仁者见仁智者不见智

Which roughly translates as "People from different backgrounds see things differently."

I know I spend a lot of time talking about cultural differences, racism, and equality. Usually these themes are related to the, occasionally strained, relationship between Westerners and Chinese. I'm sure I could talk about that area of expat life for hours. I am even trying to exploit it in order to make some money.

What sometimes goes unnoticed, though, is the occasionally strained relationships between people from the same country.

Of course, I am specifically talking about things that go unnoticed by travelers and expats. At home it is impossible to miss the tensions between people from different parts of the country. It's easy enough to see tensions between people from similar areas. No self-respecting Bostonian will talk about New York without some grief--even if it is just about baseball. But, to be fair, conflicts have been started over lesser things than the World Series.

China is a country full of people with stereotypes ready and waiting for action. There is a stereotype for every type of person whether they are foreigners or Chinese. Not all of them are bad, and to a certain extent they are taken with a grain of salt.

For example: People from Shandong are all good Chinese. People from Henan are all clever. People from Fujian are all traders who want to rip you off. People from Sichuan are all beautiful.

The list goes on.

The fact of the matter is that China is just such a big country that there would be no way to remember facts about different places without such stereotypes. They are not useless. In fact, everyone from Sichuan is probably not good looking, but they garner the reputation because of the climate. Therefore, if you think "everyone from Sichuan is good-looking," then you might remember that they are good-looking because they live at a high altitude where the air is dry and clean, and they have a lot of exposure to the outdoors. I don't know if this is true or not, but stereotypes are essentially a mnemonic. That's what I learned in class anyway.

In real life, I just learned that people don't know what the rest of China is like, and they form their opinions based on hearsay and the media... sound familiar?

So here's a story:

My good friend Meike took a weekend trip to Guangzhou (against all of my good advice--Traveling that much for a weekend is simply unnecessary). When she returned, she had to take the 40 minute cab ride from the airport to her apartment. Being the ambitious Chinese student that she is, she got into a conversation with the cab driver.

Meike is not very good at Chinese because she has only been studying for two months. I don't know what the topic of her conversation was, but from the cab driver's point of view it was probably this: "Pretty blond girl who wants to try to get better at Chinese. All sexy foreigners are easy." From Meike's point of view it was probably "boy, it's great that this cab driver is patient and helpful while I'm trying to speak Chinese."

So, the cab driver told Meike, "我喜欢你." Which means, "I like you." Not understanding that this was a come-on, Meike responded, "I like you too." Clearly this was an invitation for the cab driver to try to kiss the pretty blond girl.

Mainly I wanted to tell that story because it's funny. However, the point is yet to come:

Tonight I went with Meike to shop for Chinese tchotchkies for her to bring home as gifts. We ended up going to a tea shop because buying tchotchkies is in fact quite tedious and tea makes a good gift as well.

Unfortunately for Meike, I like talking to Chinese people about culture. I got into a conversation with the shop attendant, and I told her Meike's story about the cab ride.

She couldn’t believe that the cab driver in question was from Beijing. She thought that I was talking about a cab driver in Guangzhou, and when I made it explicit, she still wasn’t convinced that I was telling the truth. On one hand she was disbelieving, and on the other hand I think she was disappointed. As she put it, Guangzhou is a mess of a city where people come from all kinds of different places, and you can expect problems when you go there. Beijing cab drivers are all from around Beijing, so they should all be good people.

Her locational bias was followed by an explanation that really showed how stereotyping works. Although all Beijingers are good, they have their doubts about people from out of town. This probably explains why the cab driver acted out of character towards Meike. Apparently cab drivers also rip off unsuspecting Chinese who come to the city from the countryside because the “hicks” don’t know what to expect in the city.

So the bottom line is that biases run in every direction. My new theory, though, is that biases really form in layers—not like an onion—but more like layers of winter clothes on a January day in Hanover (to be more colorful). At the outset, we all wear many layers. When one stereotype is not useful anymore, we discard it and try the next layer. If that layer is too strong, then we go down to the next one, and so on until we are naked. Because when we are naked we have no more stereotypes to rely on—no more layers to provide comfort. We must form our own opinions based on the real experiences and information at hand. It’s not always comfortable, but it forces us to generate internal convictions that can be useful in any environment.