More from the danwei

I'm currently at my computer in the office. I have almost nothing to do. I learnt a sentence in Chinese yesterday - 抢打出头鸟，the gun shoots the bird who pops his head up. This was said by a colleague in response to my suggestion that I ask someone to give me some translation to do. I was working on the idea that doing nothing is not the most optimal of my faculties, and that doing translation is something I actually want to do. I don't think he really understood that. I get the impression the ideal working day for a typical low-level office worker in China is to have nothing to do, leaving them free to chat on QQ (chinese msn) all day, with an occassional break for sleeping. I also get the feeling that using initiative is seen as the equivalent of veering off course, so better to sit down and shut up, just follow the middle way.

This might have something to do with something I noticed recently. People like to call other stupid. In schools, you won't get a huge amount of encouragement for doing something different or positive, but if you get something wrong you'll get shouted out and called 'stupid' - 笨 ben, as well as losing face in front of your 60 other classmates. In fact, in the local paper this morning there was an article about how a teacher hit a 7 year old kid for getting a maths question wrong, damaging his kidneys (although I imagine this is an isolated incident). I remember once last year I was on the campus at university studying, and at the table was a mother teaching her young son English. Not once did I hear any words of encouragement, only a shrill 'ben!' everytime he got his fifteen and fifty mixed up. Chinese girls also find it amusing to call their boyfriends 'ben'.

So maybe me asking for something to do is just plain 'ben'.