Bowling Together

            "She's going to Barcelona soon, what suggestions do you guys have?"  Jesús asked the group.

            Jesús is from Spain, a young-looking 35-year-old of average height with closely cropped black hair, an ever-present five-o'clock shadow, and a quick, broad smile.  He's been living in Harbin for around four years now, training engineers and helping manage local operations for the plane manufacturer Airbus.  He has an ability, almost a compulsion it seems, to meet and befriend other foreigners in Harbin.

            He was asking a small group for ideas of what our Russian friend should do in the Spanish city.  Luckily, one of the other girls there happened to be from Barcelona and started talking about museums, restaurants, tourist sites etc.

            We were seated at a table in Tree Pizza, an American restaurant run by a guy from New York.  The music was a mix of American rock and Russian pop.  Fake license plates and kitsch pictures of New York City adorned the walls.  The group consisted of a few Spaniards, a French woman, a Russian woman, and myself.  This is part of what makes living in China interesting; you get to mix with a diverse group of people that make up the community of foreigners here.

            "How about beaches around Barcelona?" our Russian friend asked.

            Jesús interjected, "But you have nice beaches in Russia, no?  Around Sochi, in the Black Sea."

            Our Russian friend explained that some parts of Russia had nice beaches, but that it's a big country and she didn't live near any of them.

            From here the conversation slid down several levels in quality, where people feel comfortable talking about the world in the vaguest and broadest of terms.  "What about the beaches in Vladivostok," someone said, "aren't they supposed to be nice?", to which someone replied, "of course not, aren't they polluted like in China?"  Someone else objected that there are in fact some beautiful beaches in China, like in the southern island of Hainan, which drew some grave nods of agreement from the rest of us.   "But of course", said the French friend, "everyone knew that the best beaches in the world were in the Caribbean, on islands like St Lucia and Jamaica."  "But did she know", said Jesús, "that the locals on those islands couldn't even afford to enjoy their own beaches because the tourists could pay much higher prices to use them?  And anyway, beaches on the islands of Southeast Asia were just as good as their Caribbean counterparts, and much cheaper."

            Suddenly Jesús looked at me and asked "What about beaches in the US?"

            I thought for a moment and said, "Well the beaches I have most experience with are in the Northeast, they're mostly rocky, and the weather isn't great for beaching there most of the year anyway."  The group was silent and the hopeful glow in Jesús' eyes faded to dismay, his lips puffed up into a small pout.  "But yeah, Miami, Hawaii, California, they're supposed to be nice," I said.  "Not that I've been to any of those places."  It was enough to appease.

            I've found that this kind of chatter is common in groups of foreigners here that come from different places.  People feel a desire to talk about the world, different customs and cultures, I think from a genuine desire to learn something and take advantage of all the perspectives available.

            But so often these talks turn into "knowledge matches," and bold statements on places never visited become commonplace.  One person's own anecdotal evidence replaces thoughtful questioning of other members of the group.  Instead of an inclination to learn something surprising or interesting, people may pushback against statements that challenge their worldview.

            I've found it's often easier to just give in to these kinds of attitudes.  When asked about America, rather than try to paint a nuanced picture of my home country, which I love and try to represent fully, I'm usually better off repeating a few sound-bytes.  "New York is my favorite city, it's a lot of fun.  Chicago is nice and so underrated.  LA is just one big sprawling traffic jam, but I've heard they have good Korean food (I've never been)."  Of course this isn't always how these kinds of discussions go, but it happens more often than I'd expected.

            I think what most bothers me are just the blanket statements and the bald-faced stereotypes.  Of course there are some beyond-the-pale stereotypes that people have been trained to avoid (Russians drink too much, American's are all obese, Chinese are all good at math).  But there are some fairly common ones that people will still assert with confidence, kind of high-brow stereotypes.  People may say about the United States, for example, that the portions are huge, the vast majority of households own guns, and all Americans are huge patriots, or at least really like the US.  Meanwhile, I'm hesitant to make practically any wide-ranging claim about my own country.

            Of course, I don't want to stereotype foreigners living in Harbin; this isn't always the attitude people take.  The other night I was talking to a Ukrainian friend who teaches English in Harbin.  Like many English teachers here, she is pretending to her students and their parents that she is from an English speaking country, in her case Canada.  I asked her what she says when her students ask her about Canada, what she misses, what she learned about in grade school, what her favorite parts of the country are.  She says she's taken the time to read about Canada, and that sometimes she makes answers up on the fly.  After pausing thoughtfully for a minute, she smiled and added humbly, "but you know, I might not even be able to answer some of those questions if they were asking me about Ukraine." 

            Of course, those kinds of sweeping conversations are a small side of expat life in Harbin.  So much of the community is positive.  It's close-knit, and because of the general lack of large-scale crossover between foreigners and locals in social life, for better or for worse, it's an isolated community.  Sometimes it can feel like living in a small town of a few thousand people, inside a city of 5 million.

            Many foreigners hang out at the same bars, cafes and restaurants.  They work together as teachers in the same local schools or study together at university. They drink together, have trivia nights, go to spas and on bike rides, go on day trips outside the city.  They go bowling together.

            It's hard to understate the importance of the smartphone app WeChat for social life in Harbin, among foreigners but also local Chinese.  WeChat is a messaging app, but also so much more; it has functionalities similar to those of Facebook, Shazam, Venmo, Grubhub and Uber, all rolled into its platform (some of these are managed by third parties).

            But what's more important than its usefulness is the culture surrounding WeChat.  To add a person on WeChat means almost nothing, but it can lead to almost anything. Contrast that with the US; if you meet someone in a bar and chat for a couple hours, there is some small chance of an exchange of numbers or Facebook pages at the end.  In China, if you chat with a new acquaintance for about ten minutes (often less), it would be almost strange if you didn't add their WeChat.  This has happened to me dozens, if not hundreds of times.  It's then shockingly normal to, at a later date, reconnect at a later date with that ten-minute acquaintance you met one night in a tipsy haze.  It's also fine to reject such an offer, as no one has invested anything in the relationship.

            In a word, the niggling little neuroticisms and anxious second-guessing that partly make up American social life just aren't a thing here.  It seems like this is just what social life looks like in China, but I think being a foreigner helps quite a bit as well.  As foreigners, there's a common understanding that we are trying to crack the codes that come with trying to live a full life in China.  Many of us need all the help we can get.

            In most Chinese cities there is a WeChat expat group chat, usually with hundreds of members, where people can share information on local news, good restaurants and bars they've found, or ask questions about visas, transportation, or anything else relevant.  In Harbin, there are also group chats for Trivia Nights, Poker Nights, and Foodies.

            Nightlife for foreigners largely revolves around Bar Street.  Though it's near HIT, it seems that many foreign students from other universities and adults working in the city see it as the place to be on weekend evenings.  There's a bar for everyone.  Ace is a no-frills place that is popular with both foreigners and Chinese, and is the default go-to for many.  Mix is a bar popular mostly with the sizeable Russian community here.  Bubble Pub has three fridges full of imported craft beers, as well as fifteen rotating taps (very rare in China).

            Night's on Bar Street remind me of a passage from George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, where he describes life as a foreigner in Paris.  With the little earnings he made as a dishwasher, he could go out on Saturday nights and "take part in the social life of the quarter."  He would drink and sing the night away with a mix of other foreigners and locals, and towards the beginning of the night's festivities he says "Everyone was very happy, overwhelmingly certain that the world was a good place and we a notable set of people."

            There have definitely been times in Harbin when I've felt like I was part of a notable set of people in a wonderful world (it's not clear to me that this is part of life as a foreigner in China, or just something that everyone feels in their twenties after a few drinks).  On any given night it's possible to meet characters with huge variation in backgrounds.  Some are fresh off the boat, others have lived here for 15 years.  Some get by teaching English in elementary schools, others have started their own businesses here, and still others help multinational corporations run their China operations.  The best part isn't simply that they're there and you can talk to them, but that they want to talk to you as well.  Just last night, I met two men from Uzbekistan who are in Harbin for a couple of weeks.  They've been studying Chinese non-stop for 6 years, and now work as translators when officials from their city, Samarkand, make trips to China.

            By the end of those Saturday nights, Orwell writes, he and his comrades "perceived that they were not splendid inhabitants of a splendid world, but a crew of underpaid workmen grown squalidly and dismally drunk."  This 2:00am comedown happens as well, on the short walk home from Bar Street.  In these moments, lit by fluorescent streetlights, it's uncomfortably easy to remember that Harbin is an underdeveloped, polluted city compared to its urban cousins on China's Southeast coast. Walking home, used napkins and empty bottles litter the street, and stragglers linger around street corners as the bars shut down.  Huge mechanical beasts of burden lurk in the urban backdrop, left from the previous day's construction.  The view from Bar Street in the wee hours isn't pretty, and it's hard to feel like the world is very splendid at all.