Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about all the product safety concerns involving China. A lot of people are saying that the problems have been overblown, and are a price we should pay in order to have cheaper goods. After living in China, though, I don’t buy it. I’ve seen so  much of a typical Chinese mentality (that isn’t shared by everyone, just the majority) that explains for me why there have been so many problems, and why they won’t go away without major action by the US government.

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Last June I was hired by a high school in Kaifeng to help recruit new students. This high school primarily teaches English. The founder of the school, Mr. Yuan, spent one year in Canada and has enough English to have a conversation, though his pronunciation is horrid and his vocabulary lacking. He was a nice person, though, and very eager.

(One time, we were in a restaurant together and I asked where the bathroom was. He thought I meant an actual bath tub, not just a toilet. I don’t see how that wasn’t one of the first things he learned living in Canada. He was in Windsor, which is RIGHT NEXT TO Detroit, so I can’t believe they use a different word.)

Mr. Yuan wanted me to go around with him and one of his students, whose English name was Rainy. They were going to Mr. Yuan’s home town, Tang Yin City, in northern Henan province near Anyang. (Don’t worry if you don’t know where these places are, it doesn’t really make a  difference.) Mr. Yuan wanted to show off the fact that Rainy, after studying at his school, could understand me, a native English speaker, and translate my words. We went around to various middle schools in Tang Yin and I talked, Rainy translated (often incorrectly), and punk middle school students asked me questions about the US’s involvement in Iraq, my position on Taiwan, and my position on the Japanese PM visiting Yasukuni Shrine (which pisses off Chinese people to no end, but that’s another story).

All in all, I was paid $12 a day for this, plus hotel, travel, and food, for three days. Hey, $12 gets you pretty far in China.

Anyway, the three days we were in Tang Yin we were being driven around by Mr. Yuan’s brother. Actually, I don’t know if he was REALLY his brother, because Chinese people have a habit of referring to their friends (close and not) as brother and sister. Our driver’s car had no shocks or A/C, and was falling apart. It didn’t ACTUALLY die on us at any point, though, so it was better than some other experiences I had had.

On the first night of the trip we had a very large meal with some of Mr. Yuan’s friends, who didn’t speak English. It was a very common thing, if you were eating with a foreigner, you would invite your friends to show off the foreigner because it made you look good, no matter if any communication was possible.

The meal was a typical communal style meal,  with dozens of dishes served  on a lazy Susan in the center of an enormous table that could fit near 20. Also, it being a typical Chinese meal, everyone had a large amount of alcohol, except for me and Rainy (I don’t like getting drunk around people I’m not comfortable with, and I think Rainy was too young). Mr. Yuan had a lot of bai jiu (rice spirits), which is like vodka but smells like licorice and anise. The driver just had a few beers, not enough to be drunk, but too much to drive (so I thought).

As we were about to leave Mr. Yuan says that now the driver will drive me back to my hotel room. I protest, because I’m not sure he is capable. The driver didn’t speak English so Mr. Yuan said something I couldn’t catch in Chinese that was probably along the lines of “she doesn’t like your car” (Chinese people liked to not hurt people’s feelings, so they often made up excuses that had little to do with the truth). I got in a cab, went back to the hotel, and they even let me sleep in the next morning! (Sleeping in for them was 6:45 instead of 6:30 am).

The next evening, we had dinner, and the driver again drank enough beer to easily fail a Breathalyzer in the US. I objected again. This time, Mr. Yuan tried to argue the point with me.

“I know what you think, I was in Canada. I know there are laws against driving after drinking. But in China we do not have these laws.”

I fumed silently. That was not the point, the point was that we might die. And how could China not have drunk driving laws? I tried to explain this, but he kept saying, “it’s fine, it’s fine”. Either way, I got in a cab and went back to the hotel, and prayed that the cab driver hadn’t been drinking.

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When I got back from this trip, I told this story to one of my regular students, who was one of my brighter and more aware students. I told him this story, and after assuring me that China DOES have anti-drunk driving laws (that are not enforced), he said this:

“In China, often, if there is a 70% chance something bad will happen, people will do it anyway because there is a chance nothing bad will happen. If there is a 80% chance, they will do it. If there is a 90% chance, they will do it.”

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No wonder Chinese companies try to get away with lead paint!