The Ugly Little Beast Called Culture Shock
Trip Start
Oct 19, 2007
1
11
70
Trip End
Ongoing
Wuhan,
Hubei,
China
Monday, February 25, 2008
I don't think I even bothered trying to write a message about how life was going a month ago. Unless something of monumental importance has happened (car crashes and the house burning down would both fit into this category... for those I've not kept in touch with during the Taiwan years, both these things did actually happen while I was living in Kaohsiung), I don't write when I am in a shitty mood. And a month ago, I admit, I sometimes felt like about ten different kinds of crap!
The pollution had ceased to bother me (this is somewhat of a miracle, come to think of it). But by the time Mum and I got to Guilin, I could feel something akin to culture shock starting to sink its nasty little claws into me. Things that I thought were on the amusing side of disgusting when I first came here, began to feel a lot less amusing. The spitting and the really grotesque noise that accompanies it 2 seconds before the gooz ball lands a few feet in front of you... And not just out in the street, but on buses, in restaurants... how would you feel if you slipped on spit on the way to sit down and have dinner? I used to sigh and turn a blind eye, but not so many weeks ago I found myself unable to control a shudder and sneer of revoltion. The scary dunnies. The people who lift their kids up to poo into public garbage cans. When I first saw it by the side of the road, I gawked in shock. When I saw it in the domestic terminal of Guangzhou airport, I uttered something so foul, the mother in question ran away.
Don't get me started on rudeness. The shoving, people trying to cut in front of you in lines, or just cutting in front of you when walking fullstop. The endless staring. After 7 years of living in Kaohsiung, trust me, I am used to staring. I feel like something is wrong when it doesn't happen! But the staring in China is on a completely advanced level or obnoxiousness. I have threatened to stick a stranger's cell phone up his backside when I caught him taking photos of me with the camera while I was in a less than chirpy mood. The funniest was when Petra was surrounded by people watching her while she was getting her hair cut. Pissed off, she asked me to tell them to put their cameras away. I told them to put the cameras away and that it wasn't a zoo. One of the hairdressers gaped and breathed "Oh I get it... foreigners are people too!" Ouch.
Oh, and how about evil sleazy chauvinistic men in bars?! You can try to ignore them. You can yell at them. Hell, you can even hit them if you want. They don't go away. Why? Because you are a woman in a bar and they want to be "friends" with you (friends of the kind that grope). You don't have any male friends around and therefore aren't owned by anybody therefore there is no reason why you can't go off and screw them like the Hollywood movie tart they assume you must be?! Sounds bitter? You weren't there! Ask Tanya for her opinion if you think mine is jaded. I have since learnt that the 2 men, whose behaviour was by far the greatest inspiration for the tirade above were probably actually mafia, which definitely explains the bartender's lack of intervention (that really pissed me off at the time because it made me feel like as far as the bar staff were concerned, it is ok for drunk Chinese men to behave like that towards foreign women) but if anything this new piece of information makes me feel even more disturbed than before... Fantastic! So I yelled and swore at (several times at the top of my lungs), pushed (he tried to cop a feel) and bruised (after I got rid of him, he went to grope my friend's butt, what was I supposed to do?!) some Mafia jerk and his buddy?! Just what I needed, I'm sure. They were retarded-drunk so I am hoping they will not remember me, should I be unlucky enough as to run into them again.
When I came here, I swore that regardless of what was going on around me in this country, I would refuse to allow China to change me for the worse. When I rammed my luggage trolley into a woman in Guangzhou airport, I knew I was in trouble. It is not as bad as it sounds. I saw her dart forward and try and cut in front of Mum and I, despite the fact that there was plenty of space all around us and we were obviously going too fast. I knew the trolley was going to hit her. I could have hauled it back. I didn't. After it hit her and she squeaked, Mum said something like "Silly git, well, if she is going to be rude and cut in front of people like that, these things will happen..." My (possibly disappointed) reply was "Huh... I thought it was going to hit her a LOT harder than that." Mum was shocked. Her little girl, who wouldn't have hurt a fly as a child, was running about trying to flatten locals with her luggage trolley in China. I was plain fed up. Why is it always me who gives way? Why is there only a collision when I cease to give a shit, just like the people around me?
Three other things probably contributed to my state of mind. One was some of my adult students telling me they thought China would attack Taiwan in the next 2 years sometime after the Olympics. That it is inevitable (excuse me, but when is war ever inevitable?). That Taiwanese politicians and Xinjiang terrorists were the two biggest problems facing the games. And here I thought it would be pollution and overcrowding! I love Taiwan. I consider it my second home. I knew I'd hear stuff like this when I came to China. I was prepared for it. And most of the time I can switch off. When highschool students yell "Thailand is NOT a country!" when they get mixed up and think I am talking about Taiwan (we were practicing distinguishing nations from nationalities), I can laugh. When somebody says to me "Oh, so you used to live in Taiwan PROVINCE?" I can smile. After all, I walked into that one. To put it in context, the person had asked me "How long have you lived in China?" "3 months" "Why is your Chinese so good when you've only lived here for 3 months?" "Because I lived in Taiwan for 7 years." I used to be vague about my answers. You know..."I've lived in Wuhan for 3 months, but I lived in Taiwan for 7 years before that." While you will never ever hear the words "Taiwan Province" pass my lips, nor did I come here to pick fights. The problem is the more people pick on Taiwan to my face, the more defensive and pig-headed I get. When people talk about going to war with Taiwan, the person who feels like she just got a knife stuck between her ribs is me. I want to scream. I've taught children and adults in both countries. I have friends in both. I will be torn apart by any conflict between the two. It had better not happen. Those students had best be wrong. When I lived in Taiwan, I thought war was so unlikely as to be nigh impossible. Now, I just don't know. People go into fits of rage at the mere mention of Taiwanese independence (no it is not me who brings it up!) with enough passion that they do not care about possible consequences. Sure, these are not the people who would make the decision to attack, but the hundreds of missiles pointing at that one little island hardly reassure me. I admit it, I'm scared.
Next on the list of things that made me upset that month was the aftermath of a car crash I'd seen. From the site of the crash (ie, scattered shopping bags, smashed oranges) there was a bright red blood stain on the road that stretched for at least 10 meters. It doesn't take a genius to work out somebody was hit and dragged. I'd been in mid chat with a cab driver. But when we saw that, he shut up and I burst into tears and cried all the way home. The thing that upset me the most was that the blood had not been cleaned up but people were just driving over it. Nobody survives the loss of that much blood. Somebody died there. The road was wide enough to go around it.
Finally there was a woman in a hurry who pushed one of my kindergarten students in front of a car. Not nudged, not bumped, but pushed. She was almost hit (the student, not the nasty woman). Her mother and I were holding her hands. We had to yank her out of the way. I was furious and yelled at the woman. Why can't you wait the 2 seconds it will take for the car to pass? She looked at me like I was insane. What kind of a person pushes a little kid in front of a car? What kind of people drive over the blood of another (quite likely recently deceased) human being? If it were not for fantastic and considerate workmates and super nice students (I like pretty much all of my students when they aren't talking politics) I'd have been in grave danger of making some pretty nasty generalizations.
After Guilin, in the space of a week, my Mum and two closest friends, Leah and Petra, all left China. That didn't make me feel any better. But the straw that broke the camel's back was definitely the winter. The coldest China has seen in a century. Even now, I cannot feel anything but cheerful at the sight of snowflakes. But the havoc that snow caused in Wuhan just about sent me ballistic. The first sign of trouble was that the water pipes for the washing machine froze, so that we couldn't wash our clothes. Then we were without running water a couple of times because of snow freezing then busting up water pipes down the street. Finally I woke without power on two different days. The first was because we'd plugged in too many heaters (not surprising as we were damn cold and scared of freezing to death) and burnt out the circuit. The next was because there was no power in a big chunk of Hankou (the area I live) caused by heavy snowfall.
After I lost it in the hallway (I'm embarrassed to report I went on a rant to a Chinese staff member, something along the lines of "This is ridiculous. What was I thinking of, leaving Taiwan for this bullshit?") I knew little Miss Sunshine was up shit creek. I retreated to my room, hid, fully clothed under the quilt and bawled my eyes out for a couple of minutes. I'm not used to feeling helpless and I don't like it, but short of burning books to keep warm, I was at a loss for what to do. Even with 5 layers of clothing and a pair of gloves, without the heater on the room was cold enough to make my fingers numb. When I was done feeling sorry for myself, I blew my nose, picked up my Chinese text books and put them in a bag, along with a huge pile of cash. I vowed that I would walk until I found electricity and would sit down and study. When I was done I would come back and if the power was not back on I would resign, go check into a hotel where there was a power generator and heat and I would, at the very least, not die of hypothermia, then book a ticket out of this god-forsaken country. When I came back and saw the lights on in our building, I burst into tears again. It turns out I didn't really want to leave China after all. I went upstairs and wrote a vicious email to my boss in Canada about the crap living conditions (he was not to blame for the power going out, but he most certainly is to blame for the lack of insulation, the lack of proper heating and the damn rats).
That was a month ago. It got worse before it got better too. Tanya's plane got delayed by 4 hours because there was more snow. We couldn't go to Beijing because the snow was so bad no planes could take off for a couple of days. There was chaos all over the country. We were lucky. At least it was only our travel plans that bit the dust. When I think about the people who couldn't go home for Chinese New Year, the workers who died trying to restore power to the country, the people who had to finish their New Year celebrations at sunset because they had no power, were too poor to buy candles and were short on coal too... well, I feel like a bit of a sissy.
But then it stopped snowing. Both Tanya and I managed to get escape Wuhan. I went to Yunnan and Yunnan cured me. How? I'm not really sure, except that while it takes a hell of a lot going wrong to make me sad, it takes very little other than a blue sky to make me happy. After a week of blue skies and mountains I had regained lost ground. I was happy again. And not just a little. I was back to disgustingly bouncy and cheerful levels of happiness.
Now, life is good. Spring is coming. I can feel it. I still made it to the park to exercise at least once a week, even in the worst of the snow, but now I go almost every day (with a lot fewer layers of clothing). Exercise and listening to Mayday have me just about bouncing off walls. Time is an amazing thing. It ticks by and things change. A month has gone by and in that time I've gone from one extreme of my emotional spectrum to the other. Thank you blue skies, thank you Mayday, thank you park, and thank you to everybody and everything that has given me reason to smile this past month. How do I feel about China now? Sometimes it's great and sometimes it sucks. But at least I'm over my culture shock and I meant what I said. China will not change me for the worse.
