Stranger in a strange land

As I wrote in last week’s post, my wife and I went to China for a week, specifically to Shanghai, Yiwu and Hangzhou. The trip was the exhilarating and exciting to all senses but left a foreign impression of China.

China is a multifaceted country. As tourists, each day we encountered worlds that we had never seen, each different from each other. In Shanghai, we sat in the cool, peaceful passages of the Yu Garden and were swept along with the mass of people and vehicles, two and four wheeled, to view the lighted buildings in the Bund, the Shanghai river district. We browsed the old-fashioned shops in the Pudong district in Shanghai, unchanged for hundreds of years, and poked our noses in only one building among the massive wholesale complex of the Futian International Trade City in Yiwu, the largest wholesale source of consumer products in the world. Our ears were assaulted by the sounds of the vegetable hawkers at a supermarket (see video below) and soothed by the silence of the tea fields above Long Jing village above Hangzhou. We enjoyed the tastes and smells of an elegant Chinese tea ceremony and encountered rather different ones as we strolled through the food booths at the Yiwunight market.  All this we did with the temperature ranging from 30 – 38 degrees and humidity no less than 90% and quite often even higher. As can be seen from this partial list, no day or even half day was the same in any sense.

China is a completely different country in another way also. When traveling in North America, Europe or even South America, tourists can somehow manage on their own. The locals know enough English or tourists can easily learn the local language to communicate basic ideas while the meanings of both street and store signs can be guestimated. Most cultural rules and norms in the West are similar enough to understand the rules of behavior and even blend in with the locals to one degree or another. The populations and governments accept and even facilitate tourism.

China is another story. The vast majority of Chinese do not know a single word of English, not to mention any other foreign language. Except for stores selling international brands, signs are generally in Chinese, inaccessible for most foreigners, including highway signs. Even "universal" tasks can be difficult. Ordering a meal or telling a taxi driver to go to your hotel is a challenge.  We ordered the same set of drinks from Starbucks three times and received three different pairs of beverages. Finding the "next" button in an overheated, asphyxiating ATM closed cubical is an experience that I will never forget. This inaccessibility goes beyond language. The Chinese have their own rich culture and do not need anybody else’s. The Chinese have their own way of doing many things, generally quite logical even if the logic is not immediately evident to a Western tourist. Even catching a train at the Shanghai Hongqiao train station, would be daunting for the unescorted or unitiated. 

This distance makes it necessary to have an intermediary, a guide of some type. We were lucky to be accompanied either by our daughter or our excellent guide, Aron Long. They opened up the window of China and allowed us to glimpse a tiny bit of China and its culture. The lonely planet hiker would find this country very intimidating and rather inaccessible.

 To make it clear, we had a wonderful, even amazing trip.  I do not regret a single moment and hope to return, albeit not in July. At the same time, I do even fantasize of living there because I could never be a part of Chinese society in any way even if I spoke and wrote Chinese. As Heinlein would way, I would always be a stranger in a strange land.