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.

The lush island

Qingdao (青岛, literally Lush Island) is a cute little German-style town on the seaside. It was invaded and occupied by the Germans from the late 1800s until the first world war, at which point the Japanese took over, then the Chinese, then the Japanese again, and finally the Chinese post-WW2. During the time it was occupied by the Germans, they built roads, sewers, shops, etc. and gave it some of the best public services in Asia at the time. They also built a brewery—Tsingtao (see? Qingdao/Tsingtao, same same but different), which is still the most famous brewery in China, domestically and internationally. Although the Chinese clearly see the German (and, subsequently, Japanese) invasion as subjugation by a foreign power, it’s one of the primary reasons that Qingdao is so nice to visit and so prosperous today. 

Actually, for those who have been there, it reminded me a lot of the Gold Coast in Queensland—tall shiny buildings, huge public areas by the seaside, people are relaxed and the weather is humid from the sea. Amazingly refreshing from the dirty, smelly and very flat cityscape that is Beijing. 

We went there for the international beer festival, which I expected to be a tiny little expat wank. But, as it turns out, it’s a huge Chinese tourist event, which attracts almost 4 MILLION people per year. On the day we were there I reckon there would have been HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people. We were fooled into thinking the half-kilometre square at which we entered was the extent of the festival, which resulted in a very long and confused phone call to our friends when we were trying to find each other.

As the day wore on, we uncovered more and more different parts of the festival—beer tent after beer tent, rides (horrendously expensive), several hundred food stalls that were ALL selling the same chuanr, incredibly kitsch mouse ears/masks/bracelet things, pole dancers (in the middle of the children's rides!), character parades, contortionists, food sellers dressed in drag, half naked men jumping on tables in response to an African man on stage yelling 中国好不好? (Is China alright?). What is it with Chinese men deciding that shirts are optional as soon as the temperature goes over 30 degrees?

The sheer volume of the festival, everything about it, was astounding. It's hard to describe how it feels to be in the middle of a sea of sweaty, drunk, loud, enthused, mostly male Chinese. To be honest, all the lights and sounds and people pushing was a bit too much for the senses. What got us in the end was the BLARING music from every direction. We are a group of young people who enjoy going out for a drink and seeing some live music, but seriously, the noise from this place was unbelievable. I honestly don't understand why it is that Chinese people must have music up just loud enough to make the speakers start crackling, no matter how large they are. Anyway, end of rant. Let's just say it was definitely a cultural experience—definitely worth one visit, but I wouldn't be going back without earplugs.

Notes for travellers: 

• Fast train Beijing to Qingdao is 4.5 hours, 315RMB, very comfortable. They book out quickly, esp on weekends for events like the International Beer Festival, so get your tickets as early as possible within the 10 day window allowed by the ticket sellers.
• We stayed at Old Observatory Hostel. Pros: great service, chilled out vibe, amazing rooftop bar with Western food and good beers and cocktails. Cons: beds are super hard, it's noisy because of the type of people who stay there, it's a taxi ride away from much of the seaside. Overall would go there again.
• International Beer Festival: Travel from the old city area is about 15km (40-50 kuai in a taxi), entry is 20 kuai , beers are 20 kuai each minimum. Beware almost everything inside is relatively expensive, and it's hard to get decent food unless you love chuanr.

A great leap forward

Ha. There are so many Chinese sayings to make fun of. Life here is just an endless series of classless puns.

Anyway, what this post is actually about is learning a foreign language. I spent some time in Yunnan recently—which was absolutely gorgeous, by the way, I highly recommended going there—and one day we were stuck in a little Tibetan village with no other laowai in sight. The village was one of those cute little places you see in postcards. Rolling green hills, terraced crops, big square Tibetan houses ...

We were led towards a hut that had a gated yard out the front of it. Immediately on entering the gate, the pungent smell of cattle arse attacked our noses. Suddenly not so picture-perfect. Into the small shack at the back and I realised this is where we were having lunch. 

Feeling a little out of place, and unable to ask anyone in English what the hell is going on, I decided to throw caution to the wind (I suddenly realise what a strange saying that is ...) and try out some of my Chinese. I'm mentally trawling through pages and pages of vocab lists from my textbook.

"这是什么?" What is this? (pointing to the small bowl that is being laid out in front of me)
"是酥油茶." It is suyou tea. Suyou? What is that? Whip out my iPhone dictionary ... ah it's butter tea. Oh, and it tastes like watered down butter. Funny that.

Also I see a hard yak cheese served with sugar, soft bread rolls and yak's milk yoghurt—this is cultural experience at its best.

Ok, so we've established what we're eating. This is going ok! They can understand me, and I can pick up some of the words they're saying. Let's keep going.

"你叫什么名字?" What is your name?
Ok, I didn't really understand the answer to that, probably because you have a Tibetan name that's hard to pronounce.
Let's try ... "你去学校马?" Do you go to school?
"是的" Yes. 
"你 每天去学校马?" Do you go to school every day?
"每天" Every day.
"你今年多大?" How old are you?
"十三." 13. What the? You look about 6! 
"你今年多大?" How old are you? Ooh you cheeky little boy.

So we progress like this for a while. How many brothers and sisters does he have? Is that his older brother? Why is he not at school today? Then he asks:

"你哪国人?" What is your nationality?
"澳大利亚人" Australian. 
Wait a second, I have an idea.
"你要看照片 ... ahhh [I don't know the joining words] 澳大利亚?" Do you want to see photos ... Australia? With a smile.
Oooh that's done it. Now I have a large crowd of Tibetan children pressing in on either sides, eager to see the image being projected from the iPhone.

I show them kangaroos ("袋鼠!" How is it that this 13 year old Tibetan boy knows the mandarin word for kangaroo?), emus (no idea what that one is!), some scenic landscape from near my home. Next I find some pictures of my 妈妈 mother and 爸爸 father  ... now how exactly do I explain the concept of step-parents? "不是我爸爸 ... 是 ... 我妈妈的男朋友" This is not my father ... it is ... my mother's boyfriend! Oh my vocab is failing me, that elicited a bit of shock. 

And this is a picture of 我的男朋友 my boyfriend. "你有几男朋友?" How many boyfriends do you have? What? Did you really just ask me that? "一个!" One! He almost looks disappointed. 

Oh now this has really got them started. Questions are coming from left, right and centre. What's you're name, what's this place, what work do you do? And many that I can't understand. My head is exploding from trying to translate backwards and forwards from this crazy language. Time to redirect their attention.

"你们看, 这是北京" Look, this is Beijing. Attention is glued back to the iPhone.
"我们的中国!" Our China! They suddenly recognise the photos I'm showing them. It's a place they've never been, and they may never go there. It's more than 2000 kilometres away from here. I realise how lucky I really am, to be able to live in a place that is, in their eyes, so magical.

This is one experience I'll never forget, and not only because of the yak butter tea. It's the first time I conversed with someone in China in their own language!

The aircraft experience

So you kind of assume that flying in China is just like flying in the rest of the world. It's a straightforward process of check in-security-wait-board-fly. At that point I start to enjoy myself, forced to curl up with a book or a movie for hours on end, accompanied by hot cups of tea brought by the very responsive flight attendants.

Chinese planes? Well they are a different experience altogether. You start with the check-in queue, which, despite being signposted in both English and Chinese characters, somehow always manages to fool the locals into thinking they can take the express queue just because they don't really want to wait in the others. I can see why they give it a try, really, because Chinese airport staff seem to have a problem with actually doing their jobs. It's like every person is the first flyer ever to approach the check-in desk, and the staff can't figure out how to work the machinery, despite having two people behind every counter (one to move your bags between the two luggage belts that don't connect, of course!). If you're lucky, you might get some entertainment as you wait for the paint to dry in the form of a local guy who's got himself drunk and can no longer stand up in the queue.

Past check-in, the next phase of the party is airport security. Now this is the bane of any frequent traveller's life. But there's a special level of profanity reserved for Chinese airports, surpassed only by US airports. You've got to understand that there are far more people in China at the moment than worthwhile jobs, so they've got to find as much space as they can to absorb labour. It also increases the chance of them actually delivering the service you're supposed to be providing, because it compensates for the extreme incompetence of their workers. So keeping those things in mind, it's really quite reasonable that you have five staff per line: you need one to check your passport again (with video camera behind on case of any mishap), one to play solitaire on the computer as your luggage goes through the scanner, two to feel you up after you go though the full body scanner (one for each gender, of course), and another to stand around looking completely useless but very authoritative in their freshly ironed airport uniform.

Next stop is the departure hall, where you have your choice of a range of Chinese delicacies to pick from. These include such delights as chunks of meat in vacuum packs (not refrigerated), dried packaged baby tomatoes and hawthorn berries, unidentifiable fresh fruit with spikes and fingers, pine nut and rose happiness cake, cigarettes, and of course the ubiquitous baijiu ... all at only four times the price you'll pay on the street! If you can drag yourself away from the shopping, waiting at your gate before it's even open will be a long queue of Chinese people, making sure they get on the plane first to get the best spots for their carry-on bags. Wander past the three separate people checking your boarding pass within five metres of each other, and you're finally aboard your blessed plane. The quality of the infrastructure is significantly better than you've been lead to believe (what with all those stories of Chinese planes falling out of the sky mid-meal service), and the flight assistants are quite pleasant, so you're thinking maybe this is on the up. Maybe you'll be able to relax now.

And you can ... at least until the crew tell you that you're about to land. The seatbelt light, you learn, is really more of a vague suggestion than an actual rule, and your fellow passengers are actually allowed to get up whenever they like. Particularly just when the plane's wheels touch the ground, at which point it is totally acceptable to spring out of your seat with the agility of a surprised kitten and open the overhead lockers, spilling the contents on all those who were stupid enough to heed the seatbelt sign. Of course, the next battle is to get off the plane as soon as you can, lest you be one of the suckers left behind with a 30 second delay to the baggage collection, which means you obviously can't secure the best spot to wait 20 minutes for your baggage to come out.

At last your baggage has arrived, despite the team of 7 airport staff cleaning the baggage belt with filthy rags where your baggage is supposed to be coming out, and you think maybe you're nearing freedom. You can almost smell the fragrant wafts of Beijing smog coming from the exit. But alas, another uniformed airport staff member is shouting at you in urgent Chinese. She's pointing at the sticky bag tag on your luggage and waving frantically. You see someone else motioning to the luggage tag stuck to their boarding pass. Your boarding pass, of course, is long forgotten in the depths of your carry-on as it's now adopted the stately title of most-favoured bookmark. Dig it out, prove that you did not, in fact, steal someone else's luggage along with their dirty underwear and you're freeeeeeee … 

At least, you're free to sit with a cranky taxi driver in a traffic jam for the next two hours.

The train experience

I am just finishing off The Joy Luck Club  by Amy Tan (yes yes, I know, I should have read it years ago, but here in China it somehow seems more appropriate), and I found a passage that describes almost exactly my experiences with trains, planes, and, well any kind of public transport in this place really. I'm sure many expats will sympathise!

The landscape has become grey, filled with low flat cement buildings, old factories, and then tracks and more tracks filled with trains like ours passing by in the opposite direction. I see platforms crowded with people wearing drab Western clothes, with spots of bright colours: little children wearing pink and yellow, red and peach. And there are soldiers in olive green and red, and old ladies in grey tops and pants that stop mid-calf. We are in Guangzhou.

Before the train even comes to a stop, people are bringing down their belongings from above their seats. For a moment there is a dangerous shower of heavy suitcases laden with gifts to relatives, half-broken boxes wrapped in miles of string to keep the contents from spilling out, plastic bags filled with yarn and vegetables and packages of dried mushrooms, and camera cases. And then we are caught in a stream of people rushing, shoving, pushing us along, until we find ourselves in one of a dozen lines waiting to go through customs. I feel as if I were getting on the number 30 Stockton bus in San Francisco. I am in China, I remind myself. And somehow the crowds don't bother me. It feels right. I start pushing too.

Rumours in China

One of the peculiar outcomes of censorship is the proliferation of rumours. I hear all sorts of strange stories all the time here—a whole car of policeman was run over by a bus, sweet potatoes you buy on the street are cooked in old chemical vats, air conditioners cause respiratory diseases (but the smog doesn't!), Bo Xilai was innocent/guilty/a victim of his own wife ... a personal favourite of mine was the rumour that the Chinese Government was overturned by coup, which turned out to be (fortunately or unfortunately) entirely untruthful. How on earth did that one start?

One particularly tragic outcome of that is that people don't know what is happening exactly when they need information most—during natural disasters. The recent heavy rains in Beijing came as a surprise to me when I received emails and messages from friends and family back home. How is it that the international media know about the local weather system before locals do? I direct you to an interesting read from the New York Review of books about the consequences of this information failure.

The outcome of all this is that nobody trusts the information that is given to them. I think that'd be an interesting topic for a PhD thesis.

Cycling in Beijing (a loooong post)

Since I bought a bike about a month ago, I have spent a reasonable part of my time here cycling. So much so that it's become part of my life, like my iPhone, my hiking boots and yoghurt. Man I love yoghurt.

So cycling. Originally I was resisting buying a bike. As long as you have google maps and a 3G connection, you can get buses and subways from anywhere to anywhere in Beijing between the hours of 5.30am and 10.30pm. Yep that's right, despite being one of the biggest cities in the world, Beijing's public transport system shuts down after dinner. There are plenty of taxis around but, unfortunately, these are also hard to come by at night time and ... well I'll reserve my comments about taxi drivers for a later post. I secretly quite like the fact that you can't catch a bus in the middle of the night. Maybe this is because it more closely resembles my city of birth, whose population is less than 2 per cent of Beijing's, or maybe it's because my window here overlooks a busy road, where bus drivers do not hesitate to notify unwitting cyclists that they are in the way by blasting their horns. But I think deep down it actually just feels more wholesome this way. It's like the city is punishing you for staying out too late—the little angel on your shoulder gently saying YOU SHOULD BE IN BED!

Where was I? Oh yes, I was resisting buying a bike. Simultaneously, I was looking for some place to exercise, to work off the fine layer of (Peking roast duck-) fat that was starting to envelop my hips. Gyms are surprisingly hard to come by in this place. Chinese people don't use them and, for the most part, the Westerners that want them are paid a sum fit for a monarch in this city. That means gyms here are under-equipped and incredibly expensive. I scoured the internet for weeks trying to look for a reasonably priced, clean gym that was nearby to my office or my house. I eventually found one gym in the basement of the Chang'an theatre and they quoted me ¥2,000 for a six month membership. That is actually more expensive than at home, and here my income is only a fifth of what I was earning at home! Crazy!

Even though I tried my very hardest at bargaining in Chinese and, when that didn't work, my colleague called and spoke Chinese with the gym manager, they wouldn't budge on the price. So I got grumpy (as I usually do when I don't get enough exercise) and stomped off to my local bike guy. That is, a place on the street where my friends bought their bikes at slightly less of a Western-premium than those in the bike shops. I bought mine—a little rusty but totally loveable—for about ¥200. Check it out:

I explained in very broken Chinese that my friend, who had come with me, also wanted a similar standard of bike. The trusty bike guy says "10分钟" (10 minutes) and toddles off. My friend and I are left a bit confused, standing there wondering whether he his actually going to come back. Sure enough, ten minutes later he's back, with a really nice Giant bike in reasonable condition. Hmmm ... wonder where he got that from? And I wonder what sort of deal he has with the bike shop he's standing in front of for them to let him get away with this?

So I'm assuming both our bikes were stolen from unsuspecting foreigners at some point. Bike stealing is a big problem in Beijing, which is kind of to be expected when most people leave their bikes on the street without locks. Maybe this is showing my Western gen-Y origins, by why the hell would you leave a bike unattended in a huge city without locking it? To be fair, most foreigners buy shiny new bikes with shiny new locks, and people still manage to steal them. I hear that many of the locks sold on the streets of Beijing actually have uniform keys (of course! it's cheaper that way!) so that probably doesn't help, although I suspect most of the stealing is done with a trusty set of bolt cutters.

Wow have I really written this much without even getting to the actual riding part? Let's get to it.

Riding in Beijing is nothing like riding in Australia. At home, if you're a cyclist, you must be:
a) super athletic, because obviously you ride hundreds of kilometres a week (and/or up and down mountains);
b) rich, because look at that shiny silver titanium bike that you chose over a house deposit; and
c) really un-self conscious, because ... c'mon you're wearing lycra!

Here, it's completely the opposite. Everyone rides a bike, or at least remembers the time when there were no private cars, and it was the only way of getting around. Cycling is not for exercise, or for leisure, or for competition, it's to get you from A to B. That means you have to do it in a suit and tie, or a skirt and heels, or a silk dress, depending on your destination. It means there's no point in having gears, because Beijing is flat and you can't ride any faster than the traffic, which is all going under 20km/hr anyway. It also means you have to find some way of carrying around your most treasured things, like your handbag (everyone has a basket), your best friend (no problem! they can just sit on the luggage rack at the back!) or your garbage (get a three-wheeler with a trailer!). Think I'm joking? Check out these pics:

You also need to have some way of avoiding the rain:

This is how the world-class recycling system in Beijing works:

How else do you carry your mattresses? 

Illegal aliens and soft power

I want to pick up on a thread that's been weaving it's way through my intellectual life here in Beijing (which is somewhat confined due to my lack of Mandarin)—the Chinese sense of self identity and how that affects foreigners like me.

I posted earlier an extract from Simon Winchester about the self confidence of Chinese people as a society. Winchester's hypothesis is that the Chinese have so long and deep a history as a people that they exude a self-assuredness that is, at its most benign, unexpected for the unwary Westerner. Winchester describes this cultural phenomenon as 'frustrating' for visitors to the Middle Kingdom, but his tone leads to something slightly more sinister—self confidence can quickly become a kind of xenophobia in the wrong circumstances.

[beware inflammatory juxtaposition!] Beijing recently announced an action plan to 'Clamp Down on Illegal Aliens'—i.e. foreigners living in the city without appropriate documents. You might think this is an unintentional slight that really comes down to a simple misunderstanding of the negative connotations of the term 'illegal aliens'—surely it's just Chinglish? Yes, you might think that, except for the more detailed account provided by state television broadcaster CCTV's Yang Rui on national television:

The Ministry of Public Security is getting rid of foreign trash right now, arresting foreign scum and protecting innocent Chinese girls from them; but in order to do that, we need to focus on Sanlitun and Wudaokou, and target those who frequent the areas and its event organizers. Foreigners who can't find a job in their home country come to China and get involved in illegal business activities such as human trafficking and espionage; they also like to distribute lies which discredit China to persuade locals to move abroad. A lot of them look for Chinese women to live with as a disguise to further their espionage efforts. They pretend to be tourists traveling around the country while actually helping Japan and Korea make maps and collect GPS data for military purposes. We need to take action, first kick that crazy foreign journalist from Al Jazeera out of the country and close their Beijing office, and then shut everybody up, all the members of the foreign press who demonize China.

(The reference to 'protecting innocent Chinese girls', by the way, appears to be a thinly veiled allusion to either the recent attempted molestation of a Chinese local by a white male, or the ongoing rumour that foreign men are 'taking' many of the local eligible young women, or perhaps both.)

I'm not going to get into the political reasons for this move, as there has been a lot of commentary on the subject of why the Government is taking this action, and why now. But I am interested in what this tells us about the Chinese worldview and how I should behave in response.

Obviously, and I want to make this plain, nobody should be making any kind of extreme generalisations that attempt to confront racism with racism. Even on the China Daily website, underneath the publication of the above quote from Yang Rui, there are a few comments that allude to the fierce debate that rages constantly among Chinese locals about whether foreigners are to be welcomed or despised. It's certainly true that Yang is not representative of the opinions of all Chinese people. But it presents an interesting question that has been intriguing me since before I arrived here—how do Chinese people see foreigners? How do they see Australians? What should I be aware of in my interactions with Beijingers so that I can treat them with respect and humility?

As an amusing yet relevant anecdotal pause, I was recently discussing with my coworkers their travels overseas, what they enjoyed and what they didn't, and how these experiences compared to my own. Firstly, their experiences were much more limited than mine. I have been lucky enough to travel through many parts of Europe on a number of occasions, live and study for a short time in western Europe, see the US and parts of southeast Asia and travel a fair bit within Australia and New Zealand. That's not outside of the normal range of experiences among my peer group. My coworkers, on the other hand, have seldom travelled even within China. Some have been overseas with work for short (week-long) conferences, and very few have had the chance to study overseas. But none have been anywhere outside China for pleasure. I try to be conscious of my privileged upbringing and suggest that maybe this is because Chinese people have not been as wealthy as some Western countries, and therefore lack the opportunity to travel. My colleagues agree in part, but in general, they cannot understand how you could possibly exist outside China, where the food is so repulsive! Why would you want to go somewhere you have to travel all the way to Chinatown to get a decent feed?

Now I can attest to the fact that Chinese people have a lot to be proud of with regard to their food. It is, as mentioned previously, AMAZING. But I still like other types of food, too. What would the world be like without pizza, croissant, borscht, hummous or hamburgers? Food is not like an exclusive covenant, where you can only choose one cuisine and you're holed up in one type of food hall for the rest of your life.

What surprised me the most, though was their remorseless attack on the food of other countries. Foreign food was, according to my coworkers, 'disgusting'. On the few occasions they travelled internationally, they lost weight because they 'couldn't find anything edible'. Maybe food is just one of those issues that gets Chinese people really riled up. Or maybe it's a sign of a broader disinterest in different cultures that results from Winchester's self-assured 'Chineseness'. I certainly don't think my coworkers meant any harm, and they probably didn't anticipate that my reaction could be to take offence. Luckily for them, I come from a country without a strong identifying cuisine (unless you count Vegemite as a cuisine ...), so I found the whole thing more amusing than offensive.

Whatever the reason behind Chinese people not travelling much, the broader impact of this phenomenon is that locals, even in Beijing, which is incredibly globalised these days, don't expect me to have a different cultural background. They don't anticipate that I may not know how to eat a whole fish with chopsticks, and they can't see why I wouldn't know the etiquette rules of Chinese business meetings. This obviously leads to some hilarious situations as per my previous post. One thing they do know for sure is that I'm immeasurably rich. Rich enough to buy anything I want and rich enough to pay three times the locals' price at the markets. And they are right in some ways. I try to say that I'm on an allowance that just covers my living expenses with little to spare, and that things in Australia actually cost a lot more than China, or even than the US. But truth be told, i know I'm incredibly privileged to be educated and able to travel. My salary in Australia is many multiples of the most extravagant pay packets here. 

This brings me to the conclusion of my long and winding meanderings that began at 4am this morning. My insomnia led me to James Fallows' recent blog on the rise of China (a somewhat larger and deeper topic than this one!):

Soft power becomes powerful when people imagine themselves transformed, improved, by adopting a new style. Koreans and Armenians imagine they will be freer or more successful if they become Americans -- or Australians or Canadians. Young men and women from the provinces imagine they will be more glamorous if they look and act like people in Paris, London, or New York. If a society thinks it is unique because of its system, or its style, or its standards, it can easily exert soft power, because outsiders can imagine themselves taking part in that same system and adopting those same styles. But if it thinks it is unique because of its identity -- "China is successful because we are Chinese" -- the appeal to anyone else is self-limiting.

Fallows is clearly talking about China's ability to influence on the international geopolitical stage, but it makes me wonder: will I always, regardless of how hard I study my Mandarin textbook, be an outsider here? No matter how much I come to enjoy pork dumpling for breakfast, is it actually impossible for me to be a part of this incredibly exhilarating, stimulating and vivacious Chinese world?

Guess I'll have to wait to find out.

On the importance of representing your people

Me: This slide shows the Australian perspective on policy making. You can see here that there are many influences on politicians' decisions about policy.


Colleague: What does 'Commonwealth Government' mean?


Me: The national government.


Colleague: Oh yes, the central government. [points to a box that shows 'Voters (the public)' have an influence on decision-making] What does this mean?


Hmmm ... she must not understand the word 'voters'.


Me: Voters, you know, people who vote for the Government. The population.


Colleague: Oh right! Yes that is important for other countries. We do not have to worry about that here.

The Chinese state of mind

It is a Chinese state of mind, and one that outsiders - and all who are non-Chinese are very much outsiders here - may occasionally find infuriating and insufferable, but that certainly exists, and at no great depth beneath the Chinese skin ... It is an attitude of ineluctable and self-knowing Chinese superiority, and it results from the antiquity and the longevity of the Chinese people's endeavours ...  

The very fact that Chinese achieved so much and so quickly (fifteen major inventions a century, as [Joseph] Needham once calculated) appears to have created a sense of self-satisfaction and superiority - a king of national smugness that led Emperor Qianlong to remark so famously to Lord Macartney, "we possess all things ... I have no use for your country's manufactures.' And this self-congratulatory complacency, this hubris, inevitably contributed to the problems that caused the empire in time to flounder and fall, and that led to the poverty and backwardness that characterised China for so long. 

But China is neither poor nor backward any more; and it is one of the ironies of history that the success of modern China derives in large measure from this very same sense - which aggrieved westerners like Lord Macartney might say was a peculiarly and infuriatingly Chinese sense - of self-certainty, of an unshakeable confidence about its position at the centre of the world. And all this certainty derives from the sturdy foundation of civilisation that China built for itself so very long ago ... 

For silk, tea, bureaucracy, and the early inention of the compass as such do not make China what it is. What makes China different is the case-hardened sense of inner certitude that this vast array of invention has given to it.

- Simon Winchester, The Man who Loved China - the life of Joseph Needham (title of the UK edition: Bomb, Book and Compass)

3 days in the life of a Chinese workplace

DAY 1: Asked counterpart if 9am meeting was acceptable. She says "10am is better, 9am too earlier". Then night before she texts me:

 "I'm in the suburb of Beijing .maybe I can't arrive at our office on time in tomorrow morning .could we meet at half past 11.I would like to treat you a welcome lunch first ,after that , we can talk about our working.how about that?"

I think this is a good situation. Plus I need to register myself at Big Brother foreigner registration in the morning, which takes 1.5 hours longer than anticipated of painful language barrier-ridden queuing. Arrive at 11.30, counterpart is running 15 minutes late. Meet counterpart at 12 midday and head to lunch. Yes! More fabulous food - this time salad (surprisingly similar to how Mum makes it), silken tofu soup, eggplant fabulousness and red bean sticky rice that is like crack cocaine on my palette. No of course I cannot pay, this is a welcome lunch! Counterpart takes me for a tour of the office, fills out a form in Chinese and realises she should have told me to bring my laptop. She tells me to go home and enjoy the lovely—only moderately smoggy—afternoon. Also to pack my bags for a work trip to nearby Shandong province starting tomorrow. Sum total 2.5 hours of 'work'. 

DAY 2: Supervisor rings my mobile a 4.56am. We are flying out to Dongying and he will pick me up in 20 minutes. Sleepy ride to the airport ends in breakky at the airport of Hong Kong style soup with dumplings and noodles. First chopstickful lands on my nice clean skirt, to my supervisor's immense amusement, then I realise my cup of water is freshly boiled only after pouring down my throat (reminder this is an indecent hour of the morning). After a very pleasant flight, we arrive in Dongying at a chandelier-laden hotel with the biggest rooms I’ve ever seen. I'm told that today is for xiuxi (rest) in the king-sized bed. Ok, resting it is! Fresh pair of clean men's underwear is in the bathroom but no iron? 

Phone call at 11.30 announces someone is taking us to lunch ... now. Ok! Clothes back on. Drive into a gated series of caul-de-sacs. What? Double storey houses with white picket fences? Are we in country USA? No it's a Chinese Western-style community, which apparently is a sign of wealth. Hauled into someone's living room, eat something that tastes like peanut and sugar but looks like a spider web wound into a little ball with chunks of tasty dead fly. Not too bad, actually. 

Get up again, we are going to pick caomei (strawberries) in the garden … I’m not sure why. Then back in the car (aha! We are not eating at the obsessive gardener's East-meets-West house) to a local restaurant. A man who looks like Santa crossed with Genghis Khan motions to us with his long stick. I realise there is a big plastic pool of fish next to him—this is a nice one? He's asking me. I smile politely and then the next minute BAM he's clubbing the fish with a rolling pin. Surprise surprise, carp for lunch. It's cooked in a hotpot in the middle of the table, boiled in front of us with Chinese cabbage and tofu. The waitress comes to stir the soup and carries a bowl of yellow dough. She is rolling it up into balls and slapping it to the side of the pot so that they become lovely carp-scented steamed maize breads. My suspicion is the hot pot is actually supposed to be spicy and they have left out the chilli (as a token gesture for the foreigner) which is why it's kind of bland. Two men eat almost a whole 40cm fish while I have a whole one piece before it becomes too much. Then back to hotel to xiuxi some more. 

Another phone call heralds dinner time! Walk into a private room hoping this will be a nice cosy end to a rather strange day. Instead, we find eight men already at the table standing, smiling, and waving us into three special seats they have allocated to us. I realise my boss is the distinguished guest of a group of local politicians. Wishing I read over that chapter on Chinese banquets! Oh memory, why do you only store useless pieces of information? Let's think: host faces door, 2nd most VIP to his right, 3rd to his left. Sit where told. Don't eat or drink until the host does. Only drink when toasted. Be careful of the dreaded baijiu. Cheers with lip of glass lower than the other person's. 

Food keeps coming out and I don't get a chance to eat because I have to stand up every 3.5 seconds for another toast. And for some reason I have to drink baijiu while everyone else gets wine. No fair! Ok so finished toasting, now I can eat ... oh everybody is getting up. What? We're leaving? It's only 7.30 and after all those shots I'm slightly more than tipsy. Back to dark room. 

DAY 3: 1am get to sleep dehydrated—turns out baijiu is not easy on the stomach. 2am wake to sounds of excited or angry female voice through the wall. Think my colleague may have a mistress ... struggling to accept cross-cultural difference while half asleep and suffering from hangover. Alarms screams breakfast. Then we meet last night's guests in the foyer and three black cars turn up. Incidentally, black is a bad choice in the most polluted country in the world, but it's a national obsession. The local politicians and their buddies get in the black cars in a fluid organised motion according to a set of rules that is plainly obvious to everyone but me. 

An usher quickly shoves a small flower onto my lapel before I get shuffled into a large lecture hall. My boss is on the panel in front of me, and I am seated in the front row. In the middle. By myself. Nobody seems to care that I can't actually read or understand anything the panel is saying. I don't even know the name of this conference or what it's about. Each panel member gets up and says about 30 seconds worth of (what seems like) stirring but serious speech. Then the audience claps for barely a few seconds after each speaker—for some reason this makes me uncomfortable, as if there were some international standard for applause that is not being met.

My boss is urgently motioning for me to get up and leave. I realise the introductory speeches are over, or there has been some hiatus. I leave the lecture hall but my boss stays in there to give his lecture. Now I'm stuck with a group of local officials who do not speak English and can't really understand why I'm there. Or maybe they do, but I don't? I find out shortly that we are doing a tour of some buildings—a university dorm, a LED light factory, a 'software park', a real public park, and some government offices. Each place has a dedicated officer with a headset and speaker to provide the tour. The head honcho seems to be disinterested, and I don't really blame him. He likes the 3D televisions, though. Then we are abruptly sitting at a conference table drinking lü cha (green tea). The two sides of the table—one side with local Dongying officials, and the other side with officials from somewhere else nearby—take turns in giving epic speeches while everybody else sits in silence, trying not to fall asleep. My boss (returned from the abyss) tells me they are listing their city's achievements. What the?

Then to lunch. By this time I'm savvy. Not the stunned mullet I was yesterday. Oh yes, you can't fool me, I know what to expect. I can do this whole banquet thing, you just watch me.

Walk into the most ornately furnished dining room I've ever been inside. A whole new set of people here. Head honcho from this morning is not sitting in the host seat—he is number 2 on the table this time. The host from last night's banquet is not even in a position of honour here, he's just one of the participants. Realise there is no lazy susan to distribute the meals like any other banquet in which I have participated. Waitresses start bringing out individual meals and Mr Host turns up. Lots of standing and bowing and chasing others' glasses to the floor trying to get my glass lower than theirs. Mr Host is apparently the 2IC for the whole city, which is why everybody is suddenly silent, solemnly listening to his ranting. More individual dishes come out—soups, sea cucumbers, things that look like prawns but are only a centimetre long, vegetables, fruit, unidentifiable pieces of fish. I lose count when the whole crabs start coming out. I have to ask my boss how to eat it—how embarrassing! Luckily you don't have to do that one with chopsticks.

Then Mr Host gets up and moves to a non-honoured guest seat. What's going on? Boss seems edgy, he tells me the 'most important man' in the whole city is coming to dine with us! More toasting, more standing up and sitting down, more listening to long rants from slightly tipsy politicians in Chinese. I wonder whether it's acceptable to just get up and go to the bathroom? Nobody else seems to be doing it, or maybe they're just subtle. Where is the bathroom, anyway? Did I ever learn how to ask it in Chinese? Maybe that waitress will tell me. Oh! Everybody is up again. Time to go. Shake hands with the 'most important man' and get shuffled into a car, belly aching and head reeling with new information.

What the hell just happened?

Forbidden City and Summer Palace

Someone told me recently that Aboriginal people in Australia often painted over their rock paintings—it was never expected that they would be preserved in their original form. So, again demonstrating my generation's cultural identity, I did a quick search on the interwebs to get the facts. According to the Australian Government's site on the Kakadu National Park's Aboriginal rock art, "At many sites in Kakadu images have been painted over each other: the artist was not concerned about preserving an image for posterity but simply wanted to paint to tell a story."


So I'm sitting here beside a cute little pond I found nearby my hotel and contemplating how the Chinese treat their cultural heritage. I'm sure this is a well-discussed topic in intellectual circles to whose conversations I'm not privy, but in the absence of any further research from my iPhone, these are a few observations I've made in the past few days.


Western people like to maintain their historical artefacts in their original condition—untouched to the extent possible—as if it somehow proved that the history is real. Anybody who has tried to see the David, or the Mona Lisa, you'll know that you can't just wander up and trace their curves with the tips of your fingers or stick your nose up close to see if the eyes are actually following you. I think our societies try to keep our cultural relics unchanged because we value objective truths in history. Chinese people, on the other hand, do not consider it necessary to keep a monument, building or painting in its original condition. They can't understand why you would. If you didn't rebuild things, they would look old and shabby! Why would you want to fence off a building? How can you use the building if it is fenced off? What is the point of having a temple if nobody can enter it?


Personally, I like the Chinese approach. I think it is so much more vibrant to live your history. It's nowhere near as boring as stuffy museums and art galleries full of high heels, dark suits and the occasional hipster stocking. It helps everybody to become part of their history and to remember where they came from. It brings history and culture to the people, and boy do many many people come to these places. We went to the Summer Palace on a public holiday weekend, and it was absolutely packed full of Chinese people, mainly from other regions. Imagine that, people wanting to see historical places in their own country. The Forbidden City was the same. 


Strangely enough, rural visitors seem almost as interested in the laowai (foreigners) as they are in their society's history! I lost count quickly of how many pictures were taken of me and my (white Australian) friends. Sometimes the culprit would sidle up to us—just that little bit too close!—and we would find ourselves unexpectedly in the middle of a family portrait. I asked our volunteer Chinese guide why they wanted photos of us, and she responded simply 'because you are beautiful'. So lovely, but I still don't understand why they take photos of us.
Given that we are all allowed to get up close and personal with Chinese historical sites, I have managed to visit two in my first week of China and this is what they look like:

Summer Palace

Forbidden City