It's a Mystery

Living in China for several months, there are many customs and trends to which I have adjusted. Early posts centered on the novelties that came with life in China, the things I couldn’t figure out or found troublesome and foreign. Recently these posts have become fewer, partly because I now take many of these differences for granted. I have in many ways become accustomed to life in China. There are, however, still some things that make me realize that I will never fully understand China, its culture or its people. In no particular order, I give them to you now.

1. I was in our campus convenience store trying to spend the cash remaining on my ID card, and found a pile of black and red tote bags embroidered with the words “Trader Joe’s”. I can understand seeing these in a random market with lots of fake purses and such, but a college campus?

2. Chinese fashion and hair. I went shopping last weekend and we saw quite some interesting outfits, including a 40-year-old woman in black leather ankle-length pants, a bright pink cardigan and sneakers. Also one hairstyle that seems to be popular is a perm with lots of choppy layers and a big fan of ironed flat bangs.

3. Cabs. They are convenient and generally cheap, but in Hangzhou they all disappear around 5:00 when they have to check in or switch drivers. It is impossible to get a cab anywhere in the city from about 4:00 to 5:30, peak traffic time and the time when the buses are so crammed full of people that you can rarely get on.

4. China is developing, very quickly. Anyone who reads the newspapers will of course say “well, yeah of course”. But my point is that on the ground development is taking place at a speed that is unheard of in other countries. Consider: I went to a favorite fried noodle place near school one day, and the cooking was taking place, as usual, on the sidewalk in front, next to a table of ingredients. I went back for lunch the next day and suddenly there was an almost completely done kitchen enclosure. A restaurant near school closed down, was entirely gutted, had no front wall for a good period of time, and reopened about two weeks later completely renovated. I heard a story of a street-crossing underpass in Urumqi built in anticipation of greater Olympics-related tourism (Urumqi is really far away from Beijing) start to finish, including outfitting it with retail shops, in a week.

5. The Olympics are everywhere: sponsors have been displaying the Beijing 2008 logo on ads and products for years, every city has official Olympics merchandise stores (and knockoff goods in all the markets), the gym at the University I was studying at was decorated on the outside with the Olympic rings. I know it’s a matter of national pride, but it’s really pervasive.

6. Firecrackers. Rumor has it that during the Chinese New Year, many foreigners fear for their lives due to the number of fireworks and firecrackers people set off of their rooftops, and I believe it. Especially at weddings and grand openings, firecrackers are used in abundance, and you can often hear them echoing from farther-off places, having no idea what they are celebrating. It’s endless. When that restaurant near school re-opened, there was an entire are of sidewalk covered with firecrackers, filling the whole area with smoke and deafening sound.

7. English education. The kid who begged near a bar we frequented spoke practically accent-free (though limited) English, but most of our roommates, echoing spoken Chinese, put a vowel after every consonant sound. I doubt any of their teachers have ever been to English-speaking countries, and the material they study is more absurdly useless than what we used to study. In the course of helping my roommate with her homework, I had to explain to her what Hepatitis was, and explain words like “hoist” taken from a passage explaining US flag protocol. One friend found her roommate memorizing words by letter (for instance, one day just reading a list of words that start with ‘A’). I once looked at my roommate’s corrected homework. The sentence she’d written in response to a question (I don’t know if it was the right answer or not) was grammatically shaky but not wrong, and then the teacher had, in her corrections, added an adjective in an entirely incorrect spot, turning the sentence into nonsense.