Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

Beijingers are the work-hard-stay-quiet type. I have proof. Listen:

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That was my subway in the morning a few days ago. I left in the announcer lady just to prove I hadn’t turned down the volume. Granted it was a bit early for Beijing — 7:45 — but the car was pretty full, albeit not thigh-jammed-between-buttocks full.Anyway, that’s my generalization of the week: Beijingers are quiet.Yeah.

Facetiousness aside, if someone does a study of expat generalizations about China, my money’s on a finding that, while the rate of generalizations goes down rapidly after the first three months in country, it still hovers at one a week even after a year.

And maybe they’re not as contrary to nature as the quiet Beijinger zinger, but the typical generalization about China is

1. As false as it is true
2. As applicable to somewhere else as it is to China

I caught myself fixing up a nice generalization yesterday after my third conversation with the service apartment staff about whether we could continue using the blankets they’d loaned us during the brief ice age at the end of October between AC shutoff and heating system resuscitation. The blankets were soft and comfy. I wanted to keep them for our remaining couple of months here. They’d have none of it, despite the exorbitant monthly rent my company pays to keep us in a furnished apartment. At first they wanted to tack it onto the bill, which I told them was stingy. Then (as punishment for my editorial remarks, I suppose) they wouldn’t even consider the blanket rental option. They just had to have the blankets back. Period.

So here’s the generalization I was working on:

Businesses in China are all focused on short-term gain over any long-term considerations

It’d be easy enough to write this off as pure exaggeration. But the path to the generalization is a little more psychologically insidious, so it’s worth a look-see.

First of all, yes, I was a bit pissed off about not getting my way. Even after I explained to the blanket nazi that I was going to tell my huge army of expat friends and colleagues not to frequent his institution with its abysmal service level, he apparently wasn’t cowed.

So what do you do when you’re pissed about something not worth being pissed about? You try to make it bigger. “It’s not just this guy who’s an idiot, it’s his whole badly managed organization.” And that’s probably true, as far as it goes. But then you remember, “Hey, Jonathan told me about how the Peking duck restaurant served him a day-old duck, and when he told them the waiter made a big scene.”

Voila! If one example makes a theory, two make a proof. QED businesses in China are all focused on short-term gain over any long-term considerations.

But why just in China, why not everywhere?

Ah, now here is the weird expat thing. Why not naturally conclude that the whole world is focused on short-term gain, or whatever it is you’re generalizing about? Why does it always have to be a characteristic particular to your host country?

I’m not really sure. The reductionist might say it’s pure ethnocentrism: just as you see the whole people rather than individuals, you see all Chinese service institutions rather than just a single bad experience.

But that doesn’t seem like the whole truth. I think there might be something of the bandwagon effect here too. You’ve heard people say things like this, so unconsciously you want to find examples to support it, even if consciously you’re dubious about the claim. Hmm, not sure I’ve got that quite right either.

Why make the Grand Claim in the first place (All Xs Are Y)? Why not just leave it as a single, ungeneralizable incident and move on? Somewhere in all this, the Ego is looking for a chance to prove himself, to state a universal truth. He hopes others will band with it and give you a chance to play the role of Great Oracle About All Things China.

Good enough for me. So here’s my big chance for fame, my statement of universal truth, to be seized by the fourth estate and chipped into my tombstone: “He was the first to observe that Beijingers are quiet.”