Chinese Culture

·      When I first decided to study in China a lot of people thought I was crazy. They thought that it was insane for me to choose a destination so far from everything that I was used too and in a language that was so completely foreign to me, those people may have been right but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything different!

·      Some cultural differences are hard to be able to handle at times. For example, spitting is a very common thing among men in the Chinese culture. When you are on the street there are men spitting on the round and I have even seen some spit on the floor inside of the train stations. It’s hard to ignore when we were brought up around the belief that doing anything like that is incredibly rude and just plain gross! Another time when you can see a blatant difference is when waiting in line for just about anything, because lines mean nothing to most Chinese. When you wait in line its a very good probability that a few people will just jump right in front of you!  The concept of “waiting your turn” doesn’t seem to be something that was taught in elementary school quite like it was in the United States! Your patience is sometimes stretched with situations like that but it definitely helps you grow and become more understanding of others’ cultures.

·      But not all the differences are bad ones. A few times this past weekend while in a smaller city of China, a Chinese family asking if we would be in a picture with them approached my friend and I. They were so enthusiastic and excited about getting a picture with a “Meiguo ren” (American)! So somewhere in China there is a picture of a Chinese woman and I on a bridge in the middle of a Chinese garden. And they aren’t the only ones who get beside themselves at the sight of a foreigner. Multiple times a day we would have people saying “Laogui, laogui!”, which means “foreigner, foreigner!” while we walked past. People would also come up to us and say “Hello!” because that was one of the only English words that they knew. Its so funny to see how entertained they are just from seeing people from another country!

·      Overall the differences, either being entertaining or tough to handle, make living in a foreign country much more interesting and I believe will force me to move out of my comfort zone and grow into a more international person. Since I hope to someday have the chance to work in an international company, I couldn’t be happier about my decision to throw myself into the culture and customs of China!