The More Things Stay the Same

In my experience, I've always found that no matter where I go, people are mostly the same. This has remained true, but there are still some things that surprised me in China!

The first and biggest thing I encountered was restaurant culture. Living in a hotel for the first month, I ate out a lot. Here's what I learned:

In most restaurants, you seat yourself. A server will follow you to provide the menu and whatnot, but you're allowed to chose where you sit. When it's time to pay, you have to go to the register yourself, even in high-end places. Conversely, in fast-food chains, there aren't trash cans because you're expected to leave your trash on the table, as if you were in a sit-down restaurant! (This makes me PHYSICALLY UNCOMFORTABLE haha, but there is physically no place for me to throw anything away, so I have to do deal with it...)

Another thing about China is that there is no sales tax! At all! Anywhere!* And you don't tip servers, so going out to eat is actually quite affordable.

*China has a value added tax (VAT) in place of a sales tax, so everything is already calculated into the price you see instead of being added at the end.

The next thing that really stood out to me was this:

There's a couple of these in various metro stations.

At first I wasn't quite sure what I was looking at (some kind of hospital ad?), but then I noticed that the blue characters on the left are the same two that appeared on my complementary breakfast ticket: "avoid payment." Then in a rush I realized that it's been about 25 years since China's one policy was fully implemented, and that the mother in this ad is saying "The second child is also free of charge!"
I was definitely a little dumbstruck. Shenzhen is an extremely new city, so it doesn't carry much of a sense of history with it. In my daily life, it's quite easy to forget about the realities and repercussions of China's political situation. This was the most vivid example I've seen so far.

There's also a level of intensity in children's education that I can't decide if is uniquely Chinese, or  something I never really experienced in America because I didn't work in the field.

This is where I work two days out of the week. "Shenzhen's Inaugural One-stop Center for Child Development." And it's no exaggeration. It's four floors of various educational centers mixed up with some restaurants and little shops where mom can buy clothes or get her nails done (plus a supermarket on the first floor for all your home-supply needs).

Still related to children, I was chatting with some of my students as I got to know them, as one does, and they were very impressed that I was all the way from America (most white foreigners being from Russia around here). One student told me that she really wanted to visit America, but her father told her that she couldn't because there were too many guns, and that it would be dangerous.

Which brings me to probably the biggest thing I notice on a daily basis. I feel incredibly safe. Shenzhen is a massive city with a massive population, and, by accounts from my local friends, with a very lax police force. Yet there seems to be minimal homelessness, no gang violence, and low crime. Now, of course, I live and work in a part of town where there's clearly a lot of money being moved around. I don't spend any time in the areas where migrant workers live, so my perception is skewed. But even considering all those that, the city doesn't seem threatening at all.

Maybe an example will help. In America, convenience stores--like the ubiquitous 7/11--have a cultural perception of being places where trouble starts; if you stay in or near one you're "skulking." The convenience store next to my apartment, by contrast, has two picnic tables set up outside to allow customers to relax as they drink their tea or eat their breakfast. Spending time outside a convenience store isn't a sign that you're a punk youth up to no good; you're more likely to be middle-aged and relaxing for a bit.
There's a lot more to this particular difference that's difficult to quantify, and I don't think I can unpack it all right here. Suffice it to say that I'm quite content in this new and slightly different atmosphere (even if I do get tired of being stared at).

<3

BONUS, check out the unholy spawn of communist propaganda posters and sex appeal in capitalist advertising: