Is China (or Taiwan) Making You a Worse Person?

I had to laugh at this. I find that Taiwan has given me some of the same attitudes. Oh dear.

Fred

[quote]

How China Is Making Me Into a Worse Person

You think you can shove past me in the line at the airport or at the bank? Think again, buster.

Yes, presence in any foreign environment inevitably “improves” people. They learn about the new country, and their home country, and themselves, in ways they couldn’t otherwise. They’re jogged out of routines. They are exposed to different languages and approaches to life. And blah blah blah. Every day’s exposure to China no doubt improves me in all those ways.

But I realize that, in addition to pulverizing me in a physical sense, this China stint is making me worse as a human being. I’ll kick off the series with the most obvious transformation; I already have three or four others in mind and fear there will be many more installments to come.

  1. Public manners. The virtues of modern China are most apparent at the individual and family level. People are smart, and funny, and adaptable, and energetic. They, or most of them, are difficult not to like.

China’s least appealing face involves people’s manners in public. If you’re not in my immediate family, then out of my goddamned way! I mentioned in the Atlantic the Hobbesian struggle to get in and out of subway cars. It is replicated in countless forms, for example anything involving a “line.” The one that makes me want to scream is when the first person onto an elevator starts rapidly pushing the Close button, to get moving before too many others pile on.

You can work up all sorts of historical or anthropological explanations behind every-man-for-himself behavior. It’s a survival imperative when there are too many people for too few resources. It’s an effect of big, anonymous city life — what happens when a city is three times larger than New York — or a legacy of the mistrustfulness of the Cultural Revolution years. Who knows.

What I do know is that if you exist in this culture, you are shaped by it. I’ve only been exposed to it for a few months, and I’m already responding. After a previous stint in Japan, I realized that I had started bowing while talking on the phone, like the locals, and beginning the typical utterance with sumimasen ga, or “Excuse me, but.” And now….You think you can shove past me in the line at the airport or at the bank? Think again, buster. Since junior high school football I’ve never used my elbows intentionally, as weapons, as I use them now. A friend has told me how he loves watching American visitors come into — and later go out from — the Shanghai or Beijing airports. On the way in, when finding they make no progress toward the immigration desk or in the taxi queue because of Chinese people cutting in front of them, they smile in appreciation of raw Chinese energy. On the way out, when someone tries to cut them off, they grab the interloper by the shoulder and fling him back.

That’s the person I am now. When I start hammering at the “Close” button, I’ll know that my transformation is complete.[/quote]

theatlantic.com/doc/200612u/fallows-china

I have the same elbows.

I growl more in public, but not much more than before.

Fred Smith is turning me into a kinder, gentler, more sympathetic person, so it cancels out.

If you as my mom, yes, China and Taiwan did turn me in a worse person. I used to have great manners, but seem to have lost some of them in order to survive. :boo-hoo:

Man, he stole my line! I’ve been saying that to explain ML Chinese behavior for ages. I do think that certain aspects of civic behavior are much better here than across the straight - and some of them have changed to become that way right before my eyes. One of those is public attitudes towards litter - used to be I’d get looks for picking up a piece of trash and throwing it in the trashcan (“How dirty!”) Nowadays I see parents actually teaching their kids not to litter.

However, I do find myself jumping up and down in glee when I get a parking space in front of someone else. Perhaps that’s a symptom.

Is China (or Taiwan) Making You a Worse Person?

Oh shit yeah. Burping farting and swearing has become a way of life for me here, though I’m still not relaxed enough to start hacking and spitting (at least not yet).

whatever, just say buhaoyise and it’s cool.

I haven’t taken up chewing betel nut yet, or spitting in public, I do have a stab at the old nose every now and again though, but try to keep it in the confines of my home and always wash my hands immediately, wherever I am. I certainly have become more violently natured toward road users, but still manage constraint most of the time. I generally have a natural assumptive dislike for other people though, which I never had before coming here, due to the majority being ill mannered and selfish in my eyes, and I maintain this attitude until they prove me wrong (not often enough.) I now have a low opinion of most Chinese people and consider this a very sad thing to think as I always considered everyone as equal before coming here and thought everywhere I had travelled had people that all showed a general respect for one another and each other’s property. Taiwan stinks in this area, and I wish it didn’t.

James Fallows’s wife wrote THE most insipid China travelogue over on Slate (too lazy to search for it.) Reading it really pissed me off because there are so many talented writers/bloggers in the mainland who are more fluent in the language, understand the culture more, and have so much more interesting things to say about the country other than “OMG the subway in Shanghai is crowded!” Giving such a large readership to her simply because she’s the wife of a famous journalist was complete bullshit.

I think i am still the same sensitive and compassionate person I was a few yrs ago. Athough now when I see a scooter accident I think to myself,“you stupid bastard,that will teach you for being such frickin idiot” or when I see someone slolom though rush hour traffic at rediculous speeds I think how fun it would be to drive over their dismembered extremities at the next intersection.When someone tries to jump the cue at the 7-11 or somewhere,I take out my Chinese voodoo doll and six inch pin immediately start stabbing it til they back off. Yes,I think I have adapted quite nicely here.

What strikes me as interesting is that in Shanghai it is the older people who have suffered the most (and who have the greater “right” to be bitter and twisted) who have the best manners and compassion for their fellow human beings and the younger generation who have had it all handed to them on a plate who are the arrogant savages without the manners of a herd of swine.

Truth be told. I have been to China several times recently and I am amazed at how much better, more polite, more civil people are today than 10 and 20 years ago. A sea change in civic mindedness and good behavior. In my last visits, I have not been pushed, elbowed or jostled once. I did not see anyone spitting in Guangzhou, Shenzhen or Shanghai in weeks. So far not at all. The staff at various restaurants, bars, stores have been unfailingly polite. I am becoming quite a China fan these days. So much improvement. So much development. So many people being lifted out of poverty with housing and disposable incomes. It is a miracle.

That said, I have changed because of my many years in Taipei, not all for the good, but things have also improved here dramatically.

Taiwan has made me a better person, but a a worse driver. Although I don’t agree with some of the social behaviour here, I’m a better person for it as I’ve experienced so much personal growth. As far as their social shortcomings, I feel they are simply a little behind.

This the China off the coast of Taiwan you’re talking about? :astonished: