I went to China in 1999.
At the time, cameras were expensive and internet was new in most countries, so there were no massive amounts of photos, videos, blogs or information in general available.
The only thing I remembered about China was a picture of a rice farmer looking weary, working in a field. Probably from a BBC docu. The other several things I knew were also ridiculously limited:
- I knew that tea was discovered by a Chinese man. A drawing of the man was provided in my primary school textbook.
- I knew Jackie Chan from his movies. So I assumed all Chinese are Kung-fu masters.
- In 1996–99, I worked as a regional trade manager at an organization that imported electrical equipment from China. My boss and his cousins would frequently go to China, on business. They’d tell me wild stories. For instance:
- The Chinese drink blood.
- The language is impossibly hard.
- Women in a province called Yunnan, take showers by the roadside.
- A few BBC articles I had accidentally read about China had painted it in negative terms, making it appear like a backward, boring place. The photos in the said articles were, again from some rice field.
So, in August 1999, I told my boss I wanted to go to China. He said I won’t survive there since I’d be eating only fruits and raw veggies, as he claimed, “Chinese food is nasty” and everything is cooked in pig lard (I am a Muslim, we don’t eat pork).
I usually pride myself in only believing what I know to be true after I have evidence. So, despite the fear-mongering, I found a job in a remote town in Liaoning province, teaching “English for International Business” at a local college.
Imagine my surprise when I disembarked and entered downtown Beijing. Even in 1999 it was way more modern than the BBC photos showed. Tall buildings, modern roads, sophisticated-looking, highly educated people (not all were rice farmers!).
Several years later, when I went to Zhejiang (an important province in the central south), its beauty was unlike any I had seen in any photo album or brochure. Low hills covered in green velvet stretching across the motorway; the unforgettable bamboo forest in Hangzou (capital of Zhejiang); the interesting, dreamy buildings on an island in Xiamen (capital of Fujian province, further south on the SE coast). I could go on.
After spending several years in China, I came to following conclusions:
- Not everyone is a Kung-fu master. :)
- Frozen pig blood is a delicacy enjoyed occasionally in the North, in a hot soup called Ma La Tang. So it’s not like every Chinese drinks blood from the cups like vampires.
- There are millions of Muslims in China. There was a mosque in my town and I could buy Muslim food and halal meat. I had to be careful in restaurants, though as they usually cooked veggies in pig lard but if the restaurant was a Muslim one, it was fine. Even non-Muslim eateries, I could ask them to use vegetable oil for my dish.
- Chinese food is the most delicious food in the world. I don’t care if this offends you, it is, and that is the final verdict. If an expert chef cooks it the right way, and in particular two dishes from Sichuan cuisine: 辣子鸡丁 and 干煸豆角.
- China was not backward in 1999. In 2024 (I visited again) it is even more modern than most Western countries. Almost everything has become automatic. China has gone fully no-cash (electronic payments mostly via Wechat Pay), food deliveries are efficient and arrive in between ten to thirty minutes, most of the shopping is done online now and delivered to your door.
(Photo by Ziboy)
- The high-speed rail covers most of China, making a 14-hour train ride from Beijing to Shanghai shorten to a mere four hours or so. Beijing, where I lived and worked, has a massive metro system that is still expanding. As of 2025, it has 27 lines and over 400 stations covering all of Beijing (in 1999 it was only two lines and less than 30 stations). It covers 780 kilometers of track, making it one of the largest metro systems in the world. And so forth.
- Even the story about road-side showers was an exaggeration. Sure, in some villages in Yunnan and south China (where the weather is hot), village folk who did not have bathrooms did wash their hair or swim in a lake etc. But this is an exception and not the norm and I never witnessed it despite living and traveling all over China for two decades.
- The language is not easy but it’s not impossibly hard. I became fluent in a year and I’m currently as fluent as a native speaker.
Interestingly, the amount of fake information about China astounded me. “Culture Shock, China” a book that my colleague recommended I read was mostly wrong. Whatever the guy wrote, I experienced the opposite of it. “Lonely Planet” was also mostly wrong.
One book I won’t mention even wrote (and I paraphrase from memory) that “locals are wary of ‘the foreign devil’ and don’t like to hang out with them.” Which was absolute malarkey. Not only my students would hang out after class, some of them would even cook for me; and downtown, everywhere I went people were generally friendly and eager to befriend me.
I remember a particularly interesting scene from 2004. I was teaching here:
This was a newly-built second campus, approximately a ten-min walk from the beach. After class, I’d take my camera and just go for a long walk towards the beach. If you go further to the right in the photo, there is a village and a morning market. I remember walking there one afternoon when they were celebrating a wedding.
The villagers had never seen a foreigner in person. Immediately I was whisked away into one of the rooms and treated as a guest of honor. Food, beer, tea everything followed, but I only had some tea and ate peanuts and boiled eggs, which prompted one of the older guys to ask whether in my country we had eggs and peanuts. They treated me as one of their own, and I had a great time crashing that wedding. ;)
So, many of the ‘pundits’ writing on China are clueless, wrong, and prejudiced. Just visit and you will see for yourself.
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