We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto....

We're now in Zhaojue. Yay.

Some quick notes about cultural differences. It finally dawned on me today what it is about cultural differences that are so different. There's a redundant statement. Perhaps I should say difficult to understand. It took a statement that our team lead had made about traffic behaviour in Chengdu. Since the city grew a lot from people coming over from the countryside to find jobs, many of the people just drive the way they always drove. That is, a countryside driving mentality. There is no need to have a complicated traffic system in rural areas, so they instead just take their incumbent driving behaviour and scale it up to work in a big city. There's no need to learn a new system. Just apply what you've always known.

It works here, because that's how everyone has always done it. No need for complicated right-of-way rules or traffic lights. The rules for driving in China seem like they can be summed up in two statements:

1. Don't kill or hurt anyone.
2. Don't damage anything.

As long as you can figure that out, anything goes. That's why I can cross the street in the middle of traffic and not be worried about being hit by a car. Of course, that doesn't mean I have the right to act stupid. What it does mean is that Chinese drivers are actually very considerate at their core driving ethos. If I may call it that.

Now you take Chinese drivers from Chengdu and transplant them into Vancouver, you'd have people screaming at them every minute. That's because the system's different in Vancouver, as is the way people learn how to drive. I might be able to sum it up in these statements:

1. The law is a system designed to protect people.
2. If you don't follow the law, you will be driving unpredictably.
3. If you drive unpredictably, you will be endangering other people. This is bad.

Isn't that interesting? If it's true. Two completely different ways of thinking about driving, both aiming for the same results, but completely incompatible with each other. In one system, anything goes, as long as you follow the basic rules. In the other system, people depend on complex rules to create a safe environment. And then when one sees a foreign driver in their environment, they curse that driver as an extremely incompetent driver.

Which leads me to my next point. If two systems have the same goals, but different ways of reaching them, can they really consider each other bad systems? I guess my point is that I've concluded that social systems cannot reflect on morality. A Chinese driver most likely does care about human life, even if a Vancouverite may not see it that way. Rather, the statement on morality is made by the goals of the system, not the system itself. Individual components in a particular system may be questionable, but those questions should be asked in the context of the overall system, intent, and decision-making processes for implementation. What made the Final Solution in World War II so horrendous was not what was happening, but rather, the goals that the Final Solution tried to obtain, and the premises that were used to construct those goals. For both Chinese driving and Canadian driving, both the goals and the premises on which they are built are sound, even though they vastly differ in the details.

Maybe I should have written this in my personal blog. It seems a bit weird for this one.... :)

On another note, we are finally in Zhaojue. We spent a few days in Chengdu for orientation and lesson planning. We took an overnight train ride to Xichang, and immediately got onto a bus/van for the drive to Zhaojue. Long day, but we're feeling pretty good about how things are going. Nobody's gotten sick yet! Had a meeting today, and my heart just breaks about some of the things here. The economic situation, the rocky people soil, everything. Ask big daddy to send us some good brain transplants on how to take care of the kids. We have less kids than we expected. Unfortunate, but also fortunate. We'll be able to give each a lot more individual attention now.

Bobby