Chinese personal space

The Chinese people are really nice people. You can tell that they are very genuine people when you talk to them. They are eager to learn more about Americans. The hotel and restaurant workers are very eager to serve us and they do it happily. Even when they have trouble communicating with us, they are very sorry and they feel almost like they have disappointed us. I have really grown to love these people. That being said, they are very small people! And they have a very small personal space! Our first encounter occurred as soon as we stepped out of the airport in Beijing on Friday. These women ran up to us and started pushing and shoving trying to get our bags out of our hands. They wanted to carry them to the bus so they would get a tip. Well I had a very large sum of money with which to process our adoption with in my bag and there wasn't a chance she was getting it. She pushed and shoved trying to get me to let go and she finally resolved herself to just hang on with me and walk beside me. Well I pushed and shoved back trying to get her to let go and she wouldn't. She was very strong. Probably wasn't her first rodeo - literally! Our guides came up to us and told us not to let them carry our bags because we had important stuff in there. Well I told her that I've done everything I can to get her off my bag and my only option left is to just have a throw down right there in the parking lot. Evidently our guides speak Chinese because she said something that sounded like Chinese and the woman let go of my bag. (Our guides are fluent in both Chinese and English so I'm just kidding).

My second encounter was in the tourist sites we visited in Beijing. Chinese personal space is very small. There are several places at the Forbidden city where they won't let you in the building but you can go up to the door and look inside. Well, imagine a room full of about one hundred people with one door to get out of and the guy in the back is yelling, "fire!" This should give you a good idea of what it was like trying to look into the building. Then imagine trying to swim upstream of that stampede after you are finished looking into the building! What is wrong with these people!

Another example of Chinese personal space is the stadium seating. This doesn't have so much to do with Chinese personal space as it does the size of the Chinese people. Although there does seem to be a correlation between the size of the Chinese people and their corresponding personal space. Anyway, our church service on Sunday was in a theatre of a local secondary school. This theater had stadium seating. If you are over 6 feet tall, you might as well just stand in the corner because you're not going to sit down anywhere other than the front row unless you want to take up the seat in front of you too. Just whip your legs over the back of the seat in front of you and put your feet on the floor of that row. I'm not real sure if they weren't expecting Americans ever to visit that theater of if they just didn't care. We had one guy about 6'3" who was trying to sing the songs but couldn't get his knees out from under his chin to get his mouth open. I don't even want to tell you about the acrobat performance stadium seating seating leg room. You could barely fit adult Chinese people in those seats!

It's funny reading things like room capacity postings and elevator capacity postings. Take our hotel elevator posting for example. It says that you can fit 13 Chinese people into the elevator or 1000kg. Do the math. That's 169 pounds per person. Good luck! You get 5 Americans in there and you're having a good day. You might get close to 13 Americans if you have 4 Americans holding two babies each. It's kind of a challenge now to see if we can hit the head count capacity of the elevators. We're asking strangers if we can take their babies on the elevators because we've run out of room for adults. Did you notice the picture of our beds on the post Becky wrote yesterday? The beds aren't even knee high. I walked into the room and tripped over the bed! No joke!