Do we see how daft our own behaviour is?

We decided to have a lock put on our bedroom door for extra safety and I duly told our ayi, maid in Chinese, the new rule and the safe place to leave the key. I realise ayi here in China come from a very simple or rural background and need training in using washing machines, how to clean a fridge and oven (all new to many of them) and so forth. So I showed our ayi, Tang Ying, that you press the button in the doorknob on the bedroom side, then simply close the door and it will lock. She just needed to open the door with the key which was kept in a hidey hole and ensure it was locked afterwards in the fashion that I showed her. She passed on this information to her mother who sometimes came in instead of Tang Ying.

I came home on the day her mother cleaned our apartment and the door had been duly locked. But the key had been firmly pushed into the keyhole. Any burglar would have hardly believed his luck. Clearly, that rather essential part of my drilling had not been passed on to Tang Ying’s mother.

Ah, the daft behavior of people. Yes, before anyone accuses me, I do venture I would not have much (hilarious at least) to write about were it not for our daffy behaviour. And note I said “our” behaviour and I was not pointing squarely at the Chinese, just for a change. But before some readers relax and sheathe their politically correct weaponry, I am now going to go on about the delightful Chinese and their daffiness.

Prior to launching in I would like to make it clear that between Westerners and the Chinese there are vastly different cultural perceptions, different sensibilities. For example, the symbolic meaning of the colour black. It is well known in China that products coloured black sell well. For example their thermos flasks that many people have in their offices for their lu cha, green tea. The same applies to cars, which are often black and it looks like more than half of China are on their way to a funeral to the Westerner, who of course prefers red sports cars, sporting green sedans and so forth. Black in China is a positive colour, associated with good social manners, social upstanding and a solemn bearing. In the West, you know what we are required to wear to funerals and the colour of the armband on days of mourning. We associate black with omens, tragedy and bad luck. So when relating anecdotes about the Chinese, one has to be aware of these perceptions, the meaning of black being just one of many examples.

The Chinese taxi driver: Ah, the cabbie. I refer to this marvelous, somewhat unnerving species in my memoir, due out early next year. How they miss cyclists and scooter rider or not get knocked over by buses as we go bowling along is beyond my comprehension. To this day I still gape goggle-eyed in the back of the car. The other day one cabbie and I had a wonderful chat while we narrowly and blithely missed trucks and pedestrians, and he was truly stretching the limits of my intermediate level Mandarin. He gathered I was a South African, a Nan Fei ren. He then asked me whereabouts in Africa was South Africa. Not wishing to offend my reader, I gave the excruciatingly obvious answer, and, for emphasis, used my hands to shape out the continent and pointed to the bottom part with a precise finger. I took great delight in watching the light dawn on the cabbie’s face as he nodded solemnly, eyes widening with this fresh gem of information.

The hairy crab story: My wife, Marion, AKA chookie, was once getting off a subway train in Shanghai’s vast underground and saw a small, spry, elderly gentleman with a large, wiggling bag of hairy crabs, “oh, at least forty”, she said. As he got off the train the bag burst and there were hairy crabs scuttling in every direction. (In China your seafood often cannot possibly come fresher.) He desperately tried to grab them but the furry buggers were scuttling hell for ~~leather~~ shell in every direction. “The poor man”, my wife chortled, “was hopping like a frog after each one, an impossible task”. On his bobbing haunches he was trying to grab the critters and shove them in his shirt or what was left of his bag. Everywhere people were trying to avoid a small herd of crawling crabs. Many people were laughing at him, and some women were screeching and scampering about on high-heeled tippy-toes and with flailing handbags as the myth says they do when confronted with rats or mice in the office. One or two crabs found themselves soaring up the escalator (stairway to heaven?) or toppled on to the subway tracks. Eventually the subway cleaning staff brought him some large garbage bags and our hapless frog-man gratefully scooped most of them up.

They were laughing at him. Now, to a Westerner, and certainly to me, that would be disgusting. His large bag of crabs represented some form of livelihood, perhaps a restaurant delivery. But a Chinese will laugh at an unfortunate situation because of his different sensibility. As one of my Chinese textbooks* says, “[Laughter] is sometimes a reaction to a tragic situation and … indicates a distancing from the events or the desire not to embarrass the other …” (Laughter is xiao笑). Note the large, laughing eyes on the top of the pictogram’s abstract of a person with arms wide open, legs apart.) Here we see a huge difference in Chinese and Western norms.

I have often been mortified in public by people laughing at me here. Once I tripped and fell at a college I was teaching at and the students immediately burst into laughter but stopped after a few seconds as they saw my indignant, red face glaring at them from the pavement. But if they hurt themselves they will laugh at themselves too. Now of course I have yet to see a Chinese really hurt themselves … I am sure that has to be a different matter. Another time I was laughed at was when chookie and I were coming back from a holiday and the handle on my suitcase broke in a metro station. It was deep summer and I had to sweatily half-kick and half-haul the case along to a taxi while several lookers-on grinned and cackled. “Ni you wenti ma?” (Do you have a problem?) I thundered sullenly at them. Later I realised how ridiculous I must have looked, furiously kicking along a suitcase as if it were an overgrown football, refusing to see the humour in the incident. They must have seen my sulky behaviour as daft.

Once Marion’s handbag was stolen along with her bank card. Whilst trying to explain this to the banking staff as we tried to get a new one, some customers listening in (as Chinese people will) laughed out loud as I explained that her handbag was stolen. I exploded. But now I know the laughter is not mockery — the Western perception — but a way of distancing and minimising unfortunate circumstances.

So yes, the longer I live here I realise the Chinese must also see a lot of Western behaviour as daft. Especially spending. We just don’t know how to save. Westerners will sit in Western pubs in China and — like all over the world — drink copious amounts of alcohol and spend large sums of money on meals that would cost a fraction if cooked at home. The humble hamburger and fries are an example. One Carlsberg Draft beer in happy hour in Shanghai is about 25 RMB (currently slightly more in rands) and easily 40 RMB outside happy hour. Guinness will cost 60 to 70 RMB a pint. I know fellow “foreigners” — as we Westerners are known — who make a fortune and spend most of it in pubs. The typical Chinese would not do that. I watch the novice Chinese waitering staff’s gaping faces and speak to them and I know that to the average mainland Chinese the Western ability to piss money against the wall is beyond their comprehension. Marion and I have almost completely stopped going to pubs, even though it is a great place for ex-pats to meet people, and hardly go to Western restaurants as well.

The Western ability to spend! I have watched Tang Ying gaping at our Pizza Hut delivery menu prices. The extra large pizzas, which we used to order perhaps once or twice a month (now far less as we become more “Dutch” or Chinese in our ways) are hardly likely to cost less than 125 RMB each (Oh, but delivery is FREE!). To these humble Chinese a meal is starting to get expensive if it cost more than four RMB per person to put together. And yet they are healthy and happy, not stuffed and struggling with being somewhat overweight, like Marion and myself, typical of many Westerners (though chookie is almost slim now before I get a clout).

So sure, I find the Chinese behaviour at times most peculiar, but the longer I live here I am becoming absolutely enriched by the realisation that daftness is often a simple matter of perception. And Westerners increasingly need to develop a greater understanding of the Chinese as their country becomes the economic powerhouse of the world and arguably the most influential global player.

* A Key to Chinese Speech and Writing (Two volumes) by Joel Bellassen and Zhang Pengpeng. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to learn how to read Chinese in a fascinating manner and get a lot more insight into the culture and mindset.