Working in China
My final days in China were devoted to work-- a conference and a company visit. I took note of other workers I encountered too:
We left a company meeting very late, about 6:45 pm, and a colleague and I stopped in the restroom on the way out. We saw one of the custodian women in there washing her hair in the sink. Perhaps she doesn't have a good shower or adequate hot water at home?
In a restaurant, the bathroom was far away, and when we asked to go, we were assigned a guide to take us there. I was mildly surprised to see her standing in the restroom when we came out of our stalls. She was waiting, and then proceeded to guide us back. I'm not sure why I was surprised, but probably it was rubbing against my middle-class American upbringing. I never had servants or people waiting on me. I even felt somewhat embarrassed that we had taken about 5 minutes of this serving woman's time. Surely she had other things she could have been attending to at the restaurant. Notably, my Indian colleague was right at home. She comes from upper-class India, and is used to having a household staff. When I expressed my concerns for the woman's time, she assured me that such service people see their jobs as taking care of the host, and are happy to do it (or at least understand that that's normal for their work)-- so the woman probably had no such qualms, according to my colleague.
While driving to the meeting, we passed some workers painting the bottom of telephone poles white, presumably so they were more visible to cars and/or bikes. They were using a brush and bucket, and were painting them as far up as one of the workers could reach while standing on a stepstool held by the other. ("How high should we paint the poles?" "You're taller-- stand on this stool.").
We had hired a car for the day one time, and the driver waited while we had lunch and attended meetings. This meant hours of idle time at a stretch. I noticed that each time we got back in the car, the music was blaring when he started up the engine.
We also noted that construction materials (much of Shanghai seems to be under construction) are often ferried around on bikes. This means that guys are carrying, for instance, 20-foot poles strapped to the sides of bicycles. What an awkward load!
Finally, a comment on my own work. I spent a lot of time in meetings this trip where I didn't speak the native language, the people I was meeting did not speak English very well, and we had one or a few people who were bilingual providing translation.
One meeting where the Chinese company had almost no English capability, it suddenly struck me that we were attending completely different meetings. There was no overlap between the halves of speech that we understood. I heard myself and my colleagues in real time, but them through the translator, and vice versa for them. In our memory playbacks of the meeting, we will have rather different voices playing major roles.
Then it occurred to me that this situation of attending different meetings really happens most of the time. It is just far less obvious when everyone speaks the same language. But really, when you think about it, my own biases, views, and other factors like whether I'm tired/hungry/irritated/etc, work together to make any encounter different for me than it will be for you, based on your biases, views, etc.
My boss visited Czechoslovakia in 1990 (before the split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia), where he experienced all kinds of unusual things unique to the disintegrating socialism and Communism going on there. When he commented on things we saw in China, he often made analogies to things he had seen on this trip. Clearly, his mind was making continual comparisons based on this prior experience, Some other part of his mind seems to have deemed it relevant and hence was bringing up memories.
I did not go on this trip in 1990, of course, which means I could not apply that lens to my experience. I was presumably applying other lenses, such as my trip to China about a year ago, and my experiences in Taiwan, Japan, and other countries. I know that's true because various memories and comparisons came up for me. The point is that my boss and I were seeing rather different things even when our eyes looked at the same scene.
I wonder what it would be like to see events with no lenses from prior experience. That would be a view of true reality, I believe. (Of course you can't forget everything-- you'd crash your car-- but surely a lot more could be forgotten than we allow ourselves to).
We left a company meeting very late, about 6:45 pm, and a colleague and I stopped in the restroom on the way out. We saw one of the custodian women in there washing her hair in the sink. Perhaps she doesn't have a good shower or adequate hot water at home?
In a restaurant, the bathroom was far away, and when we asked to go, we were assigned a guide to take us there. I was mildly surprised to see her standing in the restroom when we came out of our stalls. She was waiting, and then proceeded to guide us back. I'm not sure why I was surprised, but probably it was rubbing against my middle-class American upbringing. I never had servants or people waiting on me. I even felt somewhat embarrassed that we had taken about 5 minutes of this serving woman's time. Surely she had other things she could have been attending to at the restaurant. Notably, my Indian colleague was right at home. She comes from upper-class India, and is used to having a household staff. When I expressed my concerns for the woman's time, she assured me that such service people see their jobs as taking care of the host, and are happy to do it (or at least understand that that's normal for their work)-- so the woman probably had no such qualms, according to my colleague.
While driving to the meeting, we passed some workers painting the bottom of telephone poles white, presumably so they were more visible to cars and/or bikes. They were using a brush and bucket, and were painting them as far up as one of the workers could reach while standing on a stepstool held by the other. ("How high should we paint the poles?" "You're taller-- stand on this stool.").
We had hired a car for the day one time, and the driver waited while we had lunch and attended meetings. This meant hours of idle time at a stretch. I noticed that each time we got back in the car, the music was blaring when he started up the engine.
We also noted that construction materials (much of Shanghai seems to be under construction) are often ferried around on bikes. This means that guys are carrying, for instance, 20-foot poles strapped to the sides of bicycles. What an awkward load!
Finally, a comment on my own work. I spent a lot of time in meetings this trip where I didn't speak the native language, the people I was meeting did not speak English very well, and we had one or a few people who were bilingual providing translation.
One meeting where the Chinese company had almost no English capability, it suddenly struck me that we were attending completely different meetings. There was no overlap between the halves of speech that we understood. I heard myself and my colleagues in real time, but them through the translator, and vice versa for them. In our memory playbacks of the meeting, we will have rather different voices playing major roles.
Then it occurred to me that this situation of attending different meetings really happens most of the time. It is just far less obvious when everyone speaks the same language. But really, when you think about it, my own biases, views, and other factors like whether I'm tired/hungry/irritated/etc, work together to make any encounter different for me than it will be for you, based on your biases, views, etc.
My boss visited Czechoslovakia in 1990 (before the split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia), where he experienced all kinds of unusual things unique to the disintegrating socialism and Communism going on there. When he commented on things we saw in China, he often made analogies to things he had seen on this trip. Clearly, his mind was making continual comparisons based on this prior experience, Some other part of his mind seems to have deemed it relevant and hence was bringing up memories.
I did not go on this trip in 1990, of course, which means I could not apply that lens to my experience. I was presumably applying other lenses, such as my trip to China about a year ago, and my experiences in Taiwan, Japan, and other countries. I know that's true because various memories and comparisons came up for me. The point is that my boss and I were seeing rather different things even when our eyes looked at the same scene.
I wonder what it would be like to see events with no lenses from prior experience. That would be a view of true reality, I believe. (Of course you can't forget everything-- you'd crash your car-- but surely a lot more could be forgotten than we allow ourselves to).
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