Manners

I really can’t go 3 months in China without writing a little something about Chinese manners. It’s a subject I’ve been avoiding, because it’s not very, well, “glamorous.” I don’t want to seem as if I’m ragging on the Chinese, but the Chinese standard for manners is just very very different from western one. In fact, it’s one of the biggest cultural differences I’ve noticed in my time here. It’s difficult for me to understand this part of their culture, and I know it may be hard for you to understand as well. So where do I even begin….how about spitting. Everyone spits. Men, women, everyone. You can’t walk down the street without hearing someone clear their throat LOUDLY and hock a big lugey on the sidewalk, no matter if you’re 2 feet away or not. But it’s not just outside. Today I was at Wal Mart and my cashier (a woman) spit on the floor while she was ringing up my stuff…I couldn’t believe my eyes. It’s come to the point where I hear that snorting sound of someone clearing their throat and I just cringe. But you know what they say…when in Rome! I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t spit on the sidewalk when I feel the urge…but don’t worry mom, I’ll break the habit before I get back in the states :)

Another area where manners are very apparent is at the table. I have to be perfectly blunt here…eating with Chinese people makes me loose my appetite at times. They chew with their mouths open while talking and chomping their food LOUDLY. Anytime there are bones or anything else in the meat they’re eating, they just spit it out on the table. Most of the time Chinese food is served family style. They don’t usually serve the food on their plates and then eat it though. Instead, they have a small bowl of rice that they hold in one hand, and they just reach around the table and eat off the serving plates with chop sticks. They don’t ask to pass dishes, or really use any table manners that we consider “polite.” When a group of Chinese people leave the table, it looks like it was hit by a tornado. It seems that, in China, where there are people, there is also loads of food, which also equals loads of trash. It wasn’t 5 minutes after I got on the train to Beijing that there just seemed to be bowls of noodles and snack rappers everywhere. They just never stop eating!

Chinese people are by far the pushiest, most impatient people I have ever encountered. Pushiness is just a part of their culture. If you need to get by someone, you don’t ask them to move, you just push past them. If you bump or shove someone, there’s no need to apologize because that person isn’t offended, it’s just normal thing. You can’t stand in a line anywhere without being pushed by the person behind you…that is on the rare and miraculous occasion that a line is actually formed. I’ve had to become a lot more aggressive than I’m used to being. If you’re not aggressive on a bus, you won’t get on (or off). If you’re not aggressive in line at the store, you’ll get cut in front of. One time I was buying a ticket for the subway at the automated ticket machine in Beijing. I had chosen the line, and as I reached in my wallet to grab my money, a woman came of from behind me and tried to put her money in. I couldn’t believe it! I had to elbow her away. Elbows come in very handy here. Sometimes life in China feels like a constant push and shove. There are just SO many people and so much chaos EVERYWHERE you go it’s overwhelming. I know in the states we talk about overpopulation becoming a problem, but it doesn’t even compare to how it is in China. Overpopulation isn’t just a statistic here, it’s in your face every single day and you just can’t get away from it!

Now we come to the weirdest thing I’ve encountered of Chinese manners…potty training children in the streets. I mentioned a while back in my “fun facts” that diapers are rare here, but instead children wear pants with slits in the crotch and the mothers create a signal, usually a whistle, to instruct the child to go to the bathroom. Well as neat of an idea as this is for potty training, it does include having to see kids peeing (and doing other things) in public. Kids are held over garbage cans, street grates, or just the sidewalk when they have to go. And that’s just if they happen to be outside. One of my friends saw a child peeing over a fake plant in the mall not too long ago. Oh, and bus floors aren’t out of the question either, and there is that unfortunate occasion that you are riding on a bus and see the remains…not fun but again not something that seems bothers the Chinese.

And that brings me to my last point…nothing seems to bother or annoy the Chinese at all! I’m just continually amazed at how they seem to block annoying noises out and go on with their lives. I have so many examples of this I can’t name them all, but here are a few. Chinese people like to play music on their cell phone/iPods on the bus or in train stations. Many times they do this without headphones so everyone can hear it, and it’s all fuzzy and out of tune (aka really annoying). But people don’t care. Chinese form of advertising a sale in a store is to say the same thing over and over again on a megaphone (something like “oranges half off”). Sometimes they’ll just record it on the megaphone and set it on a stack of merchandise repeating itself. This could possibly be the most annoying thing I’ve ever encountered while shopping, but I’m the only one who seems to be bothered because everyone else just goes on shopping. My guess is that it has to do with the chaos and amount of people in China that they just sort of learn to block things like this out.

Doing a little bit of reading online, I found out that China is more than aware of it's reputation for having bad manners. Chinese people who travel outside of China are warned not to embarass China by practicing some of these behaviors when they are abroad. I was reading this article that had me laughing because it named so many of the things I just wrote in this blog, plus some more. Click here if you want to read it.

Apparently there have been "anti-spitting" and other such campaigns run in China since the 1950's. These intensified in Beijing before the Olympics when the whole world would be viewed in on the country. Here is a video of a TV commercial from the 1950's that I thought was cute:

So there we are, a few things I may never understand about this very different culture. I recently read a quote that said “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” And although I may get frustrated with is sometimes, it all adds up to the reason I wanted to come here: if it was the same as home it wouldn’t be a new experience.

A typical child's apparel