Number 14: Suzhou China

Business Week ranks overseas locations in terms of hardship for the expats living there. Suzhou was given an overall grade of “High Risk Location”. One of the major factors was the pollution, other problems were disease and sanitation and medical facilities (very poor ones).

Businesses try to sell Suzhou as being a wonderful place to live, very “western” and all, they assure their recruits. But it’s sham ‘westerness’.  Yes, some names are western, but they are run to be consistent with the Chinese culture, using mostly employees from that culture, and have many of the same problems that Chinese companies have with poor quality and employees and bosses who could not care less about the health and safety of anyone, nor about doing what they’ve been paid to do.

The difficulty is actually made worse by the “good corporate wives” who dominate the expat groups here. Because it is greatly to the benefit of companies if they can convince people that living here is a great treat, the corporate wives jump on board and declare it so, simply denying the difficulties. There is no pollution, the water is fine, the hospital is great, it’s wonderful not being able to drive, much better to use a taxi or car with driver, etc.

In the face of this new wives actually find it more difficult to adjust to living here, not less difficult, as reality conflicts with the corporate wives’ reports of reality, and maybe more importantly what they actually feel must be hidden away or it will be soundly criticized, leading to worries that there must be something wrong with them for feeling this way.

These corporate wives have truly become good Chinese citizens, replacing fact and truth with manipulative falseness. They have succeeded themselves in a way, they have absorbed and truly do fit in in Chinese culture.

But I believe that actual truth and facing actual reality are better for everyone.

Another morning, another identical scene. It’s always a nightmare version of Groundhog Day when in China.

Typical scenario: problem with something that needs to be fixed. Today’s scenario: stinking bathroom filled with sewer gas.

Typical result: Repairman telling you there is no problem. Today’s result: repairman (who arrives without any tools whatsoever) standing in the middle of the stink, just looking around and, not seeing water all over the floor, insisting that everything is fine, there is NO SMELL and NO PROBLEM.

This is after having investigated and diagnosed the problem ourselves, we found a website with pictures and walked our customer service rep through the wax toilet ring issue, symptoms, repairs, etc. She understood. This is an extremely common problem here (where plumbing is a relatively recent development). She told the repairman, argued.Couldn’t budge him. Didn’t even succeed in getting him to lift the toilet and check the seal. Well, how could he, he didn’t arrive with any tools now, did he?

They used the words “impossible to fix” to me yet again.  It’s the same every time. What is impossible is getting anyone to do their job. Every time you have to argue, hassle, scream, threaten, and generally make it clear that you will commit your life to making theirs miserable before you can get them to do the simplest thing. Like, literally, change out a faulty electrical plug, or in this case, replace a leaky toilet gasket.

Another day in China. Oy.

We see funny translations every day and this bumpersticker in the back window tickled us…

(In case you can’t enlarge it, I’ll dish…it says “Baby in Road”)

Among expats living in China there is a segment who are in awe of Traditional Chinese Medicine. It’s easy to pick out those in this segment not only because they call it TCM and bring up the subject often, this latter one hallmark of a zealot, but also because their voices take on an all-capital-letter tone when doing so.

TCM. I’ve never heard so much nonsense as the worship of Chinese ancient cultures and quasi-mystical science in all my life, and that even includes listening to US politics.

There are thousands of plants that are recommended for hundreds of illnesses and mental states. Some of these recommendations turn out to be right. This would be guaranteed by simple probability even in the face of random predictions. The Chinese drink and recommend green tea for practically everything, for example, and green tea is indeed in general good for your health because its anti-oxidants impact a number of human systems in beneficial ways. The Chinese also recommend lots and lots and lots of other things. Some of their recommendations are even useful. New Englanders eat cranberries, which are good for your health too, but the Chinese won’t touch them. But we don’t worship NewEnglanders as the source of some mystical healing knowledge just because having eaten the local foods it turned out that one of them was good for one’s health.

The problem is that these ancient Chinese recommendations are not based on any sound process. Yes, they turn out to be right sometimes in the same way a broken clock is right sometimes. A Chinese acquaintance told me very seriously about the constant nosebleeds she’d suffered for years. Her TCM doctor told her these were normal. His reasoning was that other older folks in her family had suffered them too. Ergo, ‘normal’ and nothing can or should be done about them. I asked if many of her older family members had died young, and she was surprised by my question. Turned out many had. Then she told me about the time that her nose ran continuously for several days until she felt faint (she didn’t see this as any contradiction of her TCM practitioner’s assurance or advice). In this case her father brought home some garlic and ginger, chopped them up, and applied them to the soles of her feet to balance out her yin-yang, or whatever. After about 10 minutes, her nosebleed stopped, thus proving that the foot-poltice was a remedy for nosebleeds.

I asked her how the foot poultice could’ve helped. She explained again about it stopping afterward, as if I didn’t get the infallible logic. I posed a hypothetical: if she goes outside and it is not raining, and she puts up her umbrella then 10 minutes later it starts to rain, did she CAUSE the rain by opening her umbrella?  She was stumped. In fact, I think she was trying to remember if that had ever happened, in order to determine whether she had some power over the weather that had escaped her notice before. I tried to explain that because something precedes something else doesn’t prove or even imply any cause and effect. That there has to be some plausible mechanism, some way that the first-goer could feasibly have effected any change in the later event. Her intellect could simply not take it in. She began telling me about the incredible magic of TCM and I knew that I’d found a counter-factual thinker. Ratiocination not a tool in her tool-chest, so to speak.

The more I hear about TCM theories the more I realize that TCM is mostly nonsense, with the occasional hit in the dark that anyone (with any knowledge of probability) would expect to find. (Unfortunately, the many tortured and mutilated bears make clear that the nonsense is not necessarily harmless. Google China bear bile if you don’t know what I mean). Without a process for discovery and verification that might lead them systematically toward knowledge, their outcomes are bound to be right the same way a broken clock is right. This ancient-past worship blocks them from understanding rationality or making use of it. Sure, let’s test out some of the precepts, especially those like consuming natural foods that have been consumed for a long while, suggesting that they are at least harmless, but let’s don’t mistake them for ancient wisdom.

I’ve told you about the little old folks that we see out and about in their little white cotton ersatz-Mao suits that are actually pajamas. The little child-sized ABC-block-printed pajama sets are really pretty cute. These are kids’ jammies but they fit these tiny, ancient, or at least old, although occasionally closer to middle-aged, folk who, from their malnourished look to their black or missing teeth, have the air of being very poor.

And now the Shanghai police are out to get them.

Ok, I exaggerate a little. Apparently a neighborhood watch committee is lobbying Shanghai to make wearing pajamas outdoors illegal. They argue that daytime jammies make the city look bad.

I admit the jammies are good for a snigger. But it’s not really a mean spirited snigger. In fact, it turns quickly into an affectionate grin. I mean, these tiny folks usually look ancient regardless of their age, like they’ve had a hard life. And the baby bunny prints are very cute. I wager I’m as mean-spirited as the next foreigner, and I think the pajama-suit set are pretty darn adorable.

But of all the stuff we see regularly in Shanghai…the prostitutes, the pubic peeing, spitting, and worse, the theft, the pollution, the auto ‘etiquette’, the treatment of animals, well, it would be easy to go on but that might just be rude…

I just have to think that they’re overreacting a bit on the jammies.