Interesting little post on The Beijinger blog last week. Seems one of our fellow Lao Wai had a holiday gathering which — as these things do — went late, got a bit loud, and thus resulted in an oddly frantic clash with some of his elderly neighbors. I say frantic, because a simple noise complaint degenerated into (sequentially) a verbal confrontation, an awkward fist fight, a blockade, and then a trip to the local paichusuo/police station to sort the matter out. (Skip to the end: 200 RMB to the aggrieved neighbors, bargained down from 500 RMB.)
Not exactly an unusual tale in our city. Once when I was at IUP, I recall a similar event which ended with the downstairs neighbor striding into the room in a pink bathrobe and launching into a prolonged monologue on the nature of sleep, culture, and 5000 years of Chinese history. (I wish I was making that last part up…)
In any case — actually in every case — it always seems to come down to ‘culture.’ In the Beijinger post, the police offer a semi-serious lecture on “respecting Chinese culture and customs.”
Which to me is pretty funny.
I live in a hutong, in a two-room pingfang in a larger dazayuan/yard which has about 35 other households. I can tell you that an aversion to “noise pollution” and an innate selfless compulsion toward neighborly harmony are not a part of any kind of essentialist “Chinese culture.” Our next door neighbor feels no particular cultural qualms about blasting techno at all hours of the day or night or getting into screaming matches with his “Lao Po“.* And here’s the reason why: Culture has nothing to do with it, our neighbor is simply a selfish douchebag.
That’s the dirty little secret. Foreigners in Beijing would like to believe that shoving people out of the way in a queue is “part of Chinese culture,” and Chinese would like to believe that selfish breaches of the social compact are a uniquely ‘foreign’ phenomenon (along with things like “cheese” and “AIDS”). But neither is completely true.
There will always be disagreeable dickheads. It doesn’t matter what where they come from, no cultural group (however defined) is free from the curse of ‘douchebag-ism.’ If only wishing made it so…
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*We say “Lao Po” though the other neighbors say she’s not his wife, but just the latest in a series of live-ins. It’s a pretty odd matchup, between them they have like eight teeth, three dogs, and a collective IQ of 75. Seriously, it’s like a PSA for preventative dentistry or the dangers of letting children gnaw on lead paint.
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