5 Things I Won’t Miss About China

In China, no one is ever safe from the constant head-splitting symphonies of construction. If you’re out and about on the streets, you’ll have to duck and dive the physical process of construction and getting away from the ear-deafening sounds are unavoidable, but the moment you get kicked out of your own bed at 07:00 am because the deafening hammering is coming from both above and next to your home, well then those moments go on the “I really hate China” list. And that’s where I am now. As I’m sitting here, the drilling followed me from my bedroom to the bathroom, to the kitchen and now finally decided that they’re more comfortable with staying in my study. I have the drill on the left and the bone-crushing hammer on the right. My management agent is avoiding my calls and texts and every now and then my desk vibrates from the rattling going on behind the paper-thin wall.

My love for life, patience, health, and sanity have all endured mindless torture during my 3 years in China. My husband and I will bid Shanghai farewell in a few months and head back to good ‘ol Germany. On days like today, I focus my thoughts towards positive things that await me in Europe. But reality body checks me and soon I’m back in Shanghai, sitting by my rattling desk and covering my ears. With this said, I would like to the take the opportunity to share with you 5 Things I Won’t Miss From China.

Warning, some topics that'll follow will be pretty gross and are completely biased to my bad mood this morning and rocky relationship with China and it’s people. Read at your own risk.

1. The Never-ending Construction

Never-ending is a good description. The renovation of my building started barely after the sun rose and will stop at around 18:00. Then at 18:30 the construction at the hospital next door will start until around 05:00 am the next morning. This leaves roughly about 3,5 hours in the entire day where you don’t want to grab a fork and brutally attack the guy behind the drill. I have considered that maybe writing horror fiction during my time in shanghai would be very productive because dark thoughts like those appear more often than I would care to admit. Resistance against the noise is futile. The construction companies or landlords are rich (or have a lot of “representatives” in the local government) so even if they accidentally drilled a hole straight through my wall and damaged my computer, I would possibly be the one liable.

I could flee from my own home and seek solace at a coffee shop or roam the streets but construction sites cover around 1/3 of the city’s surface. Escape, is thus, impossible. I could take out my trusty earplugs, but I already tried that and they were useless against the nagging hammering.

Construction noise is Shanghai’s soundtrack. They will never finish building the city because as soon as they’ve finished with construction (mostly in poor effort), it’s already time for renovations on that very same building. It’s a doomed endless circle of nerve-splitting hammering and drilling.

2. Being sick – a lot.

Every week there’s some sort of food scandal. The latest was the McDonalds and KFC debacle about selling expired meat in their hamburgers.  At one point we had nothing to eat because there was an anthrax beef scandal, dead pigs floating down the Huangpu River due to illness, bird flu, and vegetables were no good because they were soaked in the water in which the dead pigs floated in through the city. At the same time vendors were selling mink and rat meat instead of lamb. We all lived off beer that month. The scary truth is, no one will ever really know if those scandals were actually resolved and rectified. I might still be going to an upscale restaurant in the city and instead of getting lamb curry; it could be chunks of rat floating in pig water gravy.  Very recently 30 000 tons of chicken feet contaminated with hydrogen peroxide was sold to grocery stores and pork products were treated with paraffin wax. If you Google “food scandal China” you’ll reach a whopping 9,920,000 results. Imagine that! Every day is a possible fatal gamble because you either risks getting anthrax poisoning because you craved a steak sandwich or you go bankrupt because the other option is paying roughly €40 or $50 for 500g of imported beef.

3. Air pollution

Let’s start off with some background information:

Air Quality Index  (AQI)	PM2.5 Health Advisory
Good (0-50)	None
Moderate (51-100)	Unusually sensitive people should consider reducing prolonged or heavy exertion.
Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups  (101-150)	People with heart or lung disease, older adults, and children should reduce prolonged or heavy exertion.
Unhealthy         (151-200)	People with heart or lung disease, older adults, and children should avoid prolonged or heavy exertion; everyone else should reduce prolonged or heavy exertion.
Very Unhealthy (201-300)	People with heart or lung disease, older adults, and children should avoid all physical activity outdoors. Everyone else should avoid prolonged or heavy exertion.
Hazardous (301-500)	Everyone should avoid all physical activity outdoors; people with heart or lung disease, older adults, and children should remain indoors and keep activity levels low.

 Source: US Consulate, Shanghai

So health particles are measured in the air to determine how much of the air is actually polluted.  Imagine Germany, with its green landscape and azure skies. Hiking in the forest or near mountains will have an AQI of 0. When heading to the nearest city, the AQI will be between 0 - 50.  As you can see from the table that’s perfectly healthy. Now let’s dash over to Shanghai. Our average is 101 – 200. I remember when we were on our way to the airport heading to Germany last Christmas, our AQI was 500. I could taste a “gravel” sensation in my mouth and I couldn’t see further than 4 meters in front of me. This wasn’t a one-time occurrence, Shanghai has huge pollution problems and I’m already preparing myself mentally to see a black layer covering my lungs when I go for my health check-up.

4. Méiyŏu

Translated this means “don’t have”. That’s at least what you learn from the textbooks, but in China, that also means “I have no clue, but I don’t want to embarrass myself”, “I’m too lazy to check”, or “get out of my sight foreigner”.  This was and is the answer I get 75% of the time whenever I need something from a Chinese.

5. Hygiene

Mind you, I just came back from Tibet, where the hygiene was atrocious, but that’s to be expected when you find yourself in the middle of nowhere with only kilometers and kilometers of nature that surround you. What’s China’s excuse? The lavatories here are filthy, to say the least. Brushing teeth is an unknown concept to the locals, farting and burping in public is never frowned upon (if it’s even noticed) and in some areas I’ve seen blood literally running down the street (a local woman was preparing chicken for dinner on the pavement) next to a little girl squatting to do, what in my opinion, should be done behind closed doors. Here it’s normal to wash yourself, the dog, and the dishes all in the same water and then throwing that water with abandon from your balcony onto the street while pedestrians are walking by. Here it’s also normal to relieve your bladder wherever and whenever you see fit, even if it’s right next to a free public bathroom. I was exiting a rather luxurious shopping mall in the south of Sichuan province when I noticed a long stream of liquid running down by the entrance of the building. Everyone could see there was a little girl squatting by the pavement, but instead of hopscotching the yellow river like I did, most people didn’t care and simply walked through it in their Versace shoes.  Here it’s frowned upon to blow your nose in a tissue, you must rather snort it all back (causing a noise that sends massive shockwaves of disgust through your body) and spit it out on the road, either through your mouth or nose. You can imagine what warzone the streets are during flu season. Also here you use your overgrown pinkie nail to clean both your nose and your teeth in one sitting.

Have I put all of you off from ever coming to China? Even I can say that it’s not all black and white. There’s some marvelous color here as well. Seeing as the drilling next door temporarily stopped and I got most of the venting out of my system, tomorrow things will be a bit more upbeat and I'll write a list on 5 Things I’ll Definitely Miss From China.