Culture Shock

I’ve mentioned before that Chinese people will often be very happy to help, whether or not they know the answer to what you’re asking; a ticket guy at the airport directed me to three different check in windows before grunting and telling me to go to the information counter. A related issue to this is the fact that Chinese people enjoy talking about their country to foreigners, though many Chinese people, especially college students, haven’t done much travel at all. When I was at the conference in Chengdu, one of the student volunteers, on hearing I was studying in Hangzhou, said “Hangzhou is very beautiful, especially West Lake”. This is about word for word what you’ll hear from anyone who knows Hangzhou. I agreed, “Yes, have you been there?” “No.” The thing is he didn’t say “I hear it’s beautiful there, how do you like it?”, his tone was as if he wanted to explain to me how great the city was, when of course I know it much better than he does.

This is an offshoot of a much bigger phenomenon in China, which I believe comes from a combination of a propagandizing culture and a strong history of rote education and straight memorization of quotations by famous scholars and historical dates. A newspaper article detailing the outcome of the 17th National Congress will repeat in summary everything that Hu Jintao spoke about, but offer no discussion on the substance of the material, past policies, etc; it seems what matters is knowing what was said. People rely on set associations and generalizations to form their opinions, and at times this can be uncomfortable for study abroad students.

When my roommate thinks of an American, she thinks of a white person. This is true for most people I’ve met; Americans are white and rich, and because white is beautiful and rich means you must be smart, Americans are better than other people. Because it is the most developed country, America is better than China. These are sentences I have heard, word for word, from roommates, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, random people on the street. In Kashgar I was approached by a man asking where I was from. He asked if America or China was better. I said I couldn’t make a comparison between the two, hoping he’d let the conversation drop, but he insisted that America was better, because it was the most developed country in the world. Others have encountered “all Americans are smart”, “Americans are taller and whiter than Chinese people, so they’re better”, etc. Last night I was getting a snack with my roommate and the vendor commented about all Americans having money. I called him on it, saying “not necessarily”, and proceeded to mention that though Americans make more money, things also cost a lot more, and there are plenty of poor people. This ridiculous idolization of things American is frustrating, especially since it’s so single-minded and widespread, especially among some college students who love American culture. I think next time someone asks I’ll say I’m Canadian or English, see what different reactions I get.

The race thing is big, and a lot have people have commented on how strongly a lack of diversity has influenced people’s thinking. Some people here have just said point-blank that they hate black people, and hate Japanese people. Having studied a bit the emotional wounds a culture can suffer and the extent to which past violence can feel very real to people in present day, I’m willing to be a bit understanding on the Japanese thing, but it’s really hard for the Asian-Americans in our program. Bamu is Japanese-American, and when people don’t assume she’s Chinese and our guide, they often give her a hard time for being Japanese. If people ask where we’re from and we say “America”, they then point to her and ask where she’s from; of course these white girls look American, but you don’t. My roommate asked me if I saw someone like Bamu or Shushan on the street in America, would I assume they were foreign? Partially because of the culture, it’s hard for some people to understand that a Chinese or Korean or Japanese person growing up in America would consider themselves first American and then something else; you are ethnically Chinese, and therefore you are Chinese. I asked one of my teachers over summer school, who teaches at UCLA, where she was from, and she said that it’s really hard to answer, because she grew up in Taiwan but her parents or grandparents were originally from somewhere in mainland China, which culturally would be considered her “老家” or her home town, though she’d never been.