Spitballing: Coming to China (part one)
This is Baba dancing, street dancing usually for the elderly
and quickly becoming restrained in most places. It thrives
in Chongqing.
Let's talk about my coming to China, and more specifically, Chongqing. I've lived in Chongqing since mid-ish 2017.
Like everywhere in the world there are pros and cons to living here. First of all, I moved here without doing a ton of research. Basically I read online 'Don't talk about the Dali llama' and I said 'cool, done'.
I wasn't talking about him anyway.
I did eventually start to research the language (enough people have said 'If you wan' live in America, you gotta speak the language!' *usually spoken in stereotyped country by someone out in the sun too long and they get a sunburn on the neck area and on one once pasty white arm that hangs out the side of a driver's side window). What I found was that the area I was moving to didn't speak strict Mandarin, they spoke a local Chongqing dialect that forums argued was very close to a different language from Mandarin, which caused me to sloooooow waaaayyyy down my Duolingo lessons, not gonna lie.
So I arrived in China, pudgy white girl with no eyebrow game and very little ability to speak to locals. I did however, make sure I could say thank you, please, and I'm sorry (谢谢您，请， 对不起). Which I promptly forgot when I left the airport and was surrounded by the language. Of course.
I did my teacher training in Shanghai (which was for kids teachers... but I was going to teach adults so I had a lot of free time and very little actual 'training'). I remember I fell while wondering around Shanghai (I am not synonymous with coordination) and people just parted to walk around me. Not five or ten people, but just... dozens of people. There are seriously so many more people in China than I have ever experienced in my life. I come from the south, where people are to-your-face-polite and usually offer to help strangers. So I was dumbfounded to find myself sitting there, in a large gray slab square with people milling around me, ankle semi-twisted, and no one offering to help me up.
I picked myself up, hobbled over to a crouching level wall enclosing some flowers and sat next to an old man who eyeballed me and then got up and moved away.
Looking back now, I get it. There was a string of scams around China for a while where people would pretend to need help with something and then either blame the incident on the person who helped them and sue them for money or... the person needing help would steal their stuff. It's actually kind of funny to think back on now, but in Shanghai I didn't know anything about anything so I felt like the people there weren't friendly.
Then, in an act of great timing by the gods, in that same week there was a guy standing on the side of some street that I made accidental eye contact with and he followed me around screaming 'FUCK YOU' for a few minutes, which was... surprising. I ducked into the subway system to lose him.
Not a great start.
Then I moved to Chongqing, and literally every person I spoke to that spoke English was ridiculously nice.
My first real estate agent (you need one to help you rent an apartment) was recommended by my manager and a sweetheart of a human being. She took me to dinner, which had to be embarrassing for her because my chopstick + noodle game was baaaaaaad.
To give you an idea, she literally tried to offer me an extra pair of baby training chopsticks to help me out. Picture it: a grown woman, black and red tank top, boobs showing, ass falling out the sides of a baby sized blue plastic chair, surrounded by skinny men and women all conservatively dressed despite it being about 30 Celsius, and just constantly showering herself and her neighbors in noodle juice.
That was me, week two in China.
The real estate lady was really good-natured about everything though, she even bought me my first bed sheet and comforter set.
Despite all the kindness, there were still some areas of difference to work through.
For example, she sat me down at a bar once and told me how women from the east have different bodies than women from the west. And not on the outside, but on the inside. To her, our reproductive organs were different and that's why western women can drink cold things while menstruating, but eastern women can't. When I expressed shock at this, she went on to tell me how in China women stay in bed for a month after giving birth, only drinking chicken soup and staying warm. They can't even shower.
Now I know that these are traditions in China, but not all women follow them. But when I first heard her tell me these things, I was shocked. It was one of the few times where I was being forced to acknowledge my own ignorance about the world. America's maternity leave alone would never allow for such a lifestyle and... why wasn't she better educated on female anatomy?
I left that bar confused about Chinese education and culture. I was comparing it to America because, despite having lived in Mexico briefly when I was younger, America was where I had obtained most of my experience so far.
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