Sense and Common Sense

Many of us have thought of the seemingly nonsensical actions of our Chinese friends: throwing lit cigarette butts into trash cans, driving on the sidewalk or causing bottleneck traffic situations because everyone crams into the only  available lane at once, opening a bus window when the air conditioning is cranking out cool air... and others. Let's not forget that first-time flyer who, desiring a breath of fresh air, opened the emergency exit door. Fortunately, the plane was on the ground. And the other one, on another plane, forged a quick route off by opening the door closest to him. He deployed the slide, causing 100,000 Yuan worth of damage.

We westerners look upon these misdeeds of our Chinese friends, shake our heads and wonder how in the world they came to their ideas.

Common sense: the basic ability to perceive, understand and judge things, which is shared by ( or: common to) nearly all the people, and can be reasonably expected of nearly all people without any need for debate.

It seems the people who have fallen through the 'nearly' hole are Chinese.

If you think about it, what the general public might perceive as ridiculous in China makes a lot of sense. Man on plane wanted fresh air; he opened the door. Man on plane wanted off plane; he established an exit. Man finished with cigarette, he threw it away. All traffic lanes blocked but sidewalk or bike lane is open; drive on sidewalk/bike lane.  

While all of this is logical/rational for the person doing the deed, it seems that person fails to regard the world as a whole and the other people in it. That's what makes this brand of logic downright dangerous at times. And, what is startling about that is that Chinese culture is supposedly collectivistic.

Collectivism: the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology or social outlook that emphasizes the significance of groups – their identities, goals, rights, outcomes, etc., and tends to analyze issues in those terms.

If China is indeed collectivist, how can one driver take it upon himself to take over the sidewalk, where people and bikes abound? How can the man on the plane ignore that big 'emergency exit only' sign, painted bold red on the door?

Here's another aspect of China's alleged collectivism that totally escapes me.

Children in orphanages: unloved, unwanted, underprivileged, and there are a lot of them. Foreigners will adopt Chinese babies but, except in rare cases, Chinese will not. “A family member will adopt a baby or child but will not adopt a strange child” I was told. For instance: an infertile couple might adopt a sibling's child, and that sibling can have another child. Meanwhile, children in orphanages languish.

That doesn't make collective sense to me. There are needy children in China, there are Chinese parents who want/need a child. Perfect match, right? Not so much, according to my Chinese friends. 'Keep it in the family' is the rationale, apparently because an adopted child might not be as devoted to family as a child born into a family. No stranger's blood allowed is another excuse given (and no children with defects, either – but that's beside the point).

It seems that the Chinese are collectivist only up to their own special group: tribal clan, village folk, family, friends, room mates in a dorm, an office group – in short, people who, for one reason or the other are bound together. Beyond that boundary - that collective, individualism asserts itself.

Individualism: Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires, and so, value independence and self-reliance, and advocate that interests of the individual should take precedence over the social group.

Now we're getting somewhere! That explains far better the crazy logic of our Chinese friends, but does nothing to address the collective mentality when it comes to family and friends, tribemembers or dorm mates.

I think sociologists need to come up with a new phrase to accurately describe Chinese society: individual collectivism. Doesn't that sound more apt?

The Man With the Plan

He was born in Nigeria, to a Nigerian father and South African mother. He was raised by his father in Nigeria, his mother apparently having decamped, taking her nationality with her. Life was not easy for this father and son. minimal education, social strife and income disparity all culminated into a young man with few chances at a decent life. His father, wanting the best for his boy, advised him to seek his fortune elsewhere. Or, maybe in desperation, the young man took it upon himself to hatch a plan.

In some back alley in the bad part of town, he traded with a forger to obtain a fake passport. How his father felt about that is not known. Now the world was open to him, and he set about finding his fortune. He set his sights on China because of their urgent demand for English teachers.

Once there, he worked hard at teaching for the first institution that would hire him, and every school after that. He sent most of his salary to his now ailing father. To augment his income he opened a small English school; soon his gates were flooded with little ones struggling with the intricacies of English grammar.

No doubt with the specter of his homeland and his family's poverty never far from his mind, he enrolled in university. He had been too poor to afford much schooling when he was younger. Remembering his father's words – that education will improve his station in life, he studied furiously. And he didn't stop at a bachelor's degree. When our paths crossed, he was headed for his master's.

When he first came to China, things were a lot more lax -  both in this country and in the world. Obtaining official documents was nowhere near as rigorous as it is today, and it was common for official papers to be rubber-stamped rather than being closely scrutinized. Many countries did not have any counterfeit measures imbedded in their passports and, if they did, those measures were easy to forge. In the ten years our man lived and worked in China under a fake passport, never once was that permission challenged.

Eventually the fear of being found out must have lessened. This man started taking chances. He bought an apartment, and a car. With his little English school flourishing, he rented a larger building and hired a few teachers.

About 2 years ago, he came close to being found out. China had tightened visa regulations for foreigners. If a person is here on a work visa, s/he cannot own a business. The official representing the school our man was currently teaching at, charged with keeping foreign teachers' documents current had taken the man's passport for visa renewal. Apparently, Chinese databases had been updated. The school learned that their foreign teacher was illegally operating a business. The Bureau of Foreign Affairs initially refused to renew the visa, but then compromised. Our man was placed under notice: within 6 months, the business should be either put in someone else's name or disbanded altogether, and an official certificate to that effect should be produced.

Imagine how our man must have felt! Having worked under deception for so many years, perhaps even getting comfortable with his higher quality of life, and now to suddenly come under scrutiny! Nevertheless, he transferred his business into someone else's name, and the whole scandal went away. He must have again gotten complacent with his, rich, secure life in China.  

His forged passport expired. The school he worked at knew his document was up for renewal and offered an escort to the South African consulate in Beijing. The Man with the Plan turned the offer down, saying he was too busy to go and would simply send it by certified carrier. What he actually must have done was contact a forger. In a few weeks, he produced a new, authentic looking document. 

It all came to a head on Valentine's Day this year. He had taken his fiancee to Hong Kong to shop for wedding rings. Coming back through the checkpoint in Shenzhen, his fraudulent documents were discovered and he was immediately taken to jail.

All of his assets were seized: car, house, business. Bank accounts were frozen. He remained incarcerated while the police turned over every aspect of his life. Soon the banks were calling the school where he worked, looking for their credit card payment. I can't tell you what was happening at the school he founded, but this much is true: people who had associated with him couldn't believe they had engaged with a criminal.

For four months this man sat in jail. Disowned by any institution that had ever hired him and, most likely by any other associates, he had all that time to contemplate how everything he worked so hard for was now all for naught. Surely he would be deported with nothing but the clothes on his back.

That is exactly what happened. China's police were thorough in their investigation. Since coming to China, all evidence pointed to a hard working man, giving to the community and fulfilling any obligation he took on. They dug further. The Nigerian police rendered their report: nothing to report. His only crime is that he entered this country with fake credentials.

There are many questions in the wake of this scandal. Why did he forge a South African passport when, surely by birthright he would be entitled to one? 'Too much stress' was his reply. Why a South African passport, not Nigerian? 'South Africans are welcome in China'.

Ten years have passed since his entry into China. He's no longer a young man, and he's back to square one in getting started with life. What will he do? No answer to that. But there are many answers to other aspects of this man's presence and attitude. Now we understand his vagueness, his standoffishness,  and his refusal to partake of any social events.

This is a true story; one that leaves me scratching my head. Here we have a man who has never asked for a handout. Who, by all accounts has worked hard to improve his station in life – something society universally dictates should be every person's imperative. He was a contributing member of society and to the economy. His only crime is that he did so with fake credentials.

Now, this hard working man is being deported to a country where his educational and economic chances are few, where he will have little to no opportunity to contribute to society, where he might become a victim of sectarian violence, where he might again be forced to seek refuge in another country – legally or illegally. Considering the drain on resources the European Union is enduring because of all the refugees needing asylum, doesn't it seem illogical that such a person – who is willing to work and otherwise law-abiding would be denied the chance to continue his efforts?

The good news is that China bears him no ill will. Before putting him on a plane, the officer in charge of his investigation told him he was welcome back, provided he had proper credentials. Please join me in the hope that our Man with a Plan can get them, and continue to help improve this world, one student at a time. 

I Didn't Know...

I've never claimed to be the know-all and end-all of China and Chinese culture, and I never will. To wit: even 5 years on, little tidbits of facts previously unknown to me still have the power to rock me, shock me and give me pause. Here are a few nuggets.

Single mothers:

Until recently I thought it was only a social taboo to have a baby out of wedlock in China, as it was in the west until about 30 years ago. An enlightening article in ChinaDaily clued me in to the fact that it is not just frowned upon but illegal. According to that text, a woman must furnish a marriage certificate as well as a 'valid reproduction permit' and, of course, an ID. 

Here is that revealing article: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2015-08/07/content_21524131.htm

Color me perplexed! With my still-predominently western mindset I can't believe that, in this day and age, when women can ensure financial stability for themselves, they are still required to be married in order to have a child.  Never mind the incredible 'old maid' standard rained on a woman who has not married by age 30 by family and friends, this information makes that proclamation quaint.

Now I understand why Stephanie had to get married, even though her family was opposed to the union and she didn't seem too happy about it herself (See How I spent my May Day holiday, posted May of this year).

Making The Bed:

I've attended several weddings in China, and they all follow a certain pattern, but for a few variances. Two things I had no idea about, that make me shake my head in disbelief: who should make the nuptial bed up for the wedding night, and how.

Apparently, a mother of both a boy and a girl should make the bed, in the belief that the good fortune she enjoys at having a matched set of children will rub off on the sheets, and the new couple will be just as lucky. Sam's mother, who has been thus blessed, is often called on in her village to make up the wedding night bed.

Never mind the fact that science has proven that it is fathers who offer up the extra chromosome that determines their offspring's gender. I'm  not sure if the Chinese still hold to the long since dispelled belief that it is the woman's onus to assign fetal gender, or if it is 'double joy' maternal hands that are thought to bless the sheets. It could just be that making beds is 'women's work'. Either way: this is a rather charming superstition that caused me to chuckle in disbelief.

Another strange custom is to litter the marital bed with peanuts. Whether shelled or not, I have no clue. Presumably, these peanuts will encourage a Little Peanut to soon issue forth. All I could think about after hearing that is the exhaustion a just-married couple must feel after the day-long celebration, only to enter the marital suite and have to sweep peanuts off the bed. Should the couple eat the peanuts? Who is to retrieve the peanuts: the bride, the groom or both? Those answers remains a mystery. 

Such traditions, thoughts, superstitions and beliefs are what made me fall in love with China to begin with. I scoff at these most recent additions to my list of seemingly nonsensical wisdoms, but it is a loving scoff, like one you would give your somewhat addled relative when s/he doesn't realize s/he's doing something utterly goofy. 

However, this next one terrified me...

Friends and family are responsible for hospitalized patients.

I've had some dealings with hospitals in China: when I bashed my head in and needed stitches, to have my thyroid levels checked and, most recently because of my broken leg, all done on an outpatient basis. I visited Gary in the hospital when his appendix ruptured, but gained no clue on the mysteries of inpatient dealings at that time.

I've often wondered why pajama-clad patients are permitted to roam around hospital grounds. In the case of the military hospital I always go to when needing medical care over here, patients wander as far as the shopping centers and restaurants across the street – also in their pajamas. From my limited experience with hospitals in the west - in Germany and America, once you are in the hospital, you stay in the hospital until you are discharged: no roaming outside allowed. In America, I've not been allowed to walk out of the hospital upon discharge: an orderly pushed me out in a wheelchair (presumably, every hospital in America follows that policy: whether you can walk or not, your trip out of the hospital is made in a wheelchair). 

Hospital food: the joke of the American health care profession. “The doctors are great but the food will kill you!” as one old saw goes. Now that health care in America is a for-profit business, hospitals compete for patients. Thus they offer private rooms and restaurant quality food. If your illness requires special foods, your diet is carefully monitored and outside food is frowned on. Likewise are over-the-counter medicines not allowed:  you cannot take any medication the doctor does not approve of, and what is approved must be dispensed from the hospital pharmacy.

It was my most recent visit to the hospital in Wuhan to have my leg X-rayed that opened my eyes about hospital care in China. My curiosity was aroused when I saw non-medical personnel pushing hospital beds into the X-ray department so the supine patients could be imaged. This time accompanied by Penney, a nurse in said hospital, I asked her my burning questions regarding health care in China.

Health care professionals are too busy to push gurneys, I found out. If a patient needs an X-ray, there had better be someone who can get the patient to the imaging department. Meals are also dependent on friends and relatives: the hospital does not deliver food to patients' bedsides.

“What if the patient has diabetes, and is on a special diet?” I asked.

“Most likely, the family will follow doctor's orders and only bring food that the patient can eat.” Penney replied.

“You work in the 'contagious disease' unit where family and friends cannot visit. How do those patients get food?”

“Friends and family bring it and we inspect it before giving it to the patients.”

That did not make sense to me at all. People in quarantine receiving outside food? How could that be? And what if a patient has no one to bring any food?

NOTE: when I say 'friends and family bring food', I don't necessarily mean home cooked meals. I've seen take-out containers from street food vendors make their way into patients' rooms. Street food vendors, whose carts line the sidewalks and whose food supplies linger in the open air for hours, a perfect opportunity for gastric distress, especially for someone lying in the hospital, whose immune system might already be compromised. 

Quite frankly, I live in fear of having to be hospitalized over here. Not just because I would have to share a room with... who knows how many other people, and that the bathroom would be down the hall. Not just because the accommodations would not be as luxurious as the ones I enjoyed when I broke my leg in America. And not just because the few treatments I've been subject to here have been brutal, to say the least, but because a hospital stay over here would be so far out of my range of experiences, I'm fearful I wouldn't adapt. To say nothing of not being able to understand what the doctor and nurses are saying because of my limited Chinese. 

I'm sure Sam, Penney and Gary, among other friends, would be prominent presences during my incarceration, and surely they would bring food. They would probably push my bed all over the hospital if need be. Nevertheless, as open to new experiences as I usually am, this is one I'd rather not have. I don't think anyone could blame me.

What a joy it is to live in a place where, even though I've memorized entire bus routes and find myself caught up in daily life, there are still things that can move me, amuse me and floor me with shock and disbelief. Any wonder why I stay? 

That 'First Foreigner' Feeling!

Much is said about what we expats are exposed to at the hands of our Chinese neighbors: the stares, the inane questions – I was once asked if I brush my teeth! The touching and all of the other questions that, I swear: if I hear them one more time, my head will explode! What about when we foreigners saw a foreigner for the first time?

I launch that question at my students: what was their first experience with a foreigner? And I tease them with the promise of my own 'first foreigner' experience, after they disclose theirs. Invariably I'm met with puzzled stares: I AM a foreigner. How can I meet a foreigner??? 

Now, I'm dating myself...

My family moved to America in 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. From then on, Americans were not allowed to discriminate based on race, gender or religious preference. Until then existed a painful segregation: Whites lived here and Blacks lived there. Whites ate here and Blacks ate there. White children went to these schools and Blacks to those schools. Intergration did not happen overnight, but in the military environment – on the bases and housing areas, it happened much faster than elsewhere in America.

I was a little thing then, only about 2 years old when we moved to the states. I was not aware of anything regarding race or much of anything else. One of my earliest memories is of a girl with ebony skin, kinky hair bound in pink barettes and the brightest teeth I'd ever seen: Valerie. She stood on the sidewalk and I was on our scrubby patch of front lawn. We eyed each other warily, like 2 dogs who don't yet know they are not enemies. I remember her name to this day, because she was my first 'foreigner'. I must have been about 3 years old, as corroborated by my parents.

Valerie had a different way of talking. She skipped rope and played differently than I did. She kept having to pull up her panties, startling white against her black skin. Her clothes seemed poorly made and she didn't wear any shoes when I first met her. Nevertheless, we became friends. She let me touch her wild hair and I let her touch my silky tresses. 

As military families are wont to do, we moved on, sometime when I was about 5 years old. I am sure that, by that time, I was used to 'Black'. I simply thought Black people were only black on the parts we could see: hands, arms, maybe legs and certainly face. For some reason I was convinced that the parts we couldn't see had to be white, like my parts that nobody saw.

Imagine my surprise when, after a few days living in a run-down neighborhood in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, a young man across the street was washing his car. He was Black, and had his shirt off. That's when I found out that 'they' were Black through and through!

Go ahead, laugh. I do, when I recall my dismay.

The school year started: my first year of school! Even though the Civil Rights Act was nearly 3 years in effect, our class was still somewhat segregated: boys here and girls there. Black boys in the back left of the room and Black girls to the right, behind the White girls. Inevitably, there was tension at recess.  Kids are kids and there was a lot of playground name-calling and fighting. During one such brawl, I was pushed backward off the bench I was sitting on. I landed on my left elbow and shattered bones from my clavicle to my fingers.       

There are a few distinct images of that awful, painful time: someone from the school (a woman) driving me home. I sat in the front seat, cradling my shattered left arm. My mother, rushing to the curb and yanking the door open, gently prying my fingers loose so she could see the damage. From there, somehow we ended up at a hospital, with me sitting on a consult table, still holding my arm. A large Black man with glasses, a bass voice and frizzy hair just beginning to gray approached me. His white coat was as startling against his dark skin. I wouldn't let him touch me. Was it because he was Black or because my arm hurt so much I didn't want anyone to touch it? Maybe a bit of both.

Dr. Sylvester – yes, I remember his name, too, talked with my mother. I'm fairly certain she agreed to have me sedated for treatment because the next thing I remember was lying in my bed at home, with a cast running from my left fingertips to my right shoulder. That must have been a terrible time for my poor, young psyche because I only have fragments of memory left over.

The next year, the year Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and America broke out in riots, my mother moved us back to France. There, my world went 'full White'; African immigrants had yet to start the flood that would soon overwhelm the French economy. Georges Pompidou was Prime Minister, later president. We lived with my mother's aunt until a subsidized apartment became available and, once again I lived with nuclear family: mother, sisters and brothers. Father was left behind in the divorce.

No, I wasn't politically aware when I was 6 years old. I got that from research. 

I believe it was my early exposure to another race and having Valerie for a friend that tore down the barriers of prejudice for me. At a young age I learned that people are people, no matter what their skin color or language might be. But it didn't stop the fascination the Black culture held for me: their dances, their foods, their clothing style and mannerisms and religion and speech. I had a chance to fully explore those aspects of Black culture in my teens, when my mother remarried (another American soldier) and we moved to Berlin, Germany.

Again in the military environment, where segregation was minimal, 'Black' was all around. Anyone interested could partake of Soul Night – 'Black' music played at the local disco, Soul Food served at the cafeteria, and  anyone could buy wildly colorful clothing that Blacks seemed to prefer. The base's shopping center, called the PX stocked products for African American hair care. I remember gazing at them in awe, and later seeing such products put to use when I babysat Barbara Yulee's daughters.  

I'd like to paint myself as having always been open to other cultures, races and ethnicities but the truth is that, for many years, in spite of my acquaintance with the Black culture (and later, other cultures) I still sniggered at racists joke and even made a few myself. I'm now ashamed of how I helped perpetuate negative stereotypes.

I'm making up for it, though. I made it a point of telling my students about my experiences, emphasizing that people are people no matter what color or creed. Just as my charges have beliefs and feelings and needs and wants, so do people of other ethnicities. Hopefully I can help broaden their world so that they don't believe negative information about foreigners who are now pouring into their, till recently exclusively Chinese world.