Two days without email

On Wednesday I went out with my work colleagues for a Mid-Autumn Festival lunch (apparently mid-autumn is worth not only a few days' holiday, but a free lunch, too!). Afterwards, I was drowning in post-feeding fatigue, and suggested to my friend at work that we go and grab a coffee at Starbucks. I'll have you know Starbucks is almost the only option for takeaway coffee in most of Beijing, lest you think I would actually choose Starbucks coffee of my own volition. Anyway, my colleague, being Chinese, is not really a fan of coffee, so I'm a bit surprised she has accepted my polite invitation. 

Soon, I find out why. She wants to talk about her personal life. She's having some issues with her husband, who is currently in the USA with work. My colleague has seemed a bit quiet all day, and now I'm starting to find out what's the problem. She asked him to email her every day while he was away, she says, otherwise she might get worried about him. And he promised he would. Two days went by without an email (which, she says, she didn't even really notice because she herself has been busy), and she suddenly realised he hasn't kept his promise. She started to get annoyed that she hadn't heard from him. So, she wrote him a nasty email saying she was hurt by his actions, or lack of actions as it appears. He wrote back saying he was tired, very busy, had taken on someone else's job in addition to his own because his colleague is incompetent. She wrote back with more nasty words, and then a few days later logged on to his email account (why does she have access to it?) and saw he hadn't even opened her most recent emails. How to exact revenge on this horrendous crime? She changed his email password, the same one he uses for business communications. 

I always wonder in this situations whether you're supposed to coo and soothe the girl, or whether you should give her the straightforward opinion that is forming on your tongue. But at this point, I can't help but exclaim how ridiculously childish her actions are. She admits she knows this, but can't help herself. She's an only child and is used to getting her way. Her husband has an older sister (the one child policy actually only covers about half of Chinese families—fodder for another post!), so he's used to sharing things, sharing a person's attention, and sharing his email account, perhaps? 

She changed his password back after a few days of making him stew over it. Then, realising she was a bit grumpy with him, he tried to call her 20 times in one morning, from the other side of the world. She didn't answer, and still won't talk to him.

She says she thinks they are not suited to each other. They come from different backgrounds. Her father is rich and has nought to spend his money on except for his darling little girl. Her husband's parents are not so well off, and he doesn't like the idea of her father paying for everything, including their house. Actually, he doesn't like to talk about money at all, in complete contradiction to most of his Chinese mates. She can't understand why. She thinks you have to be practical about these things, and the reality is that money is all that matters in China these days. Money, and family. She doesn't like to cook or clean and feels like she's not a 'good wife' to her husband, but she still needs his undivided attention at every point, otherwise she feels lost. If they were not married, she says, they would certainly have split up. She doesn't want to divorce him because it would hurt her parents.

There's more to it, obviously. You can't summarise the complexities of a marriage in one conversation at Starbucks. Still, I can't help but wonder how much of this is common across China, a nation of single child families, of strong family ties, of vastly unequal gender expectations, and of marriages that must last forever. Throughout the conversation, in response to my wide-eyed surprise at her actions and feelings, my colleague conceded this must be hard for me to understand because of cultural difference. 

But the lesson I'm taking away is: you men at home (you know who you are), when you think your girlfriends or wives are being too needy, should spare a thought for the poor Chinese man whose wife may divorce him because he was too busy to email her every day.

:)

Addressing a Chinese audience

I haven’t been in China long, but I’ve had the pleasure of seeing some great gaffes on the part of Westerners who are trying, in vain, to establish relationships with Chinese people in professional meetings. They hear that Chinese culture is strongly interested in ‘gifts’, so they fret over who they should give the golden pens they brought along from home. Then they try to provoke conversation across the table and end up just talking to fill the void of silence when they receive no response. Afterwards, they try to make conversation at lunch about how they decided to be vegans at age 19 ‘because eating another living creature is wrong’ and wonder why their Chinese colleagues are appalled.

Sitting in a particularly boring meeting like this the other day, I decided to write a list of suggestions for anyone contemplating a first time introduction into the Chinese professional world. The primary purpose of this list is to ensure I don’t forget my own learnings here, so if it happens to useful to anyone else … bonus!

• Don’t expect to be able to hold an informal dialogue about working topics. For some reason I can’t fathom, Chinese people expect the format of any professional meetings (aside from those over a meal) to be presentation party A - Q&A - presentation party B – Q&A and so on.
• At the end of any speech or presentation, there’s usually applause. Something niggled at me for a long time about this applause that I couldn’t quite pin down, and then it occurred to me … it’s too short! Chinese audiences only clap for maybe half the length of time that you would expect an audience at home to do. I didn’t even know we had applause rules, but there you go.
• Use a powerpoint presentation. Call it a ‘ppt’.
• Use pretty, simple pictures on your ‘ppt’, especially graphs.
• USE SIMPLE LANGUAGE. EVERYWHERE. I cannot stress this enough. Someone tried to use the word ‘Orwellian’ in a comic way and it met a lot of blank stares, obviously. Chinese people will not ask you to explain if they don’t understand your English, because it’s embarrassing for them. So don’t be an idiot, speak slowly and use words that are easy to understand rather than jargon. This also applies to any written documents and the ppt.
• Don’t assume your Chinese counterparts will have any background on your topic, even if it’s their field. Academia in China is … different to the West, and the differences are felt throughout the business world. I once saw a director of an institute with decades of academic research under his belt say that he couldn’t understand how agriculture produces greenhouse gas emissions.
• Assume that their views are China-centric (this is definitely not something that only occurs in China) and assume that they will repeat Government language/ideas.
• This should be self-evident, but avoid criticising (or appearing to criticise) the Chinese government, culture, food or popular ideologies in China.
• Use lots of figures and numbers to gain respect, while still trying to make a point.
• Ignore the people walking in and out of the room, sleeping on their desks or taking pictures with their huge Nikon cameras. They don’t realise you think this is rude.
• Bring some kind of sweet food if you can, even if you’re not the host, and make sure tea is available if you are.
• Always introduce important people at the start of a meeting and use highly respectful forms of address. An important Chinese guy I know once addressed a group of PhD candidates from another country as ‘your excellencies’ (ok, maybe this was a bit of Chinglish, but it gives you an idea of what is expected!).
• Use excessive language of thanks and imply prestige where you can.
• Gift giving is a part of Chinese culture, but you don’t have to give gifts if you don’t want to. It's much more important that you pick up the bill for the food if you are the ‘host’, although a small gesture (e.g. a trinket) will always be appreciated.
• Providing a lunch or dinner is necessary for almost any meeting. Try to arrange the meeting to be before lunch and then have a banquet – you’re likely to get more interest and appreciated feedback from participants. A dinner is even better, but there are a whole set of social rules you’ll have to navigate, and they are likely to try and get you ridiculously drunk.
• Avoid saying ‘no’ directly in response to a question. Instead, think like a politician and ignore the actual question by diverting the discussion onto a tangent.

Shanghai, land of ... Westerners?

So I finally made it down to Shanghai over the weekend. To be honest, I was a bit ambivalent about it when we were organising the trip. Shanghai wasn't on my list of 'must-see' places because I usually don't like big cities, and I particularly don't like touristy places. I try (often unsuccessfully) to get off the beaten track and make a bee-line (aside: do bees really fly that straight??) to anywhere that is famed for natural beauty. Particularly mountains. Unless you very tall buildings as mountains, Shanghai is not known for any kind of natural beauty. And it's a big city. And it's touristy. But, as it turns out, Shanghai is absolutely magnificent.

It's so incredibly Western that I almost forgot I was in China at times. In fact, it reminded me so much of Sydney the resemblance was uncanny. The Bund is exactly like Sydney Harbour—tall buildings, a long esplanade, pretty lights, expensive shops and lots of tourists (a key difference is, at the Bund, everyone is interested in taking photos of me, rather than the buildings!). The (former) French Concession really reminds me of the ritzy suburbs in Sydney like Wollahra, with loads of little boutiques, cool cafes and tree-lined streets. And East Nanjing Road pedestrian street seems unsettlingly similar to Pitt Street Mall.

The Bund:

Shanghai Museum:

Cool ceramic camel in Shanghai Museum:

Even the people seem to be more 'westernised' than in other parts of China, including Beijing. Like, they pause for you when you approach a pedestrian crossing. I was so confused the first time this happened I stared at the driver wide-eyed until he crossed in front of me anyway. And the streets are far less noisy because drivers don't feel the need to honk every few seconds lest there be a moment of peace and quiet in the middle of the day. Taxi drivers didn't scorn us just for existing, and picked us up as soon as we raised our hands.

English seems to be much more widely spoken than in Beijing, and we discovered that 'western' food is actually cooked into something that resembles what I eat at home. It even seems as if they don't push as much as the rest of China does to get on the subway or across the street or into a doorway. We got to the end of the trip and realised that, not only had we not had the pleasure of seeing someone vomit or piss in the street, but we so not a single person spitting, either. What is this strange alternate universe?

It was a nice break from China for a weekend, but I'm still glad of my decision to move to Beijing, even if I had had the option of moving to Shanghai. What's the point of living in China if you're not experiencing Chinese culture?

Notes for travellers:

• The fast train from Beijing to Shanghai goes at least once an hour every day. It takes 5 hours, is very comfortable, and costs 555 RMB (cheaper than air tickets, so I hear). Not difficult to get a ticket at all, so no need to stress out about booking too early.
• We stayed at The Phoenix in a triple room. Very comfortable, quiet, and more hotelish than a hostel. It's kind of in the middle of everything but just far enough away to catch a cab or subway anywhere. Next time, I'd stay in the French Concession. All accommodation is expensive in Shanghai, so it's worth just staying where you want to be.