Whispers in the Ether

Whispers in the Ether

Chinese people are afraid of ghosts.  This is something I purely don’t understand, but, belief in ghosts can be useful at times.  I found out about all of this a couple of months ago when walking with a friend.  I heard someone calling my name so I turned to see who it was, and my friend absolutely freaked out, she was terrified.  She told me that I was acknowledging the ghost behind me, and that anytime you hear someone calling your name behind you, it is a ghost.  It wasn’t until recently that I realized the extension to that. 

I thought that it was going to be one more cultural thing that I don’t understand, and that it was more likely to drive me insane over time when I yelled out friends names and they continued to walk away from me, forcing me to run after them to “prove” that my voice isn’t a ghost.  Perhaps that’s what cell phones are for though.  There is a very positive application for this belief though.

Everywhere you go, there are people around you.  Learning Chinese, you start to realize that many people around you are actually talking about you, rarely in a positive light.  By accepting the fact that they are ghosts, you can ignore them as “whispers in the ether”.

I’ve actually been discussing the fact that people here talk about you constantly, and not in a good way.  There are a ton of entitled little boys running around trying to cleverly make fun of you while being completely incapable of subtlety.  It gets a bit frustrating, and many of my friends and I have been trying to figure out why this is.  Many foreigners lose their tempers easily due to this, those who I hang out with actually love China, and want to understand the thought process behind everything, and to see how it can benefit us in our future in China.

I shared my ghost theory, but a good friend of mine actually explained things to me in an entirely different light.  In western countries, eg Canada, USA, England, South America, Ireland, etc we are raised with a Christian mentality.  Regardless of your religion, or lack of religion, you’re taught that you should be good to each other, the golden rule, what goes around comes around, or any variety of cliché.  China is a truly atheist nation.  They don’t believe that there’s any actual positive reward for treating their fellow man well, and the only negative repercussions are randomly enforced laws, that they will most likely not get caught out on.  This is probably why China is disorganized and completely utter chaos on a regular basis.

When I first came to China, one of the expats I met told me that I should go to Hong Kong to “decompress” every 2 months, and that 2 hours was not enough time, I need at least 2 days every 2 months.  For whatever reason, my competitive nature came to the surface and I thought that I could last longer than he had.  The truth is, he was actually doing me a favour, and I made the error of not following his advice.  Thankfully, I am actually able to learn from my mistakes.  Perhaps I should try Macau, but I honestly have a hard time thinking that the island version of Las Vegas will help me to decompress.

A couple of days ago I took a friend of mine, a Chinese friend and we all went on the search for a tea set.  A tea set in China isn’t just teacups and a pot.  There’s a whole big set up.  You need to get some sort of a table top, the older styles are made out of wood, although there are ceramic versions as well.  My Chinese friends all say that the best are made from bamboo, but I don’t want to have that kind of a tea set on display, let alone use one, I think it would just embarrass my friends.

Inset on the tea-set table needs to be some sort of drainage system.  There’s also two main ways that the water is boiled and cups are cleaned for making tea.  You can either have the stove set into the table, or you can purchase it separately.  Additionally, most people have a tap attached to the stove with a hose running down to a water container.

Once you have the stove, you need a pot with enough room for 10 or more small teacups inside placed on their side, and a teapot to boil the water in.  You then need the tea-set with a small pot for washing the leaves, a strainer to place on top of the straining teapot for serving, and a minimum of 6 cups.  Most of those who enjoy tea have around 3 tea serving sets. 

If you have 3 sets, you can reserve one set for black tea, one for red tea, and one for green.  Red tea is good for the belly and the digestion, green tea is good for the throat, and black tea, from what I can see, is a fantastic substitute for red bull (which sucks in China, by the way).  When making tea, you wash the leaves, and pour the tea into the teapot.  On the first wash, most use the first wash to wash the cups out before serving, that way you don’t have any contaminants in the tea.

It’s been my experience that there’s one person sitting at the head of the table, and the rest just sit around and enjoy the tea.  

I found what I thought was a good tea set store near my house, located a block away and just behind me.  Phoebe, Thomas, and I went into the building to find out that it was a 4 floor building full of tea, tea-sets, and tea tables.  We spent a couple of hours wandering around, and found a fantastic store full of tables.  We started bargaining, and the sales lady pushed the wrong button, so we left.  She told Phoebe that when we first walked in, she was giving us the “pretty girl” price, but she had since realized that close up, Phoebe was an ugly girl.  We immediately left her to enjoy her own spiteful company.

We went upstairs and into a teashop, to find a very interesting man who sold tea.  We sat down and talked to him for a bit, as he was a fascinating man, and had the most incredible store I’d ever seen.  There was a tea table, and a room that was so full of tea, you couldn’t actually move around in it.  He introduced us to a better place to purchase a tea-table in, and even gave us his discount card.  We looked around for the better part of an hour before finding the perfect tea-set table, with a built in stove, and included boiling utensils, and also picked up a matching set of tools for handling and washing the cups, as well as matching coasters.  Mr. Long also showed up at the end to make sure that they gave us their best deal.  He told us that he had ordered up dumplings and rolls for our dinner, and called his part time employee in to serve tea for us.  We then spent 4 hours drinking tea all night long and talking.  It was a fantastic night, although the black tea kept me up until 4 am.  We didn’t have time to find the three sets of tea cups though.  I need to do that this week, so that we can serve when my friend Bob from Texas comes to town next weekend.

At school, we’ve started learning characters this week.  The Chinese have a name for every single stroke, so that my teacher can just tell me the stroke name while I write it.  For example for water or “shui”, she would say, “shu gou, heng pie, ti, na” with the end result “水”.  I’m learning somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 characters a day, and 10 new words a day.  I finally decided to take classes Wednesday to Friday, as I actually have about 6 hours of homework for Monday thru Saturday regardless.  Also gives me time to work out new ways to say things, study with 3 or 4 people, and practice talking.  I’m somewhat amazed at how much time is taken up trying to figure out how to speak and understand Mandarin, read and write pinyin, and read and write Chinese characters.

Spiderman Air Conditioning Repair

It’s been a fairly interesting week.  I tried using a couple of suggestions on uploading pictures, but all of those I tried had a limit of 200 pictures, and want to charge for over that, and, I think I have around 400-500 or so, which may be excessive, but which ones do I delete?  I’ll figure it out sometime this week, probably use flickr or something.

My language school is absolutely fantastic, my teacher is hilarious.  She always teaches me a local phrase (Chinese slang) to use during the weekend, and she has an amazing sense of humour, so, sometimes those phrases are not completely ideal, have to watch when you say them.  The latest one is a way to attempt to get me to think like a Chinese person, and I’m having a lot of trouble with it.  It’s pronounced “Hao Shou Hao Shou”, which literally means “Good hand, good hand”, but the actual meaning of the phrase is completely different and I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around it.  I hope to drive people crazy figuring it out tonight.

Tonight I’m going with Phoebe to go check out her QiPao, and to attempt to get my kindle fixed.  Should be a busy day, actually.

Last week, I had a friend from my former school ask me for help in getting a new job.  The businesses here are run a little differently than I think that they should be run, for the most part.  The Chinese haven’t really learned over time how to run businesses, so they sometimes skip key steps such as learning how to do Marketing, or even training their employees to do their jobs more efficiently.  Instead, they throw them into a position, and tell them to figure it out.  Even the larger companies do this a lot of the time, I’ve talked to a few in some of the larger banks who say that even they provide zero training for employees.  Many companies and corporations also tend to not reward good employees and always punish the bad, so nobody wants to stick their neck out on anything, and good employees tend to want to go elsewhere where their skills are more appreciated.  9 times out of 10 when asking for a raise in China, the answer will be “No”.  I think that part of the problem in China is that they don’t necessarily see employees as a valuable asset, more of an unlimited resource… easily replaced at any given time.  I keep thinking that there is a major opportunity there in the future, if you were to run a company in more of a Canadian or American style, but, chances are that your employees would be a bit confused by the whole thing for a while as well.

I was more than happy to help out my friend, the trick is figuring out how to do it without losing “owed favours”, even if I’m not quite sure why they owe me favours, I still want to wait to utilize that when I really need them, sometime in the future.  I called a friend of mine who works in the finance industry, and thought that I’d just wing it, and hope for the best.  I’ve noticed, lately, that Chinese people don’t seem to have many friends; they don’t really think that they need them many times, but, if they’re forced into a social situation with a possible equal, most of the time, they tend to want to make friends out of those they are meeting with.  We all met at my neighborhood pub (best burgers, hot dogs, and pub food in Shenzhen), and I introduced my two friends to each other.  After about an hour of hanging out and talking, my 2 friends switched to Chinese, and had figured out a job plan for the one to pursue, with a possible job in finance as well.  Apparently, planning to have no plan can be successful as well.

I find that telephone calls of any sort tend to be the bane of my existence.  I attempted to order water today, I had everything planned out, and ended up with a recorded message that I didn’t understand until they said “good bye”.  I kept putting in my customer id number, but that didn’t get me anywhere.  I finally sent them to a friend and asked her to figure it out.  She responded by asking me to send an actual picture of the numbers on my water machine, and that’s when I found out that I had been repeatedly calling the wrong number, one that was actually for a hospital in Guangzhou.  I need to pay more attention to detail.  I’m very happy that I have once again managed to communicate enough in my bank that I was able to pay rent, I’m always surprised by the fact that the only people in this giant international bank who speak English, are the tellers.  This still seems strange to me.

To be fair though, there are still a ton of things here that seem strange to me:

1.       Seeing people ride bicycles with their entire family on the bicycle…a bicycle built for 4… and no, it is not any longer or set up any different than any other bicycle, it just has 4 people on it.

2.      Seeing the little children wander around in squeaky shoes with a butt flap open so that they can go to the bathroom at any given time (do NOT step in puddles in China unless it has just rained and you don’t have any other options open).

3.      Watching “Spiderman” change air conditioners on a 10” ledge on apartment buildings.  There is no safety lines, just some random guy on a ledge attempting to attach a rope to pull the air conditioner in through the window.  I keep expecting to watch them plummet to their deaths. 

4.      Watching employees wash windows on the giant sky scrapers and apartment buildings by sitting on a board attached to a single rope strung down from the top of the building, without any regard for their own safety.

5.      Seeing construction sites where most of the actual work gets done between 10 pm and 8 am, when there’s no safety personal around to make sure someone doesn’t blow themselves up or plummet to their doom due to complete ignorance of safe work practices.

There’s probably a lot more, but those are top on my list today.   This is probably due to the fact that I just watched Spiderman change another air conditioner on the 16^th floor across the street from me.  For the most part, my friends and I just accept these things as “The Chinese Way”, and laugh or gasp or whatever the situation requires, but it still sticks out in my mind.  I sometimes wonder if the other things that I just accept and no longer pay attention to are the things that will cause shock and awe when friends or family eventually visit.

One thing that does constantly cause me entertainment is the Chinese perception of geography.  Every single person who is not Chinese (or Asian) is a Westerner, regardless (irregardless for some of my American readers) of where they are geographically.  Russians are technically north of China, Aussies are south, but, they are all Westerners here!  Additionally, in Guangdong province, everyone not from Guangdong is considered a “Northerner”, regardless of distance or direction.  I think that this actually simplifies things a great deal of time.

I think I mentioned earlier that I have a friend here from Morocco?  She was told by her parents this week that finding a job in Morocco was next to impossible even with a degree, and that she would be far better off planning on staying and working in China.  She was a little disappointed to hear that she would not benefit by going home after her work experience and internship in China, but has decided to make the best of it.  Actually, her attitude and outlook on life is one of the reasons that she is probably my best friend here in China.  She decided that because of her work situation, she now needs to meet more people here and has determined that the best way is to use the expat newsgroups and internet clubs to do so.  I don’t think I have seen such an odd collection of people since she’s started meeting people online.  I was talking to another friend of mine who has been here for 14 years, and he highly recommends complete avoidance of expat sites, networking and meeting friends from current contacts instead of using the internet.  The last guy was very, very strange; he attempted to talk to me, but was extremely socially awkward.