Littered throughout this blog are rants and raves about how frustrating it is to deal with the proclivities of local Chinese folk, specifically the undisciplined way in which they try to get to where they’re going. Of course, I’m one of a countless number of foreigners who have commented thusly, most of the venting coming after the occasional maddening encounter with pushy queues, law-flaunting taxi drivers, and generally behavior that is ignorant to others who are sharing the same delicate environment. I’ve seen an expat push another man to the floor after his foot was stepped on in the crowd of an airport shuttle bus. I’ve seen foreigners almost hit by a taxi standing fast in front of the car, yelling at the cab driver in English. I’ve seen foreigners stuck inside subway cars, trying mightily to get out while streams of commuters crowd through the doorway.
Yes, many Chinese can be rude, obnoxious, downright uncivilized. But the world is a complicated place, and we foreigners who come here should take a good hard look at ourselves sometimes; we’re not all that different, I’m embarrassed to say. Two events from about a week and a half ago starkly brought that to my attention.
On Friday night, about four of us got dolled up and headed over to the new Infiniti building on Huai Hai road for the Diesel party. The event was located in a huge open space on the 6th floor of the building. When we arrived, there was a massive crowd waiting at the entrance. Apparently, the organizers of the party hadn’t jumped through all the regulatory hoops leading up to the event, and the police were warning them that they were in violation of a fire or building code of some sort. About 60 guests, almost all of them expats, were pushing up against the entrance, which was manned by a beleaguered staffer who eventually allowed us in ten people at a time.
For all the expat complaints about how disorderly everything is in Shanghai, it was interesting to see so many of them try to bulldoze their way to the front of the line, completely disregarding the staff’s calls for all of us to be patient and form a single-file queue. Young men sussed up in fancy suits and butt-tight designer jeans were yelling at the staff, screaming at their friends inside that they were inexcusably being kept out of the party. We quietly waited until we got to the front, but then had about 3 different people squeeze from behind to the front of where we were standing, feigning ignorance and insisting that their invitations should allow them in. Never mind that all of us had invitations. And when they lifted the rope every 5 minutes and allowed 10 people in, the scene was worse than the subway cars at rush hour at People’s Square.
The next day, I found myself hurriedly packing for my trip to Chengdu. I rolled my suitcase out toward the street, hoping to hail a cab right away so I could catch my flight out of Pudong. About 10 meters from my door, a taxi rolled up and stopped. It was dropping off a middle-aged foreigner, but seeing such an attractive fare so tantalizingly close, he pulled up short of the main door and asked me to please wait for him. I knew there was a passenger inside, so I said I’d be fine heading out to the main street, but he rushed out and popped open his trunk. Nervous about the time, I headed back and loaded by suitcase into the car; I mean, we were literally 20 steps from where the taxi was going to stop anyway.
The passenger got out and threw his money at the driver. He didn’t look very happy to be walking those extra 15 or twenty steps. I started to feel a little bad as I got into the car, but those feelings dissipated when the dude turned around, walked back up to the driver’s side and yelled out in broken mandarin: “你没有礼貌! (you have bad manners!). Then, he spit into the car at the driver and walked away.
The cabbie had been apologizing profusely to the man leading up to this event, and it wasn’t the most professional thing to do to stop abruptly the way that he did. But there’s something quite inhumane and violent about actually spitting at someone, and for a second there that driver looked really pissed. Then, he calmed down and headed toward the airport.
“That guy seemed pretty pissed at you,” I said.
“That’s the difference between Chinese and Lao Wai,” he responded without a beat. “A Chinese person will be willing to help us out and get out early. These foreigners just don’t understand that.”
Our sense of entitlement often clouds the very civility that we take for granted and judge others for not having. We often feel embarrassed at how primitive some of the Chinese who share our streets behave in light of the greater values and humanity we feel proud to possess. But the world is a complicated place, and everyone is full of contradictions. Sometimes, the real animals are us, who forget that we’re guests in this country, one that can claim a much older and richer history of civilization than our own.
