Thursday 24 December 2009

Happy Christmas

I remember that when I was little, teachers at school told me that everyone around the world celebrated Christmas. They didn’t go to China, cause here the only people who are celebrating Christmas are other foreigners. Though the Chinese do seem to use the opportunity for having some commercial events, they seem to like the idea of a special day. It reminds me of my first week in China, when I was in Beijing and it happened to be valentine’s day. It was far more commercial than in Holland, everywhere you could see couples buying roses going to more expensive (for China) restaurants, and spend their money in other ways.

However it still doesn’t feel anything like Christmas at all. The weather is finally getting colder, but it’s still more than 10 degrees during the day, and of course there are still palm trees outside. There are people wearing Christmas hats in shops and restaurants and you can buy Christmas trees and products in stores. They discovered the commercial side of Christmas here in China, but personally I think that most Chinese have no clue at all why Christmas is a holiday.

We will have a Christmas dinner at a house of French friends, so I suppose the food will be at least somewhere similar to Christmas food. Tomorrow morning I will earn some money by playing for Santa Claus at one of my Kindergartens. For tomorrow we’re also going to a Western restaurant for a Christmas meal. So the food and drinks will be good or again more similar than the usual Chinese food (which can be delicious, don’t get me wrong.)

Monday 14 December 2009

The 'real' China

There’s a discussion going on in the foreign community about what exactly is the “real” China. There are quite some foreigners who claim that Shanghai or maybe even Xiamen is not part of this “real” China, because it’s too rich and modern. On the other hand there are people who claim that, when you enter the isolated rural countryside in far away provinces like Yunnan you leave China. The answer of course is that all these places are China. The only places which you could argue that are truly different, are Tibet and Xinjiang in my opinion. Although I still don’t know any Chinese person who would agree with those regions not being part of China.

The real question is what people see as the “real” China. How they picture the ‘real’ China. Some people think of rice fields when they think of China, while others will think of big ugly polluted cities. Everyone has an idea of what China is, but since China is so extremely big the ideas people have about China are sometimes very different from each other. Not rarely do I read or hear very contradicting statements about China. When I first came to China I didn’t know what I had to expect. Off course I had expectations, but the thing I remember most is that I had pictured it as a crazy place you could only love or hate. I got this idea before coming here, because the stories I heard and read contained such a big contrast. Some people loved it, while others were simply sickened of it. Some people even seemed to be in love with the idea of China as the new superpower of the world, while others were sure that we would all be doomed if such a scenario would ever occur.

By now I have lived in two very different places in China for longer than 3 months, and traveled around for about 2 months. Some places I traveled to were pretty similar to each other from my perspective, but I also traveled to some very unique places. Hiking the tiger leaping gorge in Yunnan is nowhere near similar to traveling around Beijing. I enjoyed both a lot and comparing them shows me how different China can be.

Wuhu is the city I worked and lived before, and for me this might be the ‘real’ China. I just read back my post about Wuhu and I wrote that it was a typical Chinese city. I still think this observation was quite correct. Xiamen is way too modern to be a typical Chinese city, of course it’s also China, but Xiamen is definitely part of the new China or modern China. Last Saturday I had diner in one of the nice restaurant/bars in Xiamen, this place is owned by an old foreigner and has very good pizza’s. The place is located at the sea side and the terrace they have has a very nice atmosphere. It’s hard for me to describe why and how, but this kind of place would just not be able to exist in Wuhu. Maybe in 10 years, or even 5, because that seems to be the same everywhere in China. They are developing in top speed. Too fast even maybe…

Sometimes I like China a lot, while on other times I’m very glad that things are not like this back home. I love some of the food they have here (I also like western food a lot, so maybe I just like to eat), I liked the traveling, I like the way how easy things can be arranged if you speak only a little Chinese and are willing to pay a little money, I like the optimism Chinese people can have, I like to learn and practice Chinese most of the time, and finally it’s still the adventure and the big contrast with Holland that keep me fascinated. There are a lot of things I dislike as well; I dislike the spitting or baby’s peeing in public, the lack of queuing in any crowded public place where there should be a queue, the beggars, useless bureaucracy, the accepted hierarchy, the ignorance of Chinese people which is for a great part due to censorship which I also dislike very much.

All in all I do understand why people come back from China completely disgusted by the country, while others come back completely in love with it. It matters a lot where you go and what you see and experience. China does have some amazing nature, while it also has the most ugly polluted cities I have ever seen. It’s all part of China and so are all the opinions about China, the thing is this country is just far too big to be able to talk about a ‘real’ China.