“I don’t know why you should think I have a Chinese girlfriend,” seethed Malcolm, a young American teacher speaking to me in an office we once shared together in Shanghai. “She is a Canadian.” His beard bristled around his clenched teeth. “I think you should have just let that information come out naturally in conversation.” I said nothing and returned to writing on my computer. The silence in the room was rather stiff and would have required a chainsaw to cut.
In Shanghai many male Westerners have Chinese girlfriends or wives. That college that I was temping at during the summer vacation had loads of Westerners, oh at least twenty. Incidentally I was the only South African; we are still a rare species in Shanghai. And I am used to being either the only “foreigner” teaching at a school, or only one of three or four. Many of the blokes had either Chinese girlfriends or Chinese wives. A few of the men in Shanghai I know have gotten over the first wife and were on the next Oriental try-out. So it was almost natural of me to assume or think that perhaps his girlfriend was one of those gorgeous hei toufa de zidian (black-haired dictionary: a great, free way to learn the lingo is to have a Chinese partner; I don’t). The other blokes in the office were an Aussie and an Englishman. The Aussie had a Chinese girlfriend and the Briton, a man in his late fifties, had a Shanghaiese wife to whom he had been married for some fifteen years. The Aussie, the Brit and this Saffer got on perfectly well.
I regularly get asked if my wife is Chinese; it is a natural question here in Shanghai. The funny thing about that is the use of idiom. As a rule, in my experience, if I tell an American about my “partner” he will tend to assume I am gay as that is his understanding of the word partner. Then, when he hears that my partner is from Zimbabwe? Well, later, when I hear that it sounds like he had this picture of me going home every day to be seduced by a large black hunk, I just had to burst out laughing. Why on earth get offended?
Inevitably, I am inclined to think Malcolm’s negative reaction was racist; he was offended by me thinking he had a Chinese girlfriend … in a city where that is often the norm.
Two or three days later after that incident I breathed a sigh of relief as the hour-long lesson I had just finished had been very tedious; the material I was compelled to use was simply too difficult for the students. They were on a summer course because they were hoping to gain entry into the college, which is run from the UK, and had failed miserably on their entrance exams. They were faring no better now and many really should not even be attempting to do the course. I said to Malcolm, the only teacher around as I got back to the office: “Man that was a tough class. Unbelievably mind-numbing.” We teachers often let off steam with our colleagues or bounce problems off them.
“Well, Rod,” commenced Malcolm with the solemnity of a church minister as he walks up to the pulpit. “What about being grateful for work? Think of the work some people have to do, all the guys who just guard gates in Shanghai, the street cleaners … ”
I let him continue his sermon until he ran out of words, then just neutralised the tense atmosphere by replying, “Yes, yes, and the worst is being unemployed. Been there, done that, couldn’t afford the T-shirt. And I stood guard duty loads of times when I was doing my two year compulsory stint in the army.” (I didn’t bother telling him I fairly regularly write out gratitude lists as discussed in my recent blog, “What can we learn from depression?”)
Boy, was I glad we only shared an office for two weeks before I went back to my normal job in term time. I kept on hearing from British and Aussie mates in pubs (the best and virtually the only place to meet up with fellow Westerners and relax in the Jacuzzi of being able to speak your own language at a normal speed) that Americans are naive. Especially British people. I refused to accept it. But I keep on getting examples.
Joe is an American friend of mine, in his mid-fifties. He got thoroughly screwed here by a work agency for which I was also working at the time, Red Stocking. To my horror I discovered from him that his tourist visa had expired nearly two months ago and he was not sure what to do. “Didn’t you know that you can’t be in any country once your visa has expired?” I exclaimed, thinking my question was utterly unnecessary.
“I didn’t know,” he lamented. “I have never been out of the US before.”
I honestly did not know how to reply to that one. I regard the knowledge about visas being a requirement for nearly any country (unless you have an EU passport or the like) as a bit of common knowledge so well-known that it is common sense. The depth and the texture of the pooh you are in just varies from country to country except maybe South Africa.
“Why didn’t Tina sort out a work visa for you?” I asked Joe. She was the head of Red Stocking.
“She kept on saying she would.”
Then I sighed. I wished Joe, a very kind, gentle chap, had told me before that he was trying to get a work visa via Red Stocking as the agency was notorious for making that promise and doing nothing about getting a visa. Joe had been illegally working in China (without his knowledge) on a tourist visa and now was completely illegal in the country. He had a Chinese wife; he was lucky he was not deported. The usual law of countries is that once you are deported you cannot come back. Joe would never have seen his wife again unless he got her into the US, which she did not want to do. Joe had to pay a fine of about four thousand RMB, which is slightly more in rands and obviously that punishment is lenient compared to deportation.
I could tell several more stories about Americans and their insular thinking in Shanghai. But before the rotten tomatoes start getting pelted at me, let me get to a particular point. Many people love to generalise or stereotype. It seems we like to put nationalities and races in neat, safe boxes so we don’t have to think of them any differently. This does not allow for personal growth and interpersonal growth. Joe is my friend and it was a pleasure to attend his wedding dinner and be part of a small circle of friends and family.
Of course I catch myself generalising and stereotyping too. If a Chinese pushes in front of me in a queue — and they often do; anyone who has lived in China for a while can vouch for that — I think, “typical Chinese”, but then remind myself of all the Chinese friends I have made and some are among the most amazing people I have met.
It seems many people are conditioned for skin or “surface signs”, people’s facticity, usually skin colour or affiliation with a religion, to either like or dislike a group or a race, thus cementing our otherness rather than our togetherness.
So right now Americans are a challenge for me. Like China, the US is a mammoth country and people stuck somewhere in a huge country inevitably become insulated. They do not have to think in terms of outside cultures even though the world is globalising more and more. As we all know, both China and the US have insulated themselves in different ways from the rest of the world at different times in history. It is just a given that if I walk down a street in smaller cities outside Shanghai I will be stared at, laughed at, get that eerie “helloo” from groups of trishaw cabbies resting in the noon which comes across as mockery while they grin and stare.
In any store in Shanghai, if I ask for something in my intermediate level Chinese, the assistant, if she needs to check with a manager, will refer to me or any non-Chinese in a sentence like, “the foreigner wants to … ” never “the gentleman or the customer wants to, or the lady would like to know … ” I smile but it still bugs me. Yeah, it offends me and I try laugh it off. But why don’t I get offended when an American thinks I have a gay black boyfriend? My immediate, perhaps simplistic response is that it is so funny. But boy was our pal Malcolm offended. More about offence in another blog.
In many senses Americans are so accustomed to boundless freedoms that anything involving secrecy, bureaucracy (the kind that DOESN’T work as in SA: the US one is ubiquitous and pervasive, but, man, does it work well!)and the absence of the need to view every other person as a potential murderer, rapist, robber, govt. thug, trade unionist, spawn of Satan or worse, ANC Youth League member, gives them an almost cherubic innocent naivete.
They just don’t know the world as we do. So they’re constantly blown away by how violent, selfish, ugly, murderous, rapacious and ubiquitously deceitful it all is. They actually banks are good, that retailers are honest and that cellphone suppliers really give a shit.
So sad! That’s probably why they bombs the living daylights out of distant countries. PS: Your writing is just getting betterer and betterer every blog you craft. That’s nice!
No, they are not. I would categorize this article, especially in the context of the purported aims of Thought Leader, as somewhat akin to one of those conversations where a foreigner enquires about the dangers posed by lions in one’s backyard. The notion of America as homogenous is as absurd as the notion that they are somehow more naive and insular than anyone else. I should note that I did live there (in the Caribbean, the Rockies and New York City) for five years and am married to an American, so I am either biased, better informed, or a combination of both.
Maybe your sample was a little small there Rod? I have some extremely enlightened American friends that know more about SA visas than any of us will ever know. Perhaps you just need to meet the right American
I also humbly suggest that your sample may speak more about either the teaching fraternity or the expat Shanghai community than it does for the entire country of over 300 million diverse Americans that include some of the globes smartest and informed people.
On my first trip/day out of South Africa,a Scottish guy asked me in Edinburgh ´´you allright pal?´´ I responded back with ´´why wouldn´t I be?´´ – I only realised later that thats a normal pleasant greeting by Scottish standards… People from different backgrounds just grow up with different norms and things to be offended by.
The same reason why I feel offended when (like you) im reffered to as ´´guirri´´ (foreigner) in Spain and Spaniards cant understand why I would be offended by that. If you came from a country as big as a place like America (and as far away from the rest of world) you should be forgiven for not knowing that much about chinese culture and passport issues – the same way we wouldn´t expect a high school kid from joburg to know much about Scottish mannerisms…
I (a tour guide) frequently meet Americans from all over the States, and find them to be nearly always charming, friendly and extremely honest. But there are a few things they just cannot seem to get right: to them Table Mountain is “Tabletop Mountain”, Robben Island is “Robin’s Island” Stellenbosch is “Stellenbok”, and Afrikaans is “Afrikaan”. No matter how often I tell them the correct word, and why, after a short while they go back to using their original version. And don’t even try to get an approximate pronunciation for Buitenverwachting or Vergelegen.
But they help to keep Alzheimer’s at bay by requiring me to use mental arithmetic to convert metric measurements into imperial: hectares, kilometres, and degrees Celsius are a complete mystery to them.
One day when we were driving through an ostrich farm I told the group that the eggs were hatched in an incubator, and that the baby ostriches were raised in sheds away from their parents. An American woman immediately piped up with the question: “So how do they get milk from their mothers?”
Ignorance is not realising that you don’t know. Arrogance is not bothering to find out or thinking that you do know. Americans are often unfairly labelled as arrogant when many of them are really only ignorant—the same as many of us I guess. I spent about six months travelling through the US and found that when people discovered that I was from ‘Africa’ they were more often than not keen to find out about where I come from—even when I did receive some inane responses like, ‘but you are white’ or ‘you speak English really well’. When I spent time in Europe I found the opposite to be true and a much larger proportion of Europeans to be arrogant and indifferent. I guess many Americans get a bad reputation simply because they are willing to ask the ‘stupid’ questions.
I find my fellow south africans more arrogant and ignorant in an archaic way.When the south african
chinese won their court case last year it was confirmed and the 8 years battle before revealed
this.Even private schools here in south africa
and southern africa claiming to have a “christian based education” have subtle racialism reminiscent of apartheid education we had before 1994.
The average man in the street also reveals this.
In cracking south africa if you live and work in the former black townships you would discover
how ignorant fellow south africans are of the nature of the culture
Good job massively generalizing about a nation of 300 million based on five people you met in Shanghai. So your office mate was an ass. You really think that’s news?
I don’t understand why your Malcolm would be offended. In an country with an overwhelming numerical ethnic majority, chances are one’s partner would be part of the afore-mentioned majority. Or am I naive in thinking that?
I kept meaning to get back to some of the comments made on this blog. I am “rightly” accused in the commentary of generalisng, being ignorant, homogenising a nation of 300 million (the USA). But that is not what my blog was about. It is about the problem of us all generalising and stereotyping and catching myself in the act of doing that with regard to Americans. One of the biggest things I have learned writing these blogs is that people read them with their own glasses which mist what is really being discussed in the blog. Fascinating.
So for example, GRANT – a commentator above, says my sample was a little small (of COURSE it was), not noticing I’d already said that in my own words: “Many people love to generalise or stereotype…we like to put nationalities and races in neat, safe boxes so we don’t have to think of them any differently. This does not allow for personal growth and interpersonal growth…Of course I catch myself generalising and stereotyping too.
Grant – your comment that Americans know more about SA visas than South Africans is a complete no-brainer. Of course they would! South Africans don’t need to know. I know more than Chinese citizens about work visas in China because erm… wait for it… here it comes… they don’t need to know. They’re citizens. And… wait for it… they don’t need to apply for work visas in their own country.
Duh!
I agree Americans are often a bit naive.
They tend to see the world through rose colored glasses and cannot understand that there are people with very different ways of thinking and seeing things.
Sometimes it’s as if an American decides how a certain thing is he refuses to update or change his opinion easily even if there is evidence to the contrary.
The ability for self deception is strong.
That may explain all the invasions and bombings of other countries.
The main positive characteristic is that they are positive polite and egalitarian the exact opossite of europeans