i played chicken with a chinese cabbage

Let me begin this post by saying this is my opinion and it is in no way intended to generalize or offend. Now you’re hooked, aren’t you? Well, get ready for ridiculousness because that will be the general theme.

China is a very different place, unlike any place that that I lived or visited. Even though I worked with Chinese people in England, there is a massive difference between Chinese people grouping in England and forming a small community and China (obviously). It has been a very unique time and in some respects, difficult to adjust to. There is one aspect of Chinese culture that is a bit, well, odd. I will call it the “chicken fight” mentality. I hope that are familiar with the term chicken fight. If not, let me enlighten you.

A chicken fight can be two different things, at least in what I consider a chicken fight from being a 90s kid. The first is stupid and foolhardy: jumping in a street as cars are coming toward you and see who will wait the longest before jumping out of the way. Yeah, dumb. I have no idea how that became a thing. A chicken fight can also involve four people in teams of two, each team stacked on each other’s shoulders. The goal is to push the other team down. Usually people do it in a swimming pool so that it is not that dangerous to fall over. Why it is called a chicken fight, I have no idea. I found this image on Bing (shocking, I used Bing because I’m at school and my VPN won’t work, so no Google) and loved it. I personally never used a chicken, but if you are one of those people, I commend you for your awesomeness and strangeness simultaneously because that truly is one of the weirdest things that you can do involving a live chicken. Anywho, for the purposes of this post, I will be employing the second definition.

The point of a chicken fight is to see who stays standing, to be the first one that stays up and claims triumph of strength, determination, grit, perseverance, cleverness, and fast-thinking. Maybe I’m giving too much credit to what is ultimately a push battle, but it makes things a little more exciting to use cool adjectives. Chinese culture, especially Shanghai as a big city, has this chicken fight mentality. Now you’re probably thinking that everyone is like that, and I’d agree with you, but bear with me for a few more sentences. In China, it is all about getting there first and getting out, no matter what or who is around you. It is culturally acceptable to push, prod, poke, and forcibly propel yourself through the crowd. For example, getting on the Metro can be a battle because even though you queue up, people will push on (even when there isn’t a line). If you aren’t quick to take a spot in line or move to the front when it is your turn, people will get in front of you to do it first. Walking through a crowd is the most efficient if your serpentine because you’ll get jostled. Traffic is a joke. People pull out, drive on the wrong side of the road, clog intersections, all for the sake of getting somewhere first (which ironically slows you down because it just makes the traffic worse). It is like watching one big chicken fight all of the time.

I have had similar experiences like this in Egypt, but nothing to the extent that I see it here. When I first got here, I was shocked by the blatant rudeness of all of it until I realized, it isn’t rude here. If you want to be successful as an expat here, you have to embrace the chicken fight mentality and be prepared to win if you want to cross the street, buy food, get anywhere, find a seat on the Metro, or just get on and off the Metro. It was a bit empowering at first, pushing people (not hard, but hard enough to get the point across) and feeling like I was starting to get a hang of things worked here. I was wondering if the Chinese people around me were impressed, thought I was rude, or just didn’t care that I was following suit. (Let’s be honest, probably the last one.) As of late, however, I have let this mentality get under my skin a bit and frankly, it’s annoying. I don’t like having to push to make a point or race through a door on the Metro in order to sit down. I know that is isn’t rude here, but it has been grating on my own way of thinking.

Yesterday, I went to the market that is across from the apartment compound where I live. At quarter to five in the evening, that place is hopping, so you have to forcibly get around people to buy your vegetables. In China, you don’t wait until you’re at the till to calculate how much loose veggies or fruit cost you; instead, you go to a scale someone weighs and marks that price for you. The concept of queuing at these scales doesn’t really exist, so it’s a chicken fight. If someone if there, you want to see how fast you can get your stuff on the scale because if you don’t, you’ll wait there all day.

So, there I was with a small purple Chinese cabbage, waiting at the scale for it to get weighed and marked. The man was finishing up a few different bags for a woman ahead of me and I edged closer and closer with my wee cabbage because I wanted to mark my territory as being the next in line. Out of left field came a woman bearing peppers, lettuce-like leafage, and potatoes. She too began edging and edging closer to the scale from the opposite side in order to mark that she was next in line. I made eye contact, smiled, and held my bag out over the scale as the man was marking the last bag of tomatoes. The woman, in response, held out her peppers in a countermove. Clever, but my cabbage was in a bag and much easier to handle than her un-bagged peppers.

Stop time. Release the doves. Go full Woo.

The man moved the tomatoes and I went for the scale, knowing that I had the rightful place in line. The woman held out her peppers, trying to push them into the man so he had to take them first. It was like a slow motion moment (which is silly considering these are food products in a market, but I’ll take what I can get) as I reached out to put my cabbage on the scale and the woman was focusing on the weigher man.

Clunk.

My cabbage hit the scale first. I won a chicken fight with a Chinese cabbage. It took the man all of 3 seconds to mark the price and hand it back, so it’s not like that woman had to wait too long.

As I walked away toward the much less-crowded fruit section, I was proud that I was able to claim some small triumph in my day of continually adjusting to Chinese culture and the chicken fight mentality. It is exhausting and frustrating because I have been culturally conditioned to view these things as rudeness, but it is also a wonderful way to realize that people are different and you can’t judge a culture by your own cultural standards. I had a professor once ask what is bad and good in other cultures. As the class readied responses, she stopped the class and said: “There is no good and bad in another culture. You can’t label another culture through your own cultural perspectives, just as you can’t expect people to label yours. So, there isn’t good and bad cultures, just different.”  And with different, you get to learn and experience.