I wanted to interrupt my Huangshan writing to share more interesting stories from my time here. What I love about spending significant time living in another country is the ability to see myself through other people’s eyes. It’s unavoidable because I stand out. People stare at me and my colleagues are always asking questions about how we do things in America or asking me to explain myself when I use metaphors. In fact, the only other time when I looked “exotic” was when I lived in Sweden and while culturally different, it was a similar fascination with the West. This post will share some contrasts, go deeper into the differences I experience between the two cultures, and show a lot of random pics to split up all of the text. Most of the pics will be food.
Warning: there may be disturbing food images.
Household Contrasts
Experiencing life through a different lens creates a natural curiosity about the way I do things or the way I think, etc. Something as simple as what dishes and utensils they provided for me in my apartment start to shed a light on what they think of as essentials. I have noodle bowls, soup bowls, traditional Chinese soup spoon, rice cooker, wok, rice paddle, chopsticks, and yes, a few western utensils (oversized spoon, fork, and a sharp butter knife). I eat at home a lot and have found that I now eat only out of a bowl and solely with a pair of chopsticks. I still make the same types of food as I did in the States because I don’t want to bother with buying a whole bunch of supplies just to make something special let alone attempt Chinese food.
My apartment is very modern and very Western. Nothing overly significant there, except that my in-room washer and dryer is one unit. Why don’t we have more of those in the States? I don’t know what the living quarters of a local look like but I have seen homes in the villages. The tables and chairs are much closer to the ground that they look like a child’s dining set. People will drink water from the tap after it’s been boiled, whereas I refuse to even cook with that water. I’ve no choice when I go out to eat a restaurant, but at home, I use filtered or bottled water to rinse my food, brush my teeth, make my oatmeal, and make tea. To help kill any pesticide or germ from the markets, I cook everything: spinach, carrots, green beens, broccoli, peppers, ginger, mushrooms, etc.
Another difference I notice is that people are very friendly here. Ok, let me clarify: Strangers are not friendly, older women are still pushy, and well, you should mind yourself in the big cities, tourist attractions, and crowded villages. Theft is real. That said, here in Suzhou, it’s fairly safe. I’m not sure if it’s all of the surveillance or if it’s because despite it’s size (built like a large city but not inhabited like a large city) there aren’t the numbers of people to make theft an issue.
Suzhou Team Contrasts
Cake to celebrate two birthdays.
My team here in Suzhou is made of young 20-somethings all fresh out of school, with a couple people maybe in their later 20’s with some work experience. The young energy helps keep the atmosphere upbeat and lively. They are a bit more social and they all get along really well. Because they are young, it’s even more interesting to see their behaviors and witness their manners because this is a time in their lives when they are at liberty to express themselves (at least that’s how I perceive it in the States).
Many young people, I’m told, move to the cities to get better jobs so they may live alone and away from family. Eventually, as the parents age, they will likely live together again. It’s still not unusual to have generations of a family under one roof. Only this time, the family will move to the city, not the youth moving back home.
With that in mind, consider that they make good money doing a job at Microsoft because they hold the most valued positions in the company as software developers. Yet, I don’t see them spending money like they have lots of it. They wear nice clothes but their wardrobes are modest. Further, these kids are smart and hungry to do good work so they work a lot and are eager to please. The language barrier means they can ask many kinds of questions and Americans working with them tend to have a lot of patience.
I also find that this team puts a lot of emphasis on inclusion and team building. Contrast that with Redmond where I’m lucky to collect people to have a lunch together on any given day and where everyone is heads down working that it’s hard to feel collaborative outside of a meeting. And, morale events….our budget must be super small compared to here because our morale events are lunch excursions (we did go bowling once), not visits to other cities for a weekend get-away.
Inclusion
Inclusion permeates the environment, or maybe that’s an extension of the importance of relationship building. It is expressed in everything we do here in the team. If I have a suggestion and desire to do something, I cannot push for it to happen because I’ve learned that the team needs to think about it and consider it (logistically) before any decision towards planning can happen. Even ordering a cake or milk tea, which we do on occasion in the office, can be a collaborative event. You don’t just take your tea when it’s ready, you collect all of the teas, take it back to the office, make sure everyone gets theirs and have a couple extra in case anyone else in the neighborhood wants one and wasn’t there when we ordered.
Lunch
Lunch time is a collective initiative, brought on by one or a few people, then everyone rallies in a kind of wave that heads down for lunch together. We eat together everyday and try hard to find a table or tables close to one another that can seat everyone together. No one leaves the table until the last person is done eating. If I see everyone waiting for me to finish eating, I simply don’t finish my meal and announce that I’m done by setting down my chopsticks so I don’t hold everyone up. As long as at least one other person is still eating, I continue to eat, too. The group will get up as a collective and head back to the office once the group has decided it’s time, usually marked by the last person at the table finishing their meal.
Now, let me just add that I never did lunch in High School. In grade school and middle school, which were the same school for me, I slowly drifted away from eating with the core group. We were a small class so it wasn’t easy to have options and some of these kids I’d grown up with since Kindergarten so the friendships changed over time. It didn’t help that there were things happening in my home life that made it difficult to relate to the other kids so I preferred to work in the kitchen instead of eating at the table with my classmates whenever the opportunity was there.
In high school, I found I could skip lunch and avoid the whole social awkwardness altogether. My computer instructor, Mr. Bauer, was kind enough to let me hang out in the computer room at lunch time and after school. I say this because I don’t have a lot of experience with group lunches and this whole scenario is rather new for me. Maybe this is how it’s always done, everywhere. I just know the entire time I’ve worked at Microsoft, I’ve never had a lunch experience like this either.
Snacks
Another example of their strong sense of inclusion comes from the snacks that are brought to the office and are in the kitchenettes on each floor. (We don’t have anything like this in Redmond, FYI). The cleaning ladies throughout the day will bring food to the various neighborhoods and fix snacks, replenish cold drinks and prepare fresh hot teas for everyone. Some snacks remain in the kitchenette, other snacks they bring to the neighborhoods. The Neighborhood snacks consist of grapefruit wedges, oranges, bananas, cherry tomatoes, etc. and they typically bring one type of snack in the morning and another in the afternoon.
The unspoken etiquette is to take some for yourself, but to make sure everyone has had their chance to have some. For instance, despite two neighborhoods being next door to one another, our neighborhood would never take from the other if our supply ran out. It just doesn’t happen. And, you walk by both snack tables to get into our neighborhood so there is plenty of opportunity. Also, if you take a snack from the kitchenette you have to know that they are not meant to be taken for an individual. The cleaning woman will open several packets of things and leave them sitting open on the counter in the snack basket along side unopened packages. Apparently, when someone wants a snack from there, they take one or two pieces from the opened package. And, if they open a package, they offer it to teammates they know in the kitchen with them or as they return to their desk, they offer some to everyone in the neighborhood before finishing it themselves.
Because I’ve been sick for so long, the local doctor started me on antibiotics. Throughout the day I’d feel queasy and started bringing small pretzel breads to work with me. I was eating one while everyone was having a chatty moment, hanging out, and someone looked at it and asked where I got it (quickly eyeing the snack table). I immediately felt guilty that I was eating something and hadn’t asked if anyone wanted some, first. I stepped back to my desk to offer him the only other one I’d brought with me, but he didn’t take it. I don’t know how hard fast this etiquette is, but I do know they are very forgiving of Westerners because let’s face it, we are ignorant when it comes to these things.
Even though this is China and air quality is a problem, you don’t drink from the tap, consistency of sanitation and health inspections is lacking, etc. the people I spend my time with create an instant sense of belonging and a genuine sense of caring. Of the many things that continue to surprise me about China, this is hands down the most surprising. Reflecting on my impressions of China or Chinese people from before my time here and all I can say is I really don’t know what I thought about them. All I can say now is that I’m fortunate to know the people I do here. My time here is greatly enhanced and I am thankful for that.
Stiff Drink
This weekend is my birthday weekend and I’m sad and homesick (in a way) that I’m trying to make sure I’m not alone for my birthday. I’ve had too many of them this way and it’s just depressing. So, when I make any kind of deal out of my birthday, it’s like my way of saying that I don’t care if no one else cares….I’m going to care.
When I was awakened early this morning with an urgent matter at work, I was a bit frustrated. It’s the first day I thought I could get some much needed rest (I’m still recovering from this bronchial thing and rest has not been easy to get because I’ve been working a lot). I also thought I could do some yoga, blog a little, then get ready to have lunch with my colleagues and play some board games this afternoon. It was going to be a perfect day. Even though it’s not my birthday until tomorrow, this was the team’s way of celebrating with me and I was glad to have the camaraderie.
This task I began to look into took me most of the day. And, when lunch time was nearing, I hadn’t even showered, let alone did any yoga or blogging. Just before I was to prepare for this lunch, I see a message pop up saying I should take some steps to see if I can get my fix to check in. For you techies out there, I had a fix to an issue that was blocking our ability to deploy a service in a particular site. Every day this remained blocked would increase the likelihood that it would become customer impacting. However, before a change can be committed, it has to pass a suite of tests. In this particular branch of code, the tests that need to run can take many hours to complete and apparently the build environment was having issues so it went down for maintenance this weekend starting Friday at midnight.
Wouldn’t you know it. My tests were running for hours, right up until midnight when the system went down. This alert this morning was to tell me that the tests failed, but now the service was unreachable. Ugh! This was not going to be an easy thing to solve and required paging various people in the team, including working with Redmond until late their evening (a Friday night for them). I saw this email come in and the stress from the situation that had been building all morning, knowing that this high priority task could keep me from my birthday lunch and games, eventually brought me to tears.
I wrote an email to Redmond explaining I’d been working with the China team since early this morning, indeed worked hard to get this thing in the build before midnight the night before, but not for lack of trying was unsuccessful. I told them, I’d been up until midnight and up early, hadn’t showered, needed lunch, and I needed to go into the office for more reliable internet. I knew it was late there so all I needed was for them to know I needed this break and I could continue to work with someone after lunch.
When I arrived at lunch, I was really sad and though I was enjoying the meal, I shared what was happening and apologized for being late (so thankful I could make it at all!). Everyone was really wonderful at talking about the situation and when I learned we were all going to the office after lunch, I suddenly felt a lot better.
One of my colleagues got up to order drinks for people. He asked in English what people wanted: “coke, sprite, beer, something?” To which I laughed out a reply something like “how about a stiff drink!” Well, I thought that was funny. None of my colleagues got the joke. I didn’t actually want a stiff drink, I was suggesting it only to emphasize the stress of the day. When asked what I meant I realized they were trying to look up “stiff drink” in the dictionary. That’s when I was reminded that my humor and metaphors fall flat because of the language barrier. It would be like them saying “Great fortune is great risk.” I mean, we don’t talk like that so it sounds funny to me…like a fortune cookie saying. So these types of American or English expressions must sound like that to them.
Before lunch was even done, I got a notice from the guy in Redmond saying they were going to use my fix for testing the environment, which meant that I wouldn’t have to do anything more at the moment. An immediate wave of relief swept over me, though I wasn’t home-free, yet. Back at the office, I was able and ready at a moment’s notice to focus on the issue, but until they needed me, there wasn’t much I could do. Everyone gathered in a conference room and started playing games. Mid-way through the first game, and almost 8 hours after my morning alert, the alerting team had completed my check-in. That was it. The issue was closed. Now I could focus on spending time with my colleagues, the games, and practicing my Mandarin. It was going to be a perfect birthday/”not my real birthday, yet”, afterall.
Over packaging, attention to detail
One final note under this category. Notice what came with the cakes we ordered. Candles with 2 matchsticks, Happy Birthday crown, small cake plates and small forks, a cake cutting utensil, an insulated cake-sized carrying container with an enclosed ice pack, and the cake in a very sturdy cake box. The cake cost around $25 each, with everything included. Another aside, the cakes are not nearly as sweet as in America and yet the Chinese still find them very sweet.
I know the post was long because it covered three general topics, but I preferred to put it all in one post rather than several little ones. Next up will be more on Huangshan. Thanks for hanging in there with me!
Drop me a note and let me know what you think and how I can make these posts even better.
Audrey Sniezek 
This was a Great Post, I just loved every moment of it! It was like being there with YOU every step of the way! Thank YOU for sharing that with Me!
I’d like to hear more about work life balance, and how the outdoor climbing scene is in SE China. It must be hard to stay hydrated all the time not being able to use the tap. Especially if you wake up at night and realize you forgot to buy extra water at the store that closed when the sun went down… haha
Very true. Having enough drinking water with you in the mountains there must be difficult, though I think the further into remote areas you go, the higher likelihood you can purify or simply drink the mountain water. In places like Yangshuo or in Laos, you are not far from a town that sells water so you can always buy what you need.