Thoughts on small time and shoe polish

This blog entry is a bit more philosophical than most of my entries (so you’ve been warned).

If I asked you, a Westerner, what the small unit of time was, what would you say? A minute, a second? Perhaps you are a computer junky and a nanosecond is a small unit of time… I’d answer this as a second. That is a small amount of time.

So, what if I asked you if something could be done quickly… you probably wouldn’t think much of anything could be done in 3 seconds or 3 minutes.

Now let me take you into China for a bit. People who are more learned on these things may say that my discussion here lacks rigor and experimental support, but I’m going through this exercise anyway. You see, I have come to believe that the way we see the world is highly affected by the language we speak. From the first moment you can remember, you are hit with things like good, bad, big, small, hot, cold, sea, river, creek, and so on. Even things like up and down, left and right, front and back. I think the way you describe things from your earliest formative years using language affects how you see the world around you – your language directly shapes your worldview.

Now to the point. In Chinese small (xiao) plus time (shi) is an hour. That’s right; a small increment of time is an hour. Now, ask yourself the question about getting something done quickly but use your smallest unit of time as an hour – I’m sure you would think many things could be done in 2 or 3 hours…

This is a sword that cuts both ways for me here in China. You see, when I say I’ll have something done quickly, I could mean 10 minutes, 2 hours, or 3 days – it all depends on the task at hand. But when I say this to many Chinese, they are thinking quickly is a few small increments of time, and they can grow impatient if my quickly wasn’t a few hours.

On the other hand, if something isn’t progressing very fast they react as if only a little time has passed. You know, if 48 hours goes by and nothing happens, it’s like 48 seconds (or minutes) for me – who is going to be wound up if they don’t hear some response in less than an hour.

It’s this dichotomy that permeates life here. Some things happen so fast it makes your head spin (partly because they throw a lot of labor at certain things). Other things happen so slow, you’d have more progress with arctic glacier flows.

Another strange combination is small (xiao) and heart (xin) which means careful. Wide heart (cuxin) means careless… I haven’t figured out the connection between the size of your heart and whether or not you are careful, but I’m working on it.

Now on to shoe polish (which has never been one of my favorite things). I can remember my dad having a box with a little place he could rest his shoe on top. In this box, he kept all of the polish. I don’t know exactly how often he polished his shoes, but my guess is it was nearly once a week.

Well, in China, once a week doesn’t cut it. My shoes need polishing after one day. This is completely honest. It is so dusty here – we are essentially living in a construction site as everything, everywhere is being built, all at once. So, your shoes don’t just get dusty where it can be wiped off. They get covered, and the dust is so abrasive that if anything drags across the uppers of your shoes they immediately require a polish. Honestly, if I could, I’d have my shoes polished twice a day – once at noon and once when I got home.

Of course, I can’t do this, and my shoes don’t get the daily attention they require, as you will recall my definition of small time is about 1 second. And since some things move at a frenetic pace, you have to hold onto every second you can find… and that is why I’m really starting to love Saturday’s.

On Saturday we let the driver have some time on his own – his day of rest. I didn’t intend it this way, but that has also become our day of rest as it represent the day when we are restricted to where we can walk… and we can’t walk too far from our “bubble” as Jackie has started to describe where we live. If you go out and fight it in the city for very long, you will do exactly what Jackie and I did in the elevator at the end of the day – sigh deeply and simply say “home sweet home!”