Why It's HARD to Have Chinese Friends

so is it difficult to make friends in China well this guy's my friend I'm just joking the short answer is yes but there's a lot of things I need to delve into to kind of explain now I have lived across the entire country and lots of different provinces in regions and my experiences have led me to have a multitude of different kinds of friends here in China and of course you got to make friends when you come to China I mean why would you move here otherwise right now one of the most common questions I actually get on my channel is how easy or difficult is it to actually make friends in China now there's all kinds of psychological principles and theories based on intercultural friendship and you know what's different about your culture and what's going to be difficult to learn from their culture but that's not what I'm going to talk about me to talk about my actual experience living in China and making friends now the first and most important barrier to making friends is absolutely the language barrier now that makes sense of course if you come to China you're probably going to need to learn Chinese to be able to talk to people and make friends but that's not my point what I mean is that if you come here you're immediately going to kind of succumb to this lifestyle of hanging out with other expats or English speaking Chinese people now what's wrong with that English speaking Chinese people now the problem is if you get approached by a Chinese person who speaks English I'm going to guarantee you 99% of the time they're choosing you as a free English lesson they see your white face or they see that you're a foreigner and they assume that they can learn English for free now that's a big problem because these people tend to exhibit certain personality traits I like to call them a language rapist here's an example of a normal conversation that you might have if you get off the plane here in China with an English speaking Chinese person that approaches you hi I like you I see you a velly velly hen sir and a little fat okay thanks I think you teaching me English I teach you Chinese it's good idea sure you come my hometown I will be your guide where is your hometown in China yeah we're in China I mean we're in China my hometown have and durations snake you can have a try it's so funny [Music] now of course it's more comfortable to speak your own language this is how it is right the problem is I see a lot of situations where these language rapists will approach you and you think it's friendly and you think that you're going to get along because you can understand each other but the problem is if people are approaching you just because you're foreign or just because you speak English it usually quickly devolves into a one-sided relationship and that becomes a big problem now here's my advice to get over this not every Chinese person that speaks English is some sort of evil vampire that wants to suck out your sweet sweet yingwan get me but my advice is to basically when you get to China try to learn Chinese as quickly as possible the thing as we learn Chinese you will be able to judge someone's character a lot better than in English if you find people that have the same hobbies as you and you can speak their native language you'll probably have a more natural relationship for that person their trait of English speaking Chinese people and I'm talking about the ones that you know prey on foreigners that basically come here to practice their English is it usually that they're social outcasts now that sounds a bit harsh but what I mean is that I found a lot of these people that latch on to foreigners or their foreign teachers or try to practice English with other foreigners are the type of people that don't have friends in their native countries so you'll find out that a lot of a lot of these people don't actually have Chinese friends so I'm going to use an example I had a students from the North his name was Jackson there's a room you know thank me with Grant and Truckee and he was a Backstreet Boys Westlife loving Chinese boy just like you know anyone else but the problem is is that he didn't have any friends so what he did was laughed out of the foreign teachers and he'd have conversations with me or say at me about how Obama is awesome or how it's so sad that so-and-so US celebrity died or you know MBA is so cool what's my favorite team despite me telling him that I didn't have an interest in NBA or basketball in general he basically talks at people and what happens is a lot of these people that have you know personality traits or you know social flaws with other local people they see foreigners is this Oasis for kind of curing their loneliness or ostracization right so a lot of foreigners will find that they'll have this one student or this one person that speaks English to them very very quickly turn into a one-sided relationship and that becomes an issue so what's my advice as a foreigner trying to avoid these social outcasts and for meaning meaningful relationships with Chinese people well I'll give you my piece of advice what I found was that when I moved to Inner Mongolia I obviously didn't have any friends I was just some random white guy that showed up in the middle of China somewhere and what I decided to do was because I had lived in China and I dealt with these kind of language rapists social outcasts Thai people before was of course everyone knows that I loved motorcycles right so I thought I have to go buy a motorcycle if I shop around in the classified ads I'm bound to find other people that share my hobby lo and behold I met some of the best friends I've ever had in China and they're still my friends today because we share the same hobby it forced me to speak Chinese all the time and I developed a real natural bond with people and the cultural differences seemed to kind of melt away it seems kind of obvious that you would want to be friends with someone that shares the same hobby as you what I'm trying to say is that if you force yourself to speak the local language you're more apt to find normal people that would share the same hobbies as you and that's exactly what happened to me now the third barrier that would prevent you from making friends in China is actually the regional differences it's very apparent that China is not a homogeneous society if you ask any Chinese person they'll tell you that their town or their province or their so-and-so is completely different than other ones and no difference could be greater than the difference between north and south now I'm going to hit you with a big one I'm going to say that Cantonese people or southern people don't have friendships now that's a lot to take in but what I mean is the Western traditional idea of friendship where I like you I want to hang out with you let's hang out let's be friends does it really exist down here and it's more about a culture of connections there's a deep culture of bungeed down here and it's basically reliant on what I can do for you and what you can do for me now there's a huge divide between the north and south and this respect and I find this stereotype to be very true in Guangdong I can safely say that I don't have any close friends from this region of China in the south and this because business-savvy Cantonese people rely on an intricate network of connections that take a long time to earn someone's trust to earn someone's respect and then to be able to use them and have them use you in the future I've noticed that with my parents-in-law of notice that with all the Cantonese people I really know and my wife argues that this divide is because it usually takes some time for a Cantonese person to develop trust and they're slow to warm but at the end of the day after you get their trust you have a friend for life and you have a useful friend right now there's actually a phrase that people use down here or it could be throughout all of China and that's feel rope ano G or o Pango means a meet alcohol alcohol meet friend it sounds ridiculous but they actually define relationships or friendships that don't rely on connections or using each other as just kind of friendships that are useless and meaningless and you only drink and eat meat together now in the north it's absolutely completely different with my experience all the friends I made were northerners all the deep relationships that I had formed were with northerners and seven years into my kind of career in China all of my friends are still northerners when I lived up north we formed relationships based on bonds based on shared hobbies based on our kind of shared interests in life and each other's personalities and what I saw was a complete divide from the South where I saw southerners rich people hanging out with rich people this person hanging out with this person because they need something but my relationships in the north were based on kind of shared hobbies like I said there were poor guys there were rich guys there were shy guys they're outgoing guys but we all kind of hung out together because people were judging each other based on their character and personality traits rather than what they could get from someone now of course this is not an absolute Chinese people are individuals with their own personalities and I see the younger generation kind of getting rid of these regional divides but what my piece of advice is here is that if you're living in the south there's a lot of job opportunities where we live but the problem is is that you won't have that same kind of bro Western defined friendship with local people that you would kind of up north and I noticed that when I was living up north I had that very similar relationships with Chinese people to the point where I can't really differentiate the way I act between them and the way I act between my American friends it's that comfortable so I guess my piece of advice would be go north I'm just kidding obviously China's got a bunch of cool places to live and the cool thing is is that because China is increasingly mobile a lot of people from different provinces are moving to different cities so for example here in Guangdong in Hawaii so this little city there's a lot of northern people and I actually get along with them quite well now my best Chinese friends super Jason you might know him from other videos he's a he's a different guy he stands out in the crowd that's for sure I noticed a lot more individualism from northerners now he's actually from Inner Mongolia and the reason that we're still friends today is because despite coming from a wildly different economic background different family values different upbringing we just like hanging out with each other we have a shared interest in music and we can get along with each other without any kind of give or take necessity now I have had relationships here with people in the South where I got kind of trapped into this give or take momentum and unless you're super super savvy the foreigner always comes out on the bottom of those relationships so again not to stereotype North versus South although I find some of these stereotypes to be true the day I found northerners were much easier from a Western perspective of friendship to get along with them people in the south now this my son harsh and judgmental but I'd like to give you some advice on how to make friendships here in China it's not impossible it is difficult in some areas and you have to be a outgoing person I think that that does people a world of good when you're an outgoing foreigner that actually seeks out Chinese people because they tend to be kind of reserved if you're the one seeking out these friendships they turn out to be much more organic and natural and again sharing the same hobbies learning the language all of these are steps to avoid the expat trap of just hanging out with their students or just hanging out with other foreigners anyway thank you so much Lao inners and I will catch you on the next one so is it difficult to make friends in China well the short answer is start your car but basically a free trip I made myself laugh because I looked at your left good I didn't see this so ah three two one it's very apparent that China's not a hell of a lot I can't see you wait sit again Maggie alert get reparations you say all the time excuse me

Channel: laowhy86

Views: 748,722

Rating: 3.9284801 out of 5

Keywords: chinese friends, chinese friendship, expat, expat in china, making chinese friends, making chinese friends online, making chinese friendship, cultural differences in friendship, friendship, china, living in china, moving to china, what is it like to live in china, laowhy86, moving to china from usa, speaking chinese, speaking chinese to strangers, cultural differences between america and china, chinese culture, guanxi, connections in china, chinese people

Id: nN93Jz7N4Xw

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 11 2016