I know this is an awkward first entry for any sort of blog, let alone a travel blog. I'm horrible at writing introductory posts, and it all seems so unnatural and forced anyway. This journal is meant to be a catharsis for me, a way of letting go and processing the things I am learning, and just generally an outlet for me. And it's my blog anyway, so I can do what I want. So there. :)
But just so you know (and to provide background for what I'm about to write) I have been an expat in China for 2 years, and I'm about a month and a half deep into my third. I'm in my mid-30s, married, with a child on the way. I'm about as white as they come, and I'm from the USA, one of the most hated countries on Earth.
It has been an interesting weekend, to say the least.
We just got back from Xi'An, which is a great city in China. If you don't believe me, just ask any Chinese and they will tell you. We actually really had a great time. It was wonderful getting to meet a lot of other expats and travelers there. We got to break bread with folks from England, France, China, Japan, Iceland and Australia and share our experiences together. I can't tell you how much fun it was to be with all of them. We had our own "United Nations" session there around the lunch table, and I promise you that if all the world's leaders could get along the way we did, there would never be another war on this Earth, ever.
But the thing that kept sticking out in my mind was the reactions of the native Chinese that surrounded us. Though Xi'An is a well-traveled place where seeing a foreign face is not uncommon, people there still stared at us. As Eminem so succinctly put it, "y'all act like you never seen a white person before!" Their reactions to us were varied. Most of them just stared. (And yes, Chinese culture does consider staring impolite. They just don't care.) Several of them giggled and chatted with each other, clearly talking about the amazing foreigner they just saw. Some of them scowled at us, as though we shouldn't be invading their homeland. Some of them whispered in Chinese about the fat white devils, because they don't think we understand their language. One female passerby actually reached out and patted my friend Josh on the stomach because she thought he was fat. Some passersby stopped and asked us to take photos with them. That happens quite a bit.
But at the heart of it all is a deep-seated form of racism.
They will never admit it, but the Chinese are the most racist people in the entire world. If you're a foreigner, it's hard to grasp this at first, because they seem so friendly on the outside, but the more and more I look at Chinese culture, the more I understand how deeply racist and prejudiced it is.
Imagine, for a moment, living in a country where everyone looks just like you. They all have the same color of hair, the same eye color, speak the same language and have the same customs. Imagine that you never ever see anyone who ISN'T like you. Then you have a picture of the world most Chinese live in.
Just consider the word "foreigner" for a moment. The Chinese use this word quite often to describe me and my friends and family. I'm known as the "foreigner teacher." Ask yourself, if you are an American, how often you have heard that word in the US? The thing is, when I see a Chinese person in America, I don't look at them and say "there's a foreigner." Our population in America is so diverse that we don't even think twice when we pass someone of a different color, race or nationality. We don't think it odd when a Brit works in the cubicle next to us. We don't find it strange that an Indian is our doctor. We don't think to refer to them as "foreigners" in the great Melting Pot.
But in China, if you are not Han Chinese, you are a foreigner, a curiosity, someone to be viewed circumspectly. Most Chinese are astounded when they see me, because they have never seen or interacted with a "foreigner" in their life. They have only seen us on TV or whatever bootleg DVD they watched.
This leads to a lot of staring. It is so bad sometimes that we Americans don't even want to leave our apartments on some days. We just don't want to be looked at constantly. We don't want to be surrounded by people who are conversing about us in another language, much of which is derogatory. We get weary of having people say "hello!" and then run away giggling like a madman when we say "hello" in return. We get tired of being a circus show pony.
And to tell the truth, that's how a lot of Chinese employers use us. They trot us out on special days for photo ops, when it's convenient and a good reputation booster. There are actually literally jobs here for white people where businesses hire you to walk around in business suits just to show clients that their business employs white people who speak English. Even the school for which we teach really doesn't utilize us as they should. We are there simply so they can advertise that they have native English speakers teaching classes and show how wonderful the school is to the community. There's really not much else to it.
Our school treats us like we're the dumbest people on Earth. I'm reminded of certain scenarios in America. You know, it's the scene where a Spanish-speaking person comes in, doesn't understand English, and the receptionist at whatever office they're in thinks the Spanish-speaking person is either (a.) deaf or (b.) stupid and begins to yell the English really slowly. "FILL...OUT....THIS...FORM..." That's the way the Chinese treat us. They arrange everything for us, and if we ask for something, they disregard it, because clearly they are smarter than we are. I mean, we can't even speak good Chinese, for heaven's sake! Why would we have any intelligence at all? Even the chefs in the restaurant do this. We order dishes without any spice, but they think "so what? they're Americans, they don't know how it's supposed to taste" and they add spice anyway.
Until such time as we're needed to be shown off, we pretty much don't matter.
And let's talk about how the Chinese lie. My goodness, they will lie where the truth fits better. And they truly expect that we are so dumb that we'll believe it. I'm not talking about complex lies here. I'm talking about lies that are so blatantly obvious lies that they're not even worth telling. We get lied to on a day to day basis by the Chinese. If the cooks at McDonalds don't want to turn on the fry machine, they will just lie and say they're out of fries. If the taxi driver doesn't want to drive you completely to your door, he will lie and say it's illegal for him to do so. If my student misses a class, he will lie about where he was. If I ask for a small schedule change with my classes, and the administrator just doesn't want to bother with it, they will lie and tell me it's impossible, that no rooms are free, or that my students have a class then. My favorite Chinese lie is "it's illegal," which they whip out whenever I want to do something they don't want to do.
They lie, and they do it constantly.
This past weekend, on our return from Xi'An, we paid for a bus to take us from Xi'An to our city, and more specifically the bus station near our apartments. So naturally, because the driver wanted to go home and didn't want to drive all the way, we ended up going to our city, but stopping on some random side street in a neighborhood that none of us were familiar with. Josh had his lady friend waiting for him at the station, and the rest of us didn't know where we were or if there was a taxi that could take us home from there.
We argued with the Chinese drivers (there were four of them) and, of course, out come the lies. "We haven't been servicing that bus station in 2 years." Oh really, then how come I rode this bus last year and it went there? "We're driving this bus back to the outskirts of town." Yet later it went the same direction we did. Hundreds of lies, and we stood there for a long time, refusing to get off the bus until it took us where it was supposed to.
Chinese people, in general, will work incredibly hard to get out of doing work. The staggering amount of work they put into getting out of work far exceeds the effort that would've been required for them just to do what they were supposed to do in the first place.
So eventually the police got involved, and by the end of it all, we gave up and decided to find our way home.
Another note about China: they don't know what in the world to do with holidays. They just don't get how it works. A holiday, to them, is a day we take off, but we must make up the work another day, usually a weekend day. So basically, finding out you have a holiday from work in China is a bad thing, because it will completely screw up the next weekend when you have to work to make up for time lost.
Knowing this, my fellow teachers and I attempted to shoe-horn our make-up classes into our regular work-week preceding the holiday. We were scolded by our department, all of whom are smarter than us (did I mention that earlier?), and told that we could not do that, and that it was a rule that we had to have our classes as scheduled on make-up day. So come make-up day, we arrived at our school building to find that we were the only ones holding class in the building. Everyone else was gone. Apparently, the Chinese teachers all had their classes rescheduled so they could attend a Chinese language competition. Yes, you heard it right: it was OK for the school to re-jigger the entire faculty's schedules, but it was not OK for the foreigners to re-arrange their schedules at all.
Come to find out later that the school had just failed to tell us about this at all, because it's either (a.) funny not to tell the foreigners and then watch them be upset about it, (b.) not important to tell them because they don't really matter until it's time to show them off, or (c.) completely unprofessional and we just don't even pretend to care.
I know all of this is long and rambling, but I've said all that to say this: I believe I totally understand racism now from the perspective of what it must be like to be a black man in America. I didn't get it before. I often thought "why are black men so angry all the time?" Why couldn't they just get over it? I mean, after all, we have a black president now, black people get all the jobs they want, supposedly, and everything's cool now, isn't it?
I know now that that's not even close to the case. I know now what it feels like to have that white hot anger searing your insides because day to day you experience an incalculable amount of racism pouring down on you from all corners.
I know what it's like to be paraded about. Think about it: in America, if you're black and can't rap, act like a buffoon on TV, or carry a ball, you don't amount to much of anything, and the world doesn't care about you. Here, it's "sing us a song!" or "be the white guy on our basketball team!" or "let us take you to our friends and show you off so everyone can see how cool I am because I have a foreign friend!"
I know what it's like to be treated as less intelligent or less worthy. I understand now that Americans look at hispanics and think they are beyond retarded because they speak a different language. I know what it must feel like to black people to be considered inferior just because they come from a different place and have a different culture.
I know what it's like to be a product of affirmative action. That's basically what my job is: an important sounding title for a job that does basically nothing and counts for so little, but it fills a quota that helps my employer look good. I know how little I'm valued.
I know what it's like to have people stare at you because you look different. Every now and then I ask myself what people are expecting to see when they watch me walk or eat. Do they expect me to suddenly grow a third arm or start walking on my hands? Do they expect me to eat by putting the food into my eyeball? The only difference is skin tone and height, for crying out loud! I think of how for many years blacks have been treated like space aliens just for the simple fact of pigmentation, and it makes me cry for them, because I now know what that's like.
In a way, I am angry, but in a way I am very thankful. God has used this hurt and anger to teach me a lesson about my own racism and has given me a very valuable perspective on race relations and how others must feel. Thank you, Spirit, for this insight.
