Does Everyone Spit in China?

The real question is why don't people spit more elsewhere. Different places have different customs. What is considered rude in one country is just a matter of course in another. Yes, people spit in China. If you come from a country where it's considered rude to spit, it might seem to you that they spit “a lot”. Yes, occasionally I see someone spit. But it's not like everyone's hawking loogies left and right.

Everyday situations, like a person spitting on the street, may seem easy to understand, but everything has a huge amount of history to it. To oversimplify things, there has always been a lot of poverty in China. Historically, most people have always just scraped by. That long history of poverty translates into a culture that is largely devoid of certain pleasantries – because “high culture” (read: a snotty sense of superiority) is a luxury of the wealthy. Only they have the time to worry about whether or not someone is being polite. Everyone else has more important things to think about.

But that also means there isn't the kind of institutional anxiety that we have in the West. You're not constantly worried about offending someone, because the rules of etiquette are pretty straightforward. That is not to say that there is no etiquette in China. Etiquette does matter – but with friends, with family, with co-workers and business partners. Etiquette consists of specific rules of behavior in specific social situations. In the West, the moment you step outside your door, you're in society. It doesn't matter that you don't know anyone, nor that you're not doing anything special. There's still this imaginary force always watching you, always making sure that you're doing things right. “Does that person think I snubbed him? Oh god, I bumped into that girl. I hope she knew it was an accident. Why is he staring at me? What's his problem?” And so on.

There's this imaginary body called “society” and whenever we're in it, we're orienting ourselves by it. It doesn't matter if you're insecure or confident. Either way, you're omni-conscious of society to the point of obsession.

This deserves a brief caveat. I think a lot of this is true, though it may not sound right. The difficult part (for me) is to place exactly where it is true, and for what level of abstraction. I can't say for certain if this difference of societal awareness is essential to the West, or to America, or to Southern California, or to suburbia, or what. It's tough to place – my experience is too limited to know exactly where the difference lies. But it is undeniably there.

Maybe it's just me, and the fact that I want so dearly to be indifferent to capital-S Society. But since I've been in Beijing, the little anxieties that haunt me back home have altogether disappeared. People stare at me every single day. They shove past me on the subway, completely oblivious to whether or not I'm taking offense. People spit, and litter, and jaywalk with impunity. Thank god for all of it. However the little things might irritate me from time to time, it is a blessing to be around people who aren't constantly concerned about appearances, about impressing the invisible Other, about pretending to be something they're not. All that inspires me to do just the same. Maybe that's rude. Or maybe it's just real.