Living in China

I came to China wanting to stay and am leaving wanting to leave. I guess this might sound positive, but I don’t mean it to. When I decided to come to China I didn’t do it to spend a year abroad, have a chance to travel, or to escape. I now know that these are the common reasons for people to come to China. People come here to get away from their lives. They come here because they never went abroad in college, because they’re not ready to face “the real world,” or they have a shitty dead-end job they want to get away from. But that wasn’t me.

I came to China because of my interest in the culture and language. I learned about China in school, and yes I regretted not spending a semester abroad in China, but not because I wanted to say I’d been to China or party in China or something, but because I was really interested and impressed by the country. When I thought about China I saw it as a move, a place I would go to and live in for a few years before I moved on with my life. But when I got here I felt differently about it.

Living in China is hard; it’s definitely for people with a much thinker skin than I have. China is all about competition and fighting your way to the top, which just isn’t me. I got laughed at by a friend the other day for saying I think that a tie is the best way for a game to end, but I really think that. I like fairness and working hard to achieve things. I believe in being kind and polite and sticking up for what is right.

In China you don’t get ahead because you deserve to in the way that I think of “deserving” something. You get ahead because you push your way there. In China there are no lines, there are no real laws, and there is nothing you can’t bribe your way in our out of. At a barbeque the other day my friends and I were being treated like crap until one of the people in our group started yelling and swearing at the owner, complaining about everything he could. Now the important thing to understand is that he didn’t do this to be rude, he wasn’t goading the man into giving us better service and he definitely did not alienate the man with his actions. He was making a friend. At the end of the meal the people who owned the place gave us a little discount and the man we’d been yelling at sat and had a beer with us.

Rules don’t exist until they benefit people in China, and as soon as they don’t benefit them anymore they disappear. It’s completely appropriate to interrupt someone’s class with a call or by showing up to talk with them but when you need to contact them for some reason all of a sudden their phone is off or they don’t respond, even if they’re not busy.

Bugging people isn’t rude in China; it’s just how you get stuff done. It’s not wrong to bring up the same thing twenty times, it’s just the only way you could possibly get what you want done. And you still probably won’t get it done.