Lesson 2: Embrace the Chaos
Abraham Lincoln once said, “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” My advice to anyone coming to China is to make up your mind to be happy here before you leave home. Though there will always be challenges and frustrating moments, learn to smile through them. In the end you will be rewarded.
After the initial shock of arriving in China, I resolved to enjoy as many moments as possible, and discovered that there is plenty to love about this gritty, abrasive place. For one, I liked that I got the master suite in the apartment. I would be sharing the apartment with two guys, so the managers gave me the big room because it has a separate bathroom. This is one of the few times in China that it worked to my advantage to be a girl. Another thing I liked was my roommates themselves. They are both from London and are complete gentlemen. We all got along well right off the bat, and it was comforting to know that I would have some fellow-sufferers to relate with. It didn’t take long for us to find things to lament about.
The first few days I found the moldy walls in my room and the occasional septic odors that wafted from the bathroom a bit jarring. Though we are fortunate enough to have western style toilets, they resemble the ones you find in motorhomes in that there is no water in the bowl and the pipes aren’t bent, so there is nothing to prevent the stench from escaping. In an effort to combat this smell, I would open all the windows in my room. This merely served to let the dust, asbestos (I’m guessing on that one, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least), and chemical fumes in from the construction site next door. Ultimately, time was the only solution to my problems. The more days that passed, the more desensitized I got. More accurately, the more days that passed, the more I encountered far more offensive odors and unpleasant issues that made my apartment woes seem fairly minor. For example, the stench from the squat pots at the schools thoroughly permeates the halls. Mercifully, most of the halls are just outdoor corridors; if they weren’t I swear, if someone were to light a cigarette there would be a Christmas Vacation style explosion from all the lingering gasses. Though the random sewage smells distressed me in the beginning, I am now used to it and tend to laugh when I encounter any new attack on my poor nostrils. I’ve stopped thinking of it as weird and wrong and merely think of it as China.
There are other things that struck me as odd at first, but are now in the same bracket of things that merely define China. One such thing is the fact that everything over here breaks. I had assumed that the “made in China” moniker that is a symbol of things being cheaply made and prone to falling apart before they’re out of the box wouldn’t apply here. I guess I thought they were hoarding all of their good, quality products for themselves. Wrong. The Chinese don’t seem to be phased by constantly having to fix things, or having to replace them entirely. This applies to construction as well. In Hefei, they are constantly tearing down new buildings to put up newer ones. While I found this incredibly wasteful and senseless at first, I now accept it as simply being Chinese. Over here, a lot of things don’t make sense. The sooner you learn to accept that, the better off you’ll be. Additionally, if you can learn to laugh about it, you’ll find yourself smiling a whole heck of a lot.
There is an endless list of things one must learn to embrace (or at least attempt to shrug off) about China in order to enjoy and/or appreciate this place. Some of the more entertaining ones include food, fashion (or lack thereof), life on the highway, unapologetic staring, spitting, and buttless baby breaches. I will highlight these in case studies in the upcoming lessons.
Until then, here is one of my thoughts on China: Though I have a love-hate relationship with China (heavily weighted on the love side), one of the things I am thankful for is that I will always have a greater appreciation for the things I left behind at home.
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