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…!