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May 2005 I opened the door of a cafe's toilet the other day, and a middle aged Chinese woman was inside, about to unbutton her jeans and crouch down. I blinked and politely closed the door. One of my Israeli friends was in the cafe, so I went and sat with her and recounted how the woman hadn't locked the door. My friend replied casually, "Oh, they always do that". There are difficult things involved with living in China. Beyond trivial things like toilets and chopsticks, there a lot of deeply strange differences. Like - Chinese dinners usually require the host to order/cook twice as much as food as is actually necessary, leaving you feeling desperate to try and finish it, annoyed because you can't, and frustrated because your host will keep insisting you eat more, long after you're completely full. The level of trust between strangers here is frequently very low - it seems fine to behave harshly towards people you don't know. Chinese people seem to have a poor idea of how to enjoy themselves, rarely apparently taking the time to relax and enjoy the simple things in life - instead preferring to spend huge amounts of money on things just because they're expensive. Young Chinese men get bossed around an incredible amount by their elders, then when they grow up, inflict the same shit they had to swallow on to everyone younger than them.

Daniel Wallace

Ex pat society is a very fertile environment for stereotyping. When you travel solo in a country, you have little choice but be involved in the culture all around you. You may find things you dislike, but on some level, their world is the only game in town for you.

But, with a few dozen friends from the West living around you, teaching English, learning the local language, you can develop your own mini-culture, a bubble protecting you from the ocean. Chinese things become amusing, pitiful - suddenly you are the superior one again. I've made great "foreign friends" here since I moved to this city of Kunming, and I wouldn't trade that experience for anything. Sometimes, however, I'm shocked by how crudely derogative we can be to the country we've chosen to visit/live in.

Some lunches, we recount funny Chinese failings:

Why don't they just order a sensible amount of food at dinnertime? Why can't they stop spitting, littering, staring at foreigners? Why do some Chinese people spend lots of money trying to more or less buy you as a friend - why can't we just have a nice dinner/drinks with them in a bar? Why aren't there any good Chinese cafes, with a nice atmosphere? The women are slim, meek and really easy, lots of them want a western boyfriend. The men are unattractive, immature, they treat their women really badly, visit prostitutes all the time.

It's sad really. Maybe this is the kind of thing bigots back home believe in, but we're supposed to be the people with open minds, people that came here to experience the country, find its good and bad. There certainly are bad things about China, things I'm sure would frustrate anyone, but there's got to be another way of relating to the country than forming your own pleasant ghetto. I've tried to decide to myself, in the time I've got left in this country, to try and understand a bit more. Find some exceptions to stereotypes.

To contact Daniel Click Here

The following are Daniel's previous articles for the magazine:

Male Warrior Princess ~ On Chinese TV 
Murder And Horses - Todosantos, Guatemala
Then He Put His Foot On My Stomach ~ Thai Boxing 

My online diary of living in China: www.suitcasing.com
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