China. A country requiring travelers to have open-mindedness and resilience like no other.

22 provinces. Five autonomous regions. 56 ethnicities. 302 living languages. 255 national parks.

As Lonely Planet puts it, “You’ll see things you’ve never seen before, eat things you’ve never heard of and drink things that could lift a rocket into orbit.”

I identify as a mandarin-speaking, 100% Han, ABC (American-born Chinese). While my understandings still sit very far from grasping it all, I have poured months of my childhood and one-third of 2019 into exploring China.

In no particular order, below are some peculiarities I have noted from no less than 18 years of visits.

 

The Most Chinese Things About China

1. Roasted sunflower seeds are sweet.

The relationship between the Chinese and their sunflower seeds is so intimate and peculiar to foreigners that it deserved its own post.

Moving on.

2. Cucumbers are spiky.

I once met three well-traveled Israelis who told me that while they wanted cucumbers for making a salad, they strayed far from the ones they found in the supermarket, because those cucumbers looked “spiky.”

Here’s a little Chinese secret: spiky cucumbers are the crunchiest. The tastiest and crispiest. Biting through the thin, dark green skin is one of the simple joys of life.

Whether spiky or just normal bumpy, cukes are sold on the tallest mountains as a hiking fuel. In cities they invariably serve as the perfect study snack, often paired with sweet sunflower seeds.

When my four-year-old cousin is feeling particularly picky at restaurants, his parents just need to order of a plate of sliced cucumber sticks and place it in front of him. No sweets. Nothing fried. Just raw cucumber, and perhaps some soy sauce for dipping.

 

3. You can’t put undergarments or socks into the washing machine.

Washing underwear and socks with the rest of your laundry is considered unhygienic in China. The Chinese fret that post-wash, the underwear will not be clean enough and the socks will have dirtied the rest of the load. It is normal to hand wash your underwear every night when you shower.

Underwear-washing is so paramount to Chinese households that figuring out where one can hang up washed clothes is often the first order of business when a family checks into a hotel, or in the case of my grandparents, when boarding a cruise ship.

While hand-washing laundry is normally forbidden in most hostels around the world, it is encouraged in Chinese hostels. College students regularly hand-wash much of their laundry, though the boys have a reputation for throwing all their dirty clothes into a bucket of soapy water, stepping on it some, hanging it up, and calling it quits.

4. Cutting in line.

With a population of 1,437,973,497 people, waiting times for trains, bathrooms, and security checks are hard to predict and have no limit. With so many people shuffling through public spaces, expect line etiquette and yellow “wait behind here” marks to be ignored.

The people who sidle up to the ticket window seem to come up with every question under the sun. Sometimes it feels like all hell has broken loose. You’ll likely even find yourself in some situation where cutting to the front, or at least to the half way point, simply makes more sense. It’s shitty karma, but it also saves you half of your day.

5. Noise.

Car horns and voices are used liberally. With all the cutting in line to get to the front to ask a question, shouting matches often break out.

Ambulances have a way of disturbing a peaceful street in a sudden tirade of deafening shrieks. Announcements boom across train stations. Expect your ears to hurt at least a couple times before you go home.

6. Edible animal parts.

While not The Ultimate Chinese Snack, unlikely animal body parts and organs are time-held favorites. The top three that come to mind are

• pig ears
• chicken feet
• and duck neck.

These are eaten as side dishes, dim sum brunch, or train munchies.

Supermarkets and convenience stores hang up all sorts of these pre-packaged, ultra-processed, chewy cartilage parts. At night markets, friends gather around grilled intestines or a sour soup of beef organs, eating and drinking their way till early morning.

7. Hygiene.

Han Chinese families have the tradition of being very germaphobic. Chopsticks are seen as a sanitary method of feeding oneself, and are undoubtedly superior to the neighboring cultures who prefer eating with hands.

In less established restaurants, it is common for a table of people to be seated and promptly rinse all the already-cleaned dishes and cutlery with hot tea. A flurry of clinking and swishing ensues. A large bowl is provided on the Lazy Susan to collect the used tea.

On the other hand, China has a long way to go when it comes to air quality and public toilets.

Like many other places on earth, ditch toilets are totally a thing. If you want to get remote, you’ll have to overcome any qualms to squatting and releasing over an existing stockpile of human waste.

Another contradiction in Chinese hygiene habits is society’s perfect acceptance of letting chewed up or undesired food waste (i.e. shells of sunflower seeds) fall directly from the mouth to dining table. When eating fish or meat, bones are placed onto the table too. Restaurant servers will wipe clean the surface between customers. At home, it is more common to have a tray or dish specifically designated for collecting food waste.

8. Warm liquids and an abundance of plants.

Hot water taps are placed throughout public spaces, and at the end of every train car, because the Chinese value drinking warm liquids so much. While using these taps for steeping tea is popular, most people just have plain hot water throughout the day.

Vegetables have far more emphasis in the Chinese diet than most other diets in the world. Many meals will be plant-based, and anything from bamboo shoots to sweet potato leaves will show up on the table.

9. Trains.

Chinese trains are one of my true loves. They also have their own blog post.

10. Language barrier.

Most travelers complain about a stubborn language barrier in China. However, English is taught in school from a young age. If you approach anyone under 40, they will likely understand you, but have trouble coming up with the appropriate phrases to respond with. Speak slowly and clearly, and prepare for the worst.

Travelers may want to download a Chinese dictionary app like Pleco, or a translator app. When needing to make a specific request, such as when booking train tickets or directing a taxi driver, ask the staff of your hostel or hotel to write down what you need on a slip of paper.

11. There is no monster like the Chinese language.

The lack of an alphabet means reading and writing Chinese are achieved through rote memory, with the aid of some rough patterns. Educated Chinese people are estimated to know 8,000 characters by heart, but at least 50,000 characters exist.

Every day for the past two years, I have tried to find time for fostering my Chinese skills. When I do, it is never not a fight. Texting with a phonetic pinyin keyboard is fine, but reading and writing articles and books is still out of my scope.

Longer sentences destine me to resentment, because even if I can read 80% of what is in front of me, the missing gaps in my literacy mean I can’t understand the meaning of what any of it says. I can’t even pronounce the unknown words and fake it.

The learning curve for reading Chinese is so steep that it means despite my ability to speak Chinese from infancy, I can better read Portuguese and Italian, two languages I have little exposure to, because they are written with latin letters, and my English and Spanish skills are good enough for me to comprehend languages that are similar enough.

Maybe when the Japanese added two additional alphabets to mitigate the difficulties of their Kanji alphabet, derived from ancient Chinese, they had a point.

Even within the realm of speech I suffer greatly. Conversational Chinese is so annoyingly poetic and metaphorical, with the heavy usage of four-word idioms to express everyday feelings, win arguments, or tell jokes and stories.

I could spend the rest of my time on this earth complaining about my personal struggles with the Chinese language, but I’d like to draw attention to what this means at a political level. Imagine how much diplomatic or economic relations could be improved if Chinese was just a little bit more similar to English, or to anything. While countless people out there are literate in both English and Chinese, why would a native Chinese speaker ever take the pains to deeply research information in English, and vice versa?

The result is a massive disparity in the data, stories, and arguments being digested on both sides, and subsequently, opinions that are deeply incompatible with one another.

To put this in context with a current event, take the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines explicitly state to avoid wearing a mask unless you have symptoms, all Chinese information vehemently maintains that anyone leaving their house should be masked up, non-negotiable. Western countries seem to be listening to the WHO and Eastern countries tend to favor masks for all. This is a colossal inconsistency, considering that COVID-19 has taken 53,325 lives to date and carriers may remain asymptomatic for weeks. 

12. Financial miscellany.

China has some of the cheapest costs of living I’ve ever encountered. In 2019, load of laundry at a hostel (in a machine that holds up to 10 kilos) may charge you as little as 5 RMB, or 70 cents. Search local, and a dollar will feed you real well. Mid-meal-loosening-belt-and-pants well.

China is phasing out of the use of cash. Many businesses and online transactions rely on paperless, cardless services like WeChat banking. Even a fruit vendor selling watermelon out of his truck will have a QR code for cash-less transactions. Leaving wallets at home is safer, and more convenient. Walking out the door with just a phone can get you through the day.

Unfortunately foreigners cannot participate in cashless transactions, unless they manage to open a Chinese bank account. Cash is still accepted nationwide. To withdraw money from an ATM, I usually looked for Bank of China.

13. Sliding by.

My Chinese face allowed me to slip through the crowds, at most turning heads because I’m suspected to be an exotic Tibetan.

For the less Chinese-blooded foreigner, one may be approached for photos, but far less often than you would be approached in India. In sensitive provinces like Xinjiang, going on DIY treks or showing up in off-beat towns could get you reported to or followed by the police, who will ask for your passport and bring you back to where they think you belong.

14. Privacy.

My biggest peeve with China was the constant feeling of being under surveillance because, well, I was. I noticed it on my last visit more than ever. Traffic cameras snapped copious amounts of photos of all vehicles passing through. Swiping National IDs was frequent too. All this is under the guise of heightening national security and lowering crime rates. Chinese citizens are satisfied with it.

I guess the United States is happy with it too, since major companies are teaming with China to design the latest surveillance systems.

Youtube and Google are inaccessible without a virtual private network (VPN). Many foreign sites are slow to load. Chinese friends have complained of having their WeChats disabled for sharing BBC articles.

15. Helpful mobile applications.

• A working VPN will get you far.
• Baidu Maps, written in Mandarin as 百度地图.
• Qunar—Reserve or look up timetables for trains, flights, and buses.
• Pleco—Offline Chinese-English dictionary.
• Yahoo Mail—so you won’t be stuck in a tight spot with emails if your VPN stops working and you only have Gmail.

16. China is your oyster.

Really. Never forget that a plethora of buses routes and train tracks lie at your feet. Moving overland is affordable and can be done by daylight or overnight.

Destinations are highly accessible. Adventure options are wildly diverse. Moment to moment changes take the traveler from one extreme to another. Urban crowds will shove you like a rag doll through seas of people. Scenes out the train windows morph from towering, snow-capped mountains to deserts with only a camel here and a windmill there.

No country has occupied more space in my passports than China has. I adore this land from the bottom of my heart, and I’m telling you, this is a country that is not to be missed.