The difference between Chinese guys and foreign guys

I would again like to delve into a this hot topic.

Oftentimes my Chinese friends will ask me 外国男的和中国男的有什么不同？　And the correct answer is, well there's not really that much that is different at the heart of we human species. But, okay, you can make long lists of differences that would inculcate cultural and historic differences that serve to produce the types of men commonly seen in America versus the kinds of men produced in China, but fundamentally, there is absolutely nothing different. I hear all the stereotypes: American men are big and tall and strong and confident and hygienic while Chinese men are often shorter and less confident, etc. We all know these differences exist, and so why harp on them any longer?

But deep down, there truly are no differences. The devotion to family and home-ownership exists in both cultures. 对中国人来说结婚是一辈子的事．　那当然．　外国人也有同一的概念．　Let's just cut the crap conversation and move on?

We are interested in each other because we are shallow beings who are fascinated. Our innate desire for copulation and our animalistc urges are what provoke us in everything we do in life. Relationships occur between foreigners and Chinese people - just watch the movies and look in magazines or at billboards and you will see all sorts of mixed couples. Who is that hot girl that Jay Chou poses with? How does a pretty white female find males with whom she can mate so that she does not have to settle for the busy-body foreign boy who's either clueless and speaks no Chinese, or if he does speak Chinese and is smart and reliable, then DUH, inevitably he will be like myself and looking for a Chinese femme. No matter, we Western females will live up to our stereotypes of being very 开朗 and 独立 when mainly we're wondering where the Oxford graduates are who are returning to their home countries. Not quite.

Another fallacy - Western girls do not care about money the way Chinese girls do. Utter bullshit. Of course Westerners care about money - we spawned capitalism. We LOVE money and wealth and riches. Look at where we hang out when we go out...look at foreigner-concentrated areas in Beijing...they're all expensive places. Of course, we will remain modest with our spending and expectations, but, yes, I'm sorry, but foreigners do like and intend on having a pretty nice living situation, especially as age and time trickle on and the gust and zeal for living in wild China wears to halt.

He or she can go back to the Upper East side of Manhattan or their plantation in the Southeast or where ever he or she hails from and no matter what, that person will live just as comfortable a life as a successful person from an underdeveloped country. This is a difference between development and "non-development," and boy is Beijing developing. I myself make peanuts. In the meantime, I need to get out of Beijing and breathe.
Take in the air.

 Take on a humanitarian project in the countryside.

So long. So lonesome.

What I'm thinking as I walk home from the office

Years ago I went to the hometown of Li Bai. I studied this poem recently, and now I want to go to a mountaintop. Under this poem, I illuminate my daily grievances.

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The dew is like pearl; the moon like a bow.

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Li Bai - Staying at the Night at a Mountain Temple

夜宿山寺
危楼高百尺
手可摘星辰
不敢高声语
空惊天上人

The tower is high at the top of the mountain
From here one's hand could pluck the stars
I do not dare speak in a loud voice
I feel to disturn the people in heaven

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It is said that depressives make better writers and artists. Happy people don't produce quality art, and while I applaud myself for no longer being a depressive, I admit that being depressed and aloof brings comfort.
Off work at 6 pm. I shut down the computer and change into my walking shoes. It's time to walk home. So busy though.






My friends have invited me to dinner, but before dinner, I have to run 5k and before running 5k I have to balance my monthly budget and call my boss for the status of that 候先人. I have to read the news I downloaded on my iPad but didn't have time to look over, and I must listen to the Writer's Almanac from today, yesterday and the day before (because I've been too busy to listen to these podcasts lately), and what about PopupChinese and Fresh Air, when can I afford an hour to listen to these podcasts as well?

Fine, so it's 6:30 now, and if I don't have time or energy to run 5k, then I'll just walk the 7+k to the restaurant. Surely walking 7km is as good as running 5, yes or no? This way I could burn off the 300 calories from my second lunch, and maybe they'll have pizza tonight. Had I called Allen to ask how his date was last night? Crap, Sha Sha is calling me now. Can't forget class on Saturday, but I'm free Saturday afternoon, and so what will I do then? Study Chinese, of course, and then there is picking up teaching classes Sunday mornings and Sunday afternoon hashes. Frantic and hyper, I leave the office pondering the schedule of my weekend and my life to come. No moment to consider my surroundings, and absolutely no time for depression.

Beijing Warms Up

Crestfallen.

Another wonderfully temperate day in Beijing with blue skies and warm air. Yesterday was like today, and so was the day before that. Just a month ago I would walk outside and shiver. Now I can wear sunglasses and drape my coat over my arm. I walk home and wonder things.

One nice thing about me right now (my job, my living situation, etc) is that it might be better than it would be in the states. I will compare myself to my best friend. Chelsea, a small girl of 25, has sharp wits and a quick mouth. After graduating with a nothing degree Politics from UVA, she found herself working a few law firm stints in our hometown in rural Virginia. Around this time, I had planned on going to China, and I advised her to do likewise. Chelsea, a lover of Spanish language and soccer, decided she would go teach in Argentina, and I'm not sure how but she found an ESL program that arranged for her to go down and teach on a stipend of 100 dollars per month. She wondered how she would pay back her loans, got a deferrment, and took off. Now she is back and living in Southern California (Spanish speakers aripe) and works for the Agency of Missing and Abducted Children. She lives in a trailer, albeit very nice trailer, just an 8 minute drive from the agency and she is paid 48,000 dollars a year. She has few friends but enjoys soccer twice a week.

It's too bad she has to disappoint her Argentinian friends by adopting the Mexican accent. Chelsea confesses that she will speak to parents who have lost a child and yet she does not understand their Mexican Spanish. Argentines are proud people, especially soccer-playing Argentines. I mean, hello, did anyone watch the World Cup 2010, didn't Argentia do extremely well then? At that time, Chelsea, too was living and playing soccer in Argentina and living with her soccer-playing Argentine boyfriend. They are still together, and takes the piss out of her when she says thigs in her newly-developing Mexican accent.

Our lives are parallel and though she has more luck in the steady relationship department, I do see the two of us one day uniting in a common American cosmopolitan city.

The thing about Beijing is that everyone wants to become an entrepreneur. The desire runs rampant among 20-something Chinese-speaking foreigners. All I hear about are the businesses people are starting, their start-up websites, their blogs, their companies, their aspirations, and it's true, it is quite easy to get something started in Beijing if you have some money and find a good private equities investor. My mind lingers to the guan xi I have developed this past year and a half, and the list is meek but powerful. My roommate, an investment banker, would like us to start a project wherein we undergo the transfer of great works of art to an American museum who is willing to take them. There are thousands of pieces, and the artists, an old couple, are on the verge of death. Unwilling to surrender their works to the Chinese government, they intrust her, my roommate.

Other guan xi I have made include directors, screen writers, producers, actors and rich rich rich Chinese men. This is all in good humor and good company, but I wonder if I hadn't come to China, would the concept of making guanxi in order to start a business and make money etc even exist to me? None of my normal, white-girl/boy American friends think like this, and even some of the elders in my hometown do not say things such as, "well go out there and meet people. Make connections." Sure, there is the phrase, "It's not what you do, it's who you know," but such abstractions are taking on true form as my Beijing-ness spirals into an actual life of comfort here.

As I was saying, comfort. I can walk to work, I can walk home, and I can walk anywhere fun. Sure, friends are fleeting, but am I the most stable of individuals myself? Boyfriends, forget them. I have determined that I will tell my parents to arrange a marriage for me. Yes, when I go back home to the states, a strapping local lad will await me. Perhaps he will be a football player and own a jeep and a good chunk of land. I can wait here and be single, and, oops! No I can't marry you and live here in China forever because back home I've got pickings.

my hood Beijing

Sound like a familar story? Yes, it's a man's story.

My Year in Beijing

Three events have led to the startling revelation that I need to post a blog asap for my Western audience.  The Chinese audience isn't privy to blogger.com, nor to Twitter or Facebook and all the glitz of perfectly open Western media. First event, Boxilai's ousting as Chongqing Communist Party Secretary. Second event, the shutting down of China's Twitter (Weibo) comments as an expression of military and government might, and third, the Titantic obsession.

Actually, I just felt like posting for the heck of it. My China obsession began in college when I was a student of International Relations. Some assigned classes included Eastern Relgions, Chinese Political Economy, Chinese History from Mongul Empire until Mao, etc. These classses coupled with a part-time job as a waitress as a Chinese-owned vegan restaurant inspired an unquenching desire to go abroad and study Chinese language. My major required a foreign language, and while it was popular to summer in Prague or Paris, I decided I was going all the way to China. our college had a partnership with Fudan University, and from what I had read in Chinese Political Economy, ever since the reformist period began in China in 1978, while China's economy was open to foreign investment and hosted a wealth of modernizing cities, the West of China still remained fragmented. I wanted to go there and work. I would become an English teacher.

I was 22 at that time, a fresh college graduate, and I could already speak and type conversational Chinese (I will not boast that I could write Chinese although, sure, I can copy characters with agility an easy). Most importantly, I could talk on QQ to any Chinese friends I made, and I spent my freshly graduated summer doing just so. I found a school in the middle of no where, Suining, Sichuan. I wanted to find a college because, who wants to teach kids, and I wanted to find a school that would provide me with accomodation, visa, a round-trip flight, and a decent salary. Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes. I took off, and from my previous posts, you can see what kind of lonely life I lived as a lone Westerner in this small city. Here in Beijing, I hear legends of these type of foreigners - the ones with good Chinese and who are starting a business or doing something else in Beijing most always began their careers in middle-of-nowhere China where they were the star of the town. And so it began, in Suining, I was invited to dinners with city officials and mayors and famous painters who drew scrolls and bamboo and poetry and famous calligraphy for me, and I never paid for my own hotpot. I was invited to KTV 3 times a week and the other nights I usually spent feasting on spicy Sichuan dishes and drinking Baijiu. Since being in Beijing, I have not touched Baijiu.

I don't know what is it is about not having gone home yet. Maybe it's the desire to completely master the language and seek out a balance where a Western lifestyle can fit in perfectly with a Chinese lifestyle, but such a balance does not exists. In most cases of foreigners staying in China, they will strive very hard to fit in with Chinese crowds and never will. Dashan is just a national hero and no one treats hims him like a normal figure. They want to make a statue that praises him for learening perfect Chinese and for trying to bridge cultural gaps. Big fucking deal - anyone wants to do that. If I could have afforded it, I would have continued learning Chinese all the way through Fudan or Peking, where ever, but my disposition is rather shy, and the Chinese aren't likely to give me pressure to learn their language. On the other hand, pressure to learn English is rampant across the globe. Learning Chinese is just a pat on the back, and a foreigner is praised for his or her English abilities and happy and hardworking disposition.

Being in Beijing is tiresome and so is the fact that I have not been able to find a stable relationship or job that I like. Such struggles do not exist in the West. I did hear of a French girl who came here at 18 and now speaks perfect Chinese. At first she worked for some General doing illegal activities, and then maybe she worked in a brothel, and now she owns two houses in central Beijing, all paid for by a famous Chinese artist who is already married. What a very strange dream-like story. As for a normal relationship with a Chinese guy...western standards are for men to be forthright and confident, strong, hygenic and moral, and just strong figures. I haven't seen these qualities in any of the seemingly great Chinese men I have met. They're all too weak and servile and lacking of confidence to actually pursue me. I do give that Western women only like Chinese men who are exactly like Western guys!

That is all for now.