Making Chinese Friends is Hard
I say if you want really want to learn a culture and a language, you can’t just sit around watching Entourage and picking your nose like you’re mining gold, you gotta go out and immerse yourself in that bitch. Usually that means meeting native speakers and conversing with them more often than not. But really, who wants to do that? You just end up having the same boring conversations ad nauseum. A better way of doing this it is to make some real friends who speak the language and bingo you’ll get it faster than a std in a bathhouse. However, as I shall explain to you dear readers, meeting authentic and decent Chinese friends in China is ironically more difficult than meeting them in oh..say…Stockholm.
Now take a deep breath, close your eyes, and jump into this mess.
This doesn’t apply to all foreigners in China, just… most of them. Imagine yourself in your native country, and a huge ship pulls into the port. It docks and fresh off the boat comes a whole whack of awkward foreigners who are interested in “experiencing” your land’s culture and learning the language so that they can somehow exploit it for financial purposes and/or to get laid. Some of these arrogant dinks want to become friends with you. I don’t know about you but to me that sounds about as comfortable as having a pine cone shoved up the ass.
Secondly and somewhat related to the first reason, most “cool” individuals already have friends, hence why they’re “cool” to begin with. This links in with another block in the great wall of friendship. The people who are in fact soliciting to be your “friend” probably aren’t the people you want as friends. Those try hard English addicts are no different from the fresh off the boat dinks, you must try to avoid them, unless, they are genuinely interesting people. However I can assure you, that’s about as likely as befriending a unicorn and then having to kill it because hobos are the new unicorns, so nothing to worry about there.
There are two prime places where you meet friends. School and work. Most foreigners here work as English teachers thus befriending other foreigners OR they go to school and study Mandarin. It’s not like Chinese people need to study their own damned language, and if they do, they’re studying some off the hook classical shit that would make the hamster running on the little wheel inside my head’s brain leak out its furry little ears.
Factor in the obvious deterrents, like the initial language barrier (why would a native Chinese speaker want to waste his time talking to someone who sounds like a retarded monkey?), cultural differences (“here try some fish flavored yogurt drinks, they’re hao!”) and lack of common interests (“in my spare time I like to study inorganic chemistry and watch period dramas! What about you?”). Apply these to your search and you’ve whittled away most of the potential friends in this place of a billion people down to two department store mannequins and an old poster of Chow Yun-Fat.
This is all part of my hypothesis for why foreigners have such a difficult time meeting Chinese people and then actively hanging out with them. Instead they form their own little enclaves and whine about China on their blogs. Ha.
So what’s a lonely laowai to do when you’re looking to break out of that xenophobic cultural womb? Here’s what I can think of, although I’ve practically run out of things to say at this point and am now winging this:
Finally there’s one more option for “friendship” in this country of so many, but so few. You can always acquire a significant other. From my own top-secret scientific research, this seems to be the most common friendship between foreigners and Han Chinese. But it’s a whole nother can of rotten flesh eating worms that I’m gonna save for dinner some other time.
Filed under: dragons
my english is poor
it is so hard for me to read ur passages one bye one
read the rest next time
make friends is not easy for everyone.
i always feel lonely too.
but i believe if u smile to others
they will smile to u
i study physical oceanography,
so boring…..
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Yup - that about sums it up. Great post, only wish it had a better outcome - but nothing you can do about that, eh? haha.
The Japanese/Korean friends thing is a good suggestion, handy for practicing Chinese, and less likely to be fraught with cardboard conversation.
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Don’t know if this’ll make you feel better but most Chinese students I know studying in the US, Canada or the UK have exactly the same problems, for reasons you’ve stated above, although, from my personal experience, even if you’ve cracked the language barrier, you’re still a long way away from cruising through the local social scene and picking up friends at will. Most conversations start from the obligatory “how long have you been here”, “do you like it here” kind of questions and mostly just stop there.
Although I humbly think I now speak excellent English, there just seems to be not enough overlapping life experiences to keep a good conversation going. But then again, I might be hanging out with the wrong crowd.(I’m talking about my housemates, who are all music geeks and at any given time when there’s more than one of them in a room and there’s talking taking place, it will be about music(mostly indie) or bands(preferrably those that have never been heard of by more than 10 people in the world, including the band members themselves).
I used to think it was my problem when my “conversational English” wasn’t up to a satisfactory standard. And then I thought maybe it was because I just wasn’t as sociable as Western people. But now I know that was not the case ‘cause I can actually make some friends with other foreign students and mind you, most of them think I’m a funny guy!(Trying to be funny in another language can be a very frustrating task. YOU know how funny you can be but all the other people can get is what you can express in that language.)
I even thought perhaps I should start taking whatever drugs they’re doing just to, you know, blend in but nah… you know they’d be laughing anyway…
Alas! 今当入寝，临屏哈气，不知所云。
同是天涯沦落人，相逢何必曾相识。
Have a nice day!
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Thanks for your input coming from the otherside of the coin JFJC, although it sounds like you’re making more headway than I am. Here’s hoping we can make some real friends wherever we are in the world despite cultural differences.
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I was lucky enough (in Japan) to get a job working in a restaurant that had literally no customers. It was certainly not the most exciting job, but my coworkers had no choice but stay and listen to me stumble through whatever grammatical gem I read in my textbook on the bus to work that morning. “I… like… cake” is one I remember being especially surprised to have people react positively to.
Keeping in mind that you are one of the lowest educated (in terms of communication) people in their lives, I think that you have to give up some freedoms to get the opportunity to use their language skills for your own betterment. I would not work in a place like that again in the US, but I now live in a small village in Japan. I readily join parties and events (including volunteer fire department which is a many year commitment for the entire summer) because there is no other way to really make acquaintances (and sometimes friends) who speak normally and give me a chance to learn the dialect. Sure I have to sit through hours of talk about what pachinko parlor has the best machines, and what prostitute service has the best women, but I also get to reap the benefits of them feeling that I am a part of their community.
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