Follow Up About The Certificates/Chinese Cultural Info

Several of you have asked why they didn't simply stop handing me certificates if I wasn't supposed to be handing them out, and laughed at me instead.

I am not being facetious at all when I say, TIC. This Is China. We say this all the time here. Things don't make sense or have any sense of logic from an American cultural point of view, and you'll go crazy if you try. So you just say "TIC" and move on.

My opinion? The certificate girl was freaked out she was helping a foreigner.  I often underestimate how nervous they get around foreigners. And she wasn't "in charge" so she didn't know what to do when I didn't stop after 4. (She was holding the entire stack.) If you are not the boss here, you don't get to make any decisions. I am sure she was expecting me to stop after 4, and when I didn't, she didn't have any power to do anything about it. So she kept handing them to me and let me keep going.

I know that sounds strange, but that's how things are here.

China is extremely culturally insular. 95% of the population shares the same racial and cultural background. So I think they just often forget we have no idea what their 'norms' are. No one explained to me what was expected of me because it didn't occur to them I wouldn't know. This is extremely different from America culture, where we don't make that assumption because we live with a lot of diversity, whether religious, cultural, racial, etc.

I could have asked her, or someone else, "Why did you do that? Why did you let people laugh at me instead of telling me what to do and fixing it?" But that would have been criticism coming from a foreigner, which would be a serious loss of face for them. So either I lose face by being laughed at, or they lose face when I criticize them. It's a bigger deal to them than it is for me, so I took one for the team.

That's the best I can explain it.

But I still wish she wouldn't have asked me that on camera.