From Adam Minter at Shanghai Scrap: “Expo 2010 was visited by more than 70 million people, many millions of whom waited in long ticket lines, outside of the gates, in the heat of July and August … for the chance to wait in long lines within the Expo grounds. The obvious question is: what was the appeal? The less obvious question is: why didn’t the foreign media probe this question? More precisely, rather than ignore the phenomenon, why didn’t anyone pause to ask what was it about contemporary China that drove so many people to do something that most foreigners – especially foreign reporters who are lock-step disdainful of crowds and mass events enjoyed by Chinese – had no interest in doing?” See End of Expo: Why Expo 2010 Mattered

You’re broadcasting a message to your Chinese friends with your apartment whether you know it or not. It’s a message that locals understand loud and clear, because many Chinese homeowners — especially the kind foreigners are most likely to rent from — use their apartments to send a message on purpose.

First Impressions
This was confirmed for us yet again by a Chinese friend of a friend who was over the other night for our mutual friend’s birthday party. The group was mostly foreigners. Someone mentioned how much he liked our apartment, especially some fancy shelving in one of the walls (like many so-called middle class Chinese, our landlady had played interior design with the place when she lived here, so there’s lots of conspicuous design elements around). Jessica said, “Yeah, I really like that, too, but I wish that some of the other things in this apartment weren’t quite so fancy.”

“Why?” he replied, “It looks nice!”

“Well, it’s just that some of these really fancy design elements give people a certain impression here, like we’re really really rich or something…”

“Really?”

But before Jessica could respond, a Chinese guy whom we had just met that night jumped in and said (emphasis mine), “Yes! When I walk into this apartment, my first thought is that the owner is really, really rich. And also well educated. I would think he or she is maybe a teacher, might know about art, or has relatives or friends that know about art and design.”

Jessica told him he was right, that our landlady is a teacher at one of the local universities. He said, “See? You can just tell by the design that this is the home of an educated person with lots of money.” He continued, “I would also guess that he or she is short,” and pointed out a number of the design elements that definitely don’t take height into consideration (in my 6’4″ opinion, nothing in China takes height into consideration! :) ). Jessica laughed at his observation because it’s true — our landlady probably barely clears 5′ tall in heels (though she towers over the landlady we had in Taiwan).

Chinese D.I.Y. Interior Decorating
This kind of interior decorating is a way for “middle class” Chinese to express their enhanced station in life — status symbols, essentially. It can range from the mildly (unintentionally) eccentric, to what you’d expect from a high school design student in terms of taste, to the extravagantly ostentatious (I’m thinking here of one apartment a foreign friend almost rented that had a raised, transparent, orange-lighted living room floor with a rock garden underneath — the son wanted to have goldfish in it but his mom made him compromise).

In the 80′s wearing a watch and leather-looking, non-”Liberation shoes” meant something (it used to be common for people to look down at your shoes after greeting you to gauge your status — that’s only happened to me once here), so did owning appliances like a T.V. or fridge. In the 90′s it was things like electric bikes, pampered pet dogs, and private cars. But as each status symbol becomes too common, people with money have to find new ways to distinguish themselves. Hanging out in ridiculously-priced $tarbucks, buying ridiculously-priced hand bags, and having an interior-decorated apartment shows you’re a step up with money to burn. These things are meant to send a message, but foreigners aren’t naturally tuned in to all of them, especially things like watches, ‘normal’ shoes, and an apartment that isn’t a white-washed concrete box.

Not Our Ideal
We didn’t choose or really even want this particular apartment, although it is really comfortable. Our friends found it for us while we were in Canada with our newborn baby in neonatal intensive care. It’s lower-average for the kind of apartments foreigners rent in Tianjin (our previous apartment made some of our foreign friends uncomfortable), but we weren’t about to tell our friends ‘no’ and ask them to go apartment hunting for us again while we were in Canada; they’d already done us a huge favour. We moved back to China as overwhelmed first-time parents with an infant; just getting here was a serious hassle and we weren’t about to pick up and move. The apartment wasn’t ideal but at the time we had more immediate concerns like how to get safe baby formula and worrying about the air pollution. Since we aren’t planning to settle down here, we decided we’d live in this comfortable, foreigner/rich Chinese apartment for now.

When we first arrived in Tianjin, we wanted an “average” apartment. There’s a few reasons why that doesn’t make a lot of sense (“average” means less given the stark economic disparity between social classes, for example). Nonetheless, we wanted an apartment in which our Chinese friends would feel comfortable, one that they would feel is normal, one that wouldn’t scream “rich, privileged foreigners.” We arrived with this mentality and were more-or-less successful in finding that kind of place. (More about how that played out here, or at the link below.)

Honestly, that old apartment was ghetto — that’s the adjective the average North American would likely use to describe it, and they’d mean it literally. As far as physical facilities was concerned, it would have been in the worst downtown East Vancouver neighbourhood. (This comparison isn’t really fair, though, because while the building and apartment was physically at the standard of a North American inner-city ghetto, the neighbourhood and community was safe, friendly, and generally pleasant, unlike Vancouver’s drug-and-prostitution-infested, crime-riddled downtown eastside.) But our Chinese teachers felt comfortable in it. We knew it matched their own apartments because the buildings and rent were more or less the same; we’d done some surveying before we chose a place.

When we finally do pick a place to settle down in I don’t know yet how we’ll choose, since this time we have children and family concerns thrown into the equation that weren’t there in 2007. But I’ll definitely be aiming for something that doesn’t send quite the same message as our current place.

To read about how and why we originally lived in an “average” Chinese Tianjin city apartment, and how that played out, see:

• The Best Decisions We Ever Made in China (#1): ditching the laowai ghetto

Pronounced:
bīng qiú
Literally:
“ice ball”
Means:
1) hockey.
2) puck.

Here’s a summary/review of a sociological study that makes some interesting observations about Chinese communities in the USA:
“In the process, they become part of the larger conservative-evangelical Christian sub-culture… Like their fellow non-Chinese believers, they decry the rapid moral degradation of American society and seek to bring their children up in a way that affirms traditional Christian values, which they also believe conform to the best in their Confucian Chinese heritage.

… “their becoming American does not mean giving up the Chinese identity. Instead, the church helps them to retain and reclaim Chinese cultural identity within American pluralism.”

The question of mutual cross-cultural understanding — generally and in marriage — came up this week in two separate places. Cindy wrote about culture shock and cross-cultural understanding in marriage (as part of her on-going series about cross-cultural marriage — linked below). In a blogger interview we did for a China travel website they asked if we thought foreigners could ever really “understand China.” I love the way both articles tackle the same general theme from two very different angles.

First, here’s an excerpt from Cindy’s Our Unique Bond #4 (I really hope you’ll go read the whole thing on her blog; it’s fantastic and I cut out some of the best parts here):

Culture shock is the pruning process. It’s the Good Friday before Easter Sunday. It’s the dark night before the dawn. It’s the pain before the gain. But let me be clear on one thing: though culture shock is inevitably painful, it is not inevitable. We experience culture shock only if and when we actually desire to engage with another culture in a meaningful way. I personally know couples who marry cross culturally who don’t make an effort to engage in their spouse’s culture and I suspect they don’t have culture shock issues in their marriage. Just as an expat can live in another culture and exist purely in an expat bubble without engaging local culture, they too, won’t encounter culture shock issues.

And here I break the bad news to people considering cross culture marriages. Gulp. In my humble opinion, you WILL have to make sacrifices and be ready to lose aspects of your culture if you want to make your marriage work. [...] There are parts of my Chinese self, that I can never fully share and relate, with J. Though I try with every effort throughout our marriage. I believe it is ultimately healthy for the relationship to recognize and come to accept this. If you find yourself in a cross cultural relationship, you will have to decide the things you value in your relationship is worth the cost. In my case, I saw a character I admired, a common vision for life, and a deep friendship that bonded us even despite cultural differences.
[...]
Easier said than done. But it is worth doing. Please don’t be the kind of couple who just is content with living life according to one spouse’s culture. You are robbing yourself of the gift of being in a cross cultural marriage. J and I have learned so much about each other, and it has provided us with the invaluable skill of being able to encounter people who are very different from us with respect. And we hope to pass this on to our children to help them navigate themselves in our increasingly diverse yet interconnected world.

Here’s one of my answers from the travel website (China Blogger Spotlight: Getting intercultural with Joel and Jessica from China Hope Live):

Do you think [China/Chinese culture] is something a foreigner can ever truly understand?
Yes and no — it depends what you mean by “truly understand.” I definitely think it’s possible for people from vastly different cultures, like East Asian and Euro-American cultures, to have a deep and satisfying mutual understanding. We can also learn lots about ourselves and our own cultures through the perspectives of people from other cultures. Chinese people have the opportunity, to see things about Canadian culture and society (for example) that Canadians can’t see because Canadians are in their own culture and therefore they are too close to see some things. And the same works in reverse: outsiders in China can see things about Chinese culture and society that Chinese people can’t see because Chinese people don’t have an outsider’s perspective on their own culture. So there’s lots we can learn from one another, not just about one another’s cultures, but also about our own cultures.

Sometimes when people say “understand China” what they really mean is “accept and agree with whatever ‘China’ says or does.” Sometimes when these people hear a foreigner express a “non-Chinese opinion” (especially about sensitive topics), they disregard the foreigner by saying “they just don’t understand China” or “they’re just using foreign thinking to understand China.” I think that kind of attitude and thinking is basically nonsense, and it doesn’t promote mutual understanding. “Understanding” and “thinking and feeling the same” are not the same thing.

The differences between Chinese and Euro-American cultures are very, very deep; often I think people don’t realize how different we really are. Cultural differences are fascinating. However, I think the things we have in common are even deeper, more profound, and more important that our differences. I really believe that it’s possible for Chinese and lǎowàis (老外s) to have solidarity that is stronger and more meaningful than our differences.

Cindy, one of the very few fully bi-cultural people I’ve ever met (meaning she can relate as a cultural insider in both Taiwanese and American cultural contexts), has just launched a blog series about cross-cultural marriages and what makes their’s work. Here’s the first two posts:

• Our Unique Bond #2
• Our unique bond #1

The LA Times takes a look at the long-standing rivalry between Beijing and Shanghai: “The trash talk between the natives of Beijing and Shanghai has been going on for decades…
[...]
“‘The Shanghai men dress better than the Beijing women,’ said Liu Heungshing, a photographer who lives in Beijing. On the other hand, ‘if you walk out your door in Beijing, you have a much better chance of bumping into somebody with whom you can have an intellectual conversation.’
[...]
“To the Shanghainese, the Beijingers — and all northerners, for that matter — are peasants. ‘They smell like garlic,’ said restaurateur Xu, voicing a popular refrain.”

Pronounced: dào mèng kōngjiān
Literally: steal dream space
Means: Mainland Chinese name for the movie Inception. (Different name in Hong Kong, apparently.)

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were recently in Beijing discovering that it’s not easy to convince China’s billionaires to give money to charitable causes. FrogInaWell.net gives a helpful historical perspective on why, as anyone working with an N.G.O. in China knows, the Chinese authorities are often the biggest roadblock to the development of charitable organizations and a charitable civil society. See: Hoping for charity, without getting faith involved