Over the past ten days I have had a visit from my little sister. Like me when I first arrived, it was her first visit to China and so I did my best to bring her up to speed and let her experience as much as possible of what I go through by being here. It has been a whirlwind trip for her, filled with tourism and indulgence and hopefully she’s had a good time and got something from being here (other than lots of new handbags, tailor made clothes and massage, of course).
Sadly yesterday morning it was time for L to leave and so at 4am we were up and out to find a taxi to whisk her off to the airport. After just ten days of observing me in another country, she turned to me and pointed out that I had perhaps become a little Chinese, or taken on a few foreign (to us anyway) habits at least. Sure I eat Chinese food and try and speak Chinese if and when I can etc… but what made her squeal yesterday morning was my attire.
So what exactly, you may ask, was I wearing?! Quite simply: my pyjamas.
Yup, be it a status symbol (to show that you don’t have to rush to get dressed in the mornings) or be it just a crazy fashion statement, the Chinese are all about their pyjamas. It's a daily occurence that I see someone outside of the confines of their bedrooms, and even homes wearing pyjamas. And I'm not talking about the beautiful emboridered silk pyjamas you may expect from China, rather fleecy, flannel or padded numbers with cartoon prints in various shades of sickly colours.
At the time of the Olympics, Beijing’s Spiritual Civilisation Committee issued numerous edicts with the aim of governing citizens’ behaviour and trying to ensure it was more in-line with what foreign visitors would expect and not find ill-mannered. This ranged from instructions on how to queue to things such as how to apply make-up and comb your hair and to detailed advice on clothing; including the pyjama issue.
The Powers that be here in Shanghai have followed suit and tried to discourage the ‘visual pollution’ that is people wearing their PJs on the street. Boohoo.
Personally I think it adds a bit of charm, or certainly makes me giggle anyway. I live very centrally here in Shanghai, a neighbour to some five-star hotels and luxurious shopping centres galore. It’s a very Chinese area with fruit sellers and crumbling buildings, yet a stone’s cast from some seriously swishy, swanky sky scrapers and even swankier shops. That in itself is one big juxtaposition, but take the little old lady in her Mickey Mouse padded pyjamas walking in front of Louis Vuitton, Cartier and Hermes and it’s enough to make my head spin.
Yet there I was myself, a mere 24hours ago, in my pyjamas on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road. Refreshing that anything goes, liberating to not have to get dressed and pyjamas are clothes in themselves, I guess. My Chinese lesson of the day is: 睡衣 shuì yī - which means pyjamas.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
The rat race
What struck me a lot when I lived in Russia was that everyone seemed to have a job, or at least there were so many jobs there that didn’t exist a little further to the west. Fall out from communism perhaps, but I remember trying to figure out what the point of some jobs was. I was always mildly amused to see people sitting in boxes at the bottom of each and every escalator in the Moscow underground just watching the drones of people go up and down all day long, day after day. Yet the people sitting in those boxes, uniformed to the hilt, seemed to do their job with a great sense of pride and satisfaction. Or at least that is what I took from it. They may not have smiled outright, but who ever beams with happiness in that city?!
I get the same feeling here in China. It seems that everyone has a job here and work is something to be taken quite seriously. There are uniforms, there are morning meetings (or dictations) and assemblies and again there are jobs here which just wouldn’t exist out back west. There are attendants who sit on the streets and watch over your parked bike, there are people who take your order before you reach the counter at fast-food restaurants, there are random people in uniforms sitting in boxes in parks… You get the idea. Despite the odd beggar and ruffian, everyone has a part to play. Everyone is a cog in the giant system that is China, and that in itself is great.
What is perhaps not so great is that this seems to breed (perhaps unintentionally) a ‘jobsworth’ attitude. Everyone knows the part they should play and they don’t and won’t go above and beyond or take the bull by the proverbial horns. Just why is unknown, but it was interesting to observe another class this week and watch one of my teachers launch a lesson on decision making. The way this lesson was to work was that said teacher would draw from past experiences to get conversation going. The problem here was that this group of students didn’t make decisions. Ever. Given the same job title in the US or Europe and for sure, decision making would be part of the job but here all decision making was passed on to the next person, the one ever so slightly higher up the career ladder… and this was absolutely fine by them. They were quite content to just do their bit and nothing on top of that.
I came across another fine example of this the day I went to get my medical when I first moved here. It was a rather eventful day with stripping off, stray boobs, underwear incidents and lots of cattle-like prodding but essentially we were shepherded around from one room to the next for various different tests, just to make sure we were good, clean and healthy enough to stay in China. Finishing off one [ever so slightly degrading] test, I instinctively wanted to know what was coming next. I asked, but couldn’t get an answer. Language barrier was not the problem here as I was with a friend who spoke excellent Mandarin, but the fact of the matter was that they didn’t actually know what the next test was. They sat in the same room every day and performed the same tests and didn’t need to know what went on in the next room as they had been given a job to do and that was their focus. Nothing more, nothing less.
You can only imagine, therefore, what Chinese management styles are like… but I’ll save my ‘boss is God’ stories for another day. Phew.
As an extrovert I can be quite (there's the understatement of the year) forthcoming and am always spreading my wings, especially at work. This does get me in trouble as I can easily take on more than I can chew and I do have difficulties saying no, but am working on it and to be honest I don’t think I’d have it any other way. I’m always looking to try new things and want to be pro-active, hands-on and self-sufficient. We’d all be liars if we didn’t say that our own way of doing things was the best. China with its ‘jobsworth’, ‘think inside the box’, ‘don’t rock the boat’ attitude can thus drive me to frustration… and it does! Things take that little bit longer, you inevitably waste time talking to the wrong people and you regularly come up against brick walls [which you want to bang your head against].
I understand that it is systematic in a way and that the Chinese work ethos is all about working hard, working late and doing your bit with pride, which is all very well… but showing up for work and putting in copious amounts of hours within a restricted frame work of what you can and are willing to do does also strike me as incredibly inefficient.
My Chinese lesson of the day is: 工 gōng - which means work. It is my reason for being here in China, and is incidentally also the reason for the slight hiatus in my blog-writing. There has been an awful lot of - sometimes efficient, sometimes totally inefficient - work of late.
I get the same feeling here in China. It seems that everyone has a job here and work is something to be taken quite seriously. There are uniforms, there are morning meetings (or dictations) and assemblies and again there are jobs here which just wouldn’t exist out back west. There are attendants who sit on the streets and watch over your parked bike, there are people who take your order before you reach the counter at fast-food restaurants, there are random people in uniforms sitting in boxes in parks… You get the idea. Despite the odd beggar and ruffian, everyone has a part to play. Everyone is a cog in the giant system that is China, and that in itself is great.
What is perhaps not so great is that this seems to breed (perhaps unintentionally) a ‘jobsworth’ attitude. Everyone knows the part they should play and they don’t and won’t go above and beyond or take the bull by the proverbial horns. Just why is unknown, but it was interesting to observe another class this week and watch one of my teachers launch a lesson on decision making. The way this lesson was to work was that said teacher would draw from past experiences to get conversation going. The problem here was that this group of students didn’t make decisions. Ever. Given the same job title in the US or Europe and for sure, decision making would be part of the job but here all decision making was passed on to the next person, the one ever so slightly higher up the career ladder… and this was absolutely fine by them. They were quite content to just do their bit and nothing on top of that.
I came across another fine example of this the day I went to get my medical when I first moved here. It was a rather eventful day with stripping off, stray boobs, underwear incidents and lots of cattle-like prodding but essentially we were shepherded around from one room to the next for various different tests, just to make sure we were good, clean and healthy enough to stay in China. Finishing off one [ever so slightly degrading] test, I instinctively wanted to know what was coming next. I asked, but couldn’t get an answer. Language barrier was not the problem here as I was with a friend who spoke excellent Mandarin, but the fact of the matter was that they didn’t actually know what the next test was. They sat in the same room every day and performed the same tests and didn’t need to know what went on in the next room as they had been given a job to do and that was their focus. Nothing more, nothing less.
You can only imagine, therefore, what Chinese management styles are like… but I’ll save my ‘boss is God’ stories for another day. Phew.
As an extrovert I can be quite (there's the understatement of the year) forthcoming and am always spreading my wings, especially at work. This does get me in trouble as I can easily take on more than I can chew and I do have difficulties saying no, but am working on it and to be honest I don’t think I’d have it any other way. I’m always looking to try new things and want to be pro-active, hands-on and self-sufficient. We’d all be liars if we didn’t say that our own way of doing things was the best. China with its ‘jobsworth’, ‘think inside the box’, ‘don’t rock the boat’ attitude can thus drive me to frustration… and it does! Things take that little bit longer, you inevitably waste time talking to the wrong people and you regularly come up against brick walls [which you want to bang your head against].
I understand that it is systematic in a way and that the Chinese work ethos is all about working hard, working late and doing your bit with pride, which is all very well… but showing up for work and putting in copious amounts of hours within a restricted frame work of what you can and are willing to do does also strike me as incredibly inefficient.
My Chinese lesson of the day is: 工 gōng - which means work. It is my reason for being here in China, and is incidentally also the reason for the slight hiatus in my blog-writing. There has been an awful lot of - sometimes efficient, sometimes totally inefficient - work of late.
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