10 Things I HATE About China: They Don’t Speak English

Lazy bastards.

Why can’t they just learn the language?  Don’t they know that their 1.3 billion people should just accomodate ME?

I have an idea.  They should hire a bunch of native-English speakers (in addition to their normal English teachers) to teach their students all the way from middle school through college, then they would be great at it.

….. Oh, right.  That’s my job.

I’m a failure.

This gets only 2 Lil Red Commie Books.  As hard as not knowing the language can make daily life sometimes, it’s also a big part of what makes life different and exciting here.

10 Things I HATE About China: There’s No Friends and Family

There’s not much to really be said about this.  As someone who had never lived more than three hours away by car from home, living on a different continent was a big change.  And, to be honest, just from what I’ve seen, it’s seemed to affect me a lot less than many of the other foreigners I’ve ran into over my time here.  Maybe I just need better friends and family and I’d have missed them more? (jokes, jokes, jokes… I do miss you all… a ton, being away from everyone has truly been the hardest part of being here, I just needed something kind of funny to throw in there to lighten up the mood a bit).

And I know this isn’t really China’s fault.  I mean, I can’t blame the country for being so far away (or can I?), but it still sucks (By the way, the FINAL COUNTDOWN is now at 5 days.  Get ready Amurrrrica!).

But yeah, family and friends, you deserve a special prize.  Not only does missing you get a perfect 10 Red Mao Books on my hating China scale, but it also wins a quote from the great leader himself (this doesn’t have anything to do with the post itself, just look at it as a special treat from the Chairman… plus, it kind of reminds me of a rap lyric):

“Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’”

10 Things I LOVE About China: Tailored Clothes

I’ve had 3 suits tailored for me in my entire life.  I think they were good suits, especially for someone who doesn’t get a lot of wear from them, and they cost something like $200 each on sale (I don’t really know if that’s a lot of money or not, but for a college grad thinking he needed them for work, it definitely wasn’t fun).

So when I got the opportunity to get some suits properly tailored for me here for approximately $65 each, I jumped at the chance.

And these aren’t just suits off the rack that they fit to you.  No, you walk into the Silk Market and there is stall after stall of tailors, each filled with every kind of fabric you could want for a suit or coat.  In all, there’s 3 floors of this.

In actuality, these places are essentially contractors, looking to get the best price they can before taking it to any tailor that they do business with who will give them a low enough price (this was learned when Christina tried to get a second pair of pants made exactly the same as a first pair, and they came back different).  So you definitely bargain at these places (which can be either fun or irritating depending on how you feel that day… the day I was there, I played it like Ken Jennings on Jeopardy).  I don’t know if I got a good price or not, though I know I paid less than a couple other foreigners who have gone to the same place, and the teachers at my school say that my price is very cheap.  Either way, within a week, I had four brand new suits, completely made for me, in whatever style I wanted (they have books with various designers’ different styles and cuts).  Essentially, you’re getting fake Armani and Versace suits made-to-order.  I love it.

Throw in the dress shirts that I had made for something like $11 each in Beijing, and I’m coming home with the start of a nice lil wardrobe (now if only I could find a job where I actually need these clothes).

Tailored clothing, and it’s incredible inexpensiveness, gets a whopping 9 Little Mao heads.  It probably would’ve been a perfect 10, but I didn’t take full advantage and get any jeans or regular polos made (or any Mao suits… and yes, I really did think about that one).

10 Things I HATE About China: It Stinks

I lived in Champaign for four years, and the South Farms could raise up quite a stench.  But it really didn’t prepare me for China.

The strange thing is that it comes from so many different sources, it’s hard to pinpoint just one offending smell.  Whether it’s:

- the durian stinking up the fruit stand,

- the “stinky tofu” being fried on a cart (this is the smell that I originally had thought was rotting garbage in the alley, then realizing where the smell was coming from, proceeded to order some for myself… yeah, it’s not so tasty),

- the stench of the water system (there’s a reason that we don’t drink the tap water here, and that reason is that god gave us noses. To be honest, even showering in it doesn’t seem completely right, but you do what you gotta do),

- the urine collecting in the neighborhood’s favorite peeing corner,

- or just the general lack of hygiene by a sizable chunk of the population, there is always a smell to make you turn your head a little.

Now I’m not saying that it’s so bad that you notice it all the time, but that’s mostly because you get used to it (and even then, I always know when the tofu guy is out or not from 50 yards away).  Plus, living in a city, there’s the requisite amount of Chinese pollution, so it’s not as if I have fresh air around the bad-smelling places.  The smog must do an efficient job of trapping in odor.

It’s definitely not something that makes life miserable, but I could certainly do without it, so The Stench That Is China gets only 4 Little Red Books.

10 Things I LOVE About China: Fruit

I’ve always loved to eat fruit.  Apples, bananas, peaches, oranges, you name it, I like it.  But China has taken my appreciation of fruit to a whole other level… and for once, it’s not because of a lack in that particular thing.

Completely opposite in fact.  China is the best country I’ve ever lived in in terms of fresh fruit (and yeah, I’ve only lived in one other country, so it’s really just 1st in a 2-man race).  No matter what city you go to, every street is lined with fruit vendors of every kind.  And it’s all really good too.  I think that’s due to the lack of refrigeration or trucking industry (come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing big semi-trucks at all here… and with the traffic, that’s certainly understandable).  So everything you eat is definitely fresh off the farm.

So I think I’ve mentioned before that walking down most any street, the most common sight you see are little bodegas whose main products are cigarettes and drinks (both alcoholic and non).  Well, thankfully, the second most prolific sight are fruit stands.  And not just stands, but whole mini-markets filled with most every kind of fruit, both “normal” and not (durian, the stinky fruit, will be eaten this week), plus vendors with carts (usually specializing in just one fruit, like bananas).  In any one-block stretch, it is perfectly normal to pass two proper shops with up to three mobile vendors, that’s how many we’re talking about.

Oh, and it’s cheap too (not surprising with the amount of competition).  I can pick up a week’s worth of various kinds for about $2-3 (not that I ever buy that much at once. Why bother when there’s 3 sellers within 100 feet of the school’s gates?).

And to top it all off, my school’s favorite gift to its teachers is fruit.  Cases. And cases. And cases of it.  In my time here, my school has given me two boxes of pears (about 80 per), a box of 50-60 apples, a box of mini watermelons, and a box of prickly cucumber.  So at various times, I’ve had to go into fruit overdrive, eating 5-10 pears a day.  In fact, for New Year’s I got a box each of apples and pears, so I had 15 days to eat it all (to drive that point home, I’ve had three pears just while typing this).  And Kel isn’t any help, as his school has given him even more than me (he’s currently working on a box of apples, a box of clementines, and a box of mandarin oranges (yeah I know, who’d have thought that mandarin oranges came any way other than canned and in fruit coctail)).

To summarize, fruit is good.  And there’s a lot of it.  In the Red Book scale, the fruit in China receives a solid 5 Lil Maos.

10 Things I LOVE About China: Shrimp

“They wasn’t shrimp! They was PRAWNS! Prawns are bigger, see?”

Either way, all I know is that shrimp here are great.  Even for the cheap school lunch, we are served them regularly.

They’re just so cheap (approximately $1.45/lb), fresh (still jumping as I fry them up), and delicious.

Of course, I loved shrimp before, but the sheer inexpensiveness of them here makes China great.

How great? Well, shrimp in China gets an impressive 7 Red Books on the LOVE scale.  It would be higher, but like I said, I already loved the suckers before.  If you want to get any higher up the list, you need some creatvity, a little imagination, a little something… extra (but we’ll get to those things later).

10 Things I LOVE About China: People Are Short.

(and let the stereotypes begin……………… NOW!)

Finally, I’ve found a place where I’m a giant…..

Yeeeeeah, that’s obviously not true.

Ok, ok, so, finally I’ve found a place where I’m really tall.

No?

Ok, well, finally I’ve found a place where I’m at least average height (throw me a bone here, people).

And it is sweet.

So it’s not as if I tower over everybody here, but I do tend to be on the high side of the chart.  The day that really hammered this point home for me was about 2 months into my time here, and I stepped onto a crowded elevator.  In all, there were about 7 of us crammed in there.

And I was a good 5 inches taller than any one of them!

I’ve never really cared about being taller.  Growing up, I wanted to have at least a little more height, but that was mostly as how it related to basketball.  And since my love for playing basketball waned after about the age of 14 or so, I haven’t given it much thought since (of course, maybe if I’d have been taller, I would’ve been better at basketball, thus allowing my love of the sport to grow, finally culminating in me making the NBA and earning millions, and subsequently losing it in a real estate deal gone bad and a crippling gambling habit, only to be reinvented much later as a motivational speaker… Whooo!  Wrap your mind around that for a second, I just went all the way through an imaginary life without breaking a sweat.).

That all being said (and at this point, even I barely remember what the point of this one was), it was nice to just stand over everyone else for a change.

Mao’s Little Red Book Scale: A lackluster 3 Quote Books from the Man Who Was 60% Good (that pesky Cultural Revolution thing really turned a few people off of him, I wonder why?).  It’s nice being tall (or at least average), but it doesn’t really matter.

10 Things I HATE About China: Pollution

Alright, let’s get this off to a quick start with one of the most obvious.

Pollution here is so pervasive that you truly don’t notice it after a while.  Our first couple months here, Kel and I would notice the occasional blue sky and really appreciate it.  Now? I don’t even miss them.  The sun will be shining, it will be relatively warm and nice outside (especially considering it’s winter right now), and the sky will still be gray.  Seeing a blue sky is so far from my mind that I’ve lost the ability to miss it.

Oh sure, it might be a little lighter shade on any particular day, but it’s most definitely gray.  Of course, a good chunk of this can be attributed to the fact that this is a much larger city than I am originally from.  But even then, the air pollution is still heads and shoulders worse than Chicago.

And litter and trash on the streets is remarkably bad.  I’m not talking just about the lower income places (which are the most fun, and the most “authentic” China nowadays), but anywhere you go.  Walking down the street near the bigger department stores and Western shops, at “nature sights”, visiting temples and holy grounds, you see people just tossing trash and wrappers everywhere.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like the cities are completely dirty, but the lack of care about their towns and cities is amazing.

Oh, and I failed to mention earlier, but these 10 things aren’t coming to you in any particular order.  Essentially, I have a list written down with ideas for each HATE and LOVE, and am just going to write them up as I get the feeling.  Also, these haven’t been put into a firm order of what I hate/love more than anything else, but I have given it a little thought for each.  So each new addition to the series, I’ll be including a rating for each, on  a scale of 1-10 Little Red Books (1 being the least strong feelings, 10 the strongest).

Pollution, today’s topic?  Coming at you with a solid 8 Lil Red Books.  As much as this place makes me forget what blue skies even look like, I really do miss seeing them.