Culture Clash 2005 by Julie Steimle (christmas read aloud .txt) 📖

He was smoking.

It was his legal right. I just wish he didn’t do it on the bus.

I opened the window to get me some air, but the man behind me only laughed and kept puffing away. I always came off public transportation in Tianjin smelling like nicotine even though I don’t smoke myself. There was no occasion to turn around tell him to put it out. In fact, I’m sure others on the bus wanted to ask him for a puff, but they were minding their own business. I just sat back wishing people were still worried about SARS. Then the busses were nearly empty.

Bus 95 turned down Weijin Nan Lu off of the Wujiayao Dajie using the Balitai interchange. The curvy freeway style interchange in the middle of the city was always fun to ride, rising up and down like a roller coaster. It lifted you up just high enough to see the lay of the area. Nankai University was just to the northwest. Beyond a few buildings to the south I could see the TV tower, which was much like the Seattle Space Needle. And if I squinted, I would still be able to see the Otis corporate building standing like an enormous flashlight shining upward. Of course the air pollution obscured it so a glimpse was all I could get.

Settling down in my seat, I kept wishing the smoker would just get off. There was a McDonalds and a KFC along the way (they’re always kitty corner from one another around here) and I just hoped he was riding along to find lunch. I was.

But as the bus wound around stopping at every place along the road, people getting on, people getting off, and I stared out the window at the bicycle riders and all the Huali taxis, letting the air blow on my face to keep the cigarette smell from getting into my hair (unlikely to work, but I ought to try), my thoughts mused over everything and nothing at all. There was too much coming to my senses that was so repugnant and exotic that it was best to ignore it. I mean, how does one deal with the sight of dirt and trash on every street corner and side?

Funny, with the construction all around building up for the 2008 summer Olympics, you’d think the government would also improve other things along the way, such as adding trash cans or something to at least encourage the locals to drop trash in a can rather than on the ground. A friend of mine called all the bushes on the curbs ‘plastic bag catchers’ because they were always covered in thin plastic bags people casually discarded on the street without even a thought. Would it change at all when the Olympics arrived? Smirking at the dirt on the curbs and in the gutters, I didn’t think it was likely. The main pollution problem had more to do with average Chinese person than with government clean up. Attitudes rarely change overnight. Smokers on busses had to care about things other than where he could get his next nicotine fix and what his rights were.

Besides, I just saw a man hock a lougie just on the street over there, and a kid was squatting on the sidewalk as his mother watched as he laid a warm one on the tile. It was nothing new. I’ve seen worse. No wonder SARS had been such a scare. Most people just didn’t know what was sanitary. I just couldn’t figure how that country had gone from an advanced super power with the highest technology and scientific inventions of the ancient world to what all the locals now called a ‘developing country’.

I could blame Mao, I thought as I glanced at the new legal tender the government issued. He was on every one now. They used to have nice ones with people in cultural costumes. Though I didn’t agree with Mao’s politics or how he set himself up as a god, it wasn’t entirely his fault his country became a crumbling polluted state. Their country had crashed down long before Mao Zi Dong had run in into the ground destroying the ecology, the economy, and most of the sanity of China. I couldn’t completely blame Chiang Kai Shek, though he contributed to the problem by ignoring that famine during WWII up until it was too late to really fix things while many people died. Most people in China blame the Dragon Lady, the old empress. But really, even she could not be blamed entirely. After all, a leader doesn’t have to be followed. A tyrant can be overthrown. Besides, Germany had been run into the ground by war twice after being a grand empire, and look at what it is today—a peaceful, clean country. It had to be a culture thing.

Actually, I knew it was. After teaching English in a college among children of people who had participate and been victims of the ‘ten years of madness’, the time where Mao and his little red book did its damage, I learned much simply by keeping my ears open. Old Chinese culture of community-over-individualism compounded with Mao’s nationalistic form of Marxism, which removed all freedom of thought, created a group of people that, as a social entity, remained like children. Then they had kids.

Glancing about at their posterity in the streets as the bus turned another corner, I felt like mourning the state of things. In comparison to the indomitable spirit of the westward expansionist pioneers who disliked government interference of any kind (my ancestors), many of the locals of China that I knew were not only dependant on the government for permission to do things, but also incapable of accountability for their own actions. I once tried to teach my students, while also instructing them on how to draw up a survey to gather information, to be aware that they (as citizens) were part of the reason their city was so dirty. Yes, they were full aware it was dirty. Yet, they still seemed to think that dropping trash was nothing, and that the major pollution in China was in the air from the factories. Funny, though the air pollution was pretty nasty, I really hadn’t noticed it as much until the second year when I developed my first sinus infection after getting my first bout of bronchitis ever. I was still taking antibiotics for both, though that foot massager was insistent he could cure me after three foot massages.

I had even assigned my students to write an essay on what individual citizens could do to improve the environment in the city. After collecting those and reading them, I started to lose heart that my efforts would reach them. Some mentioned planting trees, which was a highly publicized Hollywood thing that they keyed in to without any problem, but almost all of them talked about petitioning the government to do something rather than listing what an average Chinese citizen could do on a daily basis. And here I was thinking about the good citizenship award I got as a child for simply picking up trash when I lived in Vegas. Such an idea never occurred to them.

This, ‘let the government take care of it’ attitude is what led to the trashy state of the nation, I believe. A person could smoke where he wanted, drop his butts, ash and cartons everywhere, eat a meal from a plastic bag, drop that bag and let it fly into the bushes, drink a soft drink, drop that can on the ground until it rolled in the gutter, hock a lougie on the sidewalk, and when he needed to make a dump, all he needed was to find a wall. And then after all that, he would complain about how dirty his city was, taking no responsibility for his own actions. This is no exaggeration. I saw it all the time. When we did the surveys on littering in class, I asked how many would drop trash if they couldn’t find a can and how many would save their trash and search for a can. It was astonishing how many would just drop it.

I thought about this a lot while I rode to my favorite café with this man smoking right behind me on the bus. My asthmatic sister would have keeled over and asphyxiated from his smoke while all he cared about was his right to smoke and not about those he was affecting. My sinus infection certainly wasn’t getting any better from inhaling the toxic stuff. Still, there was no law yet against smoking on the bus.

Yet.

Two girls had gotten on, and I overheard them chatting. I could understand only a handful of their words, but one did glance at the man, gave him a glare as she whispered to her friend that she would be glad once the Beijing Olympics started. Then they were going to adopt a no smoking-on-the-bus law.

Hmm. A law.

Why does it always take a law to make people to the right thing?

I sighed, sticking my nose out the window as the smoker cast back something somewhat offensive to the girls we all overheard. I could see the girls bristle then snap back at him. It would start into a fight. Then everyone would gather to watch. That’s why I never got involved. It was a local problem. It needed a local solution. I had learned the hard way that it was not a foreigner’s place to give lectures on improving a nation she did not belong to. After all, who wanted to hear from a stranger that your country is a mess? I know Americans sure don’t. We have our own little messes to deal with, ones of another kind.

The bus rolled into the station. It was a dirtier corner than most of the dirty corners, junk heaped up to one side with a driveway in desperate need of washing. The curb itself was crumbling.

The smoker got off.

So did I.

He turned one way.

I went another.

His smell was still on me though. I would not be able to get rid of that until I got home to shower and wash my clothes—after a good airing out.

With still a good walk to go, I started out, crossing the street as the cars whizzed by me. They never stopped for pedestrians, but then they didn’t need to. Every Chinese driver kept his eye on the road and not his cell phone. The cops made sure of that. I had to walk under the train tracks along side the cars, ignoring the senseless telephone numbers spray painted on the walls that made the city look even dirtier. When I reached the other side where the city leveled out a bit with shorter apartment houses and lots of independent fruit and veggie sellers on the street, I looked to the left. There, just over the small fence was the little book café. There I could get a bagel and read a book right from off the shelves. They also sold macaroni and cheese. I usually came for the quesadillas and the smoothies, a wonder since cold drinks are not common in China.

The shop itself was easy to miss. It was stuck between a laundromat and some other shop like a slice of meat between two chunks