I recently returned from a business trip to China. It was my first time there, and my first visit to Asia as a whole. It was a fascinating 10 days, and I will likely center my next few posts about some of the things I learned while in this intriguing country.
As an introduction to the topic, however, let me just start off by saying that China was not at all as I expected...even though I can't really say what exactly it was I was expecting either. I think I had envisioned some other world, completely foreign to most anything I had seen or experienced. Yet when I arrived, I found myself to be in an international city. Yes, their were men on bikes riding diagonally across 8-lane intersections on a red-light, with so much piled on the back that you wondered how the poor chap managed to pedal. It is also true that on smothering August' days you could see women walking down the street holding umbrellas, not because it was raining, but rather to block out whatever sunlight managed to get through Beijing's city smog. These and a few other anomalies aside, however, it was not all that shocking. There were more skyscrapers to see than in NYC. You could find cuisine from every corner of the globe, assuming you could figure out how to explain to the taxi-driver where you wanted to go (also assuming that it was not raining, as apparently taxis do not like to drive in the rain due to fear of hydroplaning...we learned this out the hard way after it began pouring our first night out on the town!). Basically, it was a huge, dirty city. Not quite so international as other big cities, however not at all a large step from everything I had experienced before. Maybe that just goes to show that when we expect to find differences, the similarities are what seem surprising. The other way around, when we assume that we know how it should be, should work, should look or should be done, even small disparities stand out.
This point really evidenced itself to me in a simple exercise on my third day in Beijing. The first few days of my trip were spent participating in an intercultural training with other business colleagues. Towards the end of the training, we were instructed to play a card game. I didn't know what the purpose of it was, and to be honest, I wasn't all that concerned about it either. I was still really jet-lagged and, by this point, so tired of sitting in one place that I was happy to have a simple distraction.
We were split up among 5-6 tables, and on each there was a stack of cards and a sheet explaining the rules of the game. We all sat down at a table, read the rules, and played one round. Once we had finished the "practice round," so to say, we were told that from then on, whoever won was to move clockwise and whoever lost was to move counterclockwise. Players whose outcome fell in between winning and losing were just to stay where they were. The instructor said that at the end of a few rounds, we would see who had moved up the most. The final rule was that from then on, no speaking was allowed. With those instructions in mind, my competitive spirit came out and I was ready to go. I knew (so I thought) what the goal was, and I wanted to be the person who got the farthest. Plus, I had won the practice round, so I was feeling pretty confident at this point.
Pride aside, the game was really quite shoddy. It had little to do with ability, much to do with luck, and almost everything to do with who was sitting left of the dealer. I ended up losing the first round and moved down a table. This already served to aggravate me and to make me all the more concentrated on my goal - moving up! I became so focused on what I thought the purpose was, that I lost sensitivity to all other signs.
I sat down at the new table and was delt a fresh hand. We played a few rounds, and then came one draw of the cards where I clearly won. I laid down a King, and the King is the highest card there is. Another girl at the table though, tried to grab the cards. She kept on pointing to a 7, which was the lowest card. We went back and forth a few times, neither one of us giving in, although both still smiling. You could tell that we were definitely getting frustrated behind the grinning facade, however. Finally, we decided to do rock-paper-scissors, and I won the hand. Since we couldn't speak, I couldn't reason with her and let her know why I won. My thought process was pretty much as follows: she either (a) read the very simple rules incorrectly (aka a dimwit), (b) forgot the rules (also a dimwit), (c) thought she could pull one over on me (need I say what I thought of that?) or (d) had been struck by lightning and did not even realize what she was doing anymore (maybe not definitively a dimwit, but still acting like one which is just as frustrating). It never even occurred to me that she had other rules. I guess that clarifies who was actually the idiot in this case.
As was later explained to us, each table had the same rules, except for 1 line of an entire page of text. That 1 line, however, created confusion, aggravation, and chaos. We were not allowed to speak with one another, so we couldn't explain things or ask questions. What this led to was 5-6 tables full of very convicted mimes, each trying to gesture their way into victory. I found it extremely disappointing, however, to find that my first reaction was frustration and the assumption that someone else had read the rules wrong! The confusion led me to conclude someone was at fault, and that it naturally wasn't me.
I think the reaction I had can be traced back to my expectations and focus. Had I gone into the game thinking rules were completely distinct at each table and been purposefully attentive to see how the other tables played, I believe I would have easily picked up on any different rules. Even more so, I would have likely been quite surprised and pleased with how much there was in common. I approached China with a mindset of "I am entering a sino-alien world," and it allowed me to take the differences in stride and be overwhelmed by the similarities. All in all, the card game was a simple, common exercise and also an excellent way to put in perspective my first experience in China.
...don't think that is the only way I'll describe my trip though! Coming up next - culture blog, spotlight China.
Restless T.
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| Us "CAReers," as we are called, eating out one night sampling the famous Peking Duck |
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| They had many specialties at this particular restaurant... |
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| Favorite spot - Great Wall of China. It was incomprehensible to me. |
