AllanF wrote:I'd add to that not pressing the open door button for anyone at anytime even if you know there is a woman behind you carrying a baby, but we are much more well mannered and courteous than all other cultures.
Something odd has happened to me and I'm wondering if any of the other
wai guo ren (foreigners in China) have experienced this. For me, I just add it to a very long list of things that I've learned in China that I previously never imagined were part of human reality, and this one is about having a door opened for you, which wouldn't seem that interesting, but such things here can not be taken for granted.
Since coming to China, I have had collisions with doors that were ostensibly being opened for me by Chinese people so many times, that now I have totally changed my "doorway crossing habits". LOL If someone tries to open a door for me, my hand is out like a Heisman Trophy running back an inch or two away from the door in case they release it at the wrong time, which they usually do if you take your eyes off them.
Probably four times out of five, if someone over here opened a door for me, they would release it before I got through, and it would hit me in the elbow, upper arm, or ribs. I am as certain as I can be this was not intentional, but it does seem to be habitually unintentional and the timing is perfectly coincidental to when I take my eyes off them and look straight ahead. Bam!
This has been done by doormen in 3 star hotels and lower (closed it on the luggage), the girls in the
qi pao's who open the doors at nicer-than-junky restaurants, "friends", employers, and students the least often. During maybe the first four years I was here, it kept catching me off-guard because it's so under my radar, but the last time it happened I swore it would be
the last.
Has anyone else experienced this?
I have noticed that a lot of Chinese people like to squeeze through doorways with as little effort of opening the door as possible for themselves and maybe that's the underlying cause. And maybe natives instinctively know this and are not expecting what I'm expecting—that opening a door means keeping it open until the person passes all the way through it—so they never get hit.
Yesterday, as I got off the elevator with my bike, there was a man with a large dolly full of concrete for a refurb somewhere upstairs. Since he was of course already coming onto the elevator before I could get off, and Newton's laws being what they are, he had to back up with his cart/dolly and let me off with my bike before he could get on. After I exited, I was standing there by the elevator door, pressing the button to keep them from closing on the man and his cart/dolly as he entered, but he would have absolutely none of it. He politely refused to allow me to hold it for him and did not attempt to enter the elevator until I backed up and let him hold the button.
How many bizarre behaviors and petty safeguards am I going to have programmed into me before I leave the Middle Kingdom? If we add this one about doors to the daily necessity of watching out for people who are walking left and looking right, then we're two-thirds into a "Three Stooges" routine.
Last edited by Michael on Wed Nov 30, 2011 2:01 am, edited 1 time in total.