Thoughts from Beijing

Today I returned back to Beijing. After a week’s long vacation, I am ready to begin the quarter. This past week traveling around China with Jesse and Tom was a chock full of good learning experiences. I learned first that even if things are less than perfect, if you change your perspective and focus only on the good things, stuff just seems to turn out better. On the trip I also was pleasantly surprised at the number of people that were unnecessarily kind and helpful. Chinese people might be loud and pushy, but at the heart they seem to be good people, kind hearted, and honest. Deceptiveness and trickery are not to be confused with the Chinese people’s tendency to try and squeeze as much profit out of you as possible; once I was able to make this distinction, things became a lot easier.

For example in Gui lin we met these two women that introduced themselves as sisters; they were not actually blood related, but in Chinese culture, it is common to refer to a good friend as a brother or sister. The older sister was actually an employee of the hotel; we had asked for a cab from the airport to the hotel and so she asked her sister to come pick us up. When they had arrived at the airport to pick us up, we were surprised to find that they had both come to pick us up. It was fairly late at night, and yet the two women came to pick us up. They charged us about 10 USD for a car ride that took nearly an hour and a half. They took us to the bank and then to the ticket counter to buy the tickets for the boat ride up Li Jiang, a creek that was recommended to us by a number of people. After getting our errands out of the way they asked if we were hungry, being a party of three guys, the likelihood of one of us being hungry was quite high, so the two brought us to the hotel first to drop off our stuff and then to a wonderful little restaurant called the Congee City of Gui Lin.

I can’t quite explain why the two ladies were so nice to us; paying 10 dollars isn’t enough in my mind to justify going out of their way to take us around and to find a place for us to eat. Perhaps I’m making too much of the situation, but either way I was really surprised to find them so willing to go out of their way to help us out.

One of the taxi cab drivers that I met a few days ago explained to me why Chinese people are nice to foreigners; he said that after all the people that foreigners meet inevitably end up as the sole representatives of the country thus those few representatives have to put on a good image so that others can have a good impression of the country. Though that might seem somewhat less sincere than saying that Chinese people are nice because they are simply nice people, I came to the conclusion that for me at least it doesn’t matter what their reason for being nice is—the fact that they are being nice to me is enough to give me a good impression of the place.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule: I’ve run into cab drivers that have driven me around in circles thinking that I wouldn’t notice. I guess it doesn’t matter where you go there will always be some rotten apples, but the abundant number of good ones more than make up for them.

I’m looking forward to understanding more about the place and the people here I guess deep down I do feel a strange sort of affinity to them; Perhaps it is because I am of Chinese ancestry or perhaps it is because I feel I can understand why they are the way they are, but either way I enjoy being here and interacting with the locals. Everybody is a character here.