Top Six Things that Annoy Me about China (Part Deux)

Continuation from my last post:

#3 Loud Noises!!!

A near-constant bombardment of cars, crowds, and bodily noises means the Chinese are desensitized to what we in Michigan would probably split our ears. Everyone has cell phones and none of them have the volume adjusted right. The following is a sample conversation of what I often hear on the bus. Imagine that the person’s barking voice would carry 200 meters.

“Way, Knee How?? (short pause) Eh?? EH??!! EH??? (short pause) Ohh how how…EH???”

And so the conversation continues, the speaker shouting, and then grunting “eh?” or “huh?” and no one else around them blinks an eye. Chinese are shouters. Akin to German, the Chinese language just sounds angry. People could be having a very simple conversation about noodles with what sounds like scalding-hot emotion. Chinese are easily irritated, but most of the time that doesn’t account for their shrieking; they’re just very loud people.

So, when situations give way to silence it makes locals feel rather uncomfortable. One can’t escape riding a bus without enduring China’s public programming. Every bus has two monitors, which usually broadcast some inane comedy show, cooking program, or karaoke music video, invariably at a deafening volume. This is especially taxing on long, inter-city bus trips, where one must tolerate up to fourteen hours of this cacophony. What could be a relaxing trip through China’s gorgeous countryside is destroyed by cell-phone talkers and Chinese pop music, media awful in its own right.

Even the quietest, serenest places aren’t exempt. There are a handful of places in China that are as beautiful as they are barren of human activity. One such area is the small group of mountains behind my apartment. At their peak you can behold the entire city, the white sandy beaches, the famous Laoshan Mountain range and the islands in the distance, all with no else to share it with. That is, until you vaguely hear a radio barking pop music below you. And soon you’re joined by a friendly local who splits the silence with a small FM receiver, its volume at tilt. The music is muddled with static because of the altitude but that makes little difference to its listener. He smiles, nods, and says “hello” in English. A moment later, his phone rings and the man begins yelling bloody-murder into it.

#2 – Too Many $@(*#$ PEOPLE

Over the 26 years of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s reign, he starved and murdered somewhere between 60 and 70 million of his own people. It was hardly noticed. Most of us in the west attribute this colossal cover-up to the power of the Chinese Communist Party to mask and contort history, but having lived here, I think that most people honestly didn’t detect the gradual disappearance of their kin. 1.3 billion. Sweet mother of Buddha.

This presents the government with a bunch of obvious challenges: public transportation is bogged down, unemployment, depletion of resources, and inundation of sewage systems, and so forth. The Party, in its infinite understanding of its people’s needs, decided long ago that the people should have three long holidays during the year, “Golden Weeks” as the tourist industry calls it. So what happens to public transportation when 1.3 billion people get the same twenty or so days off?

I’m a traveler. I travel. So when I heard I was going to get a bunch of days off at my inane job at KISQ to frolic in the countryside I crapped my pants. I plan my trip, get out in the field, and discover that one-sixth of the world’s population had the exact same idea.

China is bloated with people. This has over-arching effects on the value of human life and dignity, the economic hierarchy, and trips to the supermarket. There are about a dozen major markets in Qingdao, and each one of them, at any given time, are crowded with as many patrons as is physically possible. I’m accustomed to warehouse-sized Wal-marts that do their best to encourage customers to stay and shop for as long as they can. Upon entering any such Chinese equivalent, though, one is immediately seized with the desire to escape by any means. One may flee to a bus only to find long queues behind each that is already brimming with bodies. Many Chinese streets are filled with bicyclers but not in Qingdao, where the dangerous practice has been outlawed, dangerous in bicycle-automobile accidents, since pedestrian safety is almost never upheld by drivers. I digress.

#1 – (In)Security

The Party’s desire for control has trickled down to every aspect of bureaucracy. Security guards are ever-present, ready to check your ID or receipt, take your money or interrogate you for inadvertently infiltrating a military base. I’ll get to that.

Within sight of my apartment balcony, there are four shacks each with two security guards pacing out front. They aren’t armed and they hardly look official. If they’re not pacing they’re sleeping, or reprimanding me for climbing over the nine-foot tall, iron gate because I forgot my ID card at the gym. On a later climb over the gate, I would find that the guards had coated every bar with engine grease, impeding my entrance.

In every supermarket, mall, university, tourist destination and Arby’s, there are statuesque guards. Sometimes they check documents, but most of the time they’re simply taking up space—what little there is left from the consumer hordes. Since they have little to do, minute tasks gain more significance. Bringing a backpack into a store, for instance, warrants a good finger-shake and a stern scolding. They have less to do, you see, because China doesn’t seem to have much theft. Pickpockets are the most common crime, though no more frequent than an American city of comparable size. Theft is as rare as burglary, neither of which are as rife as the excessive security would lead you to believe.

With more guards comes a higher demand on patrons to pay for them. It’s evident in touristy places, where ticket purchases come in succession and seeing a whole temple might mean buying five separate tickets, in part to pay for the people who are watching the transactions. One wonders then, if restaurant food would be cheaper if the staff were halved. The questions and conflicts of bureaucracy are as infinite as the potential size of bureaucracy itself. And this, my students, stems from procreation on an impermissible scale coupled with a furious desire to control the subsequent masses.

Somehow, with all this security one never feels completely secure. I can’t think of a better way to explain than to offer an anecdote. A couple of months back, I decided to take a random bus eastward along the sea its final stop, get out and take some photos. When I arrived, I found a desolate hillside. While other passengers transferred to a different bus, I walked around for a couple minutes, took some shots of a billboard with some funny propaganda on it, and started back to the bus stop. A few steps later and I was accosted by three soldiers on a motorbike. They began asking me questions that my rudimentary grasp of Mandarin couldn’t handle. They angrily gesticulated toward the facility adjacent to the bus stop that I mistook for a bus garage. I quivered as two miniature vans and a jeep pulled up, emptying fourteen soldiers, some armed and all with looks of gravity. I rang my Canadian buddy who speaks enough Chinese to be a gangster, handed the phone to the officer who looked the most serious, and hoped for the best. It turned out that all I needed to do was supply some ID from KISQ and I would be forgiven. The officer persuaded me to accept a ride to the school. I grudgingly accepted. As we pulled out onto the highway, the officer turned to me and pointed at a small sign by the road we exited. “NO ADMITTANCE” it read.

And then there was that time that I had to pay 500 USD to have guards let me leave a university, but you’ve heard that tale a dozen times already.

So that’s it, I guess. There is a slue of runner-ups for this list, including cashiers who always ask for exact or easy change, front-desk staff who wake you up in your hotel room 11pm asking if you would like a female friend, and then refusing to negotiate a price over the phone.

Haw haaa…it’s the quirky things that brought me to this country, and the same things that will send me fleeing in eleven days. Next week I’ll tell you about what I love about the flip-side of this seething chaos.

Till then,

K