Walls, Walls, Walls

China still thinks in walls. You'd think maybe a country that went ahead and built the world's largest wall to (unsuccessfully) keep out intruders would have sort of gotten tired of the whole idea of walls, but the idea of the wall is alive and well in China.

This realization first came to me last year on my second day, after I got locked in--yes, locked in--my own neighborhood. From my apartment last year, I had to pass through one (usually) locked gate to get into the space between my buildings and the other buildings in my area of the neighborhood; all the buildings on the perimeter of this area are linked by fences, turning them essentially into part of one great wall. The gated community is the basic community of China, neighborhood after neighborhood surrounded by walls, and the walls seem more important than anything else; streets often meander aimlessly, dodging around one community after another. To walk to school along the main road--in a straight line along restaurants and shops--takes me about half an hour. To walk home along a separate road, this one winding between neighborhoods, takes me well over an hour.

But divisions seem too to run deeper here than simple stonework. India may have its caste system, but China has something just as clearly divisive--the idea of outsiders. Many of the adult students at our school, having seen a few of the foreign teachers talking to each other in Chinese or about Chinese, have decided they need to find people to study with. In one of my classes, all six students talked about this desire to find a study partner. I pointed out that all six of them were studying English, that they all knew each other, and that it should be easy enough for them to make plans to meet and study. No, that wouldn't work: two of the men live in different districts, one in the Nantou area of Nanshan and the other in Bao'an, near the Nantou checkpoint (ten minutes apart by bus); the woman who lives in the Nantou area--this is no good because this would be "blended company" (a man and a woman); two students live across the street from one another, but in different neighborhoods, so this is also no good. Ideally, they all want to find someone who works at their company to study with. "Are there any people in your company also studying English?" I asked them. No, no there aren't. "Then maybe trying to find someone from outside your company would be a good idea?" No, not really; eventually someone in the company will maybe study English.

The word "danwei" (government office work units) doesn't get used much around here, and any time I use it just to mean a clique of co-workers, I'm almost immediately corrected. ("Danwei" seems to be a relic of earlier days--a word from before Opening and Reform.) But the feelings behind the danwei is alive and well. If I look at my Chinese friends, I realize I'm nearly their only friend who isn't a co-worker, and they're generally reluctant to talk to other groups of Chinese. I rarely hear my Chinese co-workers talk about meeting their friends, but they do go out together quite a lot (this despite a rapid turnover rate). It seems a desperately lonely way to live; I wonder, since they're always out with co-workers when they're out at all, whether they ever get a chance to blow off steam about work. (In the US, loose lips sink ships, but here they more likely get you fired.)

So our school now has a "social committee"--another co-worker and I--who are responsible for arranging social events for our adult students. We're looking into bowling and maybe some salsa dancing lessons nearby, trying to find something we can take people out to do at least once a month. It's a curious job to find myself now responsible for helping adults have a night out.