Jeremiah - an American historian of the Qing Dynasty who maintains (albeit somewhat intermittently) the excellent Granite Studio blog (mostly on Chinese history, but with a seasoning of more personal and quirky stuff), as well as being a regular contributor to leading China blogs, The Peking Duck and The China Beat - is, like me, a Beijing resident. He thus tends to have a soft spot for those posts where I go off on one about the distinctive challenges and irritations of working in this country (I try to avoid the typical 'China rant', which is, I feel, an overworked genre among expat bloggers here; however, if I do indulge in one occasionally, I like to think that I do it better, and with more reason).
This one, he informs me, caused him to "shoot potato chips out of my nose" when he first read it. (This was not an image I wanted to have called to mind as I wrestled with massive post-Christmas turkey indigestion!)
It is rather a long post, but it does touch on several of the most characteristic shortcomings I've found in Chinese colleagues: poor organization, poor time-management, poor communication on the telephone, inaccurate or inconsistent naming of buildings and institutions, complete inability to give directions.... and the knee-jerk impulse to blame you for their fuck-up.
I worry sometimes that people reading my posts in this vein might be discouraged from taking jobs here (I think it has happened at least once). Please don't be. You do get used to this stuff quite quickly, and I take the view that it's "all part of life's rich tapestry" - you have to laugh.
More exasperation with Chinese employers
first posted on 3rd April
So..... I'm supposed to be giving a presentation for a UK education company in one of Beijing's more remote universities. The event is being "organized" or "co-ordinated" (the inverted commas are entirely justified here, as you will see) by a Chinese educational publisher.
As is typical for this kind of gig, the administrator at the UK organization gave me contact details for the person in charge at the publishers and told me they would ring me to confirm the details. They didn't. Surprise, surprise. No big deal. Yesterday morning, I tried to contact them - sent an SMS asking them to confirm start time, address, when and where we should meet prior to the presentation. I had been given only a Chinese name for this contact. When someone called me back, they gave me only an English name. They didn't explain who they were or why they were calling (no surprise there!). Then I got another call from a different person - again no explanation of who they were, or what their relationship was to the person I'd previously spoken to. One girl, one guy. I really have no idea what's going on.
Anyway, the girl is the person whose contact details I have been given, so I call her back to try to firm up the arrangements. There is a problem. The start time has been moved back an hour (or I'd been misinformed about it in the first place; the Chinese administrator at the UK company has quite a flair for uselessness on occasion as well; we had been talking about these arrangements only 24 hours previously, and I had mentioned several times my anxiety about getting away by mid-afternoon because I was due to be lecturing in another university - way, way, way over on the other side of town, some 20 miles or so away - a couple of hours later; but she hadn't noticed or bothered to correct my expectation of the timetable, which I'd stated to her about three or four times). Annoying - but not disastrous. I could still make it to my early evening lectures across town: it's just that it might be a bit of an unpleasant rush, and I probably wouldn't have any time to stop and grab some food along the way. I did ask if they could bring the start time forward a little, perhaps to 2pm. No. Oh well.
The girl I've spoken to (shrill, over-excitable, doesn't speak very good English - pretty much par for the course for an educational publisher specialising in English teaching books!) has promised to send me the university's address in Chinese via SMS (again, an utterly standard, absolutely vital aid to ensuring that your presenter can find the venue and arrive in plenty of time). She failed to do so. I sent her a reminder. Still no reply. I try to phone her before I get in a cab. She's not answering her phone. I try repeatedly over the next half-hour that I'm in the cab, but she's not answering her phone. Although reluctant to disturb her (because she's told me that she is delivering a presentation herself at lunchtime on this day - although that turns out not to have been true), I try to contact the UK administrator by phone call and SMS: no reply from her either. Eventually, the publisher girl calls me, but she's pretty incoherent (in Chinese as well, apparently - not much help to my taxi driver). By this stage, anyway, we are literally within sight of the target university - but unfortunately we have missed the exit off the ringroad we should have taken, and end up having to do a big loop back that takes us several miles further than we needed to. Despite all this anxiety (and a not-terribly-smart cab driver: he had an old registration number, but admitted to being unfamiliar with this part of town), I make it to our rendezvous point with one-and-half minutes to spare. I am so relieved. And quietly proud. Punctuality is important to me. Luckily, I had known the location of the university (I used to teach there a couple of years back); it was just that I hadn't known the roads well enough - and didn' t have good enough Chinese - to tell the taxi driver exactly how to get there.
Well, 5 minutes or so prior to my arrival, I've received a phone call from the mysterious publishing house guy. He tells me that he's already at the rendezvous point - the university's south gate - and is waiting for me. That's reassuring. Except of course, that when I arrive - he's not there. I try phoning him. He doesn't answer. I try phoning the shrill, rambling girl. She doesn't answer. I try phoning him again, several more times. He still doesn't answer. Several minutes pass. I'm getting anxious. I'm getting paranoid. When I first spoke to the shrill girl that morning the English name she had used for the university had been different from the one I'd originally been given (similar, but different; a somewhat bizarre departure, given that the university in question has an official English name which appears on its logo, its crest, etc.; it's hard to see how this girl could both be unaware of this official name and so creatively mistranslate the Chinese name for herself, but......). I began to wonder if I'd come to entirely the wrong place, if there weren't another university with a similar name in quite another part of town. Despite having attempted to confirm the real English name of the university in question with the shrill girl, and having confirmed the approximate location, and (later) having had her give directions to the taxi driver about the address and how to get there in Chinese, it did still seem all too horribly possible that in fact there were two universities and I was at the wrong one.
Then the shrill girl calls me: "Where are you?"
Me: "I'm at the south gate. Where we agreed to meet. Where your male colleague just told me that he was already waiting for me. But he's not here."
Shrill girl: "Why are you at the south gate? We are at the west gate."
Well, you know, because I've now had, like, 3 phone calls each with you and your disappearing colleague, in every one of which we had both agreed to meet at the SOUTH gate. I even have it confirmed in a text message still stored on my phone. And The Invisible One just called me 10 or 12 minutes ago to volunteer the information that he was waiting for me at the south gate (which was evidently a complete LIE; and no, it wasn't just that he can't tell 'west' from 'south' in English - he hadn't been at the west gate either; and this university only has the two gates).
I was moderately fuming about the whole business by now. But, at least it was a nice day. And we still had a little time in hand before the scheduled start of the presentation (though, of course, it kicked off 15 minutes late, and then overran by 15 minutes - because of a horribly protracted textbook raffle the shrill girl suddenly sprang on me after I'd finished - which left me with a mad scramble to get to my other university teaching gig in time). I was - amazingly - able to relax, and see the funny side.
I think I am more wound up about it in retrospect. It is so representative of everything I find exasperating about trying to work in this country.
There's incompetence. There's Chinese incompetence. And then there's Chinese incompetence in the education sector - which is just a whole order of magnitude beyond anything you could possibly imagine.
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