Greetings from China IV

Hej!

So my fourth week in China is coming to an end....I have to admit it feels like four months....one of the good things about living in a new culture is that there are so many little things to discover that you are always tired at the end of the day.

Well so where shall I start….I could talk one page about funny facts in Chinese culture I discovered, or about all the fake products one can find at the night market. All the different food I ate and did not eat could fill at least 3 pages.

But I think I will just tell you about some discoveries I found rather interesting. So let’s start with the 2 billion people living here. My biggest concern about living in China was that the masses of people would just swallow me. That I would be pushed through the streets by all these people rushing to the metro getting lost and finding myself in some slum-like suburb surrounded by street dogs and trash. That I would disappear in this “small” city Hangzhou of only 8.8 Million people and nobody would notice. Well there are quite a few skyscrapers decorating the sides of the….river with room for many people and I surely cannot be claustrophobic when taking one of the 7 elevators to our office in the morning but besides that….I’m still here, not swallowed, not drowned, did not disappear….walking through Nordstan on a Saturday is for sure more frightening than taking the subway in Shanghai. You want to know why? Because people have time….or they at least take their time…there is no hectically running and pushing, “Excuse-me” and “move bitch”. It seems like Chinese people realized that it just does not make any sense and for sure will not get you faster to your destination to rush everywhere. 

Of course this “patience” can also have its downsides, especially when it comes to work.  My German engineering heart is bleeding when I think about efficiency and effectiveness. There is this “bakery like” chain called bread talk where you can watch the “baker” do their work. This one day I went in there when the staff was finishing some pastries with a powder sugar topic. One girl was holding the sieve and another one was hitting a spoon against it. I think this sums it up quite nicely. Sure there are a lot of people and manpower and it is good that people have a job but sometimes things just take twice as long when two people work on the same thing.

The same situation applies in the office. There are 150 people in our office who are all overloaded with work and super busy when they are asked but once you follow them everything just takes for ever and will be done in the way it is always been done, which can be quite frustrating. It is in the office when I feel like getting lost even though I am surrounded by people. Besides the fact, that the English level is very poor at our office (which is still way above average for the average Chinese) people are just afraid. Afraid to talk to me or to each other, afraid to be caught doing nothing or doing anything wrong, afraid to ask, which results in an office full of people where nobody knows what the other person does and me being the top of the iceberg of anxiety as a foreigner, a possible future client as they always say, which means if they do anything wrong with me it might mess up everything….By the way I am just a little intern. All leading managers here are Indians, which I think is very sad, but the Chinese are just too nice, too shy, too afraid. The Chinese are so restrained and subservient that they ask me questions about their job but cannot share their work tasks because they are probably afraid I could do or know it better than them. This means, 70% of the time I am doing nothing…and that sucks…I tried everything….I talked to my mentors, to the HR lady, even to the general manager, but they just don’t understand it…I gave so many suggestions about how my internship could be somehow a win-win but I think their biggest fear is to change. You don’t experience the communism on the streets but in people’s minds. My exaggerated picture of Communism was that all people look the same, wear the same, eat the same and say the same but the possibilities of luxury shopping and the unassailable power and influence of the Alibaba imperium say the opposite. It is in the people’s minds and behaviour where I can see the phasing. With the awareness of me generalizing from only a few weeks living in China I claim that Chinese people don’t question anything, they don’t come up with new ideas, are not curious and don’t think innovative. It feels like they don’t have a thrive to improve, they just accept their working conditions and bypass any possible confrontation. They copy but they don’t invent. This on the other side has a positive side effect again….Chinese people hate confrontation, which means they are not aggressive at all. Thus I can walk around, take a cab at night, talk to whoever comes up to me and stick my nose in every side street without being afraid myself. I always feel safe J. China is just very two-sided.

My resume in one sentence right now: I like China, I like the Chinese people, I love the Chinese food (well besides the chicken feet…this will not be my favourite snack no matter how long I will stay here) but working here is incredibly hard.