I wrote this in July 2007, but didn’t get around to posting it until July 2009.
Here are some more observations that struck me as interesting (at least when I jotted them down during the year), but that didn’t fit any of the themes of my previous posts. I end with an update on language, as I promised back in November.
The sort of graffiti that I’m used in America is almost non-existent in Beijing. There’s no tagging, and generally no defacing of signs. But there are phone numbers everywhere, either spray painted on walls, or as a sticker applied to the sidewalk. The stickers and pseudo-graffiti advertise various services, from plumbing work to fake documentation. And there’s an army of people to clean it up; I see them spend a lot of effort removing the stickers sidewalks, and I see plenty of signs of cleaned-up spray-paint. But this kind of advertising baffles me. Surely it’s illegal—and since the responsible person left a phone number, surely they would be easy to catch?
Everywhere I’ve been in Beijing feels safe. People have serious locks on their doors and bars on their windows (if they live on a low enough floor), and bicycle theft is certainly a problem. But I don’t actually see any crime, and violent crime in particular seems non-existent. It may be that the crime is just not reported, but I suspect that a combination of vigilance and harsh penalties goes a long way.
The Chinese have not forgotten what happend in WW2, and hatred of the Japanese is reinforced on several fronts. At least two cartoons for kids that run in prime time are based on WW2, with enemy soldiers that have Japanese accents and are as ugly and bumbling as you expect cartoon villians to be. There’s also a park on our Beijing tourist map labeled “Chinese People’s Anti-Japanese War Sculture Park”—and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a park before with “Anti-” in it’s official name.
There’s a lot less cigarette smoking in Beijing than I expected. In previous visits, it seemed like most adult males were smokers. The smoking rate now seems comparable to the U.S., which is to say that most people don’t smoke. Was there a big public health compaign here since the last time we visited? Unfortunately, smoking is still allowed in most indoor places, and it doesn’t take many smokers to make the air bad for the rest of us.
The first time I visited China, the idea of lining up (for a bus, or at a store checkout) hadn’t yet caught on. Now, lines work most places, but there are usually a few people who nudge their way forward, skip line, and generally subvert the order. The uncooperative people are almost always be middle aged or older; they grew up in an age without luxury, when you had to fight for everything you got. The younger generations always line up. This generational effect is understandable and predictable, but it’s still striking (and, yes, a bit annoying) to see it in action.
Christmas tunes tend to pop up all year long, and the tune of “Amazing Grace” is treated in much the same way as the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star.” It’s a difficult culture, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but somehow I never get over that one.
“Texas barbecue” is a natural choice of names for a flavor of potato chips. But the back of the package features a picture of live potatoes growing: a cut-away view from underground, showing the potatoes at home in the rich dirt, and with lush potato greens above ground. That somehow feels like a very Chinese way to communicate that the chips are actually good, healthy potatoes (while, as a city-dwelling American, I’m not sure I would even know what potato greens look like if I hadn’t driven through Idaho).
Kids still learn a lot of the old revolutionary songs, and a big activity in the kids’ school is learning a dance (in the Broadway sense) that goes along with a song. Oliver thought it was strange at first—he called it “the funny thing”—but really got into it as the year went along.
For a long while, it seemed to me that English has a strange status in China.
On the one hand, English is everywhere. Important public signs usually provide both Chinese and English. Written English is somewhat fashionable, even where it isn’t needed. Everyone studies English in school, starting from an early age. English is required for most any good job—mostly as a filter to weed out applicants, I think, although it must be useful in many situations. (I note that errors from Chinese web sites are typically in English.) Most young people speak English well, still better than I speak Chinese.
Sure, there are still plenty of mistakes, especially on cheap clothing, and errors slip through in even very professional packaging. For example, the sesame crackers that I bought at Wal-Mart were “delicious and tangible.” Nevertheless, there’s much less ill-formed English then there used to be.
On the other hand, despite widespread proficiency in English, people avoid it. Outside of work (and tourist sites), practically no one tries to speak to me in English. Kids, who used to approach westerners to practice English, now ignore their parents’ prodding to go practice English with the nearby foreigner. There are no English-language shows on Chinese TV, except those intended to be watched by foreigners. American movies and television shows are always dubbed in Chinese.
Looking back, I guess English must be seen as work. Whether you’re a kid who is suffering through English class, or someone who has to deal with foreign business transactions all day, the last thing you want in the evening is more English. Outside of the office and classroom, it’s time to relax in Chinese.
By the end of the year, Oliver and Sophie were fluent in Chinese for their respective ages—though not up to native-speaker level, which would probably take another year. Most importantly, they could play well with Chinese kids in the neighborhood, and they could communicate well with their Chinese grandparents.
Oliver and I probably ended up with roughly equal proficiency on some absolute scale, though with different strengths, and his strengths made him the better speaker in practice. He is far better than me in understanding spoken language; I can decipher most anything that someone would say to me, given enough time, but Oliver gets it instantly. By the end of our stay, I often turned to Oliver to ask what someone just said to me, though Oliver still often asked me to translate individual words to or from Chinese. We made a pretty good team.
By watching Oliver and Sophia, I also learned one big secret to children’s language skills: they remember things! One time, when Oliver asked me the meaning of a phrase, I asked him where he heard it. He heard it several hours earlier at school, only once. In contrast, I can’t remember a new phrase for the few minutes (or even seconds) that it might take me to reach Wen and ask her. Also, Oliver can correct my pronunciation on a word that he learned months ago, just once, and that he hasn’t used since.
The important of memory seems obvious in retrospect, and I suppose I could have learned the same thing by reading a textbook. (Would I have remembered?) Still, I know why I found the fact surprising: kids also forget a lot of things. For example, when we returned to Utah, Oliver was shocked to discover that our minivan’s sliding doors open by themselves, even though he played with the doors for three years before we left. Maybe kids forget some things because they’re too busy remembering language.
Compared to November, I became only slightly more proficient as a speaker. My listening comprehension improved quite a lot, but still not to the milestone of understanding TV. My reading improved much more—enough to be useful, and to past a threshold where I can imagine eventually learning enough to read magazines and newspapers. Eventually.
The trick, now, is to remember what we learned.
Postcript, July 2009: I think I remember a lot of what I learned, but the kids quickly forgot. Easy come, easy go.| Prev: Work | Contents: A Year in China: 2006-2007 |