By Jim Fields

Recently, I went to Tianjin on a one-day business trip. In the morning, a co-worker picked me up from my apartment at Yonghegong. After completing my business-related tasks, I bid farewell to my colleagues (who had more to do) and took a cab to the local railway station, where I planned to buy a high-speed train ticket.

I felt a vague sense of dread upon getting out of my cab, but I wasn’t sure why. I walked to the ticketing windows and got in line. There was a train leaving in 20 minutes — perfect! Approaching the front, I heard the cashier asking people for shenfenzheng (state-issued ID card), which must be shown in-person to the ticket vendor in order purchase a train ticket. This system was designed last year to curtail the activities of huangniu (yellow cows, or ticket scalpers), who buy tickets in bulk and then resell at exorbitant rates.

Of course, because I drove to Tianjin that morning, I had neglected to bring my passport.

This realization dawned on me as I neared the front of the line, slouching toward my certain doom. I felt like a criminal in shackles, crowd jeering, guillotine awaiting.

When I reached the front of the line, a young man sat facing his computer. “Where are you going?” he asked, eyes directed at the shockingly low-resolution computer screen. “Beijing South,” I responded, stuffing 55 renminbi into the slot underneath the glass window and hoping to avoid the ID issue. His gaze turned towards me. “Where’s your passport?”

“I don’t have it.” I pulled out my smartphone, where I’d saved a picture of my passport in case of a spot check during the early phases of the 100-day foreigner crackdown. “I do have this, though,” showing him a picture of my passport on the screen of my phone. He looked at the phone screen briefly, then at me, with a slightly incredulous expression. If he decided not to sell me a ticket, I would have to spend hundreds on a cab to get back to Beijing – assuming I could find one – much more than the reasonable 55 renminbi I would spend to take the train.

I didn’t hold much hope. The lumbering, soulless nature of Chinese bureaucratic institutions is well-documented. Eric Abrahamsen wrote a pretty devastating takedown of the Bank of China in this piece for the NY Times Latitude Blog:

I couldn’t help overhearing a British man next to me in the midst of a breakdown. For reasons he could not fathom they would only let him withdraw half the amount he wanted; he would have to wait until next week for the other half. But why? And why did they need yet another photocopy of his passport? And what exactly were they doing with his money?! Mounting rage began to derail his otherwise fluent Chinese. I admired his principles, but wished I could whisper to him: peace only comes to those who abandon hope.

Yes, simple trips to pay for utilities can result in a wild goose chase between branch offices, electricity can shut off without warning at the whims of local officials, and as Abrahamsen writes, ostensibly simple bank transactions can easily transmogrify into hellacious experiences.

It is important to remember that the Chinese understanding of customer service is dramatically different than the one that abides in the US, my own country of origin. The quaint notion that “the customer is always right” has almost no relevance in a culture where you actually have to scream at a waitress in order to get service in most restaurants.

The impetus is on the consumer to meet a business or institution on their terms – not the other way around. As a consumer, you become subject to the nefarious whims and various internal politics that typify massive organizations, often resulting in nightmares where you didn’t “get the memo,” as it were, and you end up not carrying a critical form or piece of identification which is necessary to complete whatever transaction you wanted to carry out. One could argue that this system is a byproduct of the political system – if you view your own relationship with the government as inherently unidirectional and top-town, why should you expect your relationship with a large company to be any different?

The man at the counter stared at me for a moment, then turned around and called over his boss. I already sensed that something about this transaction was different than the one endured by the sputtering Brit in Abrahamsen’s story. If getting a ticket was truly impossible, then the cashier would have just told me “没戏” (basically, that it was a lost cause) and send me on my way. His decision to summon the boss gave me a glimmer of hope.

The cashier explained the situation to his boss, who laughed, gave me a once over, and walked away. I wasn’t sure what was happening. The cashier then sold a few dozen more tickets to all the people who had been waiting in line behind me. Then the boss returned, with a mysterious purple card in her hand. The cashier asked to see the picture of my passport, which I showed him by sliding my phone through the slot under the glass. He keyed some data into the computer, his boss wrote my passport number on the purple card, then the cashier took my cash and printed the ticket. He picked up said ticket, the purple card, and my phone, and slid them back to me. I picked them up, amazed, incredulous. “Thank you so much!” I stammered. “You’re blocking the window,” he said, waving me along.

Shortly thereafter, when passing through security, I had to show my ticket again, and they asked to see my passport. In absence of that, I showed them the purple card the cashier had given me. The security clearance people waved me through. I walked through the train station, got on my train, and 30 minutes later arrived in Beijing. The purple card had my passport number and a contact number on it — my guess is that if one of the security people doubted my credentials, they could call the number, which would connect them to the boss of the cashier who had sold me the ticket. Of course this verification check would never actually happen – too much hassle — but the purple card seemed to be a sort of get-out-of-jail free card to whisk me through security. Long story short, the seller did me a huge favor. It would have been much quicker and simpler for him to tell me it was impossible and leave me to fend for myself.

This situation is perhaps only remarkable because of the fact that I feel like it almost never happens to me in Beijing. My interaction with the ticket seller in Tianjin changed my entire perspective – presenting a vision of kindness, of empathy, and a willingness to help and engage even if it presents a bit of an inconvenience.

I’m reminded of this speech by David Foster Wallace, which he gave at Kenyon College three years before his suicide. One of the sections has always stuck with me, where he discusses finding a new way to look at the people around you:

Most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.

Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

I think we could all gain from internalizing a bit of DFW’s perspective here in Beijing. Lord knows that life here presents infinite, confounding challenges to the psychic (and physical) health of even the happiest expat. Abrahamsen’s notion that “peace only comes to those who abandon hope” is an attractive option for anybody in the throes of a “bad China day,” but hope is what led me to the ticket counter, and hope is what keeps me here today. So the next time you time you find yourself in “consumer-hell,” as it were, maintain some hope — things may not be as grim as they seem.

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By Jim Fields

Every day, I bike past these three supernaturals on my way to work. They hold court over the southwest corner of Dongzhimen Bridge, existing in the shade north of Subway Exit D.

Every day, no matter where the sun happens to be in the sky, no matter what ad plays on the big screen above them, no matter what particulates are in our air, these three quietly sit, exchanging glances, incanting to some ancient, long-deceased ancestor, occasionally tossing offerings onto their portable altar. Bets are made, sums are counted, alcohol is imbibed according to the ritual of friendship. Outside of their immediate vicinity, time moves at a different speed.

In the concentric spheres outside their world, government caravans fly through intersections, cars crash, blood spatters, and lives unceremoniously conclude in mud huts and mountains, on the blade of knives or off rooftops or just because. Fortunes are made in large, reflective office buildings, bribes are received, deals are approved or rejected, skyscrapers are blueprinted and constructed in the space of a few months, and destroyed. Children are conceived, birthed, and educated in apartments and schools that look like tofu. Meanwhile, at the nexus of commerce and humanity, these three arbiters loiter. Cards are shuffled, bets are placed.

When I first saw them I was reminded of Van Gogh’s potato eaters because of the apparent simplicity of the scene. It seemed to be just old men playing cards, drinking beer. As time passed, these three began to burrow deeper into my conscience, transforming from human beings into something more symbolic.

They are not potato eaters. In fact, they’re much more like the gods in the universe of Shakespeare’s King Lear. As Gloucester laments, “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, — They kill us for their sport.” Thus it is with these three immortals, killing us by ignoring our concerns over visas, traffic, personal glory. We fret and wander, while they bide their time.

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By Jim Fields

New arrivals to Beijing often revel in the sheer chaos of the city. Cars, bikes, and motorized tricycles compete for inches of pavement (sometimes resulting in ungodly traffic jams). Children drop trou and relieve themselves among dining patrons at restaurants. And, of course, as any foreigner in China will tell you, there are no open container laws – hence, you can walk down the road with a Tsingtao in one hand*, yangrou chuan’r in the other without fear of the 5-0 rolling up and putting you in the drunk tank. This apparent chaos might lead a new arrival to believe that there is a complete lack of rules and ordinances whatsoever.

However, as you spend more time in China, you begin to realize – ordinances are everywhere, even where you least expect.

Don’t walk on the grass. Don’t smoke in the bathroom. Don’t set up a webcam in your home to surveil yourself. What’s a guy to do?

The answer, of course, is to become extremely selective in deciding which ordinances to follow – a process that resembles reading tea leaves: equal parts attention to detail, feigned experience, and an ability to improvise under pressure. Realizing this simple fact took me an embarrassing amount of time. I would whine to my friends, sputtering, “But pedestrians have the right of way, not cars!” … “Doesn’t that man know he shouldn’t be rolling a cigarette while riding his bike and talking on his cell phone?”… “Shouldn’t these migrant workers and their huge canvas bags allow me to get off the subway before they try to get on?” My friends soon grew tired of my personal crusade.

The odd beauty of many ordinances in China is that they all seem to be written from the perspective of an eternally wise yet distinctly paternal figure. They are very unlike ordinances in the US, filled with legalese, threats of fines, and lawsuit-proof doubletalk. Written Chinese ordinances feel more like instructions to a child, penned by a nationalistic, oddly anatomically-obsessed uncle. For example, here’s a sign that’s hung inside a public bathroom in Beijing’s Dongcheng District:

Please aid us in:

1. Cherishing public facilities
2. Not peeing outside the toilet bowl
3. Not writing graffiti on the walls
4. Not spitting on the ground at will
5. Conscientiously defending hygiene
6. After relieving yourself, promptly flushing
7. Not indiscriminately discarding garbage
8. Prohibiting illegal behavior

So there you have it. When you read the first item – “cherishing public facilities” – you’re left wondering, “By writing a poem, perhaps?” When we reach #2 on the list, we learn the answer: by not peeing outside of the toilet bowl. Of course. Why didn’t you think of that?

The rest of the list makes clear in excruciating detail exactly how you should behave whilst relieving yourself. Obviously, as any visitor to a Chinese public restroom can tell you, these rules are rarely followed – you can imagine my surprise the first time I found these rules being blatantly flouted (I would provide links to examples, but my first Google Image search opened up a Pandora’s box of unspeakable horrors).

It’s a shame they didn’t post signs about “prohibiting illegal behavior” in Qingdao, where government funds were spent to provide toilet paper that was almost immediately stolen in bulk. That’s not conscientiously defending hygiene at all.

–

* You don’t even need a paper bag!

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By Jim Fields

Below is a truly eye-opening video that neatly summarizes almost every conversation I’ve had with Beijingers about African-Americans (or people with dark skin in general). I enjoy the fact that simply by having an online show called Xiao Shuo (晓说) – and spending a bit of time abroad — this guy has become an authority on all things African American. Though I’ve seen the host’s face on billboards all over Beijing, I hadn’t actually watched the show until recently – a quick Baidu search revealed that the host is in fact the well known drunk driver Gao Xiaosong. The show impressively manages to trot out almost every stereotype about black people in one episode: as it turns out, they are good athletes, good singers, and surprisingly ineffective thieves. As an aside, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the host fans himself with a large paper fan during the entire episode, in some ways resembling a corpulent, Chinese version of a plantation owner enjoying a mint julep while overlooking his estate.

Other bits I enjoyed:

- His comment about how most American TV programs feature both a token white host and a token black host (04:14).

- His joke about Chinese immigrants in the US: “Chinese immigrants in the US hate two kinds of people… one kind is people who discriminate against the Chinese… the other kind is people who are black.”

- His story about being mugged at gunpoint by a black person at 05:14 (they stole his Nokia n95!)… Mr. Gao then goes on to teach us that when you’re mugged by a black person, the mugger generally expects you to provide 50+ dollars cash.

- When he talks about meeting Kobe Bryant at 08:38 (as a rule, any conversation about blacks in China has to include at least a passing reference to Kobe Bryant).

- 09:29: Insightful comment about the overwhelming number high-profile blacks in entertainment and sports.

- 10:26: “Almost every single popular entertainer and athlete in the US is a black person.”

- 14:44: The conspicuous absence of black people in water sports – even diving (but they’re such good jumpers!).

- 15:41: Where he talks about his childhood, when he was “still a little bit racist.”

- 16:44: Cartoon in which a white female cartoon character says she wants to tan until she becomes black so she can then win an Olympic medal.

- 17:00: Cartoon in which it is shown that black people are more like air conditioners than lighter-skinned people.

- 17:57: Explaining the few sports where the Chinese can out-perform blacks (and why!).

- 18:30: Where the black dominance of the popular music industry is discussed.

- 20:05: Where we learn that heavy metal is the most racist type of American music.

Interestingly, the host himself is a member of the Hua minority in China says that he himself was a “minority” while in America. One might think he would know better!

(Ed’s note: And the best part, in my humble opinion: the illustration on how to fire a gun in America to protect yourself against muggers with guns. It’s at the end of the first third of the episode. Enjoy! )

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