As I sit in my little apartment listening to the HK cabbies wail away on their horns, I’m realizing I’ve hit a wall. I was warned about this. It’s part of the adjustment process. Most expats go through this, I’m told. At first, the new place is so different, so exotic, so unending interesting that you don’t have time to get bogged down by the annoyances come with any culture and place. But they’re really starting to build up in me. I’m not a tourist anymore. I live here. Now that I’m a little more invested in the place, it bothers me more when people disrespect it.
The cabbies outside are frustrated. There’s a delivery truck in the road, and it’s way too big to get around the corner. So they’re just holding down their horns until it moves. It’s like they are literally trying to blast it out of the road with sound. Needless to say, it doesn’t work. In order to get around this corner, the truck is gonna lurch back and forth, blocking the intersection for twenty minutes or so, and all the honking in the world isn’t gonna make the driver change his mind, nor will it speed him up. But the cabbies won’t go around, and they won’t stop pounding on their horns. Through their horns, they’re transmitting their anger into my brain. And thousands of other brains in the immediate vicinity.
The cabbies are symbolic of my two biggest frustrations in HK. The first is noise pollution. The second is the complete disregard for the feelings of strangers. They’re related.
The auditory environment here is really difficult to deal with. Besides the constant blare of car horns, there’s construction everywhere. All the time. I love music, but I’d rather not wear headphones all of the time that I’m outside. But that’s what I find myself doing. At night, I play white noise in my bedroom to drown out the car horns. During the day, my desk is right next to the window, and they’re doing construction on my building. They’re doing construction on all the buildings. All the time. It feels like they’re drilling directly into my skull.
It’s like every aspect of the environment has been designed to maximize short-term profit, and all other concerns are irrelevant. When I first moved into my apartment, it had just been remodeled. Whatever products they used were really toxic, and the air in the common areas made me feel sick. I bet those products were cheap though. The only time people here seem to think about the impact of the physical environment on human happiness is when it directly relates to profit. Like, if we make the environment in this bar nicer, it will attract more wealthy customers. But that’s it. If you’re not someone who might give me money, then I don’t give a shit about you. That’s free-market fundamentalism. If I left the US to get away from that mentality, I moved to the wrong place.
Despite my appreciation for the potential benefits of the Chinese way of walking, it still annoys the hell out of me sometimes. I have yet to master the the Tao of walking. Sometimes, in the big crowds, I get in the groove, and it’s fun. In the morning, when I’m trying to get somewhere, it’s not fun. When I’m walking down a narrow sidewalk, and some guy wanders out in front of me, looking up at nothing and milling about as if he’s the only human in the city, it’s annoying. When he still can’t see me, even though my face is 5 inches from his, it’s aggravating. When I say “excuse me” right in his ear, and looks around bewildered, and slowly gets out of my way, completely shocked that someone might be trying to use this busy sidewalk for transportation….let’s just say it remains a good thing that I don’t have access to firearms.
This inability to recognize the existence of other people has caused some Europeans I’ve met here to speculate that Asian people have some physical problem with their peripheral vision. I don’t buy it. I’ve met too many Asian-Americans who have normal peripheral vision. This is a cultural difference. When I was in a toy store last week, I got to watch this cultural difference develop. In the US or Europe, when a child is standing in the middle of an aisle or hallway, and he’s in someone’s way, his parents will bend over and physically focus his attention on the passing stranger. They will put their arms on his shoulders, turn him in the direction of the human he’s ignoring, and move him out of the way. In this way, he learns to be conscious of the existence of others in his immediate environment. Even when there’s no possibility that they will give him something, he’s still expected to be considerate of their need to get past. In HK, and in China, children are not corrected in this way. I made the mistake of walking to the back of this toy store, just cause I was curious what kind of toys they have here. Once in the back, I had a ridiculously hard time getting out. Kids just wouldn’t get out of my way, and when I looked to their mother for help, she were just as oblivious to my presence. When the mom did notice me, she didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with the fact that her children were wandering back and forth, waving their arms, and just generally taking up so much physical space that it was impossible for me to past. In the US, a mother would put her hands on her child’s arms, and gently force the kid to take up less space. But here, because I have only the right to the physical space my body is currently physically occupying, this isn’t seen as a problem that a parent should correct.
To avoid the otherwise inevitable #2 segment to this post, let me clarify from the beginning this time. I remember where I came from, and the grass ain’t greener. I have no desire to go back to sitting in traffic jams. When I lived in the US, there were lots of things that annoyed me about the culture of my own culture. Lots. But right now, I’m not experiencing American culture, so I’m not venting about it. I’ll do more of that in my ongoing USA vs. HK segment. Right now, I need to get over this wall. I’ve been a level 2 gweilo for too long at this point. Level 3 is on the other side, I can see it, but this wall is in my way. Like the cabbies, I’m naively hoping that venting my frustration with the obstruction will eventually force it out of my way.
USA vs. HK #4: Education
By most objective measures, this should be an easy one for HK. In 2007, HK ranked among the best in the world on most measures of math and science science performance, ranking among the other developed Asian countries like Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. The US is toward the middle of the second tier, not as horrible as the media makes it seem, but not competing with East Asia. (The US is way ahead of China though.) So Hong Kong seems to be doing a much better job of teaching math and science to it’s children, at least on average. But what about higher education?
The US still has the best universities in the world. But on a per capita basis, the US and HK are pretty comparable. Because of it’s protection of freedom of expression, and it’s high per capita income, HK is one of the leading centers of education in Asia, and the world. The US has historically had a big advantage in this area, because there was a long period of time when it was one of the few places where academics could work without fear of the government looking over their shoulders. This is the primary reason China will never have world class universities under the current regime, and why HK and Japan have such a regional advantage in Asia. Asia is catching up in higher education and Hong Kong is a big part of that advance. For a look at the world rankings of universities, according to the Times of London, check out this link:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408560
Since we all know that K-12 education in the US sucks, and the US doesn’t have a big advantage over HK in higher ed, why am I still writing? Doesn’t HK win?
I guess it depends on what the purpose of education is. Basically all the school systems in the world were designed to train workers for the industrial age. The goal was to teach basic literacy and computation skills, and to make people good at following schedules and obedient to authority. Nobody explains this better than John Taylor Gatto, and his basic argument is here.
Americans have never been the obedient type, blind obedience to authority is not an American value. Years ago, I remember crossing a street with no traffic in Berin, watching the Germans wait for the light to give them formal permission to cross, rather than decide for themselves when it was safe. The Chinese do not wait for the signal, they just go. Obedience to authority is a Confucian value though, and it can stifle creativity. American schools have been much less successful in training obedience than Asian schools, and this helps explain why innovative companies like Apple and Google are located in the US, not Asia or even Europe. Confucian values teach students not to question their teachers and professors. So when a Chinese student has a new idea, and it conflicts with what the prof is saying, I have a feeling that student is less likely than an American student to decide that they might be right and the prof might be wrong.
Because of Americans’ issues with authority, they often have difficulty the hierarchical rigid environment created by most schools. So even though American schools are failing to teach math and science as well as HK schools, they’re also failing to teach blind obedience. In the age of the Google search and the smartphone, being able to do calculations quickly and memorize information is not a particularly useful skill; it’s creativity that counts. Since public school systems all over the world teach how not to be creative, American schools succeed by failing.
The winner, in a shocker, is the USA. It’s all tied up after 4: USA 2, HK 2.
Unsubstantiated Social Commentary