One day last week I decided to eat lunch at my desk in the office. Restaurants in the shopping mall nearby are so crowded and noisy at lunchtime, and I just wanted to eat something quick and keep working.  I popped down to the mall basement to get a "take-away" bowl of mixian (rice noodles with beef in a spicy soup). It's the ultimate cold weather lunch. The restaurant put it in a nice plastic bowl with a lid and off I went.

I sat back down at my desk and dove in.  A few minutes later a Chinese colleague who sits at a nearby desk came over and asked me if I wasn't enjoying the noodles. The conversation went something like this:

Her:  Don't you like those noodles?

Me:  I love them. They're my absolute favorite.  Why do you ask?

Her:  Well, you're not making any noise.  You're not slurping, so I thought maybe you didn't like them. You know we're taught that it's good to make noise while eating noodles.  It's a sign that you are enjoying them."

Me:  And we're taught that slurping and making noise while eating them is not polite. 

It was those pesky ancestors again.  She has several thousand years of ancestors whispering in her ear "slurp the noodles, slurp the noodles." I have several hundred years of ancestors whispering in my ear "don't slurp the noodles, don't slurp the noodles."

Next time I'm having a bowl of noodles I will make sure everyone in the room can hear me!

Besides the snow and the heat coming on early, the other big story in town this week is the smog.  I realize that I say this about every six months or so, but I think yesterday was as bad as I've even seen it in Beijing. Within minutes of stepping outside my eyes were burning and I had a headache and felt sick to my stomach. 

Yesterday a NASA satellite took an amazing photo of north China showing the extent of the smog.

 I'm posting it here in case you think I'm exaggerating.

Now excuse me while I figure out a way to strap my air purifier onto my face.

Earlier this week I wrote about the unusual heavy snowfall that we had here in Beijing on November 1. One report I saw said it was the heaviest snowfall in 22 years.

On Tuesday the Weather Modification Office (now there's a scary govt. bureaucracy for you!) proudly announced that they were responsible for the snow. Apparently they shot lots of chemicals into the clouds to induce the snowfall.  And the Weather Modification Office said "Let there be snow, and there was snow." The WMO bureaucrats saw what they had done and said "this is good, because it will help relieve the drought."

But The People had other ideas....

Following the announcement by the WMO, Beijing citizens responded with outrage and went online to castigate to the WMO bureaucrats for causing massive chaos in the city, and disrupting air travel and rail travel all over the country. Even the official newspapers ran editorials taking the WMO to task. 

Another thing that made people angry is that this huge snowfall came 2 weeks before another set of bureaucrats turns on the heat for the city, never mind the fact that snow is a result of cold not the other way around.

At any rate the Public Heating bureaucrats have taken pity on the The People and turned the heat on already.

And that, my friends, is a wonderfully happy ending to this story! 

After my last post on the perils and pitfalls of excessively saying thanks in China, I thought I'd do the obvious thing and talk about what comes next.

Whenever I work with a group of newcomers to China, I try to teach them some very basic survival Chinese phrases to help them get around.  This includes giving them a few ways to say 'thank you' in various social settings.  Almost without fail, someone will ask me the question "how do you say 'you're welcome' in Chinese?"  My response is always the same:  "You don't. There's no way to say 'you're welcome' in Chinese."  This is always followed by a quizzical look. 

I then proceed to tell them that, from the standpoint of good language learning, that's not even the right question to ask.  The question they need to be asking is "what do you say in Chinese to respond to expressions of thanks?"  There are numerous ways of doing that, but none of them are the equivalent of 'you're welcome' because politeness in Chinese culture dictates that the expression of thanks be deflected instead of being received.  Politeness dictates that they are deflected:  meishi (it's nothing); bu keqi (don't be so polite); or mei guanxi (it doesn't matter). 

So to those who wrote to say thanks for that last post.....bu keqi!! 

Shameless Promotion:  I wrote a small book called "Survival Chinese Lessons" to help people get started learning Chinese.  It can be purchased from Lucerna Publishing in Minneapolis.

A few weeks back I had the opportunity to give a seminar for local expats on the subject of communication.  Specifically, my topic was on how to communicate effectively with Chinese (not sure why anyone would think I'm an expert on that subject, but...I digress). Styles of communication vary greatly between Chinese and North Americans, and we spend a good part of the time talking right past each other.  My goal was to help the group (many of whom were relative new to China) understand the cultural context of Chinese communication, as well as particular characteristics.  As you can imagine, it was a lively discussion.

One of the things we talked about was the western (well, American anyway) compulsion to say 'thank you'.  Verbal expressions of thanks are absolutely fundamental to politeness in American culture. As toddlers the first three things we learn to say are 'mama,' 'dada,' and 'thank you,' and if we don't, then we (even at the ripe age of 2) feel as though the collective wrath of western civilization will come crashing down upon our heads.

But in Chinese communication, verbal expressions of thanks are not as commonly used in certain settings, particularly where a duty is being carried out. I remember learning this way back when I was a classroom teacher.  As my students handed in their homework to me, I would say "thank you," only to get funny looks from them.  Finally one student asked me why I kept thanking them for doing what they were supposed to do, namely turn in their homework.  Well, because!  In their mind, expressing thanks was not a necessity in this communication event. In my mind, it was simply a polite acknowledgment of the work they had done.

I also sometimes encounter this with close Chinese friends.  When they do things for me, I will say "thanks" (a lot), and they will get annoyed.  In personal relationships excessive expressions of thanks are construed as creating social distance; therefore close friends are not obligated to verbally express thanks. Gratitude is best expressed by doing things for the other person, not just saying words.

It's a tough one because saying 'thank you' is not an easy habit to get rid of, and not one I necessarily want to get rid of either.  But I do need to remember that the obligation to express it in Chinese is often not as strong as it is in my own language and culture.

Thanks for reading...oh wait....well, you know what I mean!

Without any warning, winter landed on us this morning as Beijing was covered with more snow than I've seen in the 11 years I've lived here.  This was the scene out my apartment window.

UPDATE:  Well, I guess Farmer Wang was behind all this.  State media is reporting that the clouds were seeded last night to produce today's snowfall. 

Without any warning, winter landed on us this morning as Beijing was covered with more snow than I've seen in the 11 years I've lived here.  This was the scene out my apartment window.

Last week I took my visiting college students to the Great Wall at Mutianyu. It was a nice, if somewhat hazy autumn morning.

UPDATE: The sick student who was holed up in my apartment all week was fully recovered by yesterday and thus was able to fly to her next destination (Thailand).

After all the guests and groups I've hosted this year, I was feeling pretty good that everyone has managed to get in and out of the country without getting sick and being put under quarantine. 

That was until yesterday.

I'm hosting a group of 20 American college students for 2 weeks--hanging out with university students, sight-seeing, learning about the culture--and this weekend one of them came down with the flu.  Not THE flu, the one that has sent the world into a panic, but the regular, run of the mill, flu.  The doc at a western clinic in town put her on some meds and suggested she be quarantined, which we have done....in my apartment.  Yesterday she and the co-leader of the group snuck out of the hotel they were staying in (we didn't want them to know she had the flu) and moved to my place.  They'll stay here until Saturday afternoon, while I take the rest of the group to Xi'an, from where they will leave the country.  Our goal is to get the patient's fever down before she has to board a plane. 

It's rough for her to be trapped in my place because she was so eager to see Beijing, but she's being a trooper. 

Never a dull moment in The Jing!

Shortly after I did my first stint in China as an English teacher, way back in 1984-1986, a fellow Minnesotan named Bill Holm (who had also taught English in China for a year) wrote a book of essays called "Coming Home Crazy."  I, and others I'd worked with instantly fell in love with the book because it so aptly described in a way that we couldn't (but wished we could) many of our own experiences and observations and the fact that, upon returning to the US we all felt that we had come home a bit on the loopy side.  Life in China in the 1980's was really like living on another planet and our adjustment back to 'normal' life in the States was at times rocky.  As I read the book I kept shouting (to no one in particular) "this is what it was like!" 

Later, in 1990, when I found myself back in China living in a dormitory with other American students trying to learn Chinese, the book helped us see the sanity of our craziness.  Once a week we would gather in someone's room for a reading of a chapter.  The China of 1990 wasn't so different from the China of 1985, so these were the stories of our lives.

Because one of my purposes of this blog post is to convince you to run out and buy the book, allow me to include a longish excerpt from the introduction:

     "An anthropologist I taught with gave me an interesting insight early in my year in China....."In Asia," the anthropologist said, looking uncommonly wise and Confucian for a Minnesotan with a motorcycle," you either lose your inner moorings, start to sink, go some kind of crazy, and just let it happen, or you will leave sooner than you expected and not learn anything."

     "Impossible!" I fulminated.  "My moorings are set in steel.  I can't live without them."

     I woke up one morning three or four months later, crazy in exactly the way he described.  I felt no panic, no fear; I was adrift and looking around interested, even cheerful, in a manner that no one who has ever said the words, "Have a good day!" can begin to understand.  It would be a good day; nothing would work, nothing would be available, and everything would go differently than you imagined.  Now I loved China.  Now I was happy....

     Scott Fitzgerald, in "The Crackup," said he knew he was crazy when he became unable to hold two opposing ideas simultaneously.  The experience of China means that you will never again see singly; the contrary of every idea in your life and culture looks as sane and reasonable as the idea itself.  Your consciousness is bifurcated once and for all, so you might as well enjoy it. Every old truth is half a new lie, every perception half a deception.  It's all right; be calm."

Bill Holm passed away recently, but the book lives on and has recently been re-released.  Feeling a bit nostalgic and reflective in my 25th year of working in China, "the old days" are much on my mind. Amid the skyscrapers and cell phone towers and shopping malls and cars and coffee shops, I am trying to remember what life was like then and how much it has changed. 

To assist me in that endeavor, I'm re-reading "Coming Home Crazy, " and am realizing that, , I am still crazy after all these years. And that's a good thing.