I’ve don’t think I’ve had too many of what we might call “These Strange Chinese Ways” posts in this blog, the type of posts often written by first-year foreign teachers (or those who never quite break out of that mentality), about things that “aren’t the same as back home” and so on (“It’s served with the head still on it!” “They eat the feet too!” “The post office reopened on the 16th but had no stamps until the 19th!”) Dealing with those are all part of one’s adjustment to a different culture, I suppose.
But it’s now 12 1/2 years since I first came to China, and 10 years since I married into a Chinese family, and there is still one “strange Chinese way” that continues to baffle me.
I’m posting it here in case any scholars of Anthropology or Far Eastern History or Abnormal Psychology can shed some light.
In a nutshell, it’s this:
Dear People of China,
Look, that over there where you’re walking is a street, or a vehicle right of way in a parking lot–the place where the cars are coming and going, in other words.
See this over here? This is a sidewalk, or maybe the shoulder of the road, or something else that isn’t smack dab in the middle of where the cars want to be.
Why, dear ones, do you habitually fan out in groups into the traffic lanes or paths? Those honking horns you hear behind you, those are the cars and trucks and buses that want to drive over the ground you’re now walking on.
And me over here, I’m pointing frantically at this patch of ground that I’m standing on, the designated or common sense-dictated place for people–you know, the ones of us who don’t have engines built in–to walk. This is called a “sidewalk.”
Do you see the problem here?
Perhaps there’s some historical basis in China’s ancient history to explain this, this, this walking or standing in the bloody traffic lanes!, but so far it eludes me.
Please, please, tell me now why you do this, and get out of the friggin’ street!
Sincerely,
Mark Baker
And this isn’t just me trying to take some morally superior stance over the people of a foreign culture. I mean, my own Wife has yet to completely shake this habit even as we’re walking along the streets and parking lots of the Seattle area after living there these several years.
We visited a mountain “wilderness preserve” park near Xiamen not long ago, a group of about 15 friends and relatives, and as the group got out of the cars and discussed which direction to go, they stood, yes, smack dab in the middle of the lane where cars were trying to enter and leave the parking lot, not moving aside until the horns started honking, but then not even looking about to realize, “Oh, we’re blocking traffic.”
A few nights later, looking down on a busy Xiamen street from the apartment where we were staying, I saw two young men walking along down the middle of a traffic lane. And I don’t mean “near the sidewalk”; I mean right in the middle of the street. A busy street, as I pointed out, with cars and buses and taxis trying to drive.
In New York (or anywhere else, really), you’d expect drivers to honk and shout out the window, “Hey, !$%%&!, get out of the street!” But there, drivers only honked in a perfunctory way and then swerved around them. And they just kept walking along down the middle of the street, this Chinese Beavis and Butthead duo.
These aren’t isolated incidents; I see it everywhere.
So I’ve tried, but I can’t figure it out. Can anyone out there explain this Chinese pedestrian penchant for standing and walking in the motor vehicle traffic lanes?
