Live from Beijing!

I know this sounds crazy, but on days when I get frustrated by living in China (we all have them!), I remind myself that being a foreigner in China is like playing the world’s oldest, biggest, and most complex video game.

Here’s what I mean.

Video games have levels.  You start at level one, and play it over and over until you master it.  This typically requires countless repetitions, since after you finally figure out that you need to “jump” and then “spin”, a big monster comes from nowhere to eat you.  So then you learn that it’s “jump”, then “spin”, and then “punch.”  If you haven’t played many video games, I suspect this sounds stupid.  Trust me, it’s addictive in a mind-numbing sort of way…

Then, just when you think you have it all figured out, you discover some kind of secret door, to a NEW LEVEL.  Suddenly all the rules have changed.  You’re back at beginning, at this new higher level.  Some things are familiar, and some things are not.  So you start figuring out how the new level works. 

And then, right when you’re starting to get bored, you discover a secret door into the NEXT level.

That’s what it’s like living in China, for me.  Doing anything requires making mistakes, and then trying again, without giving up.  Just when I think I’ve figured it out, I find a secret door, and enter an entirely new level.

Except unlike a video game, I have no idea how many levels there are.  And there are no “tips and tricks” websites or books to peruse.  My current guess is that there are more than 1,000 levels, and that the most-sophisticated foreigner I know (guess who!), is at about level 100.  That’s 10% of the way to “mastery.”  I think I’m at about level 20, and that’s after 20+ years trying to learn the language and 6 years of living in Beijing (4 now and 2 back in the 1980s).

The most sophisticated Chinese friend I know is probably at level 600.  I know this because I often don’t understand why he does what he does, but I see that it works brilliantly…

So this part of the blog is dedicated to documenting my own little revelations about the various “tricks” and “secret doors” that were certainly not obvious to me.  They therefore might be interesting to you.

At the very least, thinking about China this way helps me turn those moments of inevitable frustration into bemused resolve to keep playing the game, since it’s never, ever dull.