in the exercise, and Hui ended his series of questions to her by asking, “Do you make seengs weess your hands?” He was told curtly, yet softly, again, “No.”

Then Hui exclaimed with his whole voice and body, “Oh! How secret you are! Teacher, she is being so secretive!” And you have to envision, while Hui was making big, happy gestures- playfully pointing his finger at his secretive partner- his Japanese counterpart stood there unflinchingly, as stiff as a corpse.

Happy Hui

I smiled and shook with silent laughter, trying not to disturb the class. Hui had won my heart. A week later, I was able to interview him for a class assignment, and later still, he and I went out to lunch together. We talked about his time in America and his family, and I was able to ask him how he thought I would fare in his homeland.

Hui told me I would have many “advantages” over Chinese citizens. For one, I would be treated with a lot of leniency as a foreign guest, forgiven social missteps because of my ignorance. Also, I might be able to find work at a big company because they needed Americans to handle international business.

I asked him about the girls in China, because I thought I would have a disadvantage in a lopsided population without enough marriageable females to go around.

“Oh no!” Hui corrected me, “I think the Chinese girls will like you very much! He, he, he!” He tended to end his sentences with laughter, and one of my fellow teacher trainees nicknamed him “Happy Hui” because of it. Happy Hui predicted that Chinese girls would like a tall, fair-skinned foreigner with blue eyes, and even though I never took “advantage” of this, it turned out I was as fortunately conspicuous as he thought.

Hui also said that I would be able to get away with things in China because of my advantages. If, for example, my actions would get a Chinese citizen arrested, I would probably only be cautioned. A penalty of imprisonment or worse would likewise be downgraded to deportation. Later on in China, I had the sense that Hui was correct, but I never felt the need to test my boundaries.

Back in Iowa, in that interim before my late-August flight to Beijing, I did more online research, scouring ESL forums and websites related to life in China, and had more conversations with friends and family about my journey.

One friend, whose family emigrated from Hong Kong when he was a small child, confirmed one of Hui’s points, using a different style of speaking. “The internet is restricted there,” he told me about a familiar fact, “so you can’t use Facebook or YouTube or anything like that. In China, there’s no freedom of speech, but they don’t care if you start a fire in the street. It’s a really different place.” Once in China, I found out he, too, was right. The people started fires in the streets (not that big, just curbside fires of paper mostly) and did whatever they pleased.

What else could I expect in China? After culling through countless internet sites, I noticed that commentators said several things in common.

China-ready with my own straw hat.

Spitting
Nearly every complaint on China mentioned indiscreet public spitting. In my later travels throughout the Middle Kingdom, I observed this to be very true. I did not see groups of people spitting simultaneously, but I witnessed individuals spitting wherever they felt like (in a classroom, in a hotel lobby, inside a restaurant, anywhere outside, and every place they felt like except inside someone’s home- in that case they would use a waste basket), spitting about as often as one hears sneezes in public. And the worst part was they didn’t just lower their head to spit and let saliva fall with a gentle “ptooh” sound, they fully hawked their throats and launched it- an ugly little stain that would splat against the ground. Even worse, they did it shamelessly, replacing their cigarette in their lips in an unconscious habit, returning to the conversation without missing a beat, or, in the case of the classroom, getting right back to their notes.

I read that the Chinese believe swallowing the phlegm was unhealthy as it was supposed to collect impurities in the environment and in the body. I would also come to find out that Chinese home cures and medical advice were largely based on a generations’ old collection of old wives’ tales (e.g. the common cure-all was to drink a glass of hot water). Several times throughout the year I was forbidden by my aunt or some minder from eating certain foods based on the season (e.g. no peanuts in hot weather, they didn’t say why).

Pollution
Anyone with even a passing interest in China has doubtlessly read about the unbearable levels of pollution in Chinese cities. The people wear surgical masks in China, sometimes when they are ill or afraid of catching an illness, but often to filter the incredibly filthy air.

When Aunt Fong was walking with me once in Iowa, I asked her why she liked my hometown so much, and she told me because of its blue sky. I was taken aback. Wasn’t the sky blue everywhere? Not in China, where cloud and atmosphere are indistinguishable, and the sun appears as a dim flashlight shining through dirty dishwater.

In the summertime, being in China felt like living in a greenhouse with smog walls. The sunlight wasn’t beating on your back, but the bright heat covered you like a moist blanket. Throughout the year, the sky was a lurid wash of grays, yellows, and browns, and I quickly longed for clear, open skies. The pollution was an oppressive pall that darkened every day. It had a continuous, crushing effect on my morale.

The worst the pollution ever got was in late April-early May, when the local farmers had gathered in the wheat harvest. Once the fields were gleaned of their grain, the farmers would set fire to the remaining straw. Multiply the effect of one small field by the thousands of farms in the area, add that to the significant mechanical pollution already saturating the air, and the net effect was the smell of burning, an acrid, stinging sensation in the nostrils and eyes, and all that you might expect if you held your face above a campfire.

That intense forest fire-like period lasted for about a week and a half. It was comparatively clear after that, which doesn’t say much. Simply breathing was a health hazard in China.

Loud Talking
The Chinese have a reputation for speaking loudly and directly. I read from several people online who said that people would address a stranger at full volume and the two parties would immediately get into a near-shouting match. When I witnessed this with my own eyes, an English-speaking Chinese friend on a couple different occasions tried to explain it away by saying that foreigners often think that Chinese are arguing when they are really only having a simple discussion of common exchange. “They are only talking!” my interpreter tried to laugh it off. I was left unconvinced.

From what I had read while in America, I expected the people in China to be noisy most of the time. In reality, they spoke in a normal tone with friends or in private (around a dinner table with a big group they would start to get uproarious, which is not really remarkable). The loud voices emerged whenever people called for strangers or talked in public places. Then, commands issued like impatient line cooks shouting over the clamor of a busy kitchen.

Continued in Predictions