真受不了中国 (I Can't Stand China)

Today I came to the depressing realization that all my shoes smell like sewage.  It happened during Comprehensive Chinese class.  ‘Why does this room smell so bad?’ I wondered, sniffing around as my teacher described the difference between the intransitive and transitive forms of ‘to command’. 

‘Oh,’ I then realized, ‘it’s my feet.’

I have two nights left here.  I’ll use this one to pick out the ten things I will miss least about China.

1. The internet.  The censorship is bad enough (linguistic side note: when a website has been blocked by the government, young people say that it has bei hexie,  or ‘made harmonious’), but most of the time it doesn’t even matter because my connection is too slow to reach allowable websites.  Loading pictures on to this blog was a huge pain in my butt.  I hope you are all grateful.

2. The brutal honesty of Chinese people.  If you want to experience Asian openness at its finest, move to China and get a pimple.  Strangers will point at their own face and say ‘pimple!”, acquaintances will point at your face and say “look!”, and your very best friends will just poke the pimple and laugh.  That’s what happened to me, at least.

3. Messiness.  I’m about to indulge in some generalizations, so bear with me.  Chinese people are really messy. Trash is all over the streets, and five of the seven Chinese people I have lived with never washed their dishes.  When I want to take out the trash, I just carry my wastebasket to the stairway in my building and throw my garbage on the top of a pile.

4. Getting yelled at.  People yell at me all the time, usually things like “Foreigner!” or “Halllllo!”.  I don’t think they mean anything bad, but it still gets tiring.  I complained about this to my high school class. 

“I get really annoyed when Chinese people yell ‘Foreigner!’ at me,” I told them.

“Wait,” they asked.  “So when a foreigner walks by, what should we yell at them?”

5. Lack of Schedules.  Nothing is planned ahead here.  And everybody is always late and things never start on time.  My classmates still don’t know when their finals will take place.  More broadly (generalization alert!), this is symptomatic of a general disdain for the rights and opinions of people in ‘inferior’ positions.  One is expected to be completely receptive to the whims of his superiors and willing to change his own schedule without complaint.  I hated, hated, hated this.

6. Language barrier.  Although my Mandarin has improved, misunderstandings persist.  This difficulty was expected and unavoidable.  I still didn’t like it.

7. The babies going to the bathroom on the street.

8. Weather.  Winter is brutal here, and the rainy season has left all my clothes moldy and all my books curvy.  My shoes smell like sewage because I have to walk through puddles all the way to school. 

9. Memorization.  The Chinese method of language acquisition is based entirely on repetition.  Our textbooks are full of example texts.  Before class, we must read the assigned text and annotate it with tone marks, pronunciation and, if necessary, English definitions.  During class, we recite the text together.  After class, we complete homework assignments that often consist of mainly copying the text.  This process is tedious.  It’s bearable when we are discussing subjects like ‘Smoking-Society’s Silent Killer?’ or ‘Lhasa’s Scenery’, but it becomes excruciating when covering ‘Contracts’.   

Several weeks ago, my writing teacher approached my Australian friend and scolded him for not responding closely enough to the essay prompt she had assigned us (side note: for this particular assignment, I copied a text straight out the book and got an A+). 

“Sorry,” he said, “I just wanted to be creative.”

“You’re not here to be creative,” she answered.  “You are here to learn Chinese.”

10. Money Obsession.  Everyone always asks how much everything costs.  Haircuts, plane tickets, lunches, loaves of bread, everything.  This is not an exaggeration.  It’s not targeted especially at foreigners, since Chinese people ask each other the same thing, but it tends to lead to uncomfortable situations.  Regrettably, I told one of my roommates’ girlfriends that I earned 100 RMB (about USD $15) per hour as an English teacher.  At the time, she commented that my voice must be very valuable; since then, she routinely brings up stories about how little Chinese people earn per month (or, sometimes, per year), each time exclaiming “And remember, you earn X times that per hour!”

Also, I’m tired of Chinese people always telling me I pay too much for stuff. 

I’ll hold myself to ten complaints.  There are more, like the surfeit of counterfeit goods and the absence of toiletries (OH and how NOISY EVERYTHING IS, I CAN’T BELIEVE I FORGOT THAT), but I’m trying to keep my spirit up. 

The “10 Things I Will Miss Most About China” post is coming soon.  I wanted to save that one for my last day and end on a high note.