China. The Code of First Impression

It was 5:45 in the morning when the howling started. Half a dozen giggly young ladies pounded the hotel room door next to ours. Then they rang the doorbell, over and over and over again, all the while laughing and shouting to each other. You didn’t have to understand Mandarin to get the gist of what they were saying. “Let’s go people! Wake up. The bus will leave without you.”

My husband Dan jumps out of bed to chastise the noise-makers. The tour group on the floor in our hotel in Beijing was off to an early start. Two hours before he usually rises, my husband Dan, was off to a bad start.

Dan closed the door behind him, his eyes swollen from jet lag. The noise continued down the hall despite his attempt to intervene, first through sign language using what he thought was the universally understood, “Shhhhhhhh”, and then by calling the hotel reception. I anticipated an attitude forming and tried to head it off.

“Yes, I know they’re loud, but look at the language. It’s full of vowels. Sound carries. It’s not like English that can be mumbled without moving the lips.”

“It’s rude and inconsiderate to yell in the hallway like that before six in the morning,” responded Dan.

“Go back to bed. They’ll be gone soon.” I know however he’s making up his mind about China.

Noise in China, both people and street noise, is a recognized problem. Returning tourists all have their own stories about noise pollution. The cities don't hum with activity, they scream. TV monitors blast from elevators, public buses, restaurants, lobbies, and storefronts. Drivers lay on their horns substituting for traffic lights and road rules. Clerks positioned at sale items in department stores shout to customers as they pass, like touts, to inform them about a discount and urge them to buy. Business and pleasure travelers think nothing of shouting to each other in the hallway late at night when they return to their hotel room. The din is ever present.

In a bid to make China show well during the 2008 Olympics, the Chinese government launched a campaign to force a code of conduct on its citizens, particularly focused on Beijing. Fines were introduced for noise polluters. Drivers honking in quiet zones and vendors using loudspeakers to attract customers were fined. At the time, Beijing’s environmental bureau indicated that half of the complaints they received from westerners related to noise pollution.

It’s hard to fathom how a code of conduct could be enforced on any city of nearly eleven million people. And even if it could, the ordinance wouldn’t stop noise in hotel hallways made by people oblivious to their public surroundings. And besides, the Chinese have a tradition of living outside, communally. A hotel is just one such communal place.

Empathy aside, my husband will now weigh each new experience against his bad first impression, honed in the wee hours of a Beijing morning. It’s natural. First impressions are powerful and sticky; other negative experiences affix themselves to a first impression like dead fish to coral. A barrier goes up. Years later, when the newspapers are talking about a western resource company being bought out by Beijing interests, I know he’ll be against it, instantly, before the facts are known. Such is the lasting power of being awoken too early one cold and dark morning while still in the grip of jet lag.

Future fears aside, I start dressing and say to Dan with as much sympathy as I can muster, “Get over it.”

There are some well known annoyances that everyone talks about when they travel in China. Besides the problem of noise, people spit on the street, not just a little pat, but a smoker’s gigantic wad that announces itself like rolling thunder. While there are fines for spitting, I’ve not heard that behaviours have changed much. There's also the hard fact that subway travel brings out the nose-pickers. Dan and I quickly ran out of our hand sanitizer, something that was harder to come across than I would have thought given the number of big box shopping centers.

A former Chinese colleague of mine told me a story about her brother who returned to China to work after many years of living in Canada. When she paid him a visit, she found he had changed. He was irritable and quick to anger, even about small things. He explained that he had been beaten down by the environment, the crowds, the noise, the pushing and lack of order. So eventually you behave the same way but you're internally conflicted because you think it shouldn't be that way. There's a kind of emotional meltdown that happens. Survivors like Dan and my friend's brother push back and get angry. People like me catch a cold.

So three months of travel in China exposed, and then expanded, the limits of my tolerance. I’ve learned that acceptance is like a muscle that needs to be exercised. There wasn't a day that went by that I didn’t get the equivalent of a full body workout.

Motivated by the now past Olympics China hosted in 2008, the Chinese government did as much as it could to influence urban behaviours, both inside and outside China. For example, there was concern that some of its citizens were tarnishing China’s image abroad by practicing the same behaviours in foreign countries that the government was trying to discourage inside the country. The Spiritual Civilization Steering Committee and the National Tourism Administration issued an etiquette guide in 2006. It asked its nationals, when travelling abroad, not to litter, talk loudly, spit, and especially, respect queuing.

During my travels in China I saw no evidence of a code of conduct in practice. Perhaps, in 2006, it was simply too new, or too localized to Beijing. So every day, I assessed what I saw, heard, and experienced and went up and down about how I felt about China. I've concluded that, there are two societies grating against each other like tectonic plates. One world, that surely looks and feels like many small towns in my own country would have in 1925; the other, like some futuristic urban setting from 2020. I've seen photographs of my great-great-grandparents who lived on dusty, brown streets without indoor plumbing. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that the tobacco chewers of that time spat on the street. Such behaviour was just part of the times back then.

Here and now in China, this century-old world remains, albeit in new digs. It's sometimes a street away from the glass towers housing China's urban sophisticates.





Evidently, you can construct a new country with steel and glass faster than you can introduce urban-friendly behaviours and educate about hygiene, government-imposed code of conduct notwithstanding. It's simply going to take more time.

I've learned that lacking sleep is as much a disadvantage as lacking language skill. When I’m rested, I’m up for the day's communication challenges. But what we needed most during the three months we spent back-packing in China was a good night’s sleep. Each day, it required all our mental strength to negotiate our way through the rows of honking taxis, wayward motorcycles, touts, fruit vendors, shoeshine boys, donkey carts, chopped pavement, bicycles, blaring stereos - the normal life of the street separating us from a soft pillow at the end of a day.

Eventually, we learned how to come to terms with hotel noise, the shouting in the hallway that never quit as busloads of Chinese tourists came and went. We adopted a code of conduct for ourselves. We bought ear plugs, and wore them. (C.Moisse at maturetraveler.blogspot.com)