What a Character!

A fair few years ago I worked for an advertising agency. It was a crap job in a pretentious, jumped-up, happy-clappy company and, well, I didn’t last long in such a phoney environment.

One day however, us mere juniors were given the task to go out and spend one minute counting the number of advertisements we saw in that very short period of time. It was to inspire and awaken our senses, and it certainly worked. I was amazed at the number of adverts all around us; every space seemed like an opportunity to plug something. From that day on I have been acutely aware how much we are literally just bombarded by adverts and as much as I am a consumer happy slight shopaholic retail junkie (and really, which self-respecting 28 year old girl isn’t?!) I try to rationalise and remind myself that I am being brainwashed as my mind never switches off.

In many ways my life here in China is very unrealistic. I don’t do the humdrum things expected of me back home such as cooking, cleaning and ironing, and my diet consists to a large extent of cocktails. I wear fun clothes, get weekly manicures and paint my nails radical colours and sometimes when I can’t be bothered washing my own hair, I get someone to wash it for me. This is not a normal existence for a European and the novelty of this will wear off eventually, if it hasn’t already started to do so… It’s a bubble.

Add to this the fact that I don’t watch TV here, never listen to the radio and can’t always access the web-pages I would like to see, and it really does feel like I am living in a parallel universe where my own thoughts consume me a lot more than the thoughts of others.

One could argue that that the big group of people ruling this country (a bit fearful of the C word) do shove a bit of propaganda down our throats every now and then, and that there is a fair bit of brainwashing going on as to China’s importance in the international sphere. The reality, however, is that I never read the one newspaper in English readily available that spouts this stuff… and the rest is kind of cut off from me anyway.

I really do live a fake existence here, but what really makes me feel foreign and distant (and I mean really foreign in an alien come down from Venus kind of way!) is that I am blissfully ignorant to everything around me. I don’t have a clue what 99% of signs and posters that surround me actually mean and am missing out on the brainwashing I have become conditioned to expect.

It’s kind of nice in some ways because I can make my own reality, which is often much more fun, but I do miss being able to read things!

Learning the characters of Mandarin and how to put them together is a whole other language or art form in itself and I made the executive decision way back when that I would learn to speak Chinese with merely the help of pinyin and not bother with learning how to read or write. I am an audio learner anyway and do a great deal of mimicking others’ accents more than absorbing from reading… but what I forgot to bargain with was that I actually liked reading.

I miss out on so much in my own little bubble and as much as it is nice to no longer be part of the number one target group for advertising, I miss living the full experience and being aware.

I miss being able to read the bus routes, to know what adverts mean, to be able to read menus that don’t have pictures, to read half the things my colleagues write, to understand what my bills say, to read the signs around the city, to decipher receipts easily when doing my expenses, to know which button to press to get in the right queue at the bank, to pick up any magazine and devour each and every word, to know which is the shampoo and which the conditioner and all of these really banal things that we take for granted in our normality.

There are a handful of characters I do know however, and the most important one for me means I don’t end up somewhere I don’t really want to be. It’s a survival technique. My Chinese lesson of the day is: 女 – which is the sign for the little girls’ room. No pinyin or sound clip today, to prove my point that the two are very abstract separate things. See how you like that…!

The Bottom Line

They say that a picture speaks a thousand words and in order to explain today’s China lesson I had a lot of fun trying to capture this photo to illustrate my point. It was quite a task, since it is a sensitive area, I had to be discrete (hard task when you’re as bright and white as I am!) and I didn’t want to be seen as some crazy weirdo pervert… Keep reading, this will make sense in a while!

As seems to be the theme with this blog, there are so many differences East to West and the majority of which are something that I deal with quite well, I’d say. Sure, sometimes I do want to jump on the first plane out of here and head to the ‘normality’ of Europe, but on the whole I do not too badly and am always a good sport trying to acclimatize a bit.

Perhaps though where I feel very western, a bit prudish and really uncomfortable being in China is anything to do with bathroom behaviour. Squatties not potties, footprints on toilet seats, witnessing people do their business with the door wide open, lack of paper, disregard of hand-washing and very loud, honest and open farting (for lack of a better word) are all things I have had to just deal with. We are all human and we do all have to go, so I guess the Chinese openness kind of makes sense once I get my head around my upbringing and ingrained manners.

The vast differences in all things toilet here in China versus my very prissy, conservative and reserved British ways, starts from a very early age. It starts indeed with babies and I am amazed and ever so slightly in awe at what can be seen in the photo. Chinese babies, or rather the ones not yet ‘westernised’, do not wear nappies.

You see these little rugrats with trousers with slits up the back, bare naked bottoms exposed to the world and at the ready to be held by their parents to relieve themselves in parks, in street gutters or even (and I kid you not!) on the grass at the Olympic stadium in Beijing. I was totally freaked out to see all these bare bottoms and kids randomly peeing everywhere and felt it was something I had to get to the (pun unintended) bottom of.

Talking to Chinese friends and colleagues they’ve enlightened me that it’s better for the baby’s bottom to be aired, it’s better to train them as soon as possible, it is the way things have always been done and it’s Confucianism at it’s purest. Perhaps though the reason for this is more financial than anything what with diapers costing a lot of money. Regardless of reasons, it’s amazing.

I’ve babysat enough kids throughout the years to know that potty training is a nightmare so this really makes you think ‘how on earth is that possible?’ There’s a whistle and a grunt noise involved apparently and babies are laboriously trained to go on demand, but am not really sure how it works to be honest. Feel it is worthy of note though, and if we could get over our prejudices against anything toilet related in the west, just imagine how eco-friendly, cheap and convenient this would be?!

Am stunned every time I see this, so my Chinese lesson of the day is: 褯 jiè – which means diaper, or nappy.

Spot the White Kid

No stay in China would be complete without a visit to Xi’an – the cradle of Chinese civilisation and home of the world famous Terracotta Warriors. It’s been on my ‘to do’ list since arriving and I took the May 1^st long weekend opportunity to jump on a plane and come and see what this place is all about.

Stepping off the plane I realised that I was stepping out into real China. This isn’t the international metropolis that is Shanghai or the capital city spruced up beyond recognition to please visitors to the Beijing Olympics. Here was the China I had heard about - smoggy, bustling, chaotic and very, very foreign.

Xi’an is a lot smaller than other Chinese cities I have been to. It only has a couple of million inhabitants, the majority of which seem to be students. Being a little out of the way I guess not many international companies have set up shop here and so not many foreigners would come to live and work here, but rather just pass through to see what this city has to offer. On top of this, although the enterprising few have outdone themselves in catering for us tourists, this certainly isn’t Disneyland and the city still feels very untouched by western influences.

What is funny about the Chinese is that they have no qualms about staring and pointing and making a scene whenever they see something they think is funny or different. It is quite refreshing that they are so open sometimes, and in a way this kind of innocence and lack of ‘play it cool’ nonchalance that we have in the west is a treat. Simple things I merely take in my stride and glaze over become a big adventure, and how much fun must that be?!

Walking down the street in Shanghai people will occasionally stare at me, but the only time I really get hassled is when I keep it real and ride on the buses. Little old ladies will try touch my face, little old men will stare until their eyes almost pop out and children point unashamedly. In the weekly grind of office to cocktail bar to home, I don’t go on the bus that often so I am not faced with this intrusion enough to annoy me. It is very much still a novelty and admittedly quite flattering to be so funny or different.

My experience here in Xi’an is that the novelty would soon wear off. I still find it charming but the patience of my two 2m tall travel companions may be exasperated. The pointing and giggling is ok but yesterday we were asked to pose for goodness knows how many photographs and people come up and try speak the pidgin English they know, which is a bit of a busman's holiday for me and ever so slightly exhausting.

There I was minding my own business in my true western way, walking between excavation pits at the utterly mind blowing Terracotta Warriors Museum when this mad little Chinese man comes running up to me with his baby. “Beautiful lady, beautiful lady… Please hold the baby for a photograph!” The baby was shoved into my arms, perhaps not very amused and a bit freaked out by this white freckled thing holding him. I wanted to just placate him, to give him back, but had to pose first of all. Bizarre. What they will do with this photo of a random white person (ie me) is a mystery and I don’t know if I really see the point in it, but that is what makes this whole place so foreign.

A new day awaits anyway, and I should go put on some make-up to star in some random Chinese people’s photo albums. My Chinese lesson of the day is: 老外lǎo wài - which means foreigner, and is exactly what I am.