An ultimate China nightmare

I have been meaning to try to write about this incident - the WORST of my many bad encounters with China's horrendously incompetent banking system - ever since it happened, more than three years ago. I think I've been inhibited by the sense of trauma attaching to the event: it really was a very, very frightening moment for me.

It began when my bank card stopped working. I would have to get a new one, and I was quite anxious enough about that, because it meant I would have to go to a bank in person, and that typically results in waits of an hour or more. Furthermore, for things of this nature, the banks often used to insist that you returned to your 'home branch', wherever it was that you'd first set up the account - and I'd had this account for so long, I couldn't remember which branch I'd set it up at (luckily, most of the banks here seem to have got over this particular hang-up in the last few years).

There was a major additional source of anxiety for me on this occasion, because I had for some years been unable to use any counter services in this particular bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). What appeared to have happened was that when I set the account up, years and years ago, there had been a common PIN number for use in ATMs and at the counter. But at some point, they'd decided to split this system, creating a separate PIN for counter transactions. So, in effect, they had changed my PIN number without telling me. It didn't bother me much, because I never did conduct any transactions over the counter; so long as my ATM access was still fine, I couldn't be bothered to go through the awful rigmarole (probably, at that time, involving having to rediscover the dreaded 'home branch') of getting a new PIN assigned for counter transactions. But then my bank card wore out, and so I lost my ATM access. Problem.

Oh yeah, I had recently set up a telephone banking enquiries service with this bank as well, for which I had yet another PIN code. Unfortunately, neither my telephone nor my ATM codes were acceptable as proof of my ID inside the bank. They couldn't understand why I didn't know the separate counter transaction PIN code (that no-one had ever told me existed!). What's more, they wouldn't accept my passbook as proof of my identity. They said I needed to show my bank card as well. I showed them my bank card. They said this was no good, because the data strip in it was no longer readable.

So, if I 'lose' two of my three forms of bank ID (which, in China, seems to be frighteningly easy to do!!), I am basically SCREWED?? Surely there must be some other way I can prove that I am the account holder? In most Western banks, a signature is enough. Oh, we don't pay any attention to signatures in China. Well, what about other personal information - like my date of birth, address, the date when I first opened the account, recent transaction history? Anybody might know that. No, they bloody well couldn't! What about personal security questions - don't you have a record of my grandmother's maiden name or the name of my favourite author, obscure details that only I could know? No, we don't have any need for that kind of security question in China. Well, evidently you do. OK, what about my passport - will you accept that, together with my bank passbook, as proof of my identity?

Grudgingly, at the third or fourth wheedle, they agreed that they could accept my passport as proof of ID. I would have thought this would be a pretty standard and straightforward procedure, but the girl I was dealing with on this occasion - and her male supervisor, summoned to assist at my insistence - both somehow seemed to feel that it was too much mafan for them.

And a new problem promptly emerged: my passport was not, as far as they were concerned, my passport. I had changed my passport a couple of years earlier, so the passport number no longer matched the one they had in the records they'd made when I set up the account. All of the other information they'd recorded was the same. I was able to show them both passports, and they could see that they matched in every detail: full names, date of birth, place of birth, validity dates. They even had almost identical and very readily recognisable photos of me (nice to think that I hadn't changed at all during my first 6 or 7 years in China; for some reason, I've become haggard and balding very quickly since then!). But they were unimpressed by any of this; they were confused by the fact that the serial number was different (do Chinese passports keep the same number for life? perhaps so). I tried to explain to them that the expiry of my original passport's validity as a passport should not affect its continuing validity as a source for verifying my identity: I was still in possession of the passport which I had used to set up the account. It was quite obviously the same passport, and I was quite obviously the person to whom it had been issued - what was the problem? I could not persuade them on this point. Eventually, they insisted that I would have to go to the British Consulate to obtain an official letter confirming that the Froog in my new passport was indeed the same person as the Froog in my previous passport. I rather doubt if they have a standard form for that; I fear they might not be able to oblige at all.

So, there you are, my fellow China expats - when you change your passport, you risk losing access to your Chinese bank account, perhaps FOREVER.

In fact, these days, it seems, that may happen even if you haven't been unlucky enough to have a simultaneous problem with your bank card or your PIN numbers. My current bank recently told me that my account would be frozen no more than three months after the expiry of my current passport. You might perhaps be parted from your money like this even if you have a valid passport; ICBC seemed to be telling me that a passport was not normally accepted as proof of account-holder status, and that if I'd lost both my passbook and my bank card, I might have been equally SCREWED.

I had waited nearly an hour in the bank before getting to speak to someone. I had then wrangled with two different members of staff - mostly via a Chinese friend who'd come along to help translate for me - for nearly an hour-and-a-half. And after all that time, the outcome seemed to be that they were going to refuse to recognise me as the rightful account holder, and were going to keep my money for themselves - nearly my entire life savings, slightly more than 100,000 RMB at that time (I've burned through most of that during the last year or so of infrequent work), the fruits of seven years of working my arse off in China. I had an awful sinking feeling in my stomach - not so much terror at the threatened loss of my financial safety net, but despair at the thought of all of those thousands of hours of wasted effort, and impotent rage at a system that could be THIS FUCKED UP.

But you know what? This story has an unexpected happy ending. I invoked my meditation techniques, I forced myself to calm down, I closed my eyes and focused on the problem, determined that there must be a solution to this situation. And in that moment of silent introspection, pretty much self-hypnosis, in fact, I cast my mind back 6 or 7 years to when I had first set up this dratted account.... and it came back to me that the default PIN number I'd been given then was 0000. I had immediately changed it to a number that was more truly personal, and that I would more readily be able to remember. But I was pretty sure that had been the default PIN. And if they had reset the PIN, it might revert back to the same default, mightn't it?

It was worth a try. I keyed in four zeros on the counter touchpad. ID accepted! "I'd like to withdraw ALL of my money immediately, please."

"Are you SURE? If you do that, you won't be able to use our bank any more!"

Yeah, numbnuts, that is kind of THE POINT.

Never sorry

The Chinese aren't good at apologising. The obsession with 'loss of face' seems to make them extraordinarily resistant to the idea of even acknowledging error, and often engenders instead a culture of evasiveness, lying - and even self-deception. And even if you can get them to recognise that they've done something wrong, they'll hardly ever actually SAY Sorry.

A few weeks ago, one of my employers sent her office assistant to my bank to make a payment to me. The teller there told the office assistant that my account was about to be frozen.

They didn't tell me. Although you'd think that this would be quite important news to pass on to a customer. And they do have details of how to reach me by mobile phone or e-mail.

Oh no, of course not; no, they told a third party, a complete stranger, the first person to walk in off the street. Someone that I work for!

I was not happy. I went down to the branch, and explained to their English-speaking under-manager that it was VERY BAD to pass on information about the status of a customer's account to a third party because - well, the sort of people who pay me money are also the sort of people that I might sometimes have to pay money to, the sort of people I might do business with, borrow money from, purchase things from, etc.; and if you tell them that my bank account is about to stop working, they might, you know, start to doubt my creditworthiness. It harms my reputation.

The under-manager took all of this on board, and acknowledged that the teller probably shouldn't have done this. I asked for an assurance that it wouldn't happen again, and she said that it wouldn't happen again. I asked her for an apology, and she looked at me in bafflement. I asked her again, and she muttered that the bank had indeed behaved badly. "Well, I'd like you - on behalf of the bank - to say that you're SORRY." She did, eventually; but it was like getting blood out of a stone.

Then, of course, we got into the question of why they thought there was a problem with my account in the first place. They'd told me on the phone that it was something to do with my passport. I wondered if it could possibly be that I'd changed my visa, since I'd left the country for a few months over the summer. But it really shouldn't be any of the bank's business what kind of visa I have, or whether I have a visa at all.

No, it wasn't that. They thought my passport had expired. They thought this because they had mistranscribed my passport details into their computer database (they also have a photocopy of it, which they could have checked - but they didn't). It doesn't expire for another 5 years, but they'd written down 2012 instead of 2017.

I don't know if government regulations on this have been changed, or if it's just this bank - the Bank of East Asia - that's being so particular about its foreign customers having valid passports. I have changed passports while I've been living here, and it didn't seem to cause a problem with any of my other Chinese banks (well, it did, indirectly; but that is one of my biggest China nightmare stories, and will have to wait until another time). The "logic" is, I suppose, that a passport is a foreigner's only means of ID, and they want to keep their customer ID information up to date. However, the fact that we use a passport as ID when opening an account should not mean that it continues to be a necessary form of ID when accessing the account: we have other forms of ID - our bank card, account number, PIN number, personal security questions - to verify our identity and authorise our account access. I envisage a time - perhaps in the not too distant future - when my travelling days will be behind me, and I will settle down back in England; and I might not bother to renew my passport, if I don't anticipate going overseas again. Oh, but I'll have to renew my passport, just to retain access to my Chinese bank account! Although, actually, that still won't do me any good, because they don't have any channels in place for updating customer information online. If I want to maintain access to this bank account in China, I'll have to get a new passport in 2017, and come here in person to notify the bank of the new passport number. [I wonder what kind of visa I'd have to apply for to do that?]

Footnote 1: The title of this post is also the name of an excellent documentary about the mercurial artist/dissident Ai Weiwei that went on general release around the world (not in China, obviously) this summer - essential viewing. Ai Weiwei's unapologetic confrontation of the Chinese government is a noble act of defiance, not a perverse refusal to admit fault.

Footnote 2: A couple of months ago, Yang Rui - the odious TV presenter who embarrassed himself with a series of xenophobic and anti-Semitic outbursts on his microblog earlier this year - issued an 'apology' of sorts for calling Melissa Chan (a Chinese American correspondent for Al Jazeera) a 'bitch'. Well, he referred to having expressed "sincere apologies" on various unspecified occasions in the past, and he acknowledged that his use of a pejorative and sexist term may have been "incautious" - but he didn't actually say Sorry. He appears to be trying to strike a conciliatory pose because his Dialogue programme is dying on its feet, with fewer and fewer foreign experts willing to participate in it. What a scumbag!

You can never find one when you need one!

A further reason why Chinese banks are SHITE!

When I huffily closed down my account with China Merchants Bank a few years ago, the young girl attending to my ire insisted on knowing why, and amongst the dozen or so reasons I gave was that they didn't seem to have any branches anywhere near where I lived - indeed, none, so far as I was aware, anywhere inside Beijing's 2nd Ringroad. She loyally protested that they had at least 50 branches in Beijing. "Oh yeah? WHERE??" She was unable to help me on the specifics.

But I've been keeping more of an eye out since then, and perhaps it is possible that they do indeed have a branch on every other block in the city. It's just that most of them are inconspicuous to the point of INVISIBILITY.

Check out this picture.

Does anything about this really give the obvious impression of its being a bank? I don't think so. These days, most (but not all) bank signs do at least have the name in English as well. But the logos of all the Chinese banks seem to be strangely un-eyecatching. And the great majority of them favour a predominant colour scheme of 'lucky red' - which is, of course, also used by 80% of other businesses in China. Bank signs often don't have any high recognisability factor about them, nothing much that distinguishes them from a sign for an insurance company or a restaurant or a massage parlour. What's more, most bank branches these days are housed inside malls, and do not necessarily have any frontage on to the street. Thus, their signs - where they are visible at all - will be clustered in amongst dozens of other similar signs for insurance companies and restaurants and massage parlours, and really not at all conspicuous. And not all that close to the actual location of the bank. I have several times had the experience of seeing a sign for a bank (and a cashpoint) on the exterior of a new mall development, and thinking that the bank should be easy to find as it is probably the only tenant thus far, but after ten minutes of vainly trying to ask security guards and janitors about the the whereabouts of the yinhang, I have given up my search and returned to the streets still cashless.

Chinese banks - they really are damned hard to find sometimes.

My HATRED of my bank grows...

I needed to pick up a wedge of cash to pay to my landlord yesterday, so I made a big detour to take me past the cashpoint of my bank. (There is only one that I know of in the entire city. And although my bank is supposedly a signatory to reciprocal arrangements with all the other major banks for sharing of cashpoint services, in practice the cashpoints of other banks always seem to be very reluctant to give me any money on this card... and probably charge me an arm and a leg if they do! So, I was rather keen to try and use my bank's own cashpoint, if I could.)

The cashpoint in question is inside the building which houses my bank. All the signs advertising it are - rather confusingly - outside. But the cashpoint is inside the building.

And the building, I discovered to my surprise, closes up at 5pm. Not even 5.30 or 6pm, mind you, but 5pm.

I found this flabbergasting. It's a large building that is home to several other offices as well as my bank - how on earth can it be shutting up shop so early in the day? And most buildings of this kind manage to keep their lobbies open till late in the evening - particularly when there are facilities like cashpoints in them.

This was a very, very prompt 5pm closure too. I got there no more than a minute or two after the appointed time, and found the building emptied, all the doors locked, and a surly security guard pacing up and down in front of the main entrance.

I can't believe how much BEA sucks! Even their cashpoint is f***ing useless!!  I really must change banks.

A new low

I have several times been less-than-happy with the Bank of East Asia, the Hong Kong-based bank that I switched my main Chinese account over to at the end of last year (see here and here for reminders of why), but this week they have been achieving new levels of brain-squelching incompetence and unhelpfulness.

I was due to pay my landlord another quarter's rent (something of a leap of faith on my part, given that I don't yet know whether I am going to be granted a visa to return!). I thought it would be relatively straightforward to arrange this via the BEA's vaunted 'cyberbanking' facility (ah, foolish optimism!).

Well, not that straightforward - because it is impossible to 'cut & paste' information into the online payments form. You have to select the payee's bank from a drop-down menu. It's entirely in Chinese - even on the 'English' version of the website. And it's in tiny, tiny font that would cause even the most proficient reader of Chinese some difficulties. And there are a good 30 or so different banks in China to choose from. And they nearly all have rather ponderous names, often many characters long - making it extremely difficult for a duffer in Chinese such as myself to recognise the appropriate bank to check. Luckily, most of the banks' names include 中国 [China] and/or 股份有限 [Limited Company]; excluding these characters made the task just about manageable for me - after several anguished minutes of jumping back and forth to my landlord's e-mail to compare the name of the bank he'd sent me to the options on my cyberbanking page.

However, this initial success soon began to seem a hollow victory - because Chinese banks always insist that to ensure a successful interbank money transfer you must also specify the address of the payee's home branch, IN FULL. Again I was faced with a drop-down menu: this time it had 60 or 70 options to choose from, and many of them contained upwards of 20 characters each. When the banks say "address IN FULL", they mean "... Beijing City, Beijing Municipality, China, The World". And most of the addresses include not one but two (different!) expressions that mean 'sub-branch'. Out of the 15 or 20 or 25 characters in each address, there are usually only 3 or 4 which designate the particular street name you actually need to look out for.

With some perseverance, I managed to master this gumption test as well. It took me rather a long time, because BEA's cyberbanking page times out "for security reasons" after about two minutes - which, given how slow and glitchy the website is at the best of times, is not really enough time to fill out the whole of the interbank transfer form even if you can swiftly recognise and select the correct bank and bank address from the menus. I was further thwarted by the fact that the page several times froze on me, not allowing me access to one or more of these troublesome drop-down menus. I must have logged in and part filled out this dratted form at least a dozen times; it took up a big slice of my Sunday afternoon, very nearly two hours.

And, after ALL THIS, I was still not able to complete the transaction... because my cyberbanking security settings require me to use both my USB-stick security key AND a password sent to my mobile phone by SMS for each transaction. Real belt-and-braces stuff, this; super-secure!! I don't think I'd really wanted to be this secure. I think this was the default setting on the account which I had failed to take notice of. Rather inconvenient - since my Chinese mobile phone does not work outside of China, and I thus have no way of receiving the passwords, and no way of carrying out any online transactions. I tried to change my security settings to 'USB key only', but.... I needed an SMS password to implement that! Aha - I was able to change my mobile phone contact number without a password, so I tried switching it to my UK number. No joy - they won't send passwords to overseas mobile numbers, it seems. Nor do they answer their customer service helpline. Or respond to e-mails marked 'URGENT'.

So, I'm stuffed. I can't access my main Chinese bank account to make the rent payment to my landlord, and I don't have enough money left in the UK to wire him the money from here.

However.... I was in London at the start of the week. And the BEA, I discovered, has a branch on Shaftesbury Avenue, near Chinatown. Excellent! I'll drop in there and arrange the transfer in person.

Oh no, you won't!! No. I don't know what the hell kind of corporate structure the BEA operates under, but I was assured by the manager of their London office that the bank is essentially a distinct entity in each country, that the London bank cannot communicate with BEA branches in other parts of the world, and that it cannot provide any services to a customer who holds an account in another country.

I'm winding up my BEA account as soon as I get back to China.

I thought you were dead!

I was briefly confused on discovering last week that I had received a payment into my bank account from 荣格, Rong Ge. Then it occurred to me that this might be the 'Chinese name' for Ringier, the publishing company for whom I had done a little freelance writing a while back.

For reasons which escape me, Rong Ge is also the 'Chinese name' for the illustrious Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. [The auto-translate tool on my cyberbanking webpage kindly informed me of this. That's as far as 'English language service' goes with most Chinese banks as yet; such transaction details as get recorded for you at all are entirely in Chinese.]

"Possible", but difficult

That formula, in fact, sums up trying to get anything done as a foreigner in China.

The latest example I've had experience of: applying for a credit card.

Now, I appreciate that, as a foreigner here, I might be a particularly difficult risk to assess; while my creditworthiness might appear to be good (foreigners, on the whole, earn rather better than most Chinese, since we are mostly in "expert roles" that require a good university education and/or considerable practical experience), I accept that I might fairly be considered a flight risk. If I quit the country at short notice, it would be difficult for a Chinese (or Hong Kong) bank to pursue me for recovery of any outstanding debts.

However, in a reasonable country, you would think that such concerns could be adequately addressed by such measures as a tight credit limit, monitoring card use (suspending it if I start using it overseas without prior notice), or a requirement that I maintain a minimum balance in my bank account equal to my credit limit as a guarantee.

My history of China residence (10 years continuous) and China employment (always on a 'foreign expert' working visa) really ought to be impressive enough to support a credit card application, you would think. I could probably provide personal testimonials as well, having worked for some very prestigious Chinese employers (several leading universities, educational publishers, and SOEs). My current account balance (now over 70,000 RMB) and pattern of use (over 40,000 RMB deposited in the four months since I opened the account, with nothing withdrawn) also meet a higher threshold than would be required of a domestic applicant.

But NO - a credit card for me?! How they laughed! 

For starters, a foreigner must have a 'Z' working visa to have any chance of being considered for a credit card here. Tough luck for the very many foreigners who come to live here in retirement, or to study for an extended period (I know a couple of people who are into the third or fourth year of their doctorates), or to do business, or to live with their Chinese spouses. The majority of these run small businesses here and/or have substantial private means back home; a lot of them plan to settle here for life. But because of the Chinese government's ridiculous visa policies, they can only get 'student' or 'tourist' or 'short-term business visitor' visas. So, no credit card for the likes of them, even though they are in effect permanently resident here and often have significant personal wealth.

Ah, but I have a 'Z' visa! Have you had it for more than one year from the same employer? Oh, these canny bank officials easily sense my particular weakness: apart from my experiment with schoolteaching straight after university, I've never held the same job for more than 10 months.

They also wanted a 'statement of earnings', which is problematical, since I don't have a single full-time employer, but numerous casual employers - most of whom still contrive to pay me with brown envelopes full of cash. Still, I could have found a way around that: it was just a token bit of paperwork they were looking for, and I probably could have got away with a pay-slip for just one month. There might even have been a way to get such a statement from the company sponsoring my visa (everything can be bought in China: I figure they'd probably be willing to transfer a wedge of money from their bank to mine, and get their accountant to provide the requisite chopped confirmation of this, if I paid them that amount +10% first), although I suspect they wouldn't have bothered to check if the company supposedly paying me this 'salary' was the same as the company that had helped me get my visa.

Oh, and there's also a requirement about how long you have left on your visa. It can't be a full year (well, if it is, that would be especially devious and unfair, because "one-year" Chinese visas are only valid for 364 days), but I think it's at least six months, maybe nine or ten months.

So, if you're a foreigner, you can apply for a credit card if you have a one-year 'Z' visa which you have only recently renewed and have been working with the same company for more than a year. And even then you'll probably get turned down for some undisclosed reason. We foreigners are all fundamentally bad people. Only the noble and self-restrained Chinese can be trusted with credit cards.

Of course, these 'regulations' only apply in mainland China. Since I now use a Hong Kong bank, I think I'll take a trip down there to apply for a card. I imagine they'll take one look at the size of my balance and ask if I want Air Miles with that.

I'm thinking of a 15-digit number: can you guess what it is?

When I experienced strange difficulties in accessing my cyberbanking a couple of weeks ago, I went along to my branch to make further enquiries in person.

How was it, I asked, that the cyberbanking log-in page would not recognise my 'account number' as a means of accessing my account details?  And moreover, how was it that the online customer help service had told me that my 'account number' "couldn't possibly be more than 16 digits", when it was in fact quite clearly 19 digits long?

Well, it turns out that the 'account number' for cyberbanking purposes is not the account number. Oh no. It's a secret number, for the use of bank staff only.

WTF????

I could not extract an adequate explanation from them as to why the bank would need its own code number for referring to my account. Or why this number is ordinarily kept secret from customers. Or why they were now willing to share it with me. (Gosh, I can be a forceful fellow at times!) Or why the cyberbanking log-in page was prompting me for a number that I, as a customer, wasn't supposed to know, instead of the REAL account number which I did know.

Sometimes you just have to make do with what you can get, and treat it as a positive result. At least I was able to confirm that - for all regular intents and purposes (checking my balance, arranging inpayments from employers) - my 'account number' is the 19-digit one that appears on my bank card.

The status and purpose of the other 'account number' is likely to remain forever a mystery to me.

I am going to try to be a better person

Because, if I don't, I realise that my personal Purgatory is going to be a branch of the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, where I am going to be holding ticket no. 2152 forever....

The day before I went on holiday, I had to pay my next quarter's rent. I'm supposed to pay this directly into one of my landlord's bank accounts with ICBC using a passbook. If I'm lucky, I can sometimes get it done in half an hour or so. Usually, it takes more like an hour. And sometimes...

Well, it was the day after the end of the Chunjie holiday. There weren't many staff on. And there may have been a minor surge of people seeking to take care of bill paying or whatever that they'd been neglecting during the preceding holiday fortnight.

In fact, in my section of the bank, only three of the nine or ten windows were manned. I drew no. 2152 in the hellish lottery of the queueing ticket machine - and discovered, with sinking heart, that the numbers being served had only just advanced into the 2000s. I settled myself down for a long wait.

Long? Hah! It would have been interminable. I've often complained about the astonishing capacity of certain Chinese workers - bank clerks, in particular - to 'work' in slow motion. The trio on duty that morning were taking the art form to new heights. They only managed to process 10 or 12 enquiries in the first hour or so I was there. That's collectively, not each!

Ah, but a glimmer of hope - a fourth member of staff appeared behind one of the windows.  But didn't do anything. Just sat there, dumbly, provocatively, pretending to busy herself with trivial administrative chores for half an hour... while a mob of customers on the other side of the glass seethed on the brink of riot.

The irrelevant extra member of staff never did open up her window (not while I was there). I was still more than 100 spots away from my number coming up, and the queue had scarcely shortened at all in over one-and-a-half hours. And now it was lunchtime: it was inevitable that the three working clerks would soon be taking a break to inhale some pot noodles and then indulge in the customary 90-minute power nap. And, on this woefully understaffed day, it seemed likely that no-one would replace them. Anyone who was forced to continue 'working' over the lunch hour (which, in China, is often more like two-and-a-half hours) would lapse grumpily into a hypoglycaemic torpor and process customer requests even more slowly, if at all.

It was looking very, very unlikely that I would get to the head of the queue before the bank closed 5 hours hence. Luckily, my landlord took pity on me and agreed to come around to collect the rent in person later that day.

I won't have that option in Hell....

Keeping my seethe to myself

Yet another reason why I don't learn Chinese.....

The other day I had to pay a visit to my local branch of the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China to pay my monthly phone bill.

Trying to accomplish anything in a Chinese bank can be an exhausting gumption test, particularly in a small neighbourhood branch where no-one speaks any English. But my little branch has been getting a lot better over the past year or so. They've taken on quite a few new staff - mostly girls - who do seem friendly and helpful, and even fairly brisk and efficient. And just lately, they have appointed a middle-aged lady as a supervisor (and she does speak a little bit of English), and she seems to have got all the service points working much more efficiently.

Well, all but one. Dumb-as-a-Post is still there. He's a surly young man of about thirty, and, I think, the only member of staff who's been there ever since I moved here about 4 years ago. He is just unbelievably sour, slow-moving, obtuse, and obstructive - a real old school China service professional!

I hadn't seen him in there for a while, and was hoping he might have left. But yesterday, he was back - and his was the only window that was free. I was so dreading the encounter that I considered joining one of the other lines (none of them had more than one or two people in them, but some transactions in Chinese banks can take a very long time indeed). Instead, I decided to face up to my nemesis.

I think he must have smelled my fear. I passed him a scrap of paper with my number on it and told him I wanted to pay my telephone fee. This is what I always do. For the past 18 months or so, nobody has given me any shit about this. One of the nice young girls has keyed the number into the computer, printed off my bill, taken my money and given me my change with a minimum of fuss - and even, of late, with a breezy smile. Dumb-as-a-Post is looking at me with a mixture of contempt and incomprehension. He decides - as he usually does - that I really ought to fill out a 'request slip' detailing the nature of my transaction, in full, in Chinese. Lately, the other staff seem to have been quite happy to dispense with this otiose piece of paper entirely. If they do feel that it is somehow a 'necessary procedure', they will be quite happy to fill out the chit for me, using the information from the bill printout - it only takes 15 seconds. It should be pretty obvious to anyone, I would have thought, that, since I can hardly speak two words of Chinese, it is highly unlikely that I can read or write even one word. But Dumb-as-a-Post doesn't get this concept; he keeps waving the shitty little form in my face. And, unfortunately, the angelic supervisor lady is not around just at the moment.

I don't think it's just me. I think there's a reason why there's never much of a line at Dumb-as-a-Post's window. The other clerks were all looking at him as if he were a complete dickhead. So were some of the other customers. Soon, one of them came to my aid and filled out the form for me.

I mentioned this incident to a laowai friend that evening, and he said, "Don't you think you'd be able to deal better with situations like this if you spoke a bit more Chinese?"

"No," I replied quite emphatically. "First of all, if I'd shown any sign of being able to cope with things myself, that nice chap in the next line wouldn't have come over to help me. And second, I probably would have just called the clerk a dickhead in a language he could understand, and that probably wouldn't have helped."

We all suffer these vexing incidents from time to time. We all go through spells when we are particularly vulnerable to them, particularly low on patience and forebearance. We all - no matter how saintly and pacific our temperaments (and mine's not very) - experience the occasional bout of 'China rage'. And when this happens, and you get tempted to vent a bit, it's really much better to do it in an incomprehensible foreign language (although best to avoid the F-word, since almost everyone understands that these days!). Succumbing to the urge to swear at people in Chinese would be a very, very bad thing. And some of my foreign friends who speak good Chinese get themselves into bother because of this occasionally. I'd rather not expose myself to that risk, thank you. Ignorance of Chinese can be a kind of protective insulation. (Also, of course, you don't really know when they're insulting you..... except that you can usually deduce it from body language and so on; and I do in fact know most of the choicer swear words. Nevertheless, on balance, I maintain that not being able to swear at people in their own language does help to avoid unpleasantness sometimes.)