Being a laowai in China

Now that we're coming up to our one year anniversary in China (13th August) I can honestly say that it's been intense. Apart from the first couple of weeks and finding a place to live, life in China has been confronting a lot of the time.

Here are just a few examples for the blog record.

Shopping. As a laowai, everyone is interested in you. More so when you have a child with you but there still is a little curiosity when you are alone as well. I still cannot enjoy the shopping experience here - most shops are small (around 3-4m by 4-5m) which means that just looking or browsing is difficult. Although I have perfected "Wo yao kankan (看看)" - I want to (only) look - I still get followed around by shop assistants. It appears that they are at your shoulder to jump to your assistance at a moment's notice but I can't shake the feeling of being watched for shoplifting. Maybe that's a product of my western shopping experience where that would be the reason you were being followed by a shop assistant. Also, when I go food shopping at a large store such as the chinese version of Walmart or Trustmart I constantly have curious people glancing in my trolley to see what the laowai is buying. Perhaps they think it strange because it is never meat or vegetables (we rarely cook ourselves) so it makes me wonder what they are thinking.

Bus. Although quite rude, as perceived by western eyes, because they don't believe in queueing and make free (and frequent) use of elbows to get "there" first, they are surprisingly defferential once on the bus. Young people will stand for older people to sit (even in seats that aren't specifically designated for older people as well as for pregnant women and people with young (say under 6 years old) children. When a bus is standing room only, this is one time I am happy to have Alex or Sebastien with me as we get offered a seat. Conversely it is difficult to get people to accept that you might not want a seat (if you are only going a few stops).

Market. When we go shopping for fruit at the local market it is usually just Sebastien and me (unless it's on the weekend) and he loves it. Often we are surrounded by grandmothers who aren't backward about coming out to let you know that your child is wearing insufficient clothes, too many clothes, no hat, that you should be doing something about those mosquito bites, etc etc. They are very intrigued with the clothing choices we make as chinese seem to wear long sleeves and trousers (and even a sweater/jumper) well into when I'd call it summer and the weather is hitting the 30s(90s) with humidity building. Very often they will finger Sebastien's outift and count the number of layers and shake their heads firing off a rapidfire sentence, the gist of which is he should be wearing more.

There are other ways that being a laowai in China is intense - I'll not start on childproofing - but I shall leave it here for this post.