Planning to eventually move back to your home country after an extended stay in China? Then you have a problem. I suggest you be on the lookout for this sneaky little bugger, because he will get you, and there’s no escape.

He won’t jump up in your face and assault you outright; that’s not this saboteur’s modus operandi. Instead, he’s spent the entire time you’ve lived in China scheming against you, lurking just outside your range of perception, slowly sabotaging your much-anticipated homecoming from within the subconscious regions of your mind. His name is usually some variation of “reverse culture stress” or “re-entry shock,” and he can be a nasty piece of work, especially if you fly home with unrealistic expectations, unaware and unprepared. Fortunately, although you can’t avoid him, you can be ready for him when he comes, and that can make your re-adjustment back into your home culture a much less stressful and negative experience.

Welcome… home?

When you arrive back in whatever overdeveloped, obscenely rich nation you probably came from (no offense meant to the minority of expats from developing countries; offense to expats from the overdeveloped “first world” is entirely intentional, but when you’re in the middle of a bout of reverse culture stress you’ll happily agree with me anyway), re-adjustment might not seem like too big a deal at first. Your nominally curious friends will ask you, “So, how’s China?” And you’ll answer, “Uhhh… good?” Maybe you’ll all go out for “real Chinese food,” and they’ll give you painfully awkward looks when you eat bite-by-bite straight out of the serving dishes and hold your bowl off the table close to your mouth. Or maybe your sister will freak out when she discovers that somebody put used toilet paper in the garbage can. Or maybe you’ll do like me (I wouldn’t know anything about the aforementioned toilet paper incident) and refuse to accept the fact that your home city was built for cars, not bikes, and become a road hazard by insisting on walking and biking everywhere even though you’ve forgotten how the traffic works, violating numerous by-laws in the process and making the local motorists nervous.

There are myriad ways you can be surprised by the fact that you are no longer effortlessly at home in your own culture. Many such experiences are superficial and even funny, but the accumulation of such anecdotes can result in strong, confusing and stressful underlying emotions that leave you feeling almost as disoriented in your own culture as you were when you first arrived in China. In a way it’s even worse in your own culture: unlike in China, at home you have no excuse for not fitting in, nor do you expect to ever need one. But after a few months, the romanticizing of your home culture in which you indulged while away takes a U-turn. You become more critical and angry than ever with your home society; its flaws appear all the more damning and its benefits superficial or discounted. Reverse culture stress bleeds out through your negative attitude and actions. This is not only out of character, but seemingly without cause. Your family wants to know what your problem is, but you don’t know. Re-entry stress is a sneaky little son-of-a-turtle.

Friends’ Experiences

Bio returned to his native Brazil after years of graduate school in Texas, and he describes his cultural re-adjustment experience this way:

Take it easy on reverse cultural shock. It was awful to me. I started questioning everything as if it was totally different from before I left. It’s such a strange feeling! Till today I still react. There is a bit of American/European value in me after the experience living abroad. I guess I learned to appreciate it.

Beth, an American physiotherapist in Tianjin, likens it to the ultimate foreigner experience:

Reentry is like you’ve been abducted by aliens and had tests performed on you then you are returned back to your planet. When you go back to your home country you look about the same but you can feel completely different and feel like you don’t know how to do some normal things you used to do every day because of the alien experience you have had living overseas.

Sonja, a native of Germany who lives in Tianjin, describes it this way:

It’s part of the parcel, I think, and often hits when least expected and can be as nagging as toothache. Toothache you can figure out quite easily, but it sometimes takes some time until the realization “Oh, I’m culture-stressed!” hits home.

Who are you and what did you do with my home?

How did this happen? It’s simple, really: You left Blueland and went to Yellowland, and after a few years you’ve taken on an odd greenish tinge. You haven’t really noticed or understood this gradual change, even if you think you do. In ways deeper than you realize, Yellowland has altered your preferences, comfort zones, expectations, even the autopilot that guides you through crowds and traffic. On top of all this, while you were away Blueland faded to a slightly different shade of blue. Neither you nor “Home” are the same as when you left. This means that arriving home expecting to effortlessly slide back into the way things were is a small tragedy waiting to happen. Bethany, an American grad student in Beijing, experienced this first-hand:

When I’m in a foreign country, I don’t expect to understand anybody, and nobody expects to understand me – and since this total lack of understanding finds expression in every aspect of my daily life, my expectations are all fulfilled; and though uncomfortable, I at least find comfort in knowing what to expect. When I come back home, I expect to understand everyone and for everyone to understand me – but because living in a foreign country has indelibly left its mark on me, i just end up confusing and being confused by everyone else, and I feel even more out of place and disjointed at “home” than I did in the foreign country.

Tianjin English teacher Shannon Ingleby succinctly and unforgettably describes the experience this way:

Re-entry stress is like the direction of water when you flush a toilet in China… backwards and stinky.

It’s a rude awakening – rude because it sneaks up on you, biding its time to one day ambush your hitherto subconscious assumptions with the realization that things aren’t the way you remember them in your home country, and your home country could say the same about you.

How to Deal

To anticipate and respond to your inevitable experience of reverse culture stress, it helps to go in with both eyes open and informed, expecting, recognizing and understanding these inevitable feelings for what they are when they hit you.

Reverse culture stress doesn’t engulf everyone with the same force. Your particular experience will likely be shaped by several related factors. Here are three of the big ones:

• the amount of time you spent abroad,
• your degree of cultural adaptation while abroad,
• your personality and personal flexibility.

The longer you’re away, the more opportunity both you and your home each have to change. How much you change, of course, depends on how you spent that time abroad, how meaningfully you engaged and adapted to your host culture. If you lived, worked, and played in one of Tianjin’s lǎowài ghettos (aka 洋人街), living the life of a long-term tourist, chances are you got a smaller dose of Chinese culture; you’re still mostly blue with maybe the slightest whiff of green around the edges. But if you lived in an average Chinese neighbourhood for several years and spent most of your free time with local friends doing local things in Mandarin, you might be bright green in a few spots. The people who changed less while abroad have less adjusting to do when they return. Hard core, KTV-loving, Mandarin-speaking, culture-snob lǎowàis (p.s. – more power to ya) will probably be in for a harder time when they try to re-adjust back home. The upshot is that if you were flexible enough to adjust to China, then you are flexible enough to re-adjust back home whether you feel like it or not.

There are several things you can do to ease the stress of re-adjustment:

• Find others to talk to who’ve also returned home after extended time abroad.
• Recognize your feelings for what they are: the totally normal result of re-entering your home society after extended time away. It doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you, or that you’re a failure, or that you’re inflexible or can’t handle change.
• Expect to experience the culture stress cycle again: honeymoon (initial euphoria of returning home), disillusionment (negative reaction to home not feeling like home), adjustment (correcting unrealistic expectations and accepting the new situation).
• Realize that your perception of your home culture, while possibly enhanced and enriched due to your time away, is also heavily coloured by your culture stress feelings. When you’re in the second stage of the culture stress cycle, resist the urge to romanticize your host culture while demonizing your home culture. This urge arises from your reverse culture stress, not reality. If you feel like moving off to a monastery or a hippie farm, give it a few months first.
• Re-engage the relationships you left behind when you went to China. You can’t simply pick up where you left off because everyone has changed over the years, but you can catch up and move forward.

Related Posts:

• Homecoming Saboteur: the cultural shock of returning home (PART 2)
• How to: Confuse the traffic in your hometown
• Temporary return to Vancouver – Day 5
• China-friendly New Year’s Resolutions for Laowais

“People are worth less in China” is a provocative way to say that, in Chinese culture, there is less inherent value ascribed to the individual. The individual, in and of itself, is worth less, and this allows for routine public behaviour that appalls hyper-individualistic Western foreigners.

It’s not that the Western world is populated with millions of Mother Teresas or that the average Canadian naturally gushes altruism. Western cultures have their ugly sides. Besides, the Good Samaritan as most Westerners understand it is a watered down, less-obligated, mere shadow of the revolutionary and counter-cultural original.

Still, encountering Good-Samaritanless behaviour on the streets of the Middle Kingdom unavoidably tempts foreigners to indulge feelings of cultural and moral superiority whether such feelings are warranted or not. But regardless of which culture you belong to or how you think they compare, how we respond to other human beings is a moral issue. And knowing how to best act in situations in a culture that’s foreign to you requires some cultural understanding.

If you’re a foreigner in China, I hope Part 2 will help you better understand some of the shockingly calloused behaviour you’re occasionally witnessing; writing this is part of my own culture learning process. If you’ve never been to China, this article explores cultural factors behind the kind of behaviour described in Part 1 by surveying a handful of culture readings. (To discuss how we might intentionally respond to this particular aspect of Chinese culture, see Part 3).

I. Placing Blame

Why, when a man is bleeding from the head in the middle of the road in Tianjin, are the foreigners the only ones who rush to help, even though they’ve been advised by their Chinese friends to just walk on by? How can the supposedly “communal” Chinese not care about strangers?

The idea that Chinese don’t show even nominal concern for strangers isn’t new. Chinese social commentators bemoaned this aspect of Chinese society well before Liberation (1949). What or who gets the blame for this? As you may have guessed, Confucius — in whom Mainland Chinese both officially and in popular imagination currently locate the essence and source of “Chineseness” — takes a lot of flak.

林语堂 (Lín Yǔtáng) offers an explanation in My Country and My People, which he wrote in English to introduce Chinese culture to foreigners in 1935:

…Confucianism omitted out of the social relationships man’s social obligations toward the stranger, and great and catastrophic was the omission. Samaritan virtue was unknown and practically discouraged. Theoretically, it was provided for in the “doctrine of reciprocity”… But this relationship toward “others” was not one of the five cardinal relationships, and not so clearly defined. … In the end, as it worked out, the family became a walled castle outside which everything is legitimate loot [p.177].

Culture scholars Gao and Ting-Toomey convey similar observations (Communicating Effectively with the Chinese, 1998):

Cheng (1990) points out that the Confucian “five cardinal relationships” (wǔ lún; 五伦) put too much emphasis on family and one-to-one relationships (e.g., brother to brother and father to son); hence, they fail to address the broader aspect of human relationship, such as that between a person and the community at large. Liáng Qǐ Chāo 梁启超 (1936), a prominent thinker in modern Chinese history, attributed a Chinese person’s lack of “civic morality” (gōng dé; 公德) and sense of obligation to society to the Confucian ethic [p.14].

II. Suffocating Cynicism

The Mainland’s disturbing apparent lack of compassion for the stranger is enabled by the wilting cynicism directed at any would-be Good Samaritans. Why, if someone does dare to help, are they automatically viewed with suspicion and often assumed guilty? Why are altruistic motives the least likely of all possibilities? Here’s the most quotable explanation I’ve come across so far, once again from 林语堂 (Lín Yǔtáng):

To Chinese, social work always looks like “meddling with other people’s business.” A man enthusiastic for social reform or in fact for any kind of public work always looks a little bit ridiculous. We discount his sincerity. We cannot understand him. What does he mean by going out of his way to do all this work? Is he courting publicity? Why is he not loyal to his family and why does he not get an official promotion and help his family first? We decide he is young, or else he is a deviation from the normal human type.

There were always deviations from type, the … “chivalrous men,” but they were invariably of the bandit or vagabond class, unmarried, bachelors with good vagabond souls, willing to jump into the water to save an unknown drowning child. (Married men in China do not do that.) Or else they were married men who died penniless and made their wives and children suffer. We admire them, we love them, but we do not like to have them in the family [pp.171-172].

…in theory at least, Confucius did not mean family consciousness to degenerate into a form of magnified selfishness at the cost of social integrity … He meant the moral training in the family as the basis for general moral training [from which] a society should emerge which would live happily and harmoniously together.
…
The consequences are fairly satisfactory for the family, but disastrous for the state [175-177].

My own initial impression — and it’s just an impression — after living and studying in China for two years, is that Mainlanders are surprisingly quick to suspect one another’s motives, as if attributing negative, selfish, or less-than-noble motives to any seemingly unselfish gesture is automatic; it’s a given that altruism isn’t a real possibility. Potential Good Samaritans know this, and are therefore hesitant or afraid to act (see Example 5 in Part 1).

Here’s a perfect example, right from The People’s Daily:

…pedestrians in Fuzhou wanted to help when they found the old man lying on the ground last Wednesday. Two women tried to help the old man up. But one of the onlookers said: “Better not touch him. It will be hard for you to put it clearly later on.”

The two women hesitated and finally stood up. Using their cell phone, they called the police and first-aid center. But by the time the ambulance arrived, the old man had died.

The case is not exceptional. A similar tragedy happened just 13 days earlier, in Shenzhen. A 78-year-old man was found on the rain-soaked ground, face down in a residential compound, none of the onlookers took any action except to call the police. Despite the efforts of first-aid personnel to save his life, the man died. Had anybody turned him over and lifted his head up, the old man wouldn’t have died. When questioned by the man’s son, one of the community’s guards said: “We dared not touch the old man because we would not be able to put it clearly should anything untoward occur.”

The phrase “hard to put it clearly” may sound odd to foreigners, but everybody in China nowadays knows its meaning. When you try to help someone who falls to the ground injured or in coma, that person may allege that you caused the fall. You will then find it difficult to clear yourself of suspicion if the case is taken to court.

The same article describes a case where a bystander actually did help a woman who had fallen and broken her leg. The woman’s family took him to court, and the court ruled in favour of the family, saying it was most likely that the man was guilty (even though there was no evidence to support this) because “His behavior [of being a Good Samaritan] obviously went against common sense.”

It doesn’t help that playing for public sympathy is apparently something of an art form in China, and would-be victims can incur a similar level cynicism and distrust from witnesses. In this example translated from the Chinese internet, a crowd of onlookers sides with the out-of-town driver of an expensive car rather than the poor local pedestrian who was seemingly run down. In the crowd’s view, the pedestrian deliberately got “hit” by an expensive out-of-province car in an attempt to bully rich outsiders for compensation money — an allegedly common practice.

III. Prescribed Obligations

At this point, people with Chinese friends (or relatives) might be objecting, calling “unfair!” and at least wanting to balance out the picture. I’m among them, actually. After all, Chinese can be some of the most self-sacrificing individuals, certainly more so than the average American (see Example 2 in Part 1). The obligations to friends and family and the demonstrated willingness to meet them, for example, are greater than in the States. And where did that stereotype of the quiet, polite, accommodating Chinese come from anyway?

The [Americans] interact with Asians socially as well as at work and find them to be among the kindest, most considerate, and polite people they have ever met. Then, they meet other Asians in a public situation (on a bus, driving in traffic, in the market) and see them as rude, impolite, and inconsiderate. They wonder how people from the same culture can behave so differently [Gao, p.48].

Anyone who’s spent time among Chinese people knows that the Chinese can be some of the most generous and accommodating hosts on the planet. How is it that the same people who display warm, inviting, and consistent hospitality and graciousness in one situation (each linked word goes to a personal example of how we’ve experienced open-armed and often red-carpet treatment from our Chinese friends, neighbours, and employers) but display unapologetic heartlessness in another?

In Chinese society, how you stand in relationship to someone else defines how you should and shouldn’t relate to them, including your degree of obligation to them. In China, these different relationship categories (sometimes identified as family & close friends, guests, important connections, and strangers) make a huge difference in people’s behaviour.

Zì jǐ rén (自己人； “insider”) and wài rén (外人； “outsider”) are two of the most frequently used concepts in Chinese conversation. Chinese make clear distinctions between insiders and outsiders. A person with an insider status often enjoys privileges and special treatment beyond an outsider’s comprehension. Moreover, Chinese are less likely to initiate interactions or be involved in social relationships with outsiders. Thus, understanding the distinction between an insider and an outsider is an essential task in the Chinese self’s relational development. Chinese need to recognize not only where they are in relation to others but also, more important, whether their relationships with others are situated in an in-group or out-group context. The notions of insiders and outsiders are an integral part of the Chinese self-conception [Gao, p.49].

Hong Kong-based social psychologist Michael Harris Bond in Beyond the Chinese Face draws the connection between the Chinese relational world and typical Chinese attitudes toward “strangers”:

There is no affective response toward such people, for they are outside one’s established groups. The law of the jungle tends to prevail, with people seeking their own personal advantage, totally indifferent to the needs and ‘rights’ of others. A careless pushiness, released by the absence of authority, is the order of the day. What Westerners would call rudeness and callousness are endemic to such encounters and result in some testy exchanges across cultural lines! They were certainly the inspiration for this remark by Ralph Townsend (an American consular officer posted to Shanghai in the 1920′s) in Ways that are Dark: ‘What we see among them (the Chinese) is complete indifference to supreme distress in any one not of their immediate family or associations, even where the most trifling effort would assist the afflicted person.’

The Chinese response is always based on the nature of a pre-existing, specific relationship. Strangers have no place in this social logic and are not mentioned in any of the Five Cardinal Relations [Confucian values]. In this vacuum there are no constraints beyond self-interest to bind people together. And it was surely to this area of public behaviour that Sun Yat-sen was referring when he described the Chinese as ‘a pile of loose sand’. Similarly, Sun Long-ji has written:

We may say that from birth, a Chinese person is enclosed by a network of interpersonal relationships which defines and organizes his existence, which controls his Heart-and-Mind. When a Chinese individual is not under the control of the Heart-and-Mind of others, he will become the most selfish of men and bring chaos both to himself and to those around him.

The only principle that might guide behaviour towards strangers is the Chinese ‘golden rule’ of Confucius, ‘Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.’ This counsel, however, is in the negative and prohibits harmful acts rather than promoting helpfulness. It is quite different in its consequences from doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. This Judeo-Christian dictum is another universal principle, but one that endorses an active reaching out to strangers. It finds its expression at the broader political level in constitutional safeguards for minority rights and a social welfare system; at the interpersonal level, in a greater willingness to assist the underdog. Such a principle operates less strongly in Chinese society [pp.56-57].

Sometimes foreigners in China mistake this calloused, seemingly selfish behaviour for “individualism.” I think it’s clear that this is a mistake. It’s the Chinese communal emphasis on family and long-term associates and the failure to perceive much inherent value in the individual that allows for the dehumanization and disregard of strangers, not a greater sense or growing value of individualism. Individualism may or may not be significantly rising in China, but public unconcern for strangers isn’t reflecting it.

IV. “A pile of loose sand” and the lack of civic consciousness

In the early 20th century, Dr. Sun Yat-sen famously referred to the Chinese as “a pile of loose sand” and apparently saw nationalism as the solution:

For the most part the four hundred million Chinese can be spoken of as completely Han Chinese with common customs and habits. We are completely of one race. But in the world today, what position do we occupy? Compared to the other peoples of the world we have the greatest population and our civilization is four thousand years old; we should therefore be advancing in rank with the nations of Europe and America. But the Chinese people have only family and clan solidarity; they do not have a hundred million people gathering together in China, in reality they are just a pile of loose sand.

That was almost a century ago. Today, China suffers from nationalism overload, yet the same lack of civic consciousness still plagues domestic China. Consider these comments from award-winning journalist Ian Johnson describing late-90′s China:

A friend of mine liked to argue . . . [that] the crackdown showed that Chinese actually didn’t care much about each other or the discrepancy in what they saw and what the [people in charge] did. There was no solidarity with the persecuted, unless they were family members or personal friends. It was like the traffic accidents that one sees in big Chinese cities — crowds gather only to stare; almost no one stops to help. No wonder [the people in charge] could hold on to power so easily, he said. It doesn’t have to divide and conquer its enemies; they are divided of their own accord. I had to agree with him, because I rarely encountered a person who got really angry about the way [the people in charge] treated [the persecuted] adherents. While some far-thinking people saw the campaign as unjustified and cruel, most simply shrugged and wondered why people bothered to stand up for something they believed in. Concerned with their daily struggles, they couldn’t understand why [the persecuted] believers insisted on exercising publicly. “Why not just exercise in the living room?” was the most common response I got when I asked about the repression… [pp. 288-289, my paperback 2005 edition].

Did I leave out any other major contributing cultural factors? Don’t be shy; let me know! I realize I’ve focused here on cultural heritage to the exclusion of other major contributing factors shaping Mainland Chinese relationships and society today, which at least deserve a mention: prescribed atheistic materialism in education and multiple consecutive generations experiencing severe trauma and brutality (decades of foreign invasion and civil war, the mass famine and political brutality of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution).

Up Next…

What should you do when you feel morally compelled to intervene in a public situation, but you know that everyone from the victim to the surrounding crowd will probably misunderstand your actions and discount your motives? When intervening means breaking social norms in a way that might result in an ugly public confrontation or you getting officially blamed for the very situation in which you’re trying to assist, and maybe even fined for it, should you still intervene? How, and under what circumstances? In other words, how to be a Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics?

These are the questions I want to explore in The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.3). The best answers, of course, will come from Chinese people who have the necessary insight into their own culture, not foreigners. The idea, in the end, is to be better prepared the next time I find myself instinctively wanting to play the Good Samaritan where he isn’t necessarily welcome.

Related Articles:

• (How to be a) Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.3)
• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.1): examples
• About sharing the uglier sides of our China experience
• Judging China

Is there a “Good Samaritan” equivalent within the Chinese cultural ethos? Some would say no. For me and a lot of other foreigners in China, the apparent unapologetic absence of a Good Samaritan impulse — an alarming, flagrant disregard for other people — is one of the most shocking and appalling aspects of Chinese culture and society.

I wrote on it during our first year in China because it “thundered” me (我被它雷了), but never published it on the blog because I was trying to be careful about how we shared the negative side of our China experience. Showing up in someone’s country and immediately writing about their embarrassing social and cultural problems is bad form. Plus, I wanted to have better understanding of what was going on, read more, maybe discover the other side of the coin, and get some distance and perspective from the experience and the culture stress (by getting out of China) before sharing it with family and friends (and the internet) back home.

So I’m sharing it now, in three parts: Recognizing examples of the behaviour we’re talking about (Part 1), Understanding some of the underlying cultural “whys” (Part 2), and Deciding how to intentionally respond to this aspect of Chinese culture (Part 3).

Judging Other Cultures

We do judge other cultures whether we realize and admit it or not; it’s unavoidable for anyone with their brains at least half switched on, and it’s not a bad thing in and of itself. How, when, and why we judge are the areas where we often get into trouble. This isn’t about trying to make one culture look better than another or put down Chinese culture. Any of the aforementioned people-with-their-brains-at-least-half-switched-on ought to realize that Western societies have no shortage of glaring, embarrassing cultural issues. In fact, an intelligent Chinese critique of appalling aspects of Western cultures that they encountered while living in Canada would be fascinating to me, and valuable to my cross-cultural understanding.

When you enter a new cultural context, like if you’re a Canadian who moves to China or a Mainlander who’s moved to Canada, lots of stuff seems more or less annoying or offensive. That’s part of the cross-cultural experience. But understanding some of the reasons why people behave a certain way takes the edge off those feelings of superiority and condemnation, and we can maybe start sympathizing or empathizing or even start behaving that way ourselves. Occasionally you may still decide to personally reject or even morally condemn an aspect of a foreign culture after gaining some understanding of it, but at this point you’re not blindly judgmental.

For little things, like strangers getting a little ‘too personal’, it’s easier to reserve judgment at first and then learn not to be offended later on. But other things are so blazingly offensive that you’d rather curse the people out than attempt to understand and empathize. The behaviour we’re talking about in this series of posts is of the latter kind.

So with that overly-long intro out of the way, here are some real life examples of what the “absence of a Good Samaritan impulse” looks like in today’s China.

Is there a Good Samaritan in the house?

Example 1: Traffic fatality outside our language school
Why is it that, in China, when a guy is laying in the road bleeding from the head, the only people in the crowd who rush to help him are the foreigners?

The semester before we arrived, an American friend was with other Mandarin students and teachers leaving the school grounds on their way to a school group lunch when she heard tires squeal and a sickening *crunch*. They turned in time to see a man and his bicycle fly through the air and hit the pavement with a second gut-wrenching crunch. A crowd of passersby formed around the man, who was bleeding from the head.

And everyone just gathered around, watching.

Our friend hesitated. The teachers said not to get involved. All the foreigners in our NGO are warned during orientation that getting involved in accidents is dangerous. A person’s voluntary involvement is often interpreted as guilt, and our foreign presence can escalate potentially volatile situations. Some people started to try and move the man — he was blocking traffic.

Another classmate friend, a nurse from the UK, was also at the accident scene and she tended the man before the ambulance arrived, which took over 45 minutes. The man was in shock, and our friends heard later that he died at the hospital. They still wince at the memory of the sound of the impacts.

Example 2: “Did anybody die?” (from Peter Hessler’s River Town)
We read Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001) to one another as a bedtime story, and he witnessed this phenomenon in different forms during his years in Sichuan province. After praising the way families in Fuling cared for their members — how the elderly are given a sense of purpose and involvement, how family members demonstrate a high degree of selflessness and self-sacrifice relative to typical American families — he makes an observation echoed often in our culture readings: step outside the in-group (family, important connections, guests), and these same heroically self-sacrificing people can appear unbelievably calloused and indifferent to the needs and suffering of others.

Hessler illustrates this with several everyday examples: ticket booth “piles, great pushing mobs in which every person fought forward with no concern for anybody else”, people watching pickpockets rob strangers yet saying nothing, and traffic accidents:

Crowds often formed in Fuling, but I rarely saw them act as a group out of any moral sense. I had witnessed that far more in individualistic America… Certainly there is rubbernecking in America as well, but it was nothing compared to what I saw in Fuling, where the average citizen seemed to react to a person in trouble by thinking: This is not my brother, or my friend, or anybody I know, and it is interesting to watch him suffer. When there were serious car accidents, people would rush over, shouting eagerly as they ran, “Sǐ le méi yǒu? Sǐ le méi yǒu?” — Is anybody dead? Is anybody dead?

…usually I watched the faces of the crowd rather than the actors themselves, and in their expressions it was hard to recognize anything other than that single eager observation: something was happening [pp.112-113].

Examples 3 & 4: Helping is hazardous… and foreign
We were all warned during orientation that if we voluntarily helped out at an accident scene in China, it could be interpreted as guilt. They weren’t kidding.

An American friend of ours saw an old man fall off his three-wheel cart. Two other bike riders had come against the flow of traffic in the bike lane and the old man fell while trying to avoid them. The two riders took off but our friend stayed to make sure the old man was alright. But the old man blamed our friend and called the police! Only after repeatedly telling his side of the story for a few hours at the police station did the police finally decide that our friend was just a dumb foreigner who didn’t know any better and let him go. The idea that someone would stop to help out a stranger and not have some ulterior motive is apparently a foreign concept.

Another time, a man on a bike was waiting at a red light, and I watched him watch an old man tumble off his bike into the road right in front of him. If I’d opened the door of my taxi I could have hit him where he sat on his bike acting like there wasn’t a senior citizen lying in the road at his feet. Maybe I should have. I tried to get his attention, but he avoided eye contact. The old man picked himself up with a few grimaces and went on his way.

Example 5: How to get help
This comic is an example of something obvious that’s easy to forget: Chinese people are well aware of their own social problems. Here, an old man has fallen getting off a bus, a crowd has formed to watch, but the bystanders hold voice recorders and won’t help until the man clearly says that he fell by himself (and therefore no one is at fault). They’re afraid that if they help, they’ll end up like our friend in Example 3. One man is asking the old man to please say it again for his voice recorder because he didn’t hear clearly the first time.

More Examples
When unfamiliar or unknown foreign cultural factors are involved, it’s sometimes hard to know what to do in sudden situations that cry out for a Good Samaritan. Michael at expatriate games shares his sad experience of trying (and failing) to stop a guy from jumping off a bridge, and trying (and failing) to get the people watching to do something, like phone China’s 911. We’ve experienced similar incidents of indecision: Once I ran down to intervene when a woman’s boyfriend was physically and verbally abusive to her in public but was too late. Other times we’ve seen children being beaten in public by out of control mothers and no one intervened, etc. Occasionally stories like these end up in the news (translated): “Elderly falls in the middle of the road, no one helps because fear of being framed” and “83-year-old man fell over, passers-by watch him die.” Here’s a excerpt from The China Daily about an infamous incident:

On Nov 20, 2006, an old woman fell to the ground and broke her leg after jostling at a bus stop in Nanjing. A young man, Peng Yu, helped her up and escorted her to hospital. Later the woman and her family dragged the man to court, which ruled that the young man should pay 40 percent of the medical costs. The court said the decision was reached by reasoning. The verdict said that “according to common sense”, it was highly possible that the defendant had bumped into the old woman, given that he was the first person to get off the bus when the old woman was pushed down in front of the bus door and, “according to what one would normally do in this case”, Peng would have left soon after sending the woman to the hospital instead of staying there for the surgical check. “His behavior obviously went against common sense.” [See "Need to protect our Good Samaritans"]

From “In China, Don’t Dare Help the Elderly”:

On the morning of Sept. 4, in the riverside boomtown of Wuhan, Mr. Li, an 88-year-old man, fell in the street and injured his nose. People passed him by, but no one raised a hand to help as he lay on the ground, suffocating on his own blood.

This week, China’s netizens have expressed an outpouring of sympathy — for the bystanders.

From “The Crisis in the Chinese Soul”:

There is no such thing as selfless or altruistic love in the Chinese society, even children are thought as investments.
[...]
In the village next to mine, a local boy was killed while delivering pizza to foreigners from a popular international chain. The authorities could not find out who was responsible for the hit and run, and so the parents were denied the revenge that is normally expected in such a situation. Even more importantly, the old woman cried in public, was that she was denied the money due to her in reparation for the death of her son. Taking pity on her, the foreign boss that had hired her son paid her 300,000RMB, out of the goodness of his heart. The couple was angered by the small amount that the boss gave them, and blocked the entrance to his restaurant, effectively halting business and trying to blackmail the boss for more money. I remember sitting in this pizza parlor while the boy’s parents, two fifty year old country people, wept and wailed, begging for money from each customer, and protested against the “unjust businessman” who had given the family more money than any Chinese boss would have paid had he been fined for directly causing the death. When I asked local Chinese if they thought that this couple’s actions were fair, they all pointed out in light of the situation, “Their son cannot provide for them anymore, so of course they need to get money from someone.” They also were clear to point out, “The foreign boss brought this down on his own head. He didn’t cause the accident, so if he wanted to stay clear of the problem, he shouldn’t have given them any money.”

When a student stabbed his mother multiple times in the Shanghai Pudong Airport, the only person who interfered was a foreigner. The story and video circulated around the Chinese internet, and you can see it, along with translated online comments, here. In an even more sickening story that provoked outrage in mainstream Chinese and international news, a toddler is run over twice, people just ignore her, and it was all caught on camera.

Up Next…

Obviously this isn’t an attractive part of Chinese culture. However, poor understanding will just make it look even worse. Also, well-intentioned foreigners could get into a lot of trouble if they intervene without understanding enough what’s going on. The next post, The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.2), samples what some Chinese culture scholars (both Chinese and foreign) have to say about the cultural factors underneath the kinds of behaviour described above and why people in China tend to act this way.

Related Articles:

• (How to be a) Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.3)
• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.2): explanations, excuses, & scapegoats
• About sharing the uglier sides of our China experience
• Judging China
• Breaking the ‘rules’ in China — getting involved when you know you’re not supposed to
• Altercation

I don’t enjoy posting negative/embarrassing stuff about China or Chinese culture. Sure, when ‘China’ gets under my skin it can feel good to vent a little (this is true for anyone living in any foreign culture, not just China!), but we are guests in this country after all, and there are plenty of positive experiences to share (like in our Weekend of Chinese Hospitality post). Often I wish foreigners would just keep it to themselves; when foreigners in China whine about China, it isn’t pretty.

But we do live here, and we try to understand here, and you can’t do that by refusing to paint anything aside from the rosiest possible pictures. Husbands and wives don’t learn to love each other by avoiding problems or trying to imagine-away the things they can’t stand about their spouse. Some parts of our China experience — unavoidable, shocking, and recurring parts — aren’t that pretty, but we still have to deal with them.

There’s a couple posts I’ve had drafted for over a year called, “The Good Samaritan with Chinese Characteristics,” which I haven’t posted because they’re about a really ugly aspect of Chinese culture. I’ve been sitting on them, hoping they get nicer with age, or that I’ll learn more while I’m waiting and can then be more understanding and gracious about why, as one Chinese scholar says, there is no “Good Samaritan” equivalent in the Chinese cultural ethos. Around that same time I drafted another whole series called, “Living in the Eyes of the Beholders,” about the somewhat uniquely Chinese way foreigners are viewed and treated in public; sort of a “social exclusion with Chinese characteristics.”

When you’re with other foreigners it’s often easy to belittle China for certain things, and culture stress is always playing into that to some degree. So there’s a negotiation to make between trying to be gracious and appreciative of your host culture, but also wanting to accurately convey your honest experience of living elsewhere, and wanting to actually work through and understand your host culture better. It’s not easy to do all three at once, but we’re working on it.

I didn’t want to write and share this kind of stuff while feeling culture-stressed, and figured that a little time and distance would give some needed perspective. So now that we’ve been out of China for almost two months, I suppose it’s time for these things to get their final edits and finally see the light of day. I’ll start posting them soon, along with more stuff on Chinese medicine.

Related Articles:

• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.1): examples
• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.2): explanations, excuses, & scapegoats
• (How to be a) Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.3)
• Judging China

How a Tianjiner and an American thrive as roommates despite unavoidable cultural lifestyle differences.

It didn’t take Greg long to discover the uncomfortable truth at the heart of cultural adjustment in China: “If you’re not willing to change then it’s not gonna work. I mean, I’m not a poster child for someone who’s willing to change, but I’m working on it. [Chinese culture] is kind of cool and interesting and a novelty at first, but pretty soon it intrudes on what’s comfortable, so you have a choice to make: I’m going to resist it and try to hide from it, or I’m going to change and try to learn to live in the culture, more like a local person. Not that you have to change everything or abandoned your own identity, but you have to be willing to change some things.”

Greg and Pèiyuǎn (Jordan) have been roommates for a mere four months, but their progress in mutual understanding would put some married couples to shame. Their time together has already taught them a lot about what it takes for Chinese and Americans to share close quarters, and for Greg in particular, what it means to intentionally and consistently aim for increased cultural adaptation. They laughed often over dinner as they reminisced for me about the cultural misunderstandings and disagreements they’ve been through together.

Meet Jordan and Greg
Jordan (“Dr. Li” to his patients) is a young orthopedic surgeon completing his residency in Tianjin city. He grew up in Jìnghǎi (静海) in southern Tianjin province and worked as a translator for a local N.G.O. while in med school. When he meets me and Greg in a restaurant for our interview, he’s just completed a six-hour surgery on a broken leg.

Greg taught high school for four years in the U.S. before coming to Tianjin as a fulltime Mandarin student. After studying here for two years he’ll move in Xiàmén. With Jordan hoping one day to work overseas and Greg planning to work in China indefinitely, living together made a lot of sense to both of them.

Same-culture roommates can sometimes be difficult enough, but potential for misunderstanding and conflict increases exponentially in a cross-cultural situation.

Cultural Differences = Opportunity & Potential
As Jordan and Greg have discovered, it’s not about avoiding conflict; facing their differences together is what makes their friendship grow. The stark and numerous cultural differences are actually opportunities to strengthen the relationship and learn about one another’s culture. Mutual trust and respect, a shared commitment to honest and clear communication, and desire to understand the other’s culture are among the potent friendship-building factors that are making their living arrangement work. This doesn’t mean they’re exempt from having to deal with one another’s mutually-annoying cultural characteristics, but the misunderstandings help them discover, understand, and appreciate some of the deeper characteristics that define their respective cultures and shape who each one of them is as an individual.

For cross-cultural roommates, cultural differences and the conflicts they instigate aren’t just abstract theory; they’re lived out in everyday experiences.

Conflicting Expectations: Autonomy vs. Obligation
Greg’s default relational assumptions and expectations are strongly shaped by American individualism. He avoids imposing on his friends’ time and space out of habit and as a common courtesy, and he’s used to receiving the same kind of treatment. As he describes it: “[In American culture,] you do your best not to impose on other people’s worlds. And if you do you’re very apologetic. If you’re going to mess up my life you have to do it really carefully, and you have to ask me, ‘This is happening, it would really help out if you could maybe do this. Could you think about it and get back to me?’ Something like that.”

Jordan, of course, didn’t grow up in a society that believes individual self-determination and self-actualization are the most important causes in the cosmos. His default assumptions and expectations, which emphasize the obligations that family and good friends have toward one another, reveal a conspicuous lack of emphasis on the value of personal space and individual autonomy – at least, that’s how it looks and feels from an American perspective. Jordan describes how it is: “For me I think, if I want help, I will just ask my friend, ‘Hey could you help me to do that?’ It’s really normal for us to do that. I feel that I give them trouble, but in some way I also think that you are my really good friend, for a normal friend I won’t do that, but for me I think you need to do that for me.

“Like my friend, if he want, because I’m a doctor, sometimes –- I think maybe you can’t write this -– sometimes they need to, you know, they don’t want to work, they want me give them a, you know [doctor's note]. They just call me: ‘Hey can you do that?’ I can’t say I can’t! I will help them. If I can’t help they will say, ‘Huh, you just do me a small favour! Why you can’t? Blah blah blah blah!’ They say a lot of things and then, aiya, I will do that, I will do that. You know, your friends or your family maybe ask you to do something, sometimes I don’t even know who he is, but he just give me a call and tell me that he is my relative and ask me to help him do something. But I will do that, I need to do that. He told me he knows who, and I know that guy, and I need to help him because I don’t want him tell other person that I’m a selfish man or don’t want to help other person. Yeah, 关系网 [relationship network], very important. In my mind, I really feel that if a good friend call you and ask you to help, there’s no reason for me to refuse. That’s really important if he’s my good friend, there’s not reason to refuse him.”

It didn’t take Greg long to discover that Jordan and his Chinese friends won’t think anything about invading his formerly well-respected personal time and space without warning and assuming that Greg will be happy to drop everything and accommodate them.

Greg: “We had people over for jiǎozi. They came at like 2 in the afternoon. Later we watched a movie, about 9:30 or so they left. He went with them to escort them out. I stayed and was gonna start cleaning up and doing dishes and stuff. So five minutes after they left, another one of our Chinese friends showed up at 9:30, quarter to 10, unannounced, with four other people who happen to be his classmates who are in town and wanted to see the place. And they had food with them, so I was like, ‘Oh no, they’re gonna be here a while.’ I was just like, I can’t believe this is happening. I was going to do some dishes and go to bed ‘cause I had to get up pretty early the next morning. But I had a little pep talk with myself in the kitchen. I escorted them in and told them to sit down. I had had a plate of snacks out for the movie, so I just refilled that plate and took it out to them. For me that was a victory to not be uncomfortable with them, and to just welcome them and to give them food. I felt like I was being really Chinese, even though inside I felt not Chinese. Inside I’m like, ‘What?! What are they doing here? I want to go to bed!’ But, I did it. And afterwards I was like, ‘Hey I brought some food and didn’t act weird and stuff,’ and Jordan says, ‘Oh, good job!’ I feel like I’m trying to grow, and I fail all the time but there’s times where I feel ‘Oh, I got that one right!’ I’m encouraged sometimes when I feel like I don’t get everything wrong, I see little steps of progress.”

Jordan, for his part, was shocked the first few times he encountered hesitance and resistance from Greg, who isn’t naturally so keen to let others just phone or show up without warning, expecting they could effectively rearrange his day-planner for him.

Jordan: “Our home is really new; it’s a new building. I told him that there gonna have a guy come here to fix it, to add the gas for us, but I told him I can’t come back because my work. I really speak that really straight because you rent my room, you still have the responsibility to take care of something. So I told him, hey there’s gonna be a guy come here and repair that and I can’t come back, so please stay at home wait for him. Actually, at that time I feel that I really nice: ‘你最好……可以吗？’ ["It’s best if you… could you?"]. But he said, ‘I’ll think about it.’ What?! Really?! Why?! So I feel angry actually, at that time.”

Greg: “Well the thing is I didn’t even say ‘no,’ I just said ‘I’ll think about it,’ and that’s where often there’s these situations where you’re given – in theory – two options, but actually there’s only one option, and if you choose the other option it’s rude. …He sees it as more of a responsibility of mine to help with those things, and I see it more as a favour because I have to change my schedule to come home at that time.”

Jordan: “I told him that, ‘You are in China, so maybe you need to live as us.’ I think that, ‘I already tell him the situation, and then tell him that I really can’t do that, but it’s really necessary for us to do that, why you can’t change your schedule?’ …And also I think with Chinese friends, we like to ask a friend to help us. So if they need help and they don’t say it, I still like to help him.”

Appreciating the Emphasis on Relationship
Most foreigners and Mainlanders who spend time with one another will encounter these kinds of cross-cultural annoyances. But not everyone understands those differences to the point that they can actually appreciate why people from the other culture act they way they do. Learning to appreciate and empathize with each other and each other’s cultural background is exactly what Greg and Jordan are intentionally trying to do.

Greg: “I think there’s a lot of selflessness in China. I think the people are much quicker to give of their time and possessions. We [Americans] use ‘friendship’ pretty loosely, but I think if you’re a ‘friend’ here it means a lot, there’s a lot of sacrifices that you’re willing to do if you’re a friend. I think the hospitality is something I really appreciate. You just welcome people even when you’re not expecting them.

“I’ve done some reading before, not a lot, but I know that Chinese culture tends to be more relationship oriented than task oriented, and that’s a hard thing for me in some ways, but it’s a good thing, and in some ways I feel like that’s how it should be. Not that you don’t do tasks, but that relationships should be more important than tasks. And I see that here, and actually that’s uncomfortable because I’m a ‘task person,’ but in my mind I want to be more of a ‘relationship person,’ and so, yeah, it’s been good.”

Cross-Cultural Living: Highly Recommended! (but read the fine print)
I asked them both what they’d say to foreigners and Mainlanders who are considering living with someone from the other culture.

Jordan: “First, don’t think he’s a Chinese! Because the perspectives are really different. If something happens, maybe you a little bit angry, or you feel that, ‘Why he didn’t do that?’ or, ‘Why he do that?’ First thing you need to calm down. Don’t fight with each other. Just think about it. You need to think he is a good person, and then find a good time to talk about the question. Let him explain that, and you explain your opinion about that, and then understand each other. I feel that a lot of things we see from the different perspective. We think about it in a different way, but it doesn’t mean you are wrong or I am wrong, it’s just the perspective is different.”

Greg: “We hit a lot of bumps early on and then kinda figured some of these things out. I mean I’m sure there will be more, but we agreed before to be honest, to communicate, not to let yourself get angry about something… We’ve had some difficult conversations, but I think both of us are willing to say ‘I was wrong,’ or ‘I’ll try to change’ or ‘I’m sorry’… it’s kind of like a marriage I guess. In a way we’re like an old married couple here!

“A couple things that were helpful for us was pretty early when we had these disagreements or misunderstandings or whatever, was that we kind of said, ‘I believe you’re a good person with a good heart, and so when we have these misunderstandings, I’m going to remember that. And I’m gonna try to work through it so that I actually understand your meaning, and I don’t take it to be the bad thing that it feels like it is.’ So even if we misunderstand and it feels like he’s being really pushy or something, I can say, ‘No he’s not a pushy person, there’s just something else going on that I need to understand.’ He tries to remember that ‘Greg isn’t actually a selfish person who’s unwilling to help; there’s something cultural going on that I need to work through, because I think if he understands then he will help out.’

“So don’t move in with a foreigner lightly, and make sure that you are convinced that they have good character, because if you aren’t, then when those cultural differences come up you’re maybe going to think the worst instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt. Make sure you feel like you can trust them. Also I think at least having an understanding about how you’re going to work through cultural differences is important, like agreeing, ‘Ok, when we hit one of these issues, this is how are we going to deal with it.’

“I think the last thing I would say is don’t do it unless you’re willing to change.”

Jordan: “Also, protect his time. Because some foreigners come here just for study Chinese, or they just come here for other reasons, but they have their schedule. Normally they will do that on their own time on their own schedule, so don’t arrange something and disrupt his plans. Respect him and respect his time.”

Greg: “He does a really good job of asking me and giving me a little time to think about things instead of springing them on me, and that’s an adjustment he’s made. He’s made a lot of adjustments, probably some I don’t even know.”

Jordan: “If you want to go abroad, or for you guys who come to China, it’s good for you if you really want to change. It’s really interesting; it’s worth it to try it. But if you are not ready, don’t do it. If you really want to go abroad or really want to join or taste a different culture, then just do it if you are ready. …Being a friend is really easy, but being a good friend and a roommate? That’s another thing.”

Greg: “But there’re great rewards, so it’s worth it.”

Jordan: “Basically, it’s interesting and we enjoy it. Really!”

(Greg just spent Chinese New Years in Jordan’s parents’ home village. You can read about his experiences here.)

Christmas trees, Santa Clauses, plastic-y Christmas junk, and wanton consumerism? Can’t get enough. But Baby Jesus? Silent Night? In Tianjin? Good luck.

We just got back from the annual NGO Christmas party. Christmas songs and the Christmas Story were conspicuously absent, unlike years past. This year in Tianjin, if foreigners and locals get together and sing Christmas songs or read the Christmas story at a non-preapproved venue and time, the sky will fall down. Actually getting preapproval would cause the canals to rise up and the garbage mountain to be cast into the artificial TV tower lake, so you can appreciate why preapproval is more of a theoretical possibility than an actual observed phenomenon.

Actually, that’s not exactly how the people of consequence explained it. But instead of getting into it and explaining it all here, I’ll just say that things are noticeably tighter in post-Olympic Tianjin, especially around Christmas. Since we’re the well-behaved kind of foreigners, our Tianjin Christmas is just that much less Christmas-y.

We still had a good time; our friends who were organizing it did a great job, especially with having to scrambled to redo the program at the last minute.

Tomorrow night me and a buddy are hitting the local bath house… Merry Christmas to us! Hopefully fun stories will be forthcoming.

(PS – Comments are closed on this post.)

Of course, the day you teach a lesson to foreigners about dealing with culture stress and not withdrawing from the culture and people even when you feel like it is the day one of your local friends will inadvertently push a whole bunch of your cultural-annoyance buttons.

The NGO that we’re with in China has “culture lectures” on Saturday mornings every so many weeks. I did the one this morning, about how to handle culture stress, choosing to engage the culture and its people even when you feel like withdrawing from it, and looking at your lifestyle, living habits, attitudes, etc. to see if they are helping or hindering your cultural adjustment. I suppose I was asking for it.

After a late lunch and walk in the park, Jessica and I went home and fell asleep reading books on the couch. We were tired and we had an after-dinner karaoke party planned for the evening. A friend phoned about karaoke details. He wasn’t supposed to phone me. I’d already told him to wait for me to phone him because I was waiting to hear from someone else when and where to meet later that night. But he phoned anyway, and in a blast of partially-intelligible Chinglish (he often insists on trying his English on us, even though we refuse to speak it to him) destroyed my nap. Later, Jessica and I had dinner and were watching a movie when he called again to tell us he was on the way over and just five minutes away, even though he wasn’t supposed to come over for another hour and half. So we watched the last hour of the movie with much less snuggling but a lot more Chinglish. I was a little annoyed; Chinese people often feel free to impose upon other people’s personal space and time in ways that North Americans rarely if ever would. Of course, I was further annoyed at remembering all the stuff we’d discussed that morning in the culture class.

It’s dumb to get annoyed at Chinese people for not acting like North Americans (or vice versa), but that doesn’t mean what they do still isn’t annoying sometimes. Still, I got over it and we ended up having a really fun time, proving once again that it’s usually worth it to put cultural preferences aside and just have fun with people. And who would have guessed that this guy can sing Micheal Bolton songs?

(This is the unedited version of an article from one of Tianjin’s expat magazines this month. It includes some of the bike ownership and safety stuff from Part 1, but also includes new photos and stuff about how Tianjin traffic works, which vehicles to especially fear, and honking with Chinese characteristics.)

Staying Alive and On Your Bike in Tianjin

Avoiding accidents, reducing traffic stress, and deterring bike theft in Tianjin

We’d only been in Tianjin one week when I wrote home to my family in Canada with my first impressions of Tianjin’s traffic:

…widen the roads and intersections while narrowing the field of vision for which taxi and bus drivers feel responsible, reduce the North American-sized personal space bubble to the area occupied by the clothes you’re wearing, and take note that honking the horn apparently absolves the driver of responsibility for all those within earshot. …you never have those awkward ‘Who’s going to go first?’ moments like you get sometimes at four-way stops in Canada when people arrive at the same time and no one wants to appear pushy. In Tianjin, everyone goes first, and whoever’s in the way has right of way.

That may not the best description of Tianjin traffic but it’s an honest first impression. Newly-arrived foreigners are often appalled by the sight of their first major intersection, and surprised when they don’t witness an accident every five minutes. Even veteran expats who are no longer intimidated can still get stressed during rush hour. But I have good news! Tianjin’s traffic is actually not chaos (really). There is a system, it’s easy to get used to, and there are specific things we can do to make our commute safer and more enjoyable. It’s just that Tianjin’s traffic culture is different from what we’re used to, and we often have trouble seeing and understanding it at first glance.

When we first arrived we were given The Guide to Living in Tianjin, which says, “Believe it or not, there are rules; however, no expat has figured them out yet.” Then it adds (sarcastically?), “Maybe you’ll be the first.” And then to make you feel better it suggests, “A sure bet is to follow the locals; let them be you example, and sometimes your shield.” Do we need shields to ride a bike in Tianjin?!

Metaphors for Tianjin Traffic

Tianijn’s traffic culture (the shared collection of traffic behaviour expectations and assumptions) is different than what many of us grew up with, and explaining it to people who aren’t already used to is a challenge. James Adams has taught English at Tianjin’s Nankai U. for six years, and he offers two helpful descriptions of how bike traffic works here.

Biking in Tianjin is like… downhill skiing. Stop thinking roads, lanes, lines, and well-defined, rigid rules. Instead, think ski-slopes. If you’ve ever been on a snowy slope, you will have noticed that there are no lane-lines, but there are some basic rules:

1. Control your speed so you can avoid accidents.
2. Leave plenty of space when overtaking people, especially children, pregnant ladies, or the elderly.
3. Those in front have right-of-way.
4. Worry about what’s in your forward field of vision, not what’s behind you.

Biking in Tianjin is also like… spawning salmon. Think of adult salmon swimming up a river: a steady stream of bodies all moving in the same general direction. They move wherever they can move, taking any option to move in the right direction. There are no lines in the stream, there is only blocked space where one can’t move, and open space where one can. People will advance as far forward as physically possible when trying to cross the road, and that often means waiting inches from the moving stream of cars or in between streams of cars. Before the Olympics, most people didn’t wait at the line.

Some Collected Traffic Wisdom

You want to turn left at a busy intersection but fear for your life; you’ve never seen a disturbed ant nest this big before. Yet using two crosswalks just to turn left is getting too tedious and pathetic. It’s time to employ…

…the #1 Tianjin bike riding tip: follow a local
This is the simplest and safest way to learn when and how to wade into rush hour traffic. That grandma with a basket full of cabbage doesn’t want to get tagged by chūzūchē (出租车: “rent out car” a.k.a. taxi) any more than you do, and she won’t steer you wrong.

Stay in the pack & go with the flow
Like wildebeest on the plains of the Serengeti, there’s safety in numbers. Stay in the pack and go with the flow. It’s the ones who leave the pack that get picked off by lions… or a miànbāochē (面包车: “bread loaf car” a.k.a. Chinese minivan). Average local biking speed is so slow that collisions are easily avoidable and less potentially dangerous when they do happen. Foreigners often bike faster than locals; this saves time but adds risk.

Don’t make sudden moves (but be on the lookout for them!)
Aside from a few obnoxious school kids, slow, straight, predictability is the norm for riding in Tianjin. This lets cars and electric bikers easily anticipate your movement and safely move around you. You can gesture turns by sticking your arm out. But be aware that people will still often make sudden swerves, stops, or dismounts as if they’re the only person in the bike lane! They’re assuming that the person in front has right of way and that it’s the person behind’s responsibility to pay attention and avoid those in front.

Avoid unnecessary stress factors
Foreigners in Tianjin traffic often add to their own irritation in two stress-creating ways: speed and unadjusted expectations. If it’s rush hour and you want to bike faster than everyone else, you’ll likely get irritated at the way people are always in the way. But if you aren’t looking to pass everyone, then almost nobody will be “in the way.”

Pining for home-style traffic will only add to your frustration. Our deep-rooted expectations – that people should move in straight lines with minimal weaving, that they should look behind themselves and signal before turning or changing lanes, that there even is a “lane” and that they should stay in it, and that red lights are like a door slammed shut – are inappropriate here. Don’t trust lines and laws; trust what you see in front of you. Traffic in Tianjin is much more fluid and less rigidly defined by lines.

Honking… with Chinese characteristics
In Canada if someone is honking their horn at you it either means there is imminent danger — you’re about to crash or there’s an emergency — or it means, “Hey! Get out of my #@*!^% way, you #%^*@!” In Tianjin, horns don’t mean they’re frightened or cursing you out. Honking is a regular part of everyday driving. It lets people know, “I’m here!” or “Here I come!” It’s a safety thing, almost a courtesy, like they’re honking so you don’t have to bother checking your blind spot. Usually, a honking car is merely saying, “Don’t move left, I’m coming up to pass you,” or “Edge over a bit, I can’t get by.” They’re not angry.

Vehicles you should especially fear:

• Black cars with license plates starting in “AV…” or “DV…” These are government officials’ cars, and they drive like the unaccountable big-shots that most of them think they are. Most police are not dumb enough to pull them over for traffic violations, though it happens occasionally. Same goes for military cars, which have white license plates. Both are easy to spot because aside from their special plates, government and military cars are kept conspicuously clean.
• Dump trucks at night. They’re kept off the roads during the day, and they will make up for lost time in the dark on Tianjin’s poorly lit streets by speeding and blowing through red lights.
• Long-distance buses. Big, fast, unyielding, and with horns so loud you can feel it in your teeth.

Watch out for open manholes
Manhole covers occasionally go missing; keep an eye out. This especially stinks at night in the dark. Usually someone will stick something (anything, like a branch) in the hole to let people know. Also, the covers are often loose, especially in the winter, so avoid riding over them when you can.

Anti-theft Techniques: You Need Them

It’s no secret that bike theft is rampant in Tianjin. Most people I know have lost at least one bike, often more. One friend of a friend is on his twelfth. These are the collected theft deterrence techniques of people I know personally:

• Always lock your bike, even when you’re “just going in for a minute.”
• Use two locks, one on each tire, so it can’t be wheeled away.
• Lock your bike to something whenever you can.
• Make your bike look unique, noticeable, recognizable, or undesirable. I know three people who painted bright yellow striped on their black bikes, like a bumblebee or Stryper, that 1980’s Christian heavy metal band. My wife’s bike has purple splotches of paint all over it. Mine is just old and ugly. Odd-looking or older bikes are harder for thieves to re-sell.
• Choose your bike carefully. High-quality, name brand bikes like Giant have a higher resale value and are more susceptible to theft.
• Always park in a guarded parking space, when available. It only costs 5 máo.
• Don’t get too emotionally attached! I hate to sound cynical, but even if you take all these precautions, your bike could still get stolen. Hold it lightly.

Special thanks to James Adams, a nine-year China biking veteran and English teacher at Nankai U., for contributing to this article and for first teaching me how to buy and ride a bike in Tianjin.

Yesterday afternoon our neighbourhood bike repairman (Mr. Lu) was playing with my arm hair. This led to a conversation about body hair in general during which we both pulled down our shirts to compare (I could count his).

Two years ago this kind of conversation would have made me a little uncomfortable, but now it’s just fun.

This is one aspect of the China experience where think foreign males have it way easier. Culturally (in North America) we males have way less pressure put on our appearance, so people poking at it in awkward ways isn’t so uncomfortable. But for foreign females, coming from our hypersexualized and objectified culture where their looks are almost everything, landing in China (where most women still are generally smaller and thinner, even in the north) and getting poked, prodded, squeezed, and discussed by neighbours and random people in public can be routinely devastating.

Right now as I type this, our neighbours are outside having a neighbourhood singing practice with an accordion. They’re actually not too bad (photo from our kitchen balcony):

Off to class… (I can’t believe the pollution today is worse than yesterday!)

One of our professors beamed us into her Intercultural Communication class this week for a little Q&A session with the students. They had great questions, and it was tons of fun… thought I’m not sure how much we’ll remember, seeing as how we were tanked up on coffee and didn’t sign off ’til 3am.

They e-mailed some questions beforehand, and we’ve posted brief answers to some of them below (in no particular order). Lots of these are great questions, and they tease out different aspects of the cross-cultural living experience. The links go to examples from the blog.

[1a] What was the biggest challenge when it came to learning the new culture & language?
Joel: The people.
Jessica: It is possible (but sad) to live in China with a minimal amount of interaction with Chinese people. That said, when you make choices to try and interact with the people around you, it pushes you out of your comfort zone and it is inevitable that some of that interaction will not necessarily be easy as the bumps and edges of your two cultures grind against each other.
- When the culture differences feel like getting ambushed by a firehose

[1b] What has been the easiest part?
Joel: The people.
Jessica: For the most part, Chinese people are very warm, welcoming, and extremely encouraging of our poor attempts to learn Mandarin.
- Hospitality… with Chinese characteristics
- Sharing Chinese New Year’s with the neighbours
- Lao Zhao on Beijing accents

[2] What customs in China do you find interesting?
Jessica: There are so many interesting customs here that it is difficult to choose…also, I’m sure that there are still many, many more that we have not yet learned about. I love how Chinese play with the sounds and meanings of words, which sometime causes seemingly unassociated items to become connected to another word. For example, what do a flower vase, bottle of beverage, and an apple have to do with peace? If you are a foreigner, not much. But the words in Chinese for flower vase （华瓶）, a bottle of beverage （瓶）, and an apple （苹果） all contain characters that are pronounced “píng,” which sounds the same as 平, which is used in words for peace and well-being. In this case, you might bring all three of these seemingly random gifts to a friend who has recently moved into a new home, so as to wish peace on him or her and their new home.

Joel: I like how the neighbourhood has much more of a community feel than the Canadian suburbs I grew up in. After dinner, families go out walking in the parks; people don’t like to stay in when they don’t have to. And the whole approach to food is more fun (if less sanitary), I think. Instead of each person with an individual plate, everyone eats directly out of the serving dishes, one bite at a time. It sounds gross when I write it, but in practice it makes a meal out with friends a lot of fun. And Chinese New Year is a blast – literally.
- A little taste of Chinese New Year in our neighbourhood

[3] What is a common misconception we have toward one another?
That Chinese are meek and quiet. That Americans are all Christians. That Chinese don’t have much diversity of opinion. That popular Hollywood movies depict realistic American lives and relationships. And that fortune cookies come from China.

[4] What is something Americans need to know about China in order for us to better understand them?
The Chinese version of modern history has a huge impact on attitudes and understandings of the present, especially their perceived relationship with “Westerners.” It affects how people interpret and react emotionally to events, like the Olympic Torch relay. Americans (and most other major Western nations) have a lot of baggage and bad history with China that they may not be aware of. The Chinese have not forgotten; it’s reinforced in their education system.
- January’s propaganda: museum style
- The Tianjin “Incident”
- Why Mainlanders are taking it personally
- What Do the Olympics Mean to “Their China”?

[5] Do you have any funny stories with the language and cultural differences?
- Comfort Zone Violation #379 – Naked English Practice?
- Please Stop Paying Attention to My…
- Too fat! Too thin! Everyone’s got an opinion
- Becoming morning people
- Killing Mosquitoes with Curry
And those experiences don’t include the random stuff we see everyday: people walking backwards for exercise, yelling at the river, taking their birds for walks, biking down the road singing to themselves at the top of their lungs…

[6] Besides the language (verbal and nonverbal) how does the Chinese way of communicating compare to communication here in America?
They’re blunt where we’re sensitive and indirect (body image, personal business), and we’re blunt where they’re sensitive and indirect (“face” concerns, personal opinions, missing nonverbals). Also, Americans are much more comfortable airing their national dirty laundry in public for the whole world to see, and mercilessly and publicly vetting their leaders with little concern for how it might look to people from other nations. But in China the desire to protect China’s ‘face’ (nationally, racially and culturally) is too intense and doesn’t allow for that. So when we talk or write about China (in a local magazine), we have to take that sensitivity into account.

[7] Have you ever offended a Chinese person accidentally?
Jessica: Considering the number of times it’s gone in the reverse direction (I’ve been accidentally offended by a Chinese person) I’m sure that I’ve also done my share of being unknowingly offensive. With our current level of language, it’s even more difficult to not cause offense, because we sometimes don’t have the “right/polite language” (or know-how) to talk about some subjects (death, relationships, etc.) and could easily come off as being crass or crude.

Joel: Ha, all the time! It’s so annoyingly easy. Not that they usually tell us. But they tell us about other foreigners, and I assume they tell the other foreigners about us. Many people’s patriotic feelings were rubbed raw by the Olympic Torch relay, and during the ‘Olympic season’ accidentally saying something deemed offensive was really easy.
- National ‘Face’ & Local Sensitivity (Part 2): One hour of criticism
- National ‘Face’ & Local Sensitivity (Part 1): Not fit to print in Tianjin
- No-go zones: what we avoid talking (and writing) about in Tianjin

[8] Are the Chinese people helpful in teaching you how to use their language better?
Joel: Yes and no. Here in Tianjin it’s super easy to find people willing to chat, but regular people (in any country) don’t speak text-book language or limit their vocabulary for new language learners.

Jessica: Also, younger Chinese people (college age, especially) tend not to want to speak Chinese with us, but to practice English. While we will occasionally be part of one of these practice sessions, our goal here is to learn Chinese…so we try to spend at least an equal amount of time with that person speaking Mandarin.
- When speaking practice is fun it can be really fun

[9] Have you gotten over the stages of culture shock? What was it like?
Jessica: When you’ve studied culture stress, you can get the mistaken impression that knowing about it might somehow make you immune from experiencing it. I see people (foreigners) here all the time who are going through culture stress or culture shock but don’t realize it because they think they’re immune from it. Also, the “stages of culture shock” aren’t something that is really just “gotten over” like a cold, or the flu. Culture shock and readjustment is a process, which takes time…and the stages are often recurrent and cyclical.

Joel: Like when I yell Chinglish at vehicles when biking through rush hour traffic? Not my best moments. Culture stress affects your perception; it causes you to see everything with a negative slant. You complain more, get more suspicious of people, get more judgmental and have feelings of cultural superiority… it’s not pretty. The key is to recognize what’s happening to you, why you feel these ways, and to realize that your feelings aren’t based on reality.

[10] Were you completely sure about your decision to move to China or still apprehensive? Are you supposed to be completely sure?
Joel: We always planned to live internationally, and felt we had the whole world to choose from. But since we want to really “live into” our adopted country and culture (“culturally immigrate”), we can’t get by with just a superficial grasp of culture and language. For us, choosing China also means we’ve made a big commitment to learning the language and culture.

Jessica: We felt at that time, that we were as sure as it was possible to be that we were doing what we needed to be doing. We felt a great deal of peace about coming here. Apprehension is still a part of it though, as you consider the vast life changes and the “unknown” that must be faced.

[11] What is the weirdest experience you have had?
Joel: In some ways, every day brings weird experiences. But you’d be surprised what you can get used to, so that you stop noticing it or thinking that’s it’s weird. When people come to visit and you see them react strongly to things you don’t notice any more, then you suddenly realize how much your view of things has changed.

[12] Do you feel rejected in any way?
Jessica: One of the times I felt most rejected occurred with one of the people that I feel like usually accepts me the most. One day in class, I was talking with my teacher (who is also a friend) and she started saying how different we are, and that no matter how well I know Chinese language and culture, there will always be a huge and unbridgeable gap between us. As one who understands that the differences between us are vast, but is studying very hard in hopes that that gap can at least be narrowed a little bit, this conversation was a little disheartening. It felt like a rejection of me and of my goals in learning this language. However, time has proved (as our relationship has continued to grow closer) that it was probably not rejection, but possibly more of a practical observation.

Joel: the insider/outsider distinction is generally much stronger in China. If you’re “outside,” it’s sometimes like you’re barely even human. Foreigners here are sometimes shocked at the way locals can seem so callous to the suffering of others, at the apparent lack of a “Good Samaritan” ethos (like crowding to watch a serious accident but doing little to help). But how this distinction plays out all depends on the context, most often family (and closest friends) vs. the public, or China (nationally/racially/culturally) vs. the ‘West.’ There’s also locals vs. out-of-towners… the merchants will up the price on out-of-towners. “Foreigner” in Chinese is literally “old outer” or “out-country-person.”

[13] What things did you do that allowed the Chinese people to accept you?
Jessica: Showing interest and desire to learn the language and the culture is really important. That said, there is a balance that need to be found on where we stop asking “why? why? why?” all the time. Chinese friends have said that the continuous “whys” from foreigners are not only annoying, but can feel condescending. The interest and desire to learn needs to be coupled with a willingness to just accept and experience.

Joel: To the limited degree that we are accepted, and based on direct and second-hand feedback from locals, it seems that choosing to live in an average Chinese neighbourhood (rather than living somewhere better-than-average like most foreigners), and spending time with people seems to have scored us a few points.

[14] What aspect of the Chinese language has been the most difficult to learn?
Joel: Tough choice, because some days it seems all the aspects are competing for that honour! But often how I feel about my progress or lack thereof has less to do with the language or my actual progress and more to do with culture stress-related factors.

Jessica: Oh Chinese! It’s not for no reason that it is often listed as one of the most difficult languages to learn. It depends on the day which thing I may find most difficult.:D The aspect of Chinese that I find most “unfair” (haha) are the 多音字 (characters that pronounced differently depending on context and meaning). So it’s the SAME character, but there are multiple different pronunciations. It is often really difficult for us to know which pronunciation to use, and there are MANY of these 多音字 in Chinese.
- Learning Chinese and Culture Stress: the importance of mind games
- Learning Mandarin: Realistic Expectations

[15] How has the different communication process in China affected how you communicate with people back here in the states?
Jessica: I sometimes feel like I need to be more indirect about saying something. I usually end up saying it the normal way, but at the feeling level… I now sometimes hesitate, and wonder if I’m being “too direct” about something.

Joel: My mother will be appalled at my table manners when we visit Canada this February (it will be our first time back in 2.5 years).

[16] How long did it take you to learn the non-verbal aspects of the Chinese culture? Any examples?
Joel: We’re only just starting to catch on to this stuff. Understanding how it’s supposed to work in your head, and being able to naturally behave that way in a conversation — to really “feel it” yourself — are two very different things.

Jessica: I’m not sure there ever really comes a point where you can consider this “learned.” It’s definitely a process, and a lot of it is unconscious…where you slowly begin to absorb the non-verbals and consider them when figuring out the meaning of a particular conversation.
- Free Advice — for you and your Chinese friends
- To “lie” or not to “lie”

[17] What was the extent of your language education before going to China?
Very little. A handful of informal tutoring sessions from an encouraging biology prof who’d immigrated to the States from Beijing.

[18] What do you do for leisure activity?
Biking around exploring the city, going to parks, hanging out with the neighbours (but that’s not always as relaxing due to our lack of language and culture), playing with other foreigners (probably too much).
- How to: Hang with the homies and not get totally hammered
- Tianjin’s Forsaken Places
- Exploring Tianjin on a bike (here, here, and here)

[19] Have you had any altercations with the government?
Not really, unless you count this: When the Police Knock On Your Door, It’s Best to Have Your Clothes On. The Public Security Bureau “has tea” with leaders from our N.G.O. every month, just to check in and let them know they’re paying attention.

[20] What about the extra restrictions over there?
The restrictions tempt us to have bad attitudes, and bad attitudes make a difference. Often they seem ridiculous and paranoid, make us want to roll our eyes, or even get offended (as in, it’s my life and none of your business!). Jessica’s not comfortable writing examples on the blog, so we won’t put any here. But we knew it’d be this way coming in, and we try to remember that we’re guests here.

[21] Do you think you will spend the rest of your life in China?
Right now we plan to live, work, and raise our family here. When our (future, theoretical) kids are ready for college, who knows. But this is such a major investment for us (time, money, youth, career, etc.) that it’s hard to imagine a future that isn’t connected to China in some way.

[22] Do you miss the US?
Jessica: I sometimes miss good customer service. It will be nice to go shopping and not have to mentally psyche myself up for the experience or worry about the salesladies fighting over whether a certain garment will fit me or not and whether or not I should be allowed to even try it on.

Joel: She’s not exaggerating, and she’s not any more sensitive than the average North American woman either. The Western girls here have to learn the hard to way to become really thick-skinned when it comes to personal comments in public about body size. Especially when they come from America, where customers are pretty much worshiped. But really, we miss family and friends more than anything else.
- The Things We Miss….

[23] Have you been able to have family come and visit?
Not yet. We plan is to hold their grandkids hostage. And we told them to wait until we have better Chinese.

[24] What part of American culture are you most happy not to be a part of anymore?
Media bombardment isn’t as all-consuming here (though there is plenty). Plus, we tune out a lot of it anyway because we can’t read it, or the images don’t effortlessly connect with us like American ads do.

[25] Did you start teaching immediately or did you take time for language learning?
We’re going to take as much language school as we can possibly afford. When we do start working/having kids, we’ll be working towards jobs that let us use Chinese (English teaching is a last resort).

[26] Do you enjoy the cuisine?
Joel: Yes and no. there’s tons of good food, but there’s also lots that isn’t that appealing at all (chunks of congealed pig’s blood in soup, for example, which we had to eat this week when friends took us out). Everyone loves going to Chinese restaurants, but our foreign friends order different dishes than our Chinese friends do.

Jessica: While I like foods that fall in the “家常菜” (down home cookin’) category, I really don’t like many of the foods that Chinese consider “fancy.” If we have to attend a banquet, or are invited to a nice dinner with Chinese friends, chances are I’ll be eating more for the sake of politeness than because I’m actually enjoying it. On the other hand, some of that down home cookin’ and many of the street foods are just awesome!

[27] How long were you in the “rejection phase”? [note: refers to culture stress cycle]
It’s hard to say, because there aren’t real clean lines between the phases, and you repeat the cycle many times (hopefully less and less dramatically each time).

[28] How have you seen your goals being accomplished?
Jessica: On days when I feel like I’ve really been able to connect with a Chinese friend and talk, especially when we can talk on a deeper level about our lives, I come home feeling both that my goals are beginning to be realized in some small ways and more inspired and motivated to keep working hard and pressing deeper into the language.

Joel: Some days more than others. Some days you feel good about what you can do in the language, some days you feel bad about how limited you are — and those feelings often have a lot to do with your current levels of culture stress. But our goals are very long-term, so for now we just look at progress.

(If you’re still reading, you so totally deserve an A.)