"You can observe a lot by watching." -Yogi Berra

Tag: Chinese traffic

The Real China: Conclusion

The ultimate travel fantasy is not to any place, but to the foreign country of the past, to see the people who lived in one’s home country and culture in their shockingly ancient yet familiar form. The language could be understood and the traditions recognized, but the words used and the way people were would be the most fascinating difference.

My desire to see China was not a longing to live in another hemisphere where the people’s faces looked different and they lived in more exotic architecture. I wanted to see China because I wanted to see what it was like to be human without being a modern American. I wanted life without the restraints of American assumptions. All of our culture and language has a precedent, and I wanted to be in a society that had grown from different roots.

Would the people’s facial expressions and voices be the same as I was used to- in general- only substituting strange-sounding words? Would I feel a natural connection with people and make friends across cultural barriers? Would I feel at home away from home? Would I find my niche? How would things feel differently from the way I had always assumed the world was?

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Going to China was not just time spent abroad, a résumé highlight or adventurous gap year. It was life lived among people with completely different hearts, minds, and habits. Things overlapped, as human customs everywhere will, but in colloquial terms these people had no interest in football tailgates, processed foods, hip-hop music, or the American dream. (Well, if you want to be difficult, many Chinese families do dream of sending a child to America for college, and it seems as if as many Chinese as possibly can do emigrate out of China into whatever clean and wealthy country they can get into, with America traditionally at the top of that dream list, but that is not to say that the typical person in urban or semi-urban China conceives of life in American terms.)

In many ways, it was a relief to be there, and I savored the luxuries of Chinese life. By that I mean it was a luxury to find reprieve from the cultural nuisances I lived with in America. In China, the people might have had loud phone conversations in small, public spaces (e.g. the elevator or taxi cab) but my brain had no idea what they were saying. I did not have to involuntarily eavesdrop the way I do with all the rude, sometimes scandalous private conversations I overhear in America.

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Another great thing, I only had a guest spot in Chinese society, so it did not stress me to hear people boast about their status. I had no idea, again, what it meant when they advertised the name of their university or the corporation they worked for. “Good for you,” I would tell them without envy. No one I met in China really had what I wanted, so proclamations of personal success rolled off me like water off a…Peking duck before it was killed and roasted- when it had water-wicking feathers, that is.

My acquaintances were not pursuing the American dream- a big house in the suburbs with a big yard, big cars, big salary, and big retirement fund- they were after the Chinese dream- moving to a big, crowded city with job opportunities at mostly depressing jobs, living in a dingy apartment, having one male child, having a foreign car that was inconvenient to park and dangerous to drive, and either getting rich from a non-stop work schedule or from Communist Party funds. I did not want what the Chinese were after, so it made it easy for me to shrug off the competition.

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I also savored being around young people who tried to dress in a youthful way rather than an older, sexier way, whose appearance was modest in that they wore simple clothes that covered rather than showed off their bodies, modest in that their attitudes and actions were carefree and without worldly cynicism. The people did not often assert themselves and their identity. In China, when an authority figure or respected leader admonished the people, they listened. They may not have followed, and too often the things they did follow were the irrational words of a demagogue meant to cow the people, but as a people they felt oneness with each other and tried to band together.

That seems like ugly naivety to say that, I know, like I have come around after all my criticism to apologize for China’s brutal authoritarian state, but my meaning is the sense of place felt by the common man. Everyone in China seemed like a part of a whole, or at least the people I met uniformly expressed a strong connection to their Chinese identity. The phrase “We Chinese…” was used to begin many declarative sentences, and it was never a question if the individual saying it could speak on behalf of “we, the Chinese people.” Coming from a land of individualism, alienation, and identity politics, that seemed amazing.

And from the schools and students I saw, there were no obvious cliques of outcasts, rebels, or sharply defined popular kids. Making friends seemed so easy when every student spent their day with the same 30-50 classmates and they all saw school not as a social gaming table but as a serious work with coveted rewards of choice schools and jobs.

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I was relieved not to be around the darkness and apathy of American individualism, where not one thing can be said, not one value can be preached, without the strife of vulgar internet message boards and self-justifying arguments. In a fractured society, every piece has sharp edges; they cannot be put together with incompatible pieces. I could better tune out the hostile words in China because I could not understand more than a small fraction of what was spoken. It was up to me to search out the English language materials of my choice. I was free from the bombardment of slang terms that grow like bacteria off of the internet, pop music, and television. No one in China ever told me, out loud, “LOL,” “awesome sauce,” “that rocks my face off,” or insulted my ignorance of the newest shorthand terms for drugs and sex acts. No one, except for people in Shanghai and Hong Kong- possibly– ever judged me for my clothes, for not wearing cool jeans and shoes, or for wearing my shirt tucked into my pants “like an old man.”

China, a land or loud crowds and pollution, was in many ways my place of solitude. I escaped the tyranny of American culture that had left me a pariah in my own hometown. I knew I would not be excluded or shunned the same way in China because the people did not know how to judge me.

My essays on China were not written for personal judgment, but for comment and critique of culture. I write not so much about China as about why people do what they do, how they live, and what are the observable consequences in a people’s culture. The perspective I gained in China I apply to my view of every culture, including my own. China happened to be the place where I lived, the place I commented on, but if you have been reading closely, you will have noticed that this commentary critiqued America sharply, too, and the broader cultural forces that are universal to all societies.

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Back to the dream of traveling to the past. I would like to do this for the same reasons I went to China. All the documents and artifacts and the way the scholars, historians, journalists, filmmakers, and writers have described the past- is it true? Or more exactly, how close is it to the truth? What would the people really be like? Live like? Talk like? If they used English, how well would I understand them? Our dictionaries overlap, but from the way the people of earlier times wrote, I can tell they think, believe, and speak in fundamentally different ways than the people I live with today. I do not wish to escape to the past, but I would like to see it, be immersed in it, and let my observations and intuition shape my perspective. That is what I have done with China.

The real result is that there was much to be offended with in the country that I looked to with such airy anticipation. But if a man expects to live in any society, he either has to believe in it and be a part of it, or he has to make peace with his unhappy conscience and abide in a small niche of a corrupted whole. I could not accept the corruption of China. I could not smile and say the good outweighed the bad. I think I have long desired to depart the United States for much of the same reasons.

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I am convinced that, if Americans from before our grandparents’ generation could see their homeland today, their strongest impression would not come from our computers, our convenient home appliances, or our city infrastructure. They would not be most surprised by a child using a smart phone or families traversing interstates in a hybrid car. Instead, they would be shocked by the way children talked to their parents and the way parents talked to their children. They would be taken aback by how all the easy technology had isolated people and made their minds dependent, how it had changed basic attitudes and behavior. I am sure they would question the widespread example of parents who were modeling a conformist, materialistic lifestyle for their children. Personal music devices and DVD players would not be as amazing as the language and content of the material being played. The amazement of smart phones would sour when it was seen how much they spoiled dinners and conversations.

Americans from the past might fall prey to the quick and facile lifestyle of microwaved meals and instant entertainment- human nature dictates they would- but I imagine that the first impressions of many would mirror my observations in China. I was not so surprised at the different vehicles being driven on Chinese city streets, but in the willingness of the drivers to run me over. People mattered most, not technology.

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I was not confused by the sound of the Chinese people’s words, but by the volume and aggression they were regularly spoken with. I expected to see poverty, but what most alarmed me was how a brand new hospital building could be overwhelmed with loitering families who filled the just-opened lobbies with dirty blankets and careless trash. Foreign technology and television had made its way into China, and the ingestion of electronic media was very familiar to me. The car had made its way even to the smallest towns I visited (I was told by my two Australian friends that only about five years before our town had one traffic light and no cars). Technology in China and the outward forms of buildings and cities- while often very different- were familiar to me in their basics and not surprising at all. What shocked me about Chinese streets was not the way they looked different, but the way people spat and urinated on them. An American-born Chinese person (“ABC” in both Chinese and Chinese-American slang) can instantly be told apart from her Chinese-born peers not by her iPhone and Nike clothes, which can be bought in China, too, but by the way she wears her clothes and the way her face looks.

The point of observing culture- the point of this whole effort- is not to be found in a bloodless survey of outward modes of living. The point is to see the outworking of human thought and human hearts. My Aunt Fong would always tell me “China need time,” a strange apology from a civilization always boasting about its most ancient character, but no, I thought, China need reform- foundational reform that comes from the reform of people’s hearts

Since leaving, I have vacillated between foreswearing China forever and making a return someday to see Aunt Fong and try and find a better way of living there. I love Aunt Fong like my mother, and I talk to her every week over the computer. I also long to see all the friends and students I met in China again. I imagine being able to start new relationships with them, having my heart refined by experience and renewed hope. But I also keep in mind that China is still much the same place as I left it. I might be admired by the people there, but most of them can only giggle and gawk at me, perhaps asking me about my favorite NBA team and whether I can use chopsticks.

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I do plan on seeing Aunt Fong again- how could I not? My dilemma now is how long to stay in China and what to travel there for. A one or two-week vacation is not worth the expense or time of a twenty hour flight in my opinion. A stay longer than a month would require a visa sponsorship; I would need to have work in China. I hesitate to do that because of the misery I already experienced standing in front of a Chinese classroom. As much as I respected my elementary school music teachers and participated in their classes, that is how much my Chinese students responded to me. To my former teachers: I have done my penance. I see what I was like. I am sorry.

I was always hoping to see more of the church in China. I have asked Aunt Fong to help me find a way to observe the house churches and meet with them. She has helped me get peaks inside a few churches in what turned out to be frustrated visits. Perhaps, God willing, that hope will fully come to fruition.

For now, I am where I am. I daily dream about finding a new culture to live in and observe, or I think through how best I should get to work from my home base in Iowa writing about my experiences already. Eventually, I hope to find a place where I can be at peace and believe in what I am doing, not so much because I have found the right location, but because I have been refined and found people that I want to join together with as one culture.

Thank you for reading and commenting.

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The Real China: Traffic

Traffic in China does not follow the laws, conventions, or assumptions of American roadways, as might be expected. Remember, China is a collectivist society, which means that drivers from opposing traffic will share your lane with you.

Driving and walking are dangerous prospects in China (not that driving is especially safe anyplace else). Sidewalk and street blend into one here, and cars split the street with whatever wanders into it: bicycles, dogs, buses, motorcycles, electric scooters, livestock, domestic fowl, and plenty of pedestrians. I often wondered why so many people walked in the street, without seeming to care for their safety, when there were always sidewalks or walkways nearby. I always set out to use the sidewalk myself, but after weaving through too many food carts, tables, chicken cages, broken concrete slabs, construction leftovers, parked bicycles, trash, dung, and motorbikes, I ended up taking to the street myself.

American cities might be crowded and busy like China, but at least there is a division of space: sidewalk and street are not the same, nor do they serve the same functions. In China, if you could drive or park there, it was fair game. The same lawless rule applied to walking: if people wanted to trot along the highway with their wheelbarrow behind them, then they did so.

In China, as in most developing countries, the drivers honked non-stop. This, along with many other experiences, made me question whether “developing” was just a euphemism for the opposite of decency. Honking served a theoretical purpose- alerting other motorists and pedestrians of one’s approach- but the people in China were so jaded and dulled to the sound that they would not step aside unless they had to, and then only at the last possible moment. Drivers honked whenever they backed up, whenever they started going forward, whenever they entered a gate or narrow street, whenever they rounded a blind corner, whenever they changed lanes (although I never saw anyone check their blind spots or mirrors), whenever someone was in front of them traveling at a slower speed, whenever they were overtaking another vehicle or weaving in between opposing traffic, or for pretty much any other contingency.

Honking was constant, and it often came in the from of three-round bursts from angry truck and bus drivers. Drivers in China refuse to yield, even when turning left through opposing traffic, so they simply honk and wind their way through other vehicles like a herd of confused cows.

One of my honking taxi drivers almost ran down a university student, but I can’t really fault the driver in that case, because he had his headlights on, was driving under 5 miles per hour, and had honked steadily at the young man several times before he finally flinched and stepped aside. Chinese pedestrians, too, could be shockingly passive.

One November morning, my “Uncle” Jiang (Aunt Fong’s husband) and I were driving back from his hometown to our university, which normally took 30 minutes; we each had class at 8:00. The fog that morning was intense- you would have tripped over your toes if you didn’t know your heels were behind them. Almost as thick as the fog outside was the tension inside the car. I watched wordlessly as my honorary uncle slowly traversed the maze of the once-familiar city streets and grunted and sighed while trying to determine which streets we were on. Then, insanely, and I do not use those italics lightly, pedestrians would appear- on the highway, not on the city streets- would appear in front of us, walking the wrong way, into oncoming traffic, when a perfectly usable pathway (flat, smooth, and clear) lay on the other side of a separating barrier. We would honk and swerve around them, and after surviving our 80-minute odyssey of missed turns and drowsy detours, we eventually arrived at our campus gates.

I often muttered to myself about Chinese drivers’ lack of courtesy and safety in relation to other drivers and especially to pedestrians, but those people walking on the highway, in the fog, were out of their minds in any culture.

Back to the taxi drivers. Of course, they showed the same temerity as taxi drivers the world over. But in China, no one showed respect to the dashes and lines indicating whose lane was whose. So, when passing, the taxi drivers would honk several times and go left or right- whichever was most convenient, not necessarily a legal or safe driving space- to overtake whatever was in front of them.

Once, on a four-lane road, I was a passenger in a taxi and we were in the left lane of northbound traffic (note: China, like America, drives on the right- theoretically). We were blocked in front by a charter bus and on the right by a semi. So, in his impatience, my driver passed the bus in front by going left. We were driving north in a southbound lane.

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Driving the wrong way was fairly common for taxi drivers though. So common, in fact, that there was another taxi in front of us, also in the midst of passing the bus by driving into opposing traffic. Apparently, this fellow scofflaw was too slow for my taxi driver, so he went left around him– we were driving in the far lane of opposite-direction traffic. I do not remember how long it took to pass the car and then the bus, or by how little we missed a head-on collision, but if I counted it in breaths, it would have been zero.

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Chinese motorists pile them in, too, at least on the motorbikes. Every morning, I could count on seeing husband and wife, or daughter and child, doubled-up on a motorbike, and if it was raining, wearing a parka made to drape over the handlebars. If it was cold, they used mittens that were fastened to the handlebars. Motorcycles were not a fair weather pleasure vehicle in China. Such a thing did not really exist outside the very few rich young men in large cities driving sport bikes as playthings. Two-wheeled vehicles were used year round; they were often a person’s primary transportation. I saw, more times than I could count, father driving the motorbike, mother holding on in the back, a son or daughter standing in the foot rest, and maybe a small child in mother’s arms. I saw them carrying dogs and chickens on the back, or so many cases of beer that I do not think I could have fit them in the passenger side of my car.

A local Chinese tractor loaded up with cardboard.

A local Chinese tractor loaded up with cardboard.

The funniest, most outrageous, motorbike scene I ever saw was a woman on a scooter trailing a motorbike-truck (motorcycle front with a truck bed attached- Uncle Jiang asked me what the American word was for this and I had no word to tell him other than jalopy), and with her extended right leg she was pressing against a stack of plywood on the motorbike-truck, preventing the sheets from sliding during travel. I will repeat that: loose plywood on a truck bed was being held in place by a woman’s extended foot as she followed the truck on her scooter.

I also saw- twice, so it seemed like a regular thing- a mattress on back of a motorbike-truck, and like the plywood pile, it was loose and held down by a person instead of a rope. A man was lying down on the mattress to weigh it down, and holding onto the front of the truck bed as his friend drove. I guess that rope and bungee cord are Western luxuries.

Chinese labor has saturated the supply side so much that bungee cord is more expensive in comparison.

Chinese labor has saturated the supply side so much that bungee cord is more expensive in comparison.

It was scary and sadly funny, but too often tragic. You have probably read in the news about children being carelessly crushed by oblivious drivers, like the two-year-old, Yue Yue, who was struck and left in the street for hours as passersby took no notice of her unconscious body. Or the story of the over-packed van filled with elementary school students that was in a head-on crash. There have been multiple stories like that one, with many fatalities and serious injuries, so you may have read about these incidents more than once. I first heard about the school van crash from my mother, on a computer call from America, and I told her that awful as it was, I was not surprised. It was sadly sobering to say something like that.

On foot, a person had to expect drivers to ignore them or spitefully zoom past them. Possibly, you could even become knocked down and then run over several more times by the same car until the driver was sure that you were splattered and your family could not extract lifelong healthcare support for your dead body. When crossing the street, it was usually necessary to join up with a bold mob that was big enough to force traffic to yield. The streets were scene to daily, cavalier contempt for human life. In the Real China, that is the way of life.

A crippled man pushed himself on a wheeled cart into the middle of a major four-way intersection, cars careening past, as I craned my neck to watch from the back of a bus window. Almost as alarming as the dangerous sight on the street was noticing that no one else in my bus seemed to regard it. When my aunt noticed me staring in surprise, she laughed at it and basically communicated to me, again: “That’s China.”

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