I didn’t need to change my watch since Beijing is exactly twelve hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. One of the first insights into this new culture was noodles. Let them eat noodles for breakfast and noodles for snack. I like noodles and I ate all the noodle meals on the plane. And the sun never set that night.
On my first day in China, the sky was out and even blue. After an over-the-top buffet, (when people ask me what I am doing in China now I reply, “eating”) we went to Ikea so the new teachers could buy what they need for their apartments. This is the only Ikea from Beijing to Shanghai. They built it and the Chinese come in droves. By the time we left, it was a wall-to-wall warehouse of household goods and Chinese. The Chinese came crowding in to get a feel of the kitchen towels, to study the utensils, to inspect the hangars. But the most interesting part of the experience were the Chinese who came to take their after lunch naps on the beds in the third floor showroom. And they were allowed to sleep on. Whole families come to Ikea to visit, sitting in the chairs in the display living rooms. Or the gentleman we have seen on several rugs in the store sitting cross-legged and meditating? He is completely undisturbed by the people rubbing by.
Bureaucracy and saving face or should it be saving face and bureaucracy? The simple tasks like buying a cell phone can reveal so much about a country. All the young Chinese take English in school, but all the Chinese do not learn English in school. The young cell phone salesman looks at me and I look at him both talking earnestly in our respective tongues as if one of us is going to have an epiphany and be suddenly able to speak the others’ language. His eager, smiling face lifts the phone to explain the feature.
Ni chin fuoo shikuai yuan chong nung- that’s not real Chinese
Yes, that looks very nice. I’ll take that one.
Shum lun taodo ni mai- that’s not real Chinese either, but he wants me to write my name on a piece of paper so he can make an invoice for me. Once he has done that I can go with my scrap of paper to a central location where two women sit behind a desk. No one is speaking a word of English except me and I am not at all embarrassed by my stranger status. I can read numbers so I hand over 609 kuai for my simple Nokia which will only work in China. What I understand is that I can buy other sim cards when I go to other countries and simply swap one out for another. That seems like a good deal. My friends abroad can text me on this phone, but I won’t be getting any phone calls-I will have to get Skype for that.
One of the new hires though made the mistake of asking for an iron which was in fact out of stock in the store. The Chinese cannot tell you such a thing-“we are out of stock on that item” because it is a matter, even this, of saving face. They do not want to lose face by telling you that. So a BIG problem had its origins with the out of stock iron. It was unclear how all this got blown out of proportion, but as one of the new hires was trying to get an this alleged iron and as well as a hairdryer, the flustered young sales person gave the wrong scrap of paper to the customer who went to pay for the items and then returned to the designated salesperson with the proper documentation to be given the items of purchase. But much to everyone’s chagrin, the sales person came back with only a hairdryer and it took almost an hour with a crew of Chinese-English translators to figure it out. The new hire had in fact paid for merchandise that was now not being given to her because it is supposedly against the Chinese nature to admit a mistake. The matter could not be sorted out.
“The Chinese drive like they walk, if there is a space they will take it.” This is the first generation with cars. There have been a lot of changes in just the last eight years. All the farmland is being taken up and developed. These are the neighborhood compounds built up for expatriates and the nouveau riche Chinese. Where we live looks a little like Pleasantville or a set on the Truman show. There are some cars parked outside, but mostly they are ghost towns. You hardly ever see anyone.
But assume that your emails are read, your telephone calls are monitored and your whereabouts is being tracked at every minute. If you have a bad day in a traffic jam, be careful, what you say.
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