China isn't so different afterall

I've now been in China for 2.5 months and although I have seen and experienced many things I'd have never expected, the single biggest surprise I've realised reaching this milestone is how normal my day-to-day life actually feels here.

So first just a little bit of background. I graduated from university at the end of last year and before beginning the Master's degree I plan to pursue I thought I'd head off on one last adventure. That adventure came to fruition with me signing a year's contract for a job teaching English in Xi'an, China.

Before moving to China I saw the country as another world, so far away and so different from everything I knew. I think that's how most people who have never lived in China see it. The censored media, pollution, mass production - those are just some of the aspects of China which seem so extreme to us in the West. 'Made in China' is written on most things we buy, China isn't a place we go it's just a place our things come from, somewhere we're so detached from yet rely on so much.

When I decided I was going to come to China a common reaction my decision was met with was "why?". Usually when you announce you're taking the leap into something new, the reaction of your friends and family is one of pure excitement rather than of questioning your motives. I lived in Italy for a year when I was 17 on a student exchange and I remember the excitement everyone shared with me before my departure, people weren't questioning my decision they were congratulating me on it. But this time it was different.

Although my friends and family asked me why I was going to China they were still supportive of my decision, no one tried to stop me or told me it was a bad idea they were just curious as to why I would want to come here when I could go anywhere, or go nowhere for that matter. Strangers were a different story though. Fair enough they don't know me, they don't need to show support and that's totally fine but when someone walks into your doctor's office two months before they're off to China for a year you'd think you'd refrain from going on and on - in great detail  - about how dirty the country is (to the point where it was time for her next patient and I'd barely had any time to cover what I'd intended to). As I said though I also shared some of these perceptions about China, it was just interesting to hear how intently others also believed them.

Although the reactions of my peers were different to what I'd experienced in other circumstances, they weren't unexpected because I had been asking myself the same questions that they had been asking me. In saying that, I was excited to come to China and prove those ideas wrong, but surprisingly I sit here now at the 2.5 month mark and I don't think they are wrong. Even though I said I'm now living a normal life here, that doesn't mean that those big ideas were misconceptions. For example, many places here are very dirty compared to the West. The school I work at has visible grime on most surfaces, and the toys we use in class all all tinged black. We have a lady who is employed to 'clean' the school but that solely consists of her mopping the floors. The floors are sparkling but it's a pity they're the one thing our hands don't touch. I'm not saying this as a critique of their culture, not at all - the argument exists that we oversanitise in the West, and I think that's probably completely true. That doesn't stop however, me noticing this difference between the two societies having grown up where I have. What you believe to be 'normal' is merely what you're used to, so it's impossible for me to not notice these things as they are different to what I've been taught and observed growing up. Those 'norms' are hard to shake.

Here, young children wear open-crotched pants so that they can go to the toilet whenever they please - whether that means being held over a bin in the subway (actually saw this), or crouching down on the concrete street (again, seen it!), this is quite shockingly different to my internal norms. A similar difference in norms exists when it comes to any bodily fluid - forget blowing your nose into a tissue and washing your hands, here it's common to block one nostril while you blow the boggers out of the other right onto the street in front of you (imagine walking down the street, glancing to your side and seeing a long trail of boggers hanging from a man's nose as he's mid blow - yup really seen it). These things are all natural sure and how we handle them is only cultural, so again I'm not banging on the Chinese culture but you have to admit these things are all quite difference to what you'd see on an average day in a neighbourhood in New Zealand, or Australia, or the USA or any Western country.

So what I'm mostly surprised about is how I can live such a normal life here even though I notice these quite extreme differences in norms on a daily basis, which only provide supporting evidence for those ideas I had before coming to China. What I've realised from this is that we are all human at the end of the day and when it really comes down to it we all go through the same processes we just deal with them in slightly different ways depending on our norms, which means that nothing is completely alien.

I wake up, take a shower, have breakfast, go to work, have a lunch break, come home, have dinner, watch TV, head to bed. Every one of the processes I'm used to in my life back home is still there, nothing is missing and nothing has been added. The differences are merely within the smaller steps which these processes are made up of. When I arrive home in China I don't walk down the driveway in the fresh air and through the unlocked front door, I enter a building from a dusty street and head up an elevator to arrive at my front door. I live in an apartment building like most Chinese, but at the end of the day that process is still me returning home from work and ending up at my front door. The overall process, reason behind it and end result are the same - the steps are just slightly different.

I think this is why life here is so normal. There are differences, some of them very surprising but at the end of the day China is not a different world like many of us believe in the West. I have only been here 2 1/2 months so who knows maybe this perception will change, but for now I'm glad I have this down in writing for me to review if anything changes.