Adjusting to Life in Nanning

With my first semester done and having lived here four months, I am starting to adjust to life in Nanning. While there are many cultural similarities between China and Korea, the last 60 years has affected both and made for some very noticeable differences. There have also been personal adjustments I have had to make. Here are a few I have noticed:

Language:

Admittedly my Korean was never amazing, but I was certainly able to communicate what I needed with anybody in Korea. I was also able to read Hangeul. In China I am illiterate for the first time since 2009, and am likely to stay that way a while.

Hangeul (Korean script) is idiot proof. It still amazes me that there are people who live in Korea longer than six months who can't read it. You're telling me you never had a rainy morning to learn it? Because that is how long it takes. Sure there are nuances that take time, but I feel confident that I could teach anyone the phonetics of Hangeul in a day. There is no good reason not to learn to read Korean if you are living there. I also spent a lot of time with JiWon, Haemi and Paul learning it, so I probably learned more than most, and arguably more than I had to to live there, though I enjoyed it and have thought about picking it up again.

Chinese, on the other hand, takes years to learn to read. I have met people here who speak it quite well but who are basically illiterate themselves. I can recognize a few characters (mostly ones that are used in Korea) but I don't think I will ever be able to really read it. As to speaking it? Well there is no reason not to study it a bit, but honestly I can't see myself here in 5 years. I enjoy it a lot, but I think if I stayed in NE Asia I'd go back to Korea before staying in China long term. Because of that I have only really learned to count to five and a couple of questions. I need to learn a bit more, but I doubt I'll ever walk around China with the ease in which I walked around Korea.

Siesta:

Maybe the thing that annoys me most about Nanning. Lunch breaks here are 12-3. They all shut down and take a nap. I loathe it. Not only do I think nap time is something I moved past in kindergarten, but it drives me nuts that during half the work day the office shuts down. I know a few other tropical places do that, but usually the office stays open until 7 at night. You still get a full work day, so fair enough. Not here. Office shuts down at 5pm. So basically they have a five hour work day. Now some people may love that, but when you are the kind of person who expects to be able to get a full day's work done in a day, it is amazingly frustrating to not be able to. Especially when you have come from Korea where a twelve hour work day is the norm, the work ethic here seems appalling. Now I think Koreans have swung too far the other way, and are in the office forever whether they need to be or not (sitting there for 3 hours on kakaoTalk is not unheard of) but the opposite is no better. But this leads to the next big issue.

Too many chefs:

This is just Chinese administration. You need five signatures and stamp from a sixth person for everything. It does keep unemployment low, but the inefficiency is staggering to me. I think people in the west don't understand what communism is at all. They hear the work and think Stalin. Communism is endless bureaucracy designed to keep everybody employed. Underemployed and making very little with no chance of advancement. but everyone has a job.

Internet:

There is one internet for China, and one for everywhere else. Officially google, facebook, blogger and all these sites are blocked because they say bad things about China. That just seems so childish, and South Park's 'very small penis' episode come to mind. But that isn't the case. I think that they do it so they can practice protectionism while still abiding by WTO agreements. It keeps Chinese social media sites in operation. I mean no one would ever use qq when facebook is available, so what you do is make facebook unavailable. It is VERY easy to get around with a good vpn, which I have. But doing things like putting your docs up on a google drive for sharing becomes a problem when your students and Chinese staff (and a few expats who have really been here for too long) don't use a vpn. The alternatives to google are all in Chinese, and even the few in English are simply inferior. As I say this is an easy problem to solve with a vpn, but internet is just such a part of our modern existence, and to deny people access to it is only serving to hurt the nation denying it.



Overall I am happy here, and have no plans of leaving this year, but these are a few things that take a bit of getting used to/tolerating.