Sometimes I get distracted by things (Oh... Shiny!) Sometimes I get bored. And when I'm bored I tend to do a random search on the Net. You can find all sort of thing this way (I first found Schlock Mercenary via such random search). Of course, there's famous Rule #34, which usually leads to me finding things of one particular sort... but let's not get too deep into that.
Last random search was done for the word 'laowai' - which means 'foreigner' in Chinese. Between others it turned up two sites which I see as opposites: One called MyLaowai (which is blocked in China... and for a good reason) and another called LaowaiChinese.
First of these sites is basically a collection of rants on negative sides of life in China and Chinese people. Sure, most of the foreigners who lived in China would agree with many of his opinions, but that's not the point. The point is, owner of the site is trying to make his readers believe that Chinese are inferior when compared to foreigners (and maybe that China is inferior when compared to the West?). Now that would be just crap. Oh, I think most of us living in China have had such moments. It's not that easy to stay calm when some guy with rotting teeth is leaning too close to you. It's even harder when you wake up 7:00 Sunday morning because your neighbour decided to change these floor tiles (5th time this year) and the workers are happily removing it using sledgehammer. When you try to talk to that neighbour he's genuinely surprised that you can hear that "tiniest of sounds"... and hammering continues. Or when another neighbour decided to make love to his wife this night (which is perfectly OK by me and none of my goddamn business anyway) and, being naturally shy, popped some Canto-pop CD into CD player and cranked the volume of wretched contraption all the way up (which is definitely not OK). After midnight. When you have to go to the factory 8:00 in the morning. The point is, you can get just the same sort of thing elsewhere in the world just as easily. It's not a Chinese thing. It's human thing. And you can't change them with your angry site. Last time I checked there were more than one billion of people in China - why would they care about one foreigner... or ten thousand of them. They've got better things to do, you know, then to notice some stupid lone crusader against "Yellow Peril"... Actually, I should have better things to do than even mentioning the loser.
Now, LaowaiChinese is different. These people, I suppose, have realised the futility of trying to change the Chinese and stupidity of cursing at them. This site aims to help foreigners learn Chinese. There are a lot of examples of cultural difference between Laowai and Chinese, quite a bit of critique... but nobody is trying to make Chinese look inferior or stupid. If we get back to my neighbours... That guy changing the tiles really didn't think that this noise in the morning would affect anyone's sleep. He was sure that nobody will hear it (and looks like me and my wife were the only ones who did - people in Guangdong province do have peculiar hearing). And that guy with the CD... they both were really shy, but still managed to find the volume setting that won't affect our sleep and still would be comfortably loud for them. So they were just being human. Somewhat different from us (well, there are considerable cultural and racial differences!) but just as human. Not inferior nor superior beings when compared to others.
The hard part is... for many Chinese foreigners are more of a circus animal than a person. By bollocks, mothers have been pointing fingers at me shouting to their kids: "Look! The foreigner! Look before it runs away!". Just like this. And sometimes I do agree with that MyLaowai guy... but it passes. I met too many good people here, both Chinese and foreigners.
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