Friend from Xinxiang

There are not many foreigners in Xinxiang. Walking on the streets as one and talking with locals with my clumsy Chinese does occasionally draw some interest. But it is remarkable that it always seems to be nice positive kind of interest. I can contrast this to the two possible alternatives for attitude that foreign people invoke in Finland: indifference on the other hand and negative racist attitudes on the other. I would say that the latter is nowadays fortunately rather rare and mild, but still distinctly negative. So with this background it is remarkable, very happy and encouraging to go around in a place where you are different but your difference is perceived as interesting in a positive way.

I do not have the habit of easily starting discussions with strangers but the genuinely positive and encouraging attitude of Chinese people towards me has resulted on my recent China trips in me chatting with strangers using my poor Chinese skills more often than I do with strangers here in Finland with fluent Finnish.

People in Xinxiang are generally not fluent in English. At some point of chat I usually ask Nǐ  Shuō  Yīng yǔ  Ma ? (Do you speak English?) and get replied that this is not the case. Not so with 刘 明, Ming Liu. In the evenings when Jinlin had returned to her aunts home I often went to eat to a particular restaurant in the neighbourhood of my hotel. This was a sort of Chinese fast-food place with huge number of different foods on display so that I would not have to know the names of all the dishes but I could just point to some and say "Wǒ  Yào  Nà gè" (I want that). Ming Liu was working in this restaurant. He spotted my meagre Chinese interaction with the other personnel and come to say in good English: "You can order anything you want."

刘 明, Ming Liu

I often come to the restaurant at times when there were not many other customers so employees were not particularly busy. So starting from my second visit for a tasty meal we continued to chat with Ming all though my dinner. I tried to speak mostly Chinese to him and he spoke mostly English to me. We talked of me and Jinlin, my work as software developer at Finland, his studies, our future plans and aspects of the Chinese culture.

On my visit to the restaurant on my last evening in Xinxiang we exchanged QQ messenger numbers and have been chatting in QQ since then. He has been very helpful to me. On technical level he has telling me about freegate, a powerful and free anti-censorship proxy software. This can be used by Chinese people (or western people travelling to China) to bypass the "Great firewall" that prevents access to Facebook and Google among other things. This is in a way better than the VPN-service I have used so far because the proxy is effective only for non-Chinese web-sites and allows direct fast connection to Chinese sites in China.

Ming Liu has been helpful in my continued learning of Chinese language. I use my ChineseWriter software to write Chinese to him in QQ chat and he occasionally instructs me in more fluent usage of grammar and words. Jinlin has, in contrast, had an understandable hesitation in correcting my bad sentences. I can also help Ming Liu to improve his already good English skills further. There does not seem to be any single reason why he stands our from the crowd with his English skills, but I think big part is about attitude: about willingness to speak and write and not be too shy despite still lacking some skills.

We have also continued to chat a lot about my relationship with Jinlin, the joys and challenges of inter-cultural relationship, the typical features of Chinese culture and mentality as applied to relationships. Jinlin is still in Anhui at his fathers relatives without her computer, so our chats with her are infrequent and short and it is nice to carry on writing Chinese with Ming meanwhile. In regard to the powerful role of parents in their children's lives (even when the children are already adults), Ming told of his own case of studying dentistry mainly due to pressure from his parents and not being really interested to work as a dentist. So he is now, at 22 years, looking for some new directions to his life. He is interested in computer programming and I have tried to encourage him to do some self-study and self-development in this area since the web is truly full of free material to study in the world of programming.