A Terse Cultural Observation

I live next to a hospital. The building in which I live is owned by the hospital in which it is near. I live here because the Wife works at said hospital. It is terribly convenient to live next to a hospital where one’s wife works when one requires a visit. It is not so great when the hospital is Chinese.

I seem to remember signs from my youth in the real world telling people to be quiet in hospital zones. This always made sense to me. The last thing you want while dying in a hospital bed is to hear a marching band outside your window. For many of us, the last thing we want to hear at any point in our life cycle is a marching band outside our window.

Such signs do not exist in Chinese countries. Such signs cannot exist in a culture where everyone is too self-involved to take anyone else into consideration. The Chinese mentality is to do whatever the hell they want regardless of how it will affect others. Other people are other people’s problems.

I have more than a few students who are just becoming teenagers. Experience has shown me that this is never a good thing. The nicest, most polite children become typical raging Chinese assholes once they fumble into puberty. One such student announced at the end of class yesterday that she did not care about anything. She used to be the top student in the class. Now that she is becoming a teenager her scores are plunging down the toilet. I asked her why she was doing worse in class. She said that she did not care. This was an unusually honest answer. Few of them care, but they usually come up with excuses for their apathy. I asked her if she wanted to fail the class and take it over again. She said that she did not care. I then asked her if she would rather eat cockroaches or mosquitos for dinner. She knew that she was trapped, and the rest of the class laughed at her predicament, but she was as obstinate as a teenager and said that she did not care. This brought more laughter from the class. Few things embarrass a Chinese teenager more than being laughed at by their peers. But it is far better to be laughed at than to compromise.

When I asked her how she would feel if both of her parents died she said that she did not care. This was probably more truthful than stubborn. Teenagers and parents are a bad mix in any country. When I asked her if she wanted to go home she said that she did not care. So I told the rest of the class that they could go home and told her to stay. When she said that her parents were waiting for her I told her that I did not care.

This is typical Chinese adult behavior. These people simply do not care about anything beyond what they want to do at any given moment. When their actions have horrible consequences they blame everything on bad luck. When your atrocious driving kills someone, it is simply the unluck. If your wife leaves you because you spend every night with KTV prostitutes, your marriage must be the unluck. Fired from you job for stealing everything that was not nailed down? Unluck.

When blaming your dipshittery on bad luck no longer works for you, kill yourself. Suicide is a national pastime around here. Chinese culture tells people to follow ritual superstitions to have good luck, and if you have too much bad luck you can always open a few veins. This is not a dust off your boots and get back on the horse kind of culture. Their motto is if at first you don’t succeed, stab yourself.

The Wife’s oldest sister considered suicide about a year ago when her husband’s business tanked. They consider themselves rich, although in the real world they would be middle class, and the greatest pain rich people can suffer is poverty. They still have several cars and a big house, so I would imagine they are further from poverty than they think. And if all else fails they have more than enough relatives with more than enough spare space with which to live.

When the Wife told me that the Wife’s Sister told her that she was thinking about taking a dirt nap, I told the Wife that there was nothing to worry about. People who say they are going to do it rarely do. People who actually kill themselves usually surprise those around them. But this perspective only works in my culture. Chinese people kill themselves at the drop of a hat. The Wife had more than a few colleagues who are no longer this side of breathing because their boyfriends dumped them. Transitioning from enough money to buy jewelry and furniture to just enough money to pay the bills is more than enough to send these people over the edge.

This is one of many reasons that these hospitals are always full. Another is that the health care system is dirt cheap and people will go to the hospital whenever they sneeze. But the biggest reasons for crowded hospitals are cancer, which would take a worldwide lifestyle adjustment to eradicate, and traffic “accidents”, which are utterly avoidable.

Spending time in a Chinese hospital is a very different experience from spending time in an American hospital. I spent a sleepless night in an American hospital listening to the IV dripping. It was far too quiet for my liking. When a selfish Chinese driver was kind enough to break my ankle for me I never could have gotten any sleep in the Chinese hospital. The patients around me were all screaming into their cellphones, screaming at their visitors, screaming at the nurses and screaming while eating. The din inside a Chinese hospital is excruciating. It is little wonder that no one would complain if a marching band were outside their windows.

Despite all of my tours of duty in this country I still think like a foreigner. Since I work nights I prefer not to wake up at eight o’clock in the morning. I take out the garbagie at my convenience, not when some truck plays its horrible song. And I absolutely refuse to wear a coat when it is thirty degrees outside. The calendar may call it winter, but I dress according to the actual weather.

So when the marching band outside my window woke me up at eight o’clock this morning I considered it inconvenient, unnecessary and terribly rude to the patients dying in the hospital next door. Starting my day far too early will not kill me. I prefer not to wake up twelve hours before I go to work, but it is not the worst thing that could happen. In my foreigner mind, waking up dying hospital patients with a marching band could be the worst thing that happens to them. To the Chinese it is morning. Time to wake up. If any patients die because of the marching band or the nine to five construction that has been going on for several months, obviously they were the unluck.

Addendum of 3 January

With my advancing years I have neglected to mention that Mr McCartney now offers special “soundcheck” packages with his concerts. For about US$2000 or more, one can buy a single ticket to one of his shows, along with entrance to that show’s soundcheck earlier in the day. The package includes a buffet lunch (which is not always vegetarian, apparently), tour poster and baseball cap. The length of the soundcheck depends entirely on how long it takes the sound engineers to play with their knobs. It could be a mini-concert. It could be one song. Customers have no choice, or foreknowledge, of where their seats will be. The bulky men in small t-shirts tell you where to sit, or stand, when you show up.

It is this extra milking of fans that prompted this diatribe in the first place. So naturally I never bothered to mention it.