China - Week 50 (8/12-13): Picking up Coins and Cutting People Loose

I took a bit of time off from other things this weekend and made a few changes to narom.net. For one thing, my blog and FAQ now integrate into the “google” look of the rest of my site a little better. I’m tempted to change the look of that graphic, but for now I think the “homage to google” will work.

I have also posted up a few new FAQs and started using the “pages” feature on wordpress to update my “ about” and “ site updates” pages. So hopefully those will be more current and, I suppose, you can RSS them now to keep up with the latest changes on my site.

I’ve also added another page called “ Picking up Coins” which is basically a list of random coincidences that happen in my life from time to time. As time goes on the list should prove to be interesting reading. Come to think of it, I originally saw something similar on John Cooper’s Planet Z website. (For those of you who don’t know him, he’s old school Wushu West.)

As for this past weekend, nothing really amazing happened. On Saturday I went to the gym in the morning and ran into my trainer, Evans, as I was leaving. She mentioned that I still had some personal training sessions left which I paid for in the spring and she would text me how many later that day. It turns out I have 7 more sessions of training with her. I think I will space them out, once a week, after my move — probably Saturdays in the afternoon. With upcoming travels and what-not, I will probably have enough to stretch through a fair part of the fall.

I also had dinner with an old friend, Eri, who used to work at Yorimichi, the Japanese restaurant around the corner. I haven’t seen her in a while and she’s actually gone home to visit Wuhan twice since our previous encounters. These days she is studying computer stuff and Japanese. Her Japanese is actually quite good — much better than mine — which is a result of working at a Japanese restaurant and talking to customers in Japanese all day for a year. She has been watching “One Piece” and asked me to hook her up with more episodes. I told her I could do that after my move next week.

I have also been having some interesting situations with a few women I know here in Shanghai. There are one or two people I’ve gone on some dates with over the past year, and while I haven’t really found anyone that I’m interested in having a major relationship with, I have met some nice people. The interesting thing about the culture here (as far as man-woman relations go) is that it seems that there are all sorts of things that happen here which don’t really happen in the U.S. (or at least, as far as my own personal experiences go). Most of these are just cultural traits and I don’t really have anything negative to say about them, but one thing in particular is somewhat interesting.

In the past I’ve found that, even if you break off a relationship with someone, you can still remain polite friends (or possibly even good friends) after the “break up”. But in China, when trying to break off a relationship with someone, I’ve found that any subsequent efforts on my part to communicate politely with them as friends gets misconstrued as an interest in forming a relationship with the other person. Even an SMS message saying “hello, how are you?” can be seen as “Oh, he must like me!” or “I guess he is still interested in me”, and it ends up causing even more sticky situations. I’ve had more than a few conversations with Jia Jia about these things. Her feeling, as a Chinese woman, is that the woman will keep thinking that there is a possibility for something to happen as long as you give her reason to believe it and the only sure-fire way to make sure she knows that nothing will happen is to stop all communication OR to be brutally mean and honest with her.

Well, I don’t like being mean and telling someone cruel things just to get them off my back doesn’t seem very fair. But on the other hand, it doesn’t seem like there is much choice sometimes.

I should also mention that this really only applies when the woman is still interested. If the woman wasn’t interested in me much to begin with or there wasn’t really any mutual interest, then usually there is no problem. But there are two people in particular who were more interested in being with me than I was with them.

In any case, it basically came down to me having to cut them loose completely — even as friends. And it occurred to me that Li Qiang used to tell me that after she would break up with a boyfriend she would have absolutely no contact with them whatsoever post-breakup. I used to think it was strange, but now I’m beginning to understand why. And so, with a bit of resignation and discomfort, I told the two people who kept trying to start things up (or misconstrue my efforts to be just friends) that I was not interested in them in that way (which I had told them before to no avail) and that I would be unable to remain friends with them in the future.

The effect has been somewhat interesting. One of them has (so far) been okay with it and has not contacted me, but the other one has been displaying some curious behavīor. After telling her I would not be replying to her SMS messages anymore, she would send me a few on the first day of the “Why are you doing this?” variety. A few days later it was of the “you’re a bad person” variety. and after a bit of silence I got another message indicating that she wanted me to add money to her phone. And then most recently she’s been trying to make me jealous by telling me about other foreigners who are really interested in her and how nice they are to her. She will sort of contradict herself too: One one hand she says “I miss you and I know you’re a good person” and in another message she will write “I have lots of guys around me all the time and I think you are no good”.

There isn’t much I can do about it. I just try to see the big picture and realize that she is grasping at straws and that any effort I make to communicate with her is going to be seen in the wrong light — and that in the long run it’s better for her to be angry at me right now and deal with this discomfort than it would be for her to go through a future filled with (to her at least) mixed messages and confusing signals. While my first inclination is to be friends, sometimes it isn’t always possible.

I suppose what this has taught me is that it’s very important to pick the people you have interest in with care — because whenever you put yourself out there and ask someone else to do the same, the mutual vulnerability can cause difficulties down the line. This isn’t to say you should never take a risk — life is really all about taking risks from time to time, emotional or otherwise — but I would rather not hurt another person just to fulfill my own curiosity. It is certainly possible to ascertain another person’s compatibility with yourself without starting a relationship with them and I’m going to have to exercise that particular skill a bit more in the future.

In any case, those are things that have been bouncing around my head this weekend.

Oh, and yesterday I had the most amazing cheeseburger I’ve ever had in China. It was possibly the best burger I’ve ever had period, but it’s hard to say since it’s been so long since I’ve had a decent burger in America. But, now I know what to do if I’m ever in serious cravings for some delicious junk-food.

It’s MOnday morning right now and I’m about to start in on a marathon of work for the TVCC website. I have held off going to the gym today so that I can spend some more time working and also because I might have to run out to meet up with Jia Jia at any moment. She is possibly leaving for Beijing tonight to meet up with Cameron (who is now living/working there for at least the next 6 months) so I may not see either of them for quite a while. In any case, if I have time tonight I might run to the gym for some quick cardio, but we’ll see what happens.