Authors: Eden Collinsworth
“There’s no box for a three-month stay,” I said once I’d heard all of the choices.
“Check the one for one year,” instructed Gilliam.
“No,” I told him. “We’ll put an asterisk by the one-year box with a footnote on the bottom of the page indicating that ours is a three-month stay.”
“There’s no such thing as an asterisk or a footnote in Chinese,” my son pointed out.
“Well, improvise,” I said.
“You don’t improvise here,” he told me.
“Why not?” I asked.
“It’s not in the Chinese mentality,” said Gilliam.
“I don’t care about the Chinese mentality. I’m not signing a legal document that contains a falsehood,” I made clear.
Gilliam’s patience began its retreat.
“You’ll cause more trouble by deviating from the form,” he said sharply. “The desk person will report us to his supervisor, and we’ll be here for hours.”
“But I’ll be doing something illegal if I check the one-year box,” I insisted.
“Mother, trust me on this. Everything is slightly illegal in China. That’s the point.”
Not until I’d lived in China for a while did I understand that—by the letter of the law—everything
is
slightly illegal in China. And yes, that is precisely the point: when called on to suppress political dissent, the authorities can cite any number of recorded infractions—including misrepresenting oneself on a registration form, as I did. I did something slightly illegal at the state-run police station in order to submit their stamped form at the state-owned bank … in order to receive a state-issued card, which would enable me to turn on the state-managed electricity in our apartment … so that we were not left in the dark.
Despite my willingness, there were times during my first few weeks of living in Beijing that I didn’t fully comprehend what was happening, even after it happened. Still, I did my best when it came to
ru xiang sui su
, a practice of following the local customs.
Some of the customs were too subtle to notice. The obvious ones seemed driven by unbridled superstition. A single-digit number disappeared an entire floor in our apartment building. Dangerous to have a fourth floor, I was told. In Chinese, the word for the number 4 sounds too similar to the word for death. So seriously is the homophonous relation taken that the number rarely appears in financial projections for fear of bad luck in business. On the other hand, the number 8, which is pronounced much the same as the word for prosperity, is highly coveted, and people pay to ensure its appearance in their phone numbers and on their license plates. Hotel rooms with the number 8 are especially popular with business travelers.
With or without the advantage of lucky numbers, one should not invite adventure into one’s life without being willing to tolerate some degree of uncertainty. Chinese superstition was not my only challenge. Several days after arriving, I felt a single, painful lump under my arm. I assumed it was a large spider bite until, the next day, a second lump in the same location
appeared under my other arm. Gilliam acted as translator while the local pharmacist explained that the underarm lumps were my lymph nodes, knotted defensively by my immune system, which was under attack from Beijing’s pollution—pollution so bad that not only could I taste particles of iron from the city’s nonstop construction, but when the winds picked up, my eyes were stung by a fine powder of topsoil from Beijing’s defoliated outskirts.
Each morning, I woke to a solid mass of humidity and a sun, devoid of color, that curded the sky’s milky clouds. Beijing’s haze stagnated at a headache-inducing level, while the city groaned under the weight of its expansion. Weeks of thick pollution and stifling heat produced various forms of discomfort. There were divides between what I could live with and what I could not but was forced to.
Cupping is an ancient form of alternative medicine believed to mobilize blood flow and heal a wide variety of ailments. In the hot weather, my queasiness at the more publicly lurid signs of cupping—inky-purple spherical bruises and red welts on bare backs—contributed to the impression that I was living in a radically weird place.
Out of my element, I found certainty in keeping a neat and orderly house—my way of feeling more comfortable when the sheer foreignness of my surroundings has pushed me beyond my limits. I learned to cook unidentifiable vegetables recommended by farmers who had traveled for hours to sell their produce from the makeshift stalls in the neighborhood. I hired what is called an auntie to help with the cleaning, washing, and ironing. Gilliam was assigned the responsibilities of maintaining our supply of drinking water and making sure our computer continued to function. Without a television or radio, the apartment’s erratic Internet connection provided our limited but only access to the outside world. The years at a global think tank had trained my eye on the world’s current events, but when I learned that the sites of
The New York Times
, CNN, the BBC, and Google were periodically blocked, it was surprisingly easy for me to adjust to a life of less information.
While everything in China is slightly illegal, the corollary
is also true: anything in China is possible. A visible sign of this is the adjustable rules by which people obtain permission to buy and drive cars in Beijing.
To reduce the pea-soup pollution that envelopes the city, the Beijing government has restricted the use of passenger cars in the main area of the city. The final of seven digits on a license plate determines the days the car may not be driven. The rich beat the system by buying second cars and registering them under their drivers’ names.
In the 1980s, when I first came to China, only government officials were allowed to have cars. Now Beijing has implemented a lottery system to control the number of new cars on the road. Unsurprisingly, the rich are able to sidestep the lottery with bribes, while others wishing to own a car must add their names to a pool of one million hopefuls. Each month, ten thousand lucky numbers are drawn for permission to obtain license plates—but a drastically smaller number of those new car owners in Beijing actually know how to drive.
Traffic lights, no matter what color, are largely ignored. Lane markers serve no real purpose. It is not uncommon for drivers who’ve missed their exits to simply put their cars in reverse and back up into oncoming traffic. U-turns are made in the middle of streets. At times, passing is done by way of the sidewalk. The mentality among drivers is simple: if you see me, you are responsible for not hitting me; if I don’t see you, it’s not my fault if I hit you. Occasionally, traffic police are stationed on elevated platforms at overconverged junctions. In the middle of the chaos, they appear oddly removed from their purpose, like prairie dogs stiffly standing at alert, surveying the traffic and doing nothing about it.
One can measure Beijing’s dribble-down economy by how difficult it has become to get a cab when there are so many of them on the street. Government-subsidized gas results in incredibly cheap fares, which, in turn, result in the promiscuous use of cabs by China’s ever-increasing middle class. Cabdrivers find better-paying jobs in a matter of weeks, and openings behind the wheel are filled by peasants from the country unsure of
their way around Beijing, a city whose façade and boundaries are in a constant state of alteration.
My preferred means of transport was the onomatopoeic tuk-tuk: a two-wheeled, open-sided rickshaw attached to the back of an electric bicycle. But even tuk-tuks get snarled in Beijing’s unbelievable traffic jams. We were fortunate to be living in a neighborhood where we could walk to wherever we needed to go.
During the day, sidewalks surrounding our compound were flecked with collapsible kiosks, each under the stewardship of a man offering a single service: some repaired sorry-looking bicycles; others patched tuk-tuk tires; others resoled shoes; still others struggled to give renewed life to what appeared to be mechanical appliances left behind from the 1940s.
By six o’clock, the aromas of roasted meat, ginger, garlic, and spices hung almost visibly in the air. Replacing the fruit and vegetable stands were tiny family-owned restaurants. With no more than two or three tables, diners slurped their meals shoulder to shoulder. Each restaurant featured its own specialty dish so inexpensive that it was cheaper to eat out every night than to buy the ingredients to cook.
“Fuwuyuan!”
Gilliam would call out to get anyone’s attention. “Service worker!” is the to-the-point translation; there are no Chinese words for “Excuse me, may I have …”
Going about my uncomplicated life in Beijing, I was surrounded with a sometimes overwhelming collection of humanity. And though the Chinese have never appeared to me to be people who easily lose hope, I saw too many failures in the system to accept China’s baseline approach to governing: that ideological thinking is what matters. Nor could I help wondering how one holds on to one’s soul in a place where political beliefs designate human labor a commodity.
The day I tripped over a corpse on the sidewalk was the day of my deepest despair. The hundred yuan—the equivalent of about sixteen dollars—I gave the young man who was begging for money to bury his mother didn’t keep me from weeping once I got home. But China is not where the welfare of one is
the welfare of all; neither is it a place for Westerners to voice their political convictions. And so I focused my determination on what I went there to do.
One month after arriving in Beijing, I’d completed an outline and sample chapters for a book whose translated title was
The Tao of Improving Your Likability: A Personal Guide to Effective Business Etiquette in Today’s Global World
. The Chinese concept of Tao (also referred to as Dao) signifies a designated route. My own Tao was not yet clear. Manuscript in hand, I flagged a tuk-tuk for the bumpy ride to my Chinese agent’s office—and to whatever was next.
M
y agent scheduled meetings with four different editors interested in publishing my book.
Each greeting required one of us to do something unnatural to the other. While shaking hands is a welcomed requirement among Westerners, it is an uncomfortable practice for the Chinese. When meeting Westerners for the first time, the Chinese almost always avoid eye contact. And though a smile comes easily for a Westerner, the Chinese consider smiling at someone you don’t yet know too familiar and therefore impolite.
From a Chinese perspective, Western men—with their overly enthusiastic display of good cheer—are inappropriately familiar when they place their hands on shoulders or backs in a gesture of bonhomie. On the occasions that Europeans lunge forward to kiss both checks, Chinese women become frozen in panic.
Most Chinese offer little more than reserve during their greetings: no smiles, no eye contact, and a minimum of touching. You would be right to think this does not radiate warmth. But introductions are put in perspective by cultural surroundings. Making the effort to observe, one can take a cue from what appears in plain sight—for greetings, no matter where they take place, are foreshadowed by body language.
It has been my observation that North Americans and
Europeans are comfortable standing two or, at the most, three feet apart from the person they are greeting or speaking to, but that South Americans and Indians are likely to get closer, while the Chinese—who are loath to make eye contact—seem to have found a way of eliminating personal space entirely. It has also come to my attention that the English generally do not display a great deal of physical contact with strangers, friends, or—from what I have seen—their spouses or children. France seems to me a country where people shake hands most often and in all situations—women and children included—as it is considered a sign of equality. I have learned, however, not to presume that the French are particularly interested in speaking to anyone who is not French. Not many geographical miles away, the Italians instinctively offer kindness over recrimination. In Italy, spoken words are their own melodic reassurance, hand gestures range freely into associations, and you venture to fill in the blanks.
As for the handshake, it is said to date back to Babylonian times, when men—proved to be the more aggressively ill-mannered gender—extended the open right hand to show that they were not holding a weapon, which might explain why the gesture was not required between a man and woman until relatively modern times. It is my belief that the genesis of the handshake remains as germane now as it was then, for modern man has given modern woman any number of excellent reasons for her to be approaching him with a sharp object in hand.
A veritable bar code of information for a Westerner, the way one shakes another’s hand conveys a great deal of information quickly. When Gilliam was a boy of six, I taught him how. We were living in L.A. at the time.
A lesson for a youngster is far more effective when camouflaged as a game. Games feature the same set of components presented in the same sequence. First, there is a presentation of possibilities, dictated by the rules of the game. Next there is a single choice of action made by the player. Finally, there is the revelation of a correct or incorrect choice. Congratulations come with the former; encouragement to repeat the game offsets the disappointment of the latter.
Like any other game, my handshake game started with an underlying premise: women are different from men and require a different handshake.
“Does that mean you have one handshake and I’ll have two?” asked Gilliam, alert to a possible inequity in the division of labor.
“That’s right,” I said. “I shake a man’s hand exactly as I’d shake a woman’s because I’m a woman. Not only that, because I am a woman, it is up to me to decide if I want to shake a man’s hand.”
“A girl made this up,” Gilliam said, crossing his arms.
“Why would you think that?” I asked, trying not to sound defensive.
“Because girls are bossy and they like to make the rules.”
His playground observation was fundamentally correct.
“You’re probably right,” I conceded. “But because you’re the boy, you will have more chances at decoding the messages in the handshakes.”