Serenity Now!

In the 2002 movie version of Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American, Thomas Fowler—not the quiet American, for the record—offers the following bon mot: "They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived." While Greene didn't actually write that, it's witty stuff, and possibly even true. However, the thing is that it's probably true in some ways for almost every country, although your more exotic ones obviously work better. Case in point: "They say you come to Cambodia and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived" sounds a hell of a lot better, more mysterious and intriguing than, "They say you come to Canada and you understand a lot in a few minutes ..." I mean, what would you understand? That it's cold and they really like hockey, eh? Probably something along those lines, at any rate.

Anyway, you get the point—the quote can apply, at least in some degree, to pretty much any country in the world. Like China, for example: "They say you come to China and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived." If you ever do come to China, there is, of course, no way I can know what it is you'll understand during your first few minutes in-country; however, based on my own experience, I'd guess that any of the following are very strong possibilities:

• Wow—there are a lot of people here.
• Hello, personal space. Two feet please, two feet.
• Is traffic always this bad?
• I wonder how much carbon dioxide I can inhale before I pass out?
• Volkswagen Santana? What the hell kind of car is that?
• Was that cart full of coal?
• And I thought L.A. was polluted.
• So this is where KFC makes all their money.
• And the cigarette companies.
• Boy, they sure like to hock up phlegm here, don't they?
• Yikes—from now on, I'll have to look before I put my bag down.
• Okay, apparently cars don't have to stop for red lights. Or pedestrians. Good to know.
• Note to self: even if I have the walk signal, crosswalks are no guarantee of safety.
• Note to self, continued: Neither are sidewalks.

Obviously, this isn't a complete list, but I feel pretty confident that at least some of these things will cross your mind. Particularly now that you've read them, thereby ensuring that they will do so, thereby proving that I was right to be confident about what you would think about. Or something like that, at least.

Whatever. But what about everything else? Well, like the quote says, that has to be lived. Except of course that most of you, apparently more concerned about your health and overall sanity than I, will never live in China for any period of time whatsoever. That's where I come in. Since I have in fact lived there, I can sum up "the rest," or at least a large part of it, in one word, and that word is hard. As in, it is hard to be a foreigner living in China. (Note that I also would have accepted the slightly more subtle words difficult or complex, as well as the significantly less subtle but probably more accurate word maddening.) Why? Because in China, it seems that very little goes the way you originally planned, and nothing—and I do mean nothing—is ever as easy as it should be.

Consider, for example, eating at a fast-food restaurant in the US. You order, you pay, you get your food, you eat your food. It's just that simple. Not in China, however. In China it might go something like this: you order; you pay; you get the wrong food; you bring it back to get the right food; you find out that, despite the fact that the price is exactly the same, they can't simply exchange it and you have to get a refund and then order again; you agree to do so; you discover that you have to wait for someone to go find the manager, who is in the back smoking a cigarette and talking on his cell phone and is in no hurry to end the conversation, because only the manager can authorize a refund; you finally get a refund and place the same order, the only difference from your first order being that now it's ten minutes later; you find out that whatever you want, no matter what it might be, isn't ready—you don't mind because at this point you're thanking God or Buddha or Chairman Mao or whoever else that they didn't just say "sorry, we don't have any more of that," which is just as likely—and they'll bring it out to your table in five minutes; you get your food ten minutes later and, despite the fact that they said it still had to be cooked, it's cold; you eat it anyway; the end. Okay, okay, you caught me, that was a bit of an exaggeration: under no circumstances would the food ever be cold. But otherwise, I think it's pretty on the money.

Did this exact sort of thing ever happen to me? No, but the point is that I wouldn't have been surprised if it had. In Beijing, anyone I told that story to would have simply laughed and said "That is so China" (or possibly just "China"), then moved right on to the next topic of conversation like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. And they would have been right—it wasn't a big deal, things like that happened to most foreigners living in China on, if not actually a daily basis, at least on what seemed to be so.

Like when our friend, who spoke and read both German and English, was asked to sit down and sign a ten-page contract that was written entirely in Chinese. She was surprised by this because the company she worked for, while Chinese, employed a substantial number of foreigners and seemed to have plenty of other documents, such as job applications and insurance waivers, available in perfect English. And yet somehow a translated copy of the contract could not be found. I mean, who knew what it might say? By signing this, I agree to work for free, for twelve to fourteen hours a day, with no rights, no vacation, and God knows no insurance. Oh, and only one bathroom break. And I promise not to complain, even though lunch will never be anything more than cold rice and a few scraps of fatty, unidentifiable meat in some sort of vaguely fishy sauce. Except on holidays, when the rice will be warm. Well, it probably wasn't that bad, but you just don't know, do you? When she asked if she could get it translated, the HR woman told her that it would "not be possible." When she in insisted, the woman suggested she sign the contract, and they could have it translated later.

After thinking about it, our friend asked the woman, "What if the contract was for your and written in German? Would you sign it?"

The woman shook her head immediately. "No, of course not."

When she told that story a few days later over dinner, everyone simply shrugged their shoulders, and—by way of sympathy— said simply: "That is so China."

And that's not even a particularly bad example of how China seems to make everything just a little bit harder. Things like, say, renting an apartment, as another friend found out when he first moved to Beijing. After looking around for a place to live for a few weeks, he decided he liked the look of another friends' apartment and went to the management office to see if he could get one just like it. It turned out that he was, apparently, in luck: there was an identical apartment a few floors below our friends' that was going to be available in just over a week. In fact, if he had the time, he could check it out right at that very moment to see if it would be suitable. He did and it would, so they agreed on a price and he made plans to return in ten days and sign the lease.

Anyone with even a basic understanding of the word foreshadowing will already have realized that things did not go exactly as planned. When he returned a week-and-a-half later prepared to sign the lease and put down the deposit, the property agent told him he couldn't have that apartment. Why? "Because someone else is already renting it," he explained, as if nothing could be more natural. It turned out that this mysterious "someone else" had also been waiting for an apartment, but since his wasn't ready on the day he was supposed to move in, they gave him our friend's apartment instead. Of course, the property agent was sure everything would work out okay, because there was yet another apartment, identical to the other two, that had just come available. However, when our friend asked to look at this new apartment, he was told he couldn't because the person living there hadn't moved out yet, so the property agent was not permitted to enter. "Do not worry, it is the same," the property agent assured our friend, "You sign the lease and give me the deposit," he said. "You can trust me."

Our friend's response was a definite no, along with some understandably harsh language about how not only would no money be changing hands, but also that he did not, in fact, trust the property agent. After that somewhat inflammatory statement, the conversation devolved into a thirty-minute argument in Chinese about who knows what, although I'm guessing the words ta and ma—your and mother, respectively—were used at some point. In the end, our friend left without an apartment, and ended up renting at a different place, one where they actually let him see what he was getting before signing the lease, two days later. That is so China.

Remarkably, things got worse for him after that. The apartment he moved into had a few things wrong with it—some cracks in the walls, a leaky shower, and so on—and the management assured him they would be able to fix the problems after he moved in. What they neglected to tell him until he and his fiancée were settled in their new place was that the repairs would take about a week, and oh, by the way, "you can't be in the apartment while the work is being done." (So China.) He took it pretty well, all things considered. I think that, even after less than a month of living in Beijing, he was sort of expecting it. Smart man, obviously.

I'm not sure what it says about me, then, that after six months of living there I was still easily flustered when confronted with China moments of my very own. I figure it's either because I am, at heart, a kind, gentle, Christian soul or because, even under the best of circumstances, I'm easily annoyed by pretty much anything that falls into my field of view, including normally innocuous or even well-liked things like babies, rainbows, and kittens—especially kittens. It's one of those two things anyway, I'll let you figure out which one.

My worst China moment happened a few days before we left Beijing for good. On the way to dinner, Holly and I stopped by our apartment complex's management office to figure out what we had to do before moving out. Surprisingly, there was only one thing, and, even more surprisingly, it wasn't having the apartment cleaned. Apparently in China, as long as you don't break or steal anything from your fully-furnished apartment while habitating there, you're golden. While this is great when you're leaving, we found out the hard way later on, after moving to Shanghai, that it's not so great when you're arriving. I don't know who was living in our apartment before us, but based on the amount of coarse, wiry black hair covering everything—the floors, the mattress, the bathroom sink, and I'd rather not think about the shower drain—it was either a long-haired dog with a shedding problem or a Chinese women with alopecia, I'm not sure which. Although, based on the amount of hair, I'm hoping it was both.

That would come later, however. At the moment, the single thing we had to do before moving out was turn off our telephone service. That was it. I remember our initial foolish reaction, which was to look at each other with looks that lived somewhere between amazed and bewildered—bemused, possibly—before turning back to the apartment manager and asking if it was truly as simple as that. He nodded, and then said yes in both English and Chinese, presumably for emphasis, but perhaps simply to show off his knowledge of the word "yes," which I think is the third English word most non-English speakers learn after "hello" and "Coca-Cola." Needless to say, we should have known better.

"Can we call and have it shut off?" Holly asked.

This was the point where things started getting weird. (So China.)

"No." He grinned when he said it, as if only foreigners would be foolish enough to believe, even fleetingly, that anything could be that simply. "You have to go to the office to do it."

"Why?"

"So that they know it is your phone."

"But who else would want to turn off our phone?" I asked.

My question was met with a blank look, possibly because he either didn't know who else would want to turn off our phone or knew but didn't want to say, but more probably because the majority of the conversation to this point had been in Chinese and he had no idea what I was saying. I got that a lot.

"Can we have our ayi do it?" Holly asked, realizing well before me that nothing but madness could come from further pursuing our previous line of questioning and going in a different direction.

"Is she from Beijing?" the management stooge asked, as if that would have some bearing on whether or not our maid would be able to pay the bill.

"Why?"

"Because only people from Beijing can do this."

"What?"

"Your ayi can only turn your phone off she is from Beijing," he told us again, as if the question had to do with us not hearing him rather than the complete and utter insanity of what he had just said.

Again, Holly and I shared a look, although this time it was somewhere between astounded and perplexed—confounded, I would call it. And really, who could blame us? You had to turn off your own phone so the phone company would know you actually wanted it done and it wasn't just some strange practical joke, although if you wanted to send your maid in your place, that was okay as long as she was from Beijing, since apparently no one from Beijing would ever consider turning off someone else's phone. I mean, someone from Shanghai might do it for enough money, but from Beijing? No way. I wasn't actually sure if he was right, and I'm still not, but we'd been in China long enough to believe that it was just insane enough to be one-hundred percent true.

That being the case, we did the only thing we could: we gave up, totally, utterly, and completely. In fact, we surrendered so quickly that a stranger might have sensibly assumed we were French, but we knew it was pointless to protest. We could call the phone company, we could send our ayi and tell her to just say she that was from Beijing, we could beg and plead and bribe from sunup to sundown, but in the end we'd wind up waiting in a gigantic, slow-moving line—in a city of thirteen million, all lines are gigantic and slow-moving— at a counter at the phone company office to pay our bill, there was no getting around that.

We asked where the office was.

The next day, we made our way out to the phone company to shut off our service. After Holly made arrangements to leave work early, we sat through a thirty minute cab ride, and then stood in line for another fifteen before we finally got to the service counter, where Holly told the woman that we wanted our telephone turned off.

"Do you have your passport?"

Needless to say, she didn't, and neither did I. I know you're supposed to be carrying it with you all the time if you're in a foreign country, but that rule goes by the wayside pretty quickly, in my experience. After all, if you continually have your passport somewhere on your body—a pocket, a purse, a money belt/sweat-catcher—you are, conservatively, one-thousand two-hundred and ninety-seven times more likely to lose said passport than you are to have a policeman or some other government agent from whatever country you happen to be in ask to see it. Which, for the record, I have never actually had happened, seen happened, or even heard about happening. So no, neither of us had our passports.

However, Holly did have a copy of hers, a very good copy that had been sufficient to get her onto an airplane not once, but twice, when going between Beijing and Shanghai, and would that be okay?

"No."

Let me emphasize that: the copy was adequate to pass through airport security—never the most forgiving folks, even under the best of circumstances—on two separate occasions, but was apparently insufficient for turning off a phone line that was registered in our name.

Holly held up the passport copy to the clear plastic window that, as always, separated—or, more probably, protected—the staff from the customers.

"It's me," she said, pointing at the passport.

"Need passport," was all the woman said, despite the fact that the copy was perfect; despite the fact that the picture was clearly here; despite the fact that the odds of someone using a fake passport—a copy of a fake passport, at that—to turn off someone's telephone service (wouldn't a pair of wire-cutters be easier?) are about the same as the odds of someone stumbling upon weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In other words, the odds are pretty fucking slim.

"So I can't turn it off?" Holly asked one more time, mostly, I think, so that she could later say she'd done all she could.

"No. Need passport."

Once again, this was a fight we were not going to win. We'd tried to win such an argument before. It was at the airport and had to do with the validity of an e-ticket that had already been paid for. The airline representative said they didn't accept e-tickets, despite the fact the airline had sold our friend one and we could see his name on the passenger list. Forty-five minutes and four counters later, we'd ended up buying another ticket for the same flight.

We now knew better than to waste so much time.

"Okay, we'll come back tomorrow with our passport."

Two days later, we left Beijing. We never went back to the phone company.

© 2006 Jason Barbacovi
www.meandchairmanmao.com
jason.barbacovi@gmail.com