The Real China: Pretend Culture

Walking through a country, as opposed to skimming over it in a textbook or magazine, will reveal the little things- the things you had always assumed and never noticed in your home culture. The magazine version is great for a broad overview listing the distinctive parts that make China China, but the man-on-the-street view shows you the real points that locals would never give notice to in print, and even points that they are not even able to notice themselves.

Some things are just too embarrassing, or taken too much for granted.

The boasted value of China, the one they paraded before the world in Beijing’s international debut at its 2008 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, is harmony. This is supposed to be the cement that holds the Confucian society together, and the highest ideal that people everywhere were supposed to maintain and strive for.

“Harmony” at the 2008 Summer Olympics.

But how observable is harmony? Could a foreign guest, like me, detect it? Would Chinese people typically show more politeness or deference to others than I would normally expect elsewhere? Would public order amaze me in China as it so often amazes outside visitors to Japan? Would the famous collectivist mindset wordlessly cue everyone in on how to fit into Confucius’ hierarchy and give their attention to the group welfare? When they sang in that howling cat voice along with their one-stringed guitar, would it be multi-part or just one melody?

Would China, chief among all preachers of harmony, stand out to me as the epitome of harmony?

In my experience, just the opposite.

Public order in China is about the worst I have ever seen. Even contrasting the grimiest places within American shores- say, a smelly, trash-lined New York City subway station- with an equivalent in China- a stop on the Shanghai metro, which looks so much whiter and more modern in its architecture- China comes out the obvious loser in the chaos contest. (Or would that be the dishonorable champion of the chaos contest?)

As wild as the crowds are on a given New York subway train, everyone is still expected to follow the flow of unwritten rules. When it is time to board, people stand to the side as the people exiting the train shuffle off first. And, crowded as it can be, riders are still expected to keep their own personal space as much as possible- no fully-opened newspapers, for example- and conspicuous things like cooked food and music speakers were frowned upon, though of course anyone with experience publicly commuting through New York knows how loudly, madly, and sometimes entertainingly these mores are violated. But, in the middle of all the madness, blocking the way or bumbling over the local manners would bring down a quick scolding in that bossy New Yawk! accent.

In Shanghai, while the modern fire doors prevent passengers from contemptuously throwing their garbage onto rat-infested tracks Big Apple style, I once shared a car with a man who had taken a giant bag of garbage onto the train itself. I reflexively pulled away in my posture to give him all the space he needed around the center pole in front of the car’s double doors. He was wearing drab-colored pants and a jacket, typical for all kinds of Chinese factory workers or laborers, only his outfit was blotted with dark stains, and his hands were covered from fingernail to wrist in brownish grease. With one hand he held onto the neck of his sagging plastic bag, and with the other he held onto the circular pole overhead. I leaned into a corner of the car and pitied anyone who would hang onto that pole next- they would retract their hand and find it covered in smelly garbage grease- but then again from the look of the dirty film-covered floors and surroundings, and from the sparse cleaning crews I had encountered in China, with their soggy, old, denim-colored mops that they would listlessly drag over the pitted concrete-colored flooring, anyone holding onto the rails in a crowded Chinese subway car should be pitied.

And, I think that this is not news to anyone familiar with scenes from a slum country, but when the subway car’s doors open, the people inside and out immediately stream into each other like two opposing fire hoses. The same goes for elevators in China. Every time I tried to get off an in-demand elevator, some old woman with flat, curly hair and a dusty cotton jacket would walk straight into my chest, without flinching, unless I circled around her like a slippery matador. Now, I don’t think it was the same bossy woman walking into me every time, but this is hard to confirm because I never got a good look at her face. She always had a downcast brow and avoided eye contact as if she were a dim-eyed beetle furiously crossing the sidewalk. Plus, I stand over six feet tall and the elevator raider barely cleared five feet, and as soon as the doors opened she was palm-first into my sternum, so the angle did not allow for a good view of her face.

Even though in every subway station there are helpful floor stickers reminding people to stand to the side to clear the lane so passengers getting off the train can file through quickly first, which opens up the space for incoming passengers, and even though in it is in a land dominated by iconography when you consider Chinese written symbols, no one cares about the obvious floor signs.

What we in the West call “arrows” is Chinese for “EVERYONE AT ONCE.”

In the passenger trains, where long-riding passengers had a chance to take their shoes off and kick their feet up, they did so. They would sprawl out on each other’s laps, across rows of seats, on the bags and buckets and blankets they brought in, and if the train was crowded enough then people would spend the ride standing or squatting in the space connecting the cars, in between the bathrooms and luggage racks. Consistently, from the cheapest, slowest, most crowded train I rode in China all the way up to the high-speed G Train, people would dump their trash and spit their seeds and leftover food out all over the floor- leaving a poor, wearied cleaning lady to walk through and collect the piles as she lagged behind the accumulating mess. Alternatively, a berserk woman would stomp through and screech at people to hand over their plastic wrappers and paper bins.

Also, more obnoxious than the trash on the train, it was universal for people to play their portable TVs, radios, computers, DVD players, and speakers at full volume. Few saw the necessity of using headphones when there was no concept of keeping one’s music to oneself. Or one’s voice- loud talking and boisterous behavior pervaded the moving cavern on rails, just as it did in every other public gathering place in China.

Which brings me to my point: harmony is not a real Chinese value. It is an imagined ideal. The real values that stood out in my eyes are those that scoffed at manners like keeping quiet in public, keeping one’s hands to oneself, and all the other things supposedly learned in kindergarten. While harmony is not observable, or only obliquely so, the constant boisterousness is definitely apparent.

Cute motivational posters, while possibly made in China, are not sold there.

Boisterousness is a value of the real China, as are the (actually expressed) saying “To get rich is glorious,” and the idea that self and self’s inner circle are all that matter. The true ethic underlying all the little things in China is “every man for himself and push the strangers out of the way.”

I started to see it everywhere, in details as small as the little tissue packets everyone carried with them.

In America, practically every restaurant has napkins on the table, either in a holder or wrapped around the silverware, and public bathrooms have toilet paper and an electronic hand dryer or paper towels, so living my whole life with these conveniences made me notice the glaring absence of napkins and even toilet paper. In China, you bring your own.

In restaurants and cafeterias, the tabletops were bare. Only in the nicest restaurants- those connected to a hotel- were there napkin holders. Even then, the napkins were thin squares folded up into a triangle, and the table is so large that diners have to wait for the napkins to make their way around the lazy Susan every few minutes. Thankfully, these hotel restaurants would provide a plastic-wrapped wet cloth napkin that was thick enough to last throughout a whole dinner. Having that made me feel like I was living in luxury compared to other napkin-free homes and businesses.

If you were lucky, a small café selling noodles or dumplings might have a roll of paper streamer sitting on the table (the kind of party streamers that are used to decorate a high school gym) for you to wipe your fingers with. Other restaurants might occasionally have napkins, too- it wasn’t forbidden- but customers were generally expected to bring their own.

It took me quite a while to catch on and plan for this; many of my meals were eaten with greasy hands. Often, I was spared from learning my lesson the hard way (that is, going without tissues). Friendly students would do the polite thing and offer me one of their own.

Eventually, I tired of being offered tissues or having to ask someone for assistance every time I had messy hands or a runny nose, so I went into the store on campus and picked up my own pack of tissues. A big pack held a dozen small pouches- the convenient size that are kept in purses or pockets. I would have liked to have set an example and defied their cultural norms if I could have found a large cardboard box of tissues to bring into the classroom, but no store had them for sale. The small pouches were all that was available for personal napkin and tissue needs; they were stocked in every department store and convenience shop.

These bulk-size packs go fast when you consider that they are your sole napkin, tissue, and toilet paper supply away from home.

People wanted the small tissue pouches because they knew they needed them. If they were stuck out and about and they had to use a public restroom, the communal paper dispenser at the bathroom entrance would likely be empty, and it would be left to them to provide their own tissues to use in the stall.

Bringing one’s own tissues to every situation, needing it daily like a billfold, phone, and keys, was, I believe, a small indicator of the cultural mindset. I heard Chinese people lament how selfish everyone was, how people in China only wanted to make money for themselves and didn’t care about the condition of anyone outside their family, and while bringing one’s own tissues was not a direct reflection of epidemic selfishness of callous proportions, it was a result of a culture where every individual was left to fend for himself.

In the land of the free and independent-minded, by contrast, Americans have a big reputation for generosity. Americans will give freely to relief efforts half a world away, and that is in addition to their charitable giving to local churches, clubs, and benefits. There is still much thought for the self, obviously, and America is just as famous for being a land of competition and pursuit of wealth. Like any country, those on the outskirts of society have a very difficult time finding employment and sustenance for themselves, and more than ever, this generation of Americans fear for their jobs and worry how they will provide for their families.

Still, before the growth of the American welfare state, before the widespread breakdown in society and public morality, the Protestant American ethic, while expecting everyone to pull their own weight, had very generous and charitable habits. There were and are, in a far-fetched sense, napkins on the table. Public bathrooms were, and are, expected to have toilet paper, hand soap, and hand towels, and there is a reasonable expectation that a fair number will be fairly clean, depending on the location (gas stations not included). When they are not clean it is accepted as a common fact of life, but not as an unchangeable rule of life, as it seemed in my experience in China.

America is a real country, with real problems, and I do not argue that it is a model of virtue or a utopia. No, while seeing Chinese society has predictably made me more thankful for the blessings of American life, it has more so made me perceptive to the problems of my home country. It is well known in America that public trust and consciousness can be pretty dismal depending on what part of the country you live in. Living in dog-eat-dog New York City for a short time was a shock to my easygoing Midwestern sensibilities. My point though is that the prevailing beliefs and practices in America are still very empathetic toward neighbors and strangers. I would argue this is because many in today’s generation have been trained by cultural precedent and the familiar words “Do unto others” and “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

These exemplary American attitudes I speak of were starkly different from the popular thinking I encountered in China. The Chinese believe in receiving good fortune and luck, and working with indefatigable diligence to earn a high salary for your family. Their precedent was: if you don’t work for it, if you don’t cultivate the rice crop, your family will starve. The fears and selfish drive for survival have carried over from the generations living under famine. Chinese people of the past didn’t expect others to feed them or provide for them. They didn’t expect public charity to provide for their food or housing (what charity is there when everyone is starving in communes?), and they didn’t and still don’t expect access to timely, quality medical treatment and government services unless they know the right people.

The positive side of China’s harrowing history is that an industrious, self-achieving work ethic has become practically universal. People take individual responsibility because they have to. Every area of life depends on personal diligence. They scrupulously watch their health, meaning they scrutinize their diet and get daily exercise. Every food ingredient is chosen for its health benefits (if you trust the folk wisdom). Many rely on diet, daily tai chi, and Traditional Chinese Medicine shops as their health care plan. They know they can’t fall back on the government’s system.

Trying out Traditional Chinese Medicine. I seriously recommend cupping for muscle aches.

Aunt Fong’s father-in-law leads me through his daily tai chi routine.

The great downside of China’s universal work ethic is that managers, companies, and institutions often expect employees and underlings to live, eat, and even sleep on the job site, going all week without a day off. Also, the part that most often disgusted me about China’s selfish, starved-animal mindset: unruly crowds and near-sighted drivers and pedestrians. Whenever they encountered another person or a group, everyone had to be first. They had tunnel vision, and as a matter of course they would run into people and push them if they got in their way. No looking over the shoulder, no checking one’s blind spot. No yielding way, no stepping around. No “sorry’s” or “excuse me’s.” If this sounds like a trivial thing to live with, I challenge the reader to swap the manners of home for the law of the street in China.

In Communist China, right of way drives YOU!

Other examples of the selfish culture would be the bartering merchants who attempted to cheat people as their business model (not that this is rare among marketers elsewhere), and also the widespread littering. Roadside ditches and creek beds became reservoirs for stray trash, and any vacant or run-down property became a de facto dumping ground. The unspoken shrug was “Why worry about it? Trash is someone else’s problem, so drop your wrapper and let ‘someone’ clean it up.”

The culture of B.Y.O.N. (Bring Your Own Napkins)- and culture-wide ugly behavior are admittedly only tenuously connected. After experiencing life in China though, I started to connect the two, like a small twig connected to a branch of the selfishness tree. The twig itself is not significant, only a distant extension of the root, and if examined in isolation it would not attract special attention. However, if the root and trunk are known, then a trained eye can recognize any twig and identify its genus and species.

The question I am asking then: why do some countries provide public conveniences that are unavailable in other countries or which must be provided by the individual? I believe it is more than a case of developed versus developing countries. France is developed, but I was surprised to run into pay toilets there, and I heard of snippy store clerks getting snippy and telling foreign visitors that providing bathrooms is not their responsibility. Japan is developed, but their restaurants don’t give away the freebies of American restaurants like soda fountains and ketchup pumps (expect only one ketchup packet at a Tokyo McDonald’s).

My takeaway lesson from life in China: unlike the Confucian cultural value on everyone’s mind- harmony- B.Y.O.N. and “every man for himself” were real, actual cultural practices. Confucian harmony- the smooth, peaceful interworking of society- was an unrealized, imaginary ideal. Each individual person was on his own, and public behavior was anything but harmonious. Likewise, Mao and the communists of the 20th century said their revolutionary state was for the people, yet they could not teach the people to look out for each other, to love their neighbors as themselves.

How many other ideals, in China and elsewhere, are merely imagined? What real practices, like B.Y.O.N., are taken for granted and largely ignored? The ignored practice, and not the imagined, is what is most indicative of a culture.