A Note To Myself on Dating

I don’t know what it is, but I still don’t understand relationships. And I find myself at the end of getting a beating from the rejection stick.

Roughly 3 weeks ago, a girl contacted me on wechat. I was expecting this, because my grandma from China had spoken to another person in the retirement village, and said that her grand daughter (currently living in my city) was looking for someone. So, I left my wechat contact details.

Having been on the first date, it felt pretty good. She was only 7 minutes late, but she still turned up. I felt things were pretty good, and in general, I was open to the idea of just having fun whether it works out or not.

My idea of having fun however, started developing into expectations, and there were perhaps lots of things I overlooked. I mean, this person’s english was terrible (even though she graduated with a Bachelor’s in Urban Planning). Lucky I could communicate in Cantonese with her, so I was willing to overlook this.

Then came the fact that this person sells cell phone cases. Unable to get a permanent residence, this person couldn’t secure a job in urban planning. Again, I was willing to overlook this.

I must admit, this person was pretty. I think I overlooked too many other things.

Things were slightly weird afterwards, in that she hardly texted me. I put this down to girls liking to be chased (especially ones from China). So, I end up texting her a few days later, and only text to make plans for a second date.

After the second date, she hardly texts me. I get extremely agitated, and the uncertainty is killing me. In it, thoughts that maybe she wasn’t interested kept popping up. When she finally does text, I get a massive relief that she replied. Although I suggested a date for our third date, she states she is working. No counteroffer.

At this point, I should have just left it as she wasn’t interested. But no… I text her again asking when she’s free, and she tells me she will check the roster. So later that night, she states that she is working for the next 6 days and will be busy. At this point, I’m starting to think she’s not interested. Working as a doctor, I’m also extremely busy, but if I can take a few hours to meet up for a date, I don’t see how someone selling cell phone cases can’t.

I phone up… No answer. She texts back saying that phone wasn’t by her side at the time. Isn’t she going to phone me then? A few minutes pass, and then I phone back. She picks up, and I ask when she is free. She tells me some BS like the other workers have exams, and she’ll be busy till July. I ask her to contact me when she is free, to which she says “ok”.

I’m pretty disappointed at this point, firstly in myself that I didn’t pick this up earlier, and should have ceased contact first. And secondly, I’m disappointed that she is still trying to string me along. I understand that maybe she’s trying to be nice, but I’d rather you be brutally honest about your intentions rather than make me think I have hope still.

I’ve decided to not contact her again, and even if she does contact, I’ll respond that I’m busy. I don’t believe in second chances in a relationship. If a person isn’t interested the first time around, they won’t be interested the second time around. And even if they did come around, it would mean I’d be their back up option. And I don’t think anyone deserves to be a back up option, not especially if the person puts the other as number 1.

This probably comes off as a rant, but at least it lets me vent some off. I’m going to look back at this entry in the future, and have a laugh at it.

Social Customs

I want to start this post off by acknowledging how important social customs and interactions are in day to day functioning. Any activity or actions one performs that is out of social norms is seen as odd and weird by others.

Now I must admit, I’m not one who has tons and tons of friends. But I can strike a conversation with others when I want to and if I am interested enough in the other person. This has lead me to at times to be very friendly

What’s Wrong With China?

Having spent a fair 2 weeks in China, I can say that there were aspects I loved about the country, but aspects that I hated about it too.

I spent about 5 days in Beijing, and 7 days in Guangzhou. I had a good impression of Beijing, but then again, it was a sheltered trip to Beijing as I was with tour guides.

In Guangzhou, I stayed in a hotel, and visited family members, as well as did some free roaming about the city.

Things that wowed me about the city:

• The variety of food.
• The language.

The variety of food

In Guangzhou, restaurants are a plenty, and they’re cheap as well. Noodles, congee, bread, yumcha, all within walking distance of pretty much anywhere if you’re in the city. Did I mention that it’s cheap as well?

The language

People spoke in mandarin or in cantonese. I understand the latter pretty well, but my mandarin is still a work in progress. I was amazed at the difference in being able to read basic road signs compared to 8 years ago, when I couldn’t recognize any characters at all. Naturally, I’d be inclined to take a keen interest in the language given my interest in learning it.

Things that I didn’t like about the city:

• The people
• The environment
• The society

The people

My impression of the people, are that most are quite unfriendly, and some are insincere. Asking a shop owner (such as a computer retailer) where the closest CD/music shop was, would be answered with “I don’t know”. This was a common occurrence with all shop owners, especially when at the heart of the “electronics district”. Asking locals for directions was equally difficult. People would either say “I don’t know” or I would usually end up being pointed in the wrong direction.

In addition, people are selfish or lack any care to others. I once saw a woman carrying her baby on board the bus, and not one person offered her a seat. Now that’s got to be saying something about the peTople there.

People openly spat on the ground, and they smoked in the restaurants, despite the “smoking prohibited” signs. More than anything, it’s also a reflection on the management staff of the restaurants, who don’t want to risk offending customers, so they allow smokers to pollute the air, potentially making every other non-smoker a potential lung cancer patient.

The Environment

Dirty. That’s what I can sum it up as. The streets are extremely dirty, the public toilets even worse. It’s almost as if there is no one cleaning those toilets, and the stench…. Oh it’s just painful!

Pollution was also another terrible thing. My throat would feel dry, and the air was unrefreshing. I’d hate to live in such a polluted place, breathing polluted air constantly.

The Society

People are focussed on money. One of my family friends told me how every restaurant manager learns to profile customers according to their wealth. Based on what clothes they wore, the meals ordered etc, the managers figure out who’s rich, and who’s not.

Health care is a shambles there, with hospitals requesting a standard batch of investigations (even if not indicated) as routine. Going to another hospital with x-ray films, the other hospital will order more x-rays, because they don’t believe the results of the previous hospital’s x-ray (and also so they can make more money on investigations).

Trying to cross the road is extremely hazardous, with people having to give way to cars on pedestrian crossings. And red light runners are a common site. Not to mention the “Random 3 point turn” – on a busy two way double laned street, a driver would suddenly decide to do a 3 point turn, no regards to how disruptive it can be to oncoming traffic.

The internet was broken as well. Google maps are blocked, and trying to find places to book “eg booking.com” were a nightmare, especially when you couldn’t see where on the map it is!

Noise pollution is a real thing, and because of how busy it is, there’s never a quiet moment through the day or night. Car horns go off constantly because the drivers are pretty inconsiderate, and bike bells ring. I found it got too much at times, and stress levels start building up as a result.

I’d love to visit again sometime with the hopes that things improve, although I also fear that things may get worse, especially if it’s something like the people and the society.

Chinese Courtship Customs

Still single well past the mid twenties, my grandma got a little anxious over this, and started asking around family friends to introduce potential girlfriends to me. This was about 2 weeks ago.

Such is the mind of the traditional chinese mindset. While studying in high school and university, we’re not allowed to date, and all focus should be directed at schoolwork. We should devote ourselves to establishing a strong career and a bright future. Distractions should be eliminated, and this includes romantic relationships with anyone.The moment that one gets a stable job however, one is then expected to almost instantaneously get a girlfriend, with the hope of marriage in a year or two, and then a family.

Because of this, I never had a girlfriend throughout high school or through my 7 years of university. The moment I started working however, there were strong wishes thrust upon me to find a girlfriend who I would hopefully marry one day.

And that’s where I am today. With a stable job, but without a girlfriend in site. And so, my grandma asked a family friend of ours if she knew any single girls. She recommended me one who lived close by. Although to this day, I still havn’t spoken to her yet, I was only able to see one photo of her on Facebook.

What fascinates me most however, is the chinese culture of relationships. I mean, I’m not allowed to date until I finish all my studies, but by then, I have almost no dating experience, and I still really don’t know what I want in a life time partner. There’s a phenomenon in China of “leftover girls” which refers to females who are over 25 and aren’t married yet, most likely due to their studies. Also, chinese culture has a strong emphasis on the parents approving of their children’s partner. So if they don’t approve of the relationship, it’s a no-go for any possible future.

It’s the approval of the relationship by the parents which leads to a lot of the parents asking around for potential partners, and in fact, the parents do the work of trying to be match maker.

In my instances, I have felt this happen with my first girlfriend. It was someone my dad had eyed at a family friend’s get together, and it was with his prompting that I half heartedly asked for her number. Don’t get me wrong, I had a say in the matter, but in a way, my dad sort of gave me some prompting to ask her out.

And so it seems like a repeat of what happened with my current situation, except it was grandma who asked. I think I’ll see how things go first, I have my reservations about a successful long term future with this current female who my grandma has in a way, introduced me to.

Awesome Website For Learning a New Language

Quite a while ago, I stumbled across an excellent website for learning a new language. It’s called Lang-8 and it works by allowing you to post things in the language you want to learn, and having native speakers of the language you’re learning correcting your mistakes.

However, in doing this, you will also have to correct other people’s entries – it’s a community of give and take. The more entries you correct, the more L-points you get, meaning your entries get a higher likelihood of being corrected by other users.

It’s a website that I frequent quite often, as it helps me to learn a lot in Chinese. It’s however something that I find difficult to learn to speak and listen in. It’s very good for my grammar and vocabulary, but I need practice in listening and speaking.

I hope to skype with some of the people there so that I can improve my chinese skills.

🙂

On Learning Chinese

Chinese is hard, I’m not going to lie. After studying Chinese for over 2 years, I still feel I can’t comprehend much of the language.

The 3 main issues I have with learning Chinese are:

1. The thousands of different characters

Chinese has so many different characters, and you’d likely need to know at least 5000 unique characters to comfortably read a Chinese newspaper. It’s not just the characters you need to know, but character combinations that are used to form new meanings and words.

For instance, the character for love 爱 (ai4) and for good 好(hao3), form a completely new meaning when placed together, meaning interests 爱好 (ai4hao3). Even though you knew what the characters individually meant, you would miss the meaning of the word 爱好 if you had never learned the meaning of that word combination before.

There are many Chinese people I know, who can read the characters, but who cannot write the characters. So called “character amnesia” happens very frequently to people, who cannot manage to write simple characters. It’s happened to me too, when I try and remember how to write characters that I could easily recognize. It’s about constant repetition, and constant practice of writing characters that trains the muscles of your hands to write the character. A lot of motor skill memory to write the characters.

So essentially, there is a great deal of memorization needed to master Chinese.

2. It’s a tonal language

In mandarin Chinese, there are 4 different tones. These are neutral, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th tone. Pronouncing a word in a different tone can lead to misunderstanding of a completely different word.

For instance, ai3 (矮）means short, whereas ai4 （爱）means love. To the english speaker, they would pronounce it as “aye” for both words, but in mandarin, you need the tones present to distinguish the words apart.

It’s something that has been very difficult for me trying to pronounce tones. Speaking quickly, I’d get the tones mixed up, so I need to speak very slowly. And listening to others when they’re speaking very quickly gets me confused at times.

3. The characters aren’t phonetic

One of the biggest gripes I have with the language, is that the characters aren’t phonetic in nature. If there is a new character you have never seen before, you won’t know how to pronounce it. If you don’t know how to pronounce it, looking it up in the dictionary is going to be very difficult, as a lot of electronic dictionaries rely on pinyin (the romanization of chinese character pronounciations). There are radical searches of course, and stroke numbers search, but these are very cumbersome.

For instance, if I see a new character such as 河 （he2 – river), I would not know how to pronounce the character at all. I could vaguely guess the meaning, as the 3 strokes on the very left indicate relation to water, so I could guess the character had something to do with water. But not knowing how to pronounce it would just be frustrating. English is better in this sense, in that words are all phonetic, so even if I don’t know the meaning, I can at least probably read it out approximately.

 

Aside from these gripes with the language, I still learn mandarin, because it’s challenging, and it’s a part of my identity. In fact, writing is extremely therapeutic, and through the years, I can start seeing results in my ability to read short texts and understand what has been said by mandarin speakers.

My Chinese character practice – lots and lots of practice

I hope to be able to get to HSK5 level by the first half of next year. It involves memorizing a lot of characters, so I take it day by day. It’s an exercise in patience and persistence, and that’s part of the draw for me in learning chinese, and in learning any new skill in general. 🙂