Ni Hao!

We arrived in China safe and sound! The flight took forever and really was too long. I left the house around 8:30 am Saturday, went to Minneapolis, Tokyo, and Beijing on our way to Tianjin and arrived around 1 am Monday morning.

However, during the trip I was able to make some friends and was given a business card for a black market?! Apparently you have to call the phone number on the card, meet them at the address and then they will take you to the black market. I don't know if I will use it or not, but I thought that was interesting.

During the flight I was also privy to the five F's of China. The five F's are meant to describe Chinese culture in a succinct fashion. The five F's are:

Face
Face is representative of their proud people and culture. Despite the fact that China is a unified country of over 50 ethnicity's (learned that today from Dr. Liu's video about China and Tianjin) they all share a proud nature and have a proud air about themselves and their work, whether for better or worse. I definitely saw this proud reserve and conviction throughout the story of Jung Wang's father never bowing to pressure in the book entitled, "Wild Swan". Another aspect of their proud culture would be their reserved character and

Fate
Fate is meant to represent a very collective way of thinking the Chinese people maintain. A type of group thought takes place in Chinese culture and according to the person that explained to me the five F's, many problems that occur are due to, you guessed it, fate.

To me it seems that this fate can be extended to the way the government once held complete control over a person's life. The very restrictive way of forced thinking reminds me of Iran and the theocratic government that controlled the people's thoughts and actions through religion and fear, and now drugs.

Food
What culture does not have a food component? I have to analyze Chinese food a bit more to see how Chinese food can describe the culture as a whole, but I am sure it is rich and diverse like the make-up of China.

Friends
Loyalty would be another word for friends. My friend on the airplane explained that once you get close to someone from China and became his friend, you could shoot him in the foot and he would remain your friend. Not that I would ever want to shoot someone in the foot, but now I know if there was ever an accident around my friends from China; in short, I intend to have friends for life in this country. If you act poorly or deceitfully with someone, all the siblings and friends of the person you insulted will back their friend completely and immediately. As a true friend should!

Family
Last, but certainly not least is the Family aspect of China. The family is a big part of the culture and tradition in China. Not only the loyalty to the family group, but also the tradition surrounding the family and prestige it is to live close by. We learned in "Wild Swans" that having several generations in one house was a huge honor and that during the Spring Festival it was tradition to travel home.


Also during my stay I hope to discover how unified the multi-ethnic citizens are, (I assume they are at least in regards to the Olympics)! But more on that at another time. Until then, please post comments and leave a message letting me know you are reading my blog!

ps. I didn't realize this earlier, but even though China is a "communistic" government it feels a lot more like America than I would have imagined.

再见