10 Things I Love About China

On Monday I crossed the border from Hong Kong to Shenzhen. I stayed there for three days, then traveled to Guangzhou on Thursday. I expected to write a post for you explaining everything that happened in the past week. However, these few days have been so densely packed that I don’t think that’s the best approach here. My main takeaway from my time in China is that it so radically exceeds my expectations that I have become what you might call, in the popular parlance, a “glazer.” In the spirit of glazing, I am going to scrape the bottom of the listicle barrel. Below are 10 things I love about China so far.

1. Infrastructure

I should start by clarifying that I have only been to Shenzhen and Guangzhou, so everything I say pertains only to those two places.

These days, we usually use the words “first-world country” and “third-world country” as synonymous with a high standard of living and a low one respectively. At their inception, though, they were just classifications of economic systems. A first-world country was capitalist, a second-world country was socialist, and a third-world country sat outside of either the US or USSR’s spheres of power. From this definition, China is obviously second-world, and I hear people sometimes invoke this term when they mean “the quality of life in China is somewhere in between that of a first-world country and that of a third-world one.” This is more or less what I expected. What I found instead is that the infrastructure in China is highly advanced. You’ve likely seen the pictures of densely packed skyscrapers in Chinese cities. That doesn’t stop as you move out of the city center; the whole city is full of sleek, modern looking residences, offices, restaurants, malls, and so on. There are public amenities everywhere. The internet works consistently. Perhaps the biggest upgrade for me personally was public transportation. In China, subway stops are not within malls, they are malls themselves, with lots of food and stores and — thank god — public bathrooms. In Philadelphia, it was not unusual to see human waste in subway stations. China doesn’t seem to have that problem.

Now, I understand that in smaller cities and rural areas, I likely won’t see the same advancements I see here. But is that an indictment of China? There are areas like that in the US as well. You wouldn’t say that the US is a third-world country just because of places like, say, Oklahoma.

2. Cleanliness and Beauty

Having traveled to many places, there is a certain quality some have that is probably best described as “neglect” I think my readers will understand. It’s the feeling you get when the place is sort of dirty and poorly maintained, where the materials used are of a generally low quality. I don’t mean to imply that this sort of place is bad to visit, just that you won’t encounter the same attention to detail that you do in the US. I thought China would have this quality, and I was wrong. There is of course natural beauty — here in Guangdong, the tree-studded mountains are particularly notable — but the cities also have an element of urban beauty that you might see somewhere like Manhattan. Perhaps the best way to explain my meaning is that nothing in China looks to me like it would be out of place in the US. I thought my hotel room would be dingy. In fact, it looks exactly like a hotel room anywhere in the western world. Any difference is an improvement (Chinese hotels give out free tea). Suffice to say that everything I’ve seen so far has been quite well maintained, and there is something in the state of good repair that I find quite appealing.

3. Cheap Lifestyle

This one is pretty simple — in China, everything is dirt cheap. A good meal is less than ten bucks, and a taxi ride that saves you an hour of walking might cost only two or three dollars. Of course, the caveat is that I get paid less than I would in the US, but there are two caveats to the caveat. The first is that I do get paid more than locals because I am a foreigner. I assume that because they’re accustomed to higher wages, the salary for positions like mine turns off many foreigners. The low supply of teachers leads me to get paid more than I would otherwise, and according to my employer, more than the local teachers who do more work than I do. I’m a little skeptical of that last part, and I certainly wouldn’t celebrate it if it were true, but the fact is I get paid pretty comfortably. The second caveat is that the difference in prices is even greater than the difference in pay. That is to say, although I do get paid less, it’s not so much less as to negate the fact that everything costs less here. My rent is about a tenth of what it would be in the US; I can actually spend the rest of my money on things which interest me. There are many debates over whether China is technically socialist. I don’t know enough to take a side on that. I do think that one element of socialist thought that permeates China is the affordability of everything. One of the main drivers for socialist thought in the US is the difficulty people my age have in affording things like housing, food, education, and health care. Whatever economic system China has, it certainly seems to be doing better by its people in this respect. For me, I just enjoy getting a really good bowl of noodles for eight bucks.

4. Food

This one feels like a gimme. On my second day, I had a meal which might genuinely be in contention for the greatest meal of my life, in a place that looked more like a cafeteria than a restaurant.

I’ve mostly eaten in fast food places. The typical restaurant has you seat yourself and order of of a QR menu, with little table service. Haute cuisine exists here, of course, but the quality of food is high enough at fast food places that you could just as easily stick to those. Not every meal has been a winner, but I always get the impression that if I dislike a meal, it’s because I ordered something not to my tastes rather than because of incompetence on the part of the chef. When the food does hit, though, the experience is nothing short of exemplary. I can’t speak to the reason exactly, but my best guess is that Chinese cooking (particularly here in the south) uses a lot of salt and fat to bring out the flavor of the food, and that restaurants typically use fresh, high-quality ingredients. I was excited to move to China because I expected to encounter a lot less processed food, and thus far it seems I was right.

This is only tangentially related, but I have to mention it. I observed the time-honored tradition of “going to McDonald's in another country to see if it’s weird.” My observation is that… no, it’s not weird, but it is different. You can order a big mac, nuggets, and fries, but I chose not to because I thought that was boring. Instead, I got a burger with one beef and one sausage patty, fried chicken, a “McShaker” bag of fries that comes with powder to toss them in (I chose seaweed flavor), and a taro pie. Nothing you’d see at an American Mickey D’s, but nothing too bizarre either.

5. Enrichment

One of my many frustrations with contemporary life is that nobody wants to do anything. When people want to have fun, they choose to passively let entertainment happen to them rather than engage with it themselves. For example, a person might amuse himself by watching a movie, but there is no action on their part in doing so. I understand that this is relaxing, and there is nothing wrong with relaxation, but I think that it’s a sign of health in a culture that people choose to spend their leisure time engaging in activities that take some level of cognition.

I see this in China. People here are actual agents in their own entertainment rather than parties to someone else’s work. For example, games are quite popular. When I walk home from work, I see men unwind by playing xiangqi and cards (and probably gambling). There are lots of arcades and businesses that specialize in board games, mahjong, karaoke, and video games. I visited one of these that advertised an “english language board game night,” which didn’t actually occur. I still had fun playing a video game I completely did not understand on a Switch 2, though. What surprised me more is that there was a similar setup at the spa.

I’m somewhat picky about spas. Many spas in the US seem to offer a la carte services which you purchase, experience, and then leave. I was spoiled by my first spa experience in Singapore, which taught me that a spa can be an all day experience with relaxing spa features and dining. When I lived in Philadelphia, I would travel all the way to Edison, New Jersey, because there was a jjimjilbang in a strip mall there which offered saunas, baths, and dining in addition to massage services. I really thought that was the best a spa could be. The spa I visited in Shenzhen proved me wrong. It was an enormous building covering multiple entire floors with massage rooms, saunas, baths, restaurants, sleeping areas (many people stayed overnight), bars, video game rooms, mahjong rooms, board games, a library, and probably some other things I can’t even remember. It made Edison look dinky. My companion and I got there very early in the morning and only had time for some intense (simultaneously painful and soothing) massages before returning to my hotel for sleep. I will absolutely go back in the future to experience the rest of what it has to offer. I hope, though, that this anecdote illustrates my point: China appreciates more robust activities than I could find at home.

6. Kindness

Chinese people do not enjoy a good reputation outside of China. I don’t know why this is — it could be that many westerners, Americans in particular, dislike the Chinese government, and they conflate that with dislike for everything Chinese, including the people. It could be that disagreeable Chinese people are more likely to travel or immigrate to the west, so westerners primarily encounter them. It could be that the language barrier makes Chinese people appear impolite when they actually are not. The one possibility I won’t entertain is that Chinese people in general are, in fact, unkind. That possibility is simply incompatible with the experiences I’ve had.

In China, it is not unusual for strangers to talk to each other on the street. Although Americans have a gregarious reputation, I hardly ever see them do this. But a Chinese person might actually stop you just to chat. This did in fact happen to me when I met Robin. He was very excited by my USA hat and wanted to talk to me to practice his English (which was already very good, mind you) and to express his admiration for the US, to which he eventually hoped to emigrate. Even though we were complete strangers, we chatted for a bit, took a picture together, and swapped Wechat info. Friendships in China can arise out of nothing; when out drinking, you can just approach people and ask to toast with them, and you might end up spending the rest of the night together. In the US, people sometimes talk about visiting bars to socialize, but I don’t think that Americans really enjoy getting approached by strangers. China reminds me of how bars are supposed to function.

This is a small thing, but I’ve also noticed that people have had the opportunity to scam me and just chose not to. This is a fear that many Americans have when they travel overseas, and it may be well-founded elsewhere, but in China it doesn’t seem like a big deal. A couple of times I asked cab drivers if I owed them money. They could’ve just said yes and pocketed the extra cash, but they had the dignity to tell me I didn’t, and that we were square. I ask again: does China seem like it’s not a first-world country to you?

These are just two examples of the kindness I’ve witnessed. Like I said earlier, I don’t know if China is truly “socialist,” but the people here do seem to maintain a common interest in each other’s well-being. It’s also a highly homogeneous society, in which 91% of the population belong to a particular ethnic group (as a foreigner, I suppose I’m a part of the problem and not a part of the solution.) Suffice to say that it’s a high-trust sort of a place, and with that comes kindness.

7. Opportunities to Learn Chinese

This is another one that seems pretty obvious, but visitors in China will be immersed in Chinese. Virtually anywhere else in the world, you can get by on English alone. This is not true in China; hardly anyone speaks English. For most visitors this is a detriment. To me, it elevates the experience. 

I’ve been getting mixed signals on the quality of my Chinese. Chinese people love it when foreigners speak Chinese, and they compliment you even if it isn’t especially good. There have been times when I could not communicate effectively. At others, people seemed genuinely impressed. The good news is that I’ve already found Chinese classes within my first week here. I expect that I’ll go deeper into this in my next blog post.

8. Partners

I will confess that this one is a little aspirational. I of course don’t have a Chinese girlfriend (yet); I haven’t been here long enough to get one. If I make it through the whole year single, then I’ll confess that I was wrong and that it is just as difficult to find a lover in China as it is in the US. There are, however, some promising signs. In the US, I rarely got matches on dating apps. In China, I’ve been averaging about two a day. I would hazard a guess that dating apps are not the best way to meet people, which I feel actually strengthens my case, because if I am successful on apps then I expect to be more successful with girls in real life. The better sign, though, is that I went on two dates in my first week. By that metric, I was more successful with women in my first week in China than in the entire preceding year in the US. The first of these was my very first experience in China — going out to dinner and getting a massage with a cute girl, hanging out until the wee hours of the morning. You can see why I’m excited about my time here. Unfortunately, because she lives in Hong Kong, I can only realistically see her when I visit Shenzhen, and who knows when that will be? My second date was more complicated, because the girl did not speak English. We could communicate some, but my Chinese is rough enough that it didn’t work so well, and I felt embarrassed. But she claims she had a good time, and wants to see me again.

There’s a stereotype that white men are more popular in Asia. I don’t know if this is actually true. I do know that we’re a novelty, and that because there’s a lower supply of us, we probably have more value than we would otherwise. But another way to look at it is that China just has a healthier dating culture than the US. That’s a low bar to clear, to be sure. The girls I’ve spoken to are often standoffish, and it can hurt when they act like they couldn’t care less about dating you. But there are also things to appreciate. I’m very happy to actually have some real romantic prospects for the first time in over a year. For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel starved.

9. Work Culture

This surprised me the most out of any item on this list. Asia in general has a reputation for unhealthy work cultures. In college, we learned about the “996” phenomenon, in which Chinese businesses (especially tech businesses) expect employees to work from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm six days each week. I took it for granted that this was the norm. There are serious labor violations in China. There are workers who live this way, and there are sweatshop laborers who suffer in factories, and I’m sure there are other situations of which I’m completely ignorant. I don’t mean to downplay the severity of these issues. However, the everyday lives of the people I’ve encountered myself are not like this at all. The people I’ve met work well and work hard, but not to the point that it overtakes them. If you believed (as I did) that Chinese people have little time for rest or leisure, then you are wrong.

One thing that harms perception of China in general is that Japan heavily influences American pop culture, and many Americans conflate the two. I find that many stereotypes or beliefs about Chinese people are actually inappropriately applied observations about Japanese people. For example, Japan is famous for its overbearing work culture, so extreme that businessmen lose their identity and often die of suicide or karoshi (death from stress). I imagined that China was like this as well. You can understand my shock when, during my first day of work, my employer told me to take a lunch break at 12:00 and come back at 2:30. Apparently some Chinese businesses have a midday nap after lunch not unlike a Spanish siesta; this culture which is supposedly overworked has longer breaks than mine! I don’t know how things will be in my actual school yet, but in the office where I worked for the past week, the environment was relaxed and pleasant. People got their work done, but I didn’t feel the stress I do elsewhere. Clearly my attitude towards Chinese work culture was wrong.

10. Social Issues

I never feel unsafe in China. Crime is famously pretty low here, especially violent crimes or theft. Communities with low crime experience a number of other benefits, because they make people feel safe, and people who feel safe tend to be more prosperous. I indirectly enjoy the benefits of China’s safe community. China also has very cheap healthcare. I can’t speak to its quality — I haven’t had to visit a doctor yet — but when I went for my medical checkup, the process was quite efficient. I expect that a lot of these sorts of social, structural problems find solutions in China.

Even though I’m only talking about my very first week in China, and even though this article is more than twice as long as my last one, I still failed to tell you about everything I did in that time. I’ve had so many experiences so hectically that I can’t possibly recount them all. My primary takeaway is that I am extremely surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed China thus far. I was worried that I wouldn’t like it, and find that all the time I’d dedicated to studying Chinese and Sinology turned out to be a waste. In fact, I feel vindicated. I feel excited. I feel like my life is on the verge of incredible positive change.