Manners in China

If bad manners is very bothersome to you, do not come to China. The Chinese have their own rules regarding manners, they just differ from ours.

One of the biggest changes for those of the West is smoking etiquette. It is perfectly fine to smoke anywhere, as long as you offer those around you a cigarette. It seems as if every male smokes and some of the females. People smoke freely at the office, in a restaurant and especially on a bus. There were a handful who ask, mostly in the presence of Westerners or women, if they are bothered by the smoke. These same people light up when the bus has pulled over. Cigarette smoke is such a constant lingering entity, one does not even need to smoke to have a couple of cigarettes.

Many bodily functions are as shared as openly as smokes. The morning in China is a symphony of hacking. No day can start without a big, fat luggie. Elderly women spit in the street, even stranger is seeing a lovely woman, sitting in a park, watching people stroll by on a warm afternoon, conjure up a chunk of lung to catapult onto the path. At home, when amongst the boys in the outdoors, spitting is common, but to see men in suits, children, their mothers, their grandmothers all expel their throat candy anyplace they please, gets a little old. If there is a clogged nose, a public snot rocket is acceptable. Men fart without discretion, though this not so different than home.

It is as if the lesson of kindergarten were forgotten. Lines in China are optional. Some wait in line, but a person who budges to the front is helped indiscriminately. I met a German guy who adopted such a philosophy. "I won't be the sucker who waits in a queue, while everyone else is pushing ahead." For the Beijing Olympics, the city enacted a plan to teach Chinese to wait in lines and not spit in the street, which worked, but after the games, things went back to normal.

There are some traditional Chinese etiquette, but these are starting to slack as well. One should never leave chopsticks in a bowl, since they resemble a type of incense that is burned for the dead. One should fill everyone's tea before they pour their own. It is impolite to drink a sip of alcohol alone. Instead, one toasts by raising their glass with both hands and stating an amount to drink, typically either a half glass or to the bottom. For this reason, even beer is consumed from tiny glasses. There is no colliding of glasses, though if they do, one must always clink the glass at a lower point than the host or the person who offers the toast. It shows respect. Sometimes, there is a war over who taps lowest, who gets the privilege of offering respect. The mutual lowering of glasses looks odd. Someone typically concedes under the table somewhere.