One of the things foreigners don’t realize about China is just how noisy it is. Brakes squeal on cars, bikes, and buses, horns blare angrily, the ticket takers on the buses bellow muffled warning to cars and riders into distortion pedals and loudspeakers full of pudding. And that’s just the roadways. China is a clamoring cacophony of phlegmy roars and peals of laughter chiming in teeming streets. For many new arrivals it’s overwhelming; conversely, many Chinese first landing in the west are deafened by the silence.
If you’ve ever thought Chinese people were fighting, shouting back and forth across the restaurant or up in each others faces on the street, you’re not alone. Even foreigners who’ve been in China for years can’t always tell from tone alone if it’s a hearty discussion or the prelude to a brawl.
Photo by Fred Dintenfass
Watching movies in the west it’s easy to get the impression that the Chinese are endlessly prim and proper, elegant like Song dynasty porcelain dinnerware. Quite, well-mannered, impeccably polite like butlers in British films - this is what movies would lead you to believe. But it’s not true. If it’s artistic license then it’s one that expired some time ago.
The truth is China is way better than that. Living in China is nothing like living in a museum or haunting the abandoned hallways of a British manor – a bleak house, if you will – morose and brooding, being eaten away by sublimated passion. China is riotous, loud, ebullient; there are no strangers in China, just friends who haven’t heard you yet.
Sculpture by Lei Xue
It can also seem to foreigners reeling from the volume that everyone knows each other. If they’re not fighting, then they must know each other to be gleefully cackling so conspiratorially. That’s not necessarily true either. Chinese people are very friendly. With foreigners and with each other. In certain respects and regarding certain subjects this is a far more open society, sometimes to our chagrin. Meeting a friend’s wife for the second time, she immediately she blurted out, “you’ve gained weight.” It should be said that I had no need for the extra poundage – it wasn’t as if I was recovering from cancer and needed to pack pounds onto a gaunt frame – I was already well padded. I’m not sure whether she felt the need to make up for that comment or not, “at least your skin is looking better.”
Although fights do break out - this is a tightly wound society and too many people are close to the edge of poverty, exhaustion, disgrace - most of the raised voices are just asking for a spoon, saying hello to your neighbor across the street. Or, in the case of cab drivers, emanating from folks somehow unaware that you’re extremely close to them.
A North Korean restaurant in Chongqing
I enjoy the slightly raucous, group experience. While it’s sometimes tiring to be the brunt of an onslaught of questions and attention from Chinese astonished at your hair, skin, or fumbling attempts at their language, it’s enjoyable to watch and experience the camaraderie. Sometimes Chinese, from the rural areas especially, can strike us as childish but it’s also a joy to watch them giggle over sharing bus seats and even to watch their jaws drop at us foreigners. My first response to the merriment is often irritation and my second response is, when did I become such a stick in the mud? Are the things I find funny really that much more amusing? (They’re not, except to 12 year old boys).
Walking down the street surrounded by the bustle and blare you get the sense Chinese people are living their lives to the fullest. It’s a party and it gets rowdy and someone might even hock a loogey in the corner, but when you’re in China you feel alive. The shouts of the waitresses and diners, the steely clang of metal spoon against wok, the slurping of diners sucking up their noodles, it’s just a part of the sweet spicy soul food that China serves us up every single day.
Related Links
5 Things the Foreign Media Gets Wrong About China
Warning：The use of any news and articles published on eChinacities.com without written permission from eChinacities.com constitutes copyright infringement, and legal action can be taken.
All comments are subject to moderation by eChinacities.com staff. Because we wish to encourage healthy and productive dialogue we ask that all comments remain polite, free of profanity or name calling, and relevant to the original post and subsequent discussion. Comments will not be deleted because of the viewpoints they express, only if the mode of expression itself is inappropriate.
Please login to add a comment. Click here to login immediately.
Sign up with
Google
