oh, China

Living in China can do strange things to a person. Really. When I meet Americans living here in China, I can usually get a sense of how long they’ve lived here just by the way they carry themselves, by the way they act, by how much they have become un-Americanized.  So I was thinking about that the other day, and decided to try looking at myself. How un-Americanized, or rather, how Chinified, have I become since living here these six months? Here are just a few of my reflections.

 

For the first time in my life, I have started craving rice. Yeah, strange. I’m not as bad as most Asians about this yet, meaning I can still enjoy a few meals once in a while that don’t include rice (especially breakfast), but once I go two or three days I start missing it. Right now I’m on day four and I’m about to go crazy. I was thinking about just making up some rice for a snack. Weird.

 

(Okay, okay, I know that comment above about “most Asians” was totally un-PC. Sorry, didn’t mean to offend anyone.)

 

I was also astonished to realize that I have only worn two outfits in the past five days. Please don’t get too grossed out by this or think I have terrible personal hygiene. It’s just the custom here. Actually, I am fairly unusual in that I don’t usually wear the same thing two days in a row – I at least alternate two outfits back and forth. But let me tell you, when you have to do all your laundry by hand and nobody really cares if you wear the same thing every day, it’s really tempting to wear things multiple times (even many multiples of times) before calling them “dirty.” It’s also tempting to wear the same pants today that I got dirty yesterday in the slush outside, since that same slush is just going to get them dirtier.  Really, before you judge me too harshly on this one, try hand-washing all your jeans and then letting them hang dry, hoping against hope that they’ll dry before they freeze. It’s not a particularly fun experience.

 

Recently I was struck by the fact that I no longer notice the terrible fashion (or rather, lack of fashion) here. In fact, I was quite surprised a few days ago to actually see a girl wearing a really stylish, sophisticated, well put-together outfit. She looked like she could have been on the streets of DC or NYC, not on the slush-covered roads at Liaoning University. That very well may have been the first classy outfit I’ve seen here, besides traditional suits. While not noticing the bad fashion is convenient for me now, I’ll admit that I’m a little nervous about when I go back to DC! Haha!

 

Another interesting phenomenon in China is that people develop a skill of being oblivious to noise. There is so much noise in this country, largely because there are so many people, that if a person pays attention to everything, they could probably literally go insane. A car horn in China is simply a way to let others know that you exist and are there, talking on a cell phone is perfectly allowable in just about any situation, music blasting out the door of a store is apparently an invitation to come in and shop, and there is always a construction sight within earshot to just add to the background noise. Silence is unheard of, no pun intended. At least, that’s the way it is in the cities, and despite most of you never hearing about Shenyang before I moved here, it does happen to be a city of more than 7 million people. So what am I getting at? I have apparently developed that skill. Not that I’m upset to be Chinified in this way, because it’s certainly a useful skill to have (especially living in China!). But apparently some of my foreign friends have not been so blessed… they’re constantly overwhelmed by the noise around them.

 

One more thing. In Chinese, there seems to be no such thing as a run-on sentence. As long as you throw in a comma, you can just keep going. (Obviously, that’s a bit overstated, but not by much.) I don’t know how many run-ons are actually making it to the final postings on my blog, but I know when I’m writing I’m sure struggling to find the end of sentences! I never used to have that problem…

 

So, it seems I’m becoming Chinified. But only to an extent. I still find certain things strange and bizarre in this place, like seeing the laoban (boss) of my dorm rollerblading through the hallways on a fairly regular occasion.  Or seeing some workers try to create a make-shift drainage system to get the melting water from the roof of a store to flow down into a manhole, when there were already inches of slush covering the ground anyway. Yeah. Strange.