China Moments

When my plane reached the gate at Beijing International a squad of Chinese health officials (workers?) came on board and announced they would take our temperatures in light of the H1N1 flu. The announcement lasted for about 10 seconds in English and 100 seconds in Chinese. Then the officials walked down the aisle taking the thermal reading of each passenger by pointing a sensor at our foreheads.  Once off the plane we walked through another health check and another thermal reading. Upon passing immigration I was handed a card that recommended I stay at home for seven days..a self quarantine. Having passed and not to having fellow passengers with fevers, who where mexican citizens, or had visited mexico, I was feeling lucky. Luckier than two of my co-workers who upon return from the states had been quarantined in a two star hotel for seven days…because a fellow passenger had been confirmed with H1N1.

I was thinking about writing this facebook app that would track expat’s China Moments. Those positive and negative moments of their time in China. You could mark a specific moment as positive or negative and how positive or negative it was. Horse pulling a wagon of watermelons. +3 (at least until you drive). People cutting in line at KFC. –4 (at least until you get used to it). I think the chart would show the first 3-5 months as a net positive, the next 6-18 months as negative, a swing back to positive, followed by a neutral position. Neutral being relative to the original disposition of the person to begin with.

I am in kind of this neutral position now. Life here is life. I live in my little english expat bubble. Go to work. Come home. Go out. Day in and day out, life is pretty good. But then some things happen that makes me stand up and say “wow, that was a china moment”. Two from the past two weeks. First was the H1N1 or swine flu reaction. It was worse than just the temperature taking at the airport. Some of Yang’s best friends would not see her for a week. A friend of mine had to sneak out of the house to pick up packages I brought him from the US. Masks were handed out at the office. Some of my Chinese co-workers for sure thought I should have stayed home and our general manager had to inform everyone that a seven day self quarantine was not our travel policy.

The second “china moment” was the blocking of many websites, including the one I work on, due to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen square [censored] on June 4th. I actually have a fairly China centric view of this. That it was a incident in China and people in China are the ones to handle it. That an American someone sitting in a some random reading room is really a third party to this, despite how passionate he might feel. But the handling of it, to block common communications tools inside and outside of china was abhorrent. And the fact that I had a part to play in this as part of my job function makes me feel…well…best not said.