re: #610 Guanxi88

I’m awash in Chinese here, for professional reasons. Surrounded by a large group of mostly mainlanders working for a mostly Taiwanese leadership. Mainlanders - eh, more or less atheists. Taiwanese - Christians to a man, if you ask them; confucian to the core if you watch them.

They always go on and on about this kinda stuff. Of course, no one believes it, they say, but a lot of people do, and since they make their plans based on these forecasts, it’s important for them to know what these forecasts are. It’s a funny and convoluted way of confirming the accuracy of a system the validity of which you deny.

Isn’t it fun being one of the few “round eyes” in the group?//
I felt (most of the time) like a very small fish in a bowl of very large fish and one wrong word or miss step could spell the end of me. Needless to say the philosophy lessons we took did help me feel a little less uncomfortable and helped me look at our situation with less intimidated eyes. Now the lessons in Chinese didn’t help a bit and were a huge FLOP! If some of the younger members hadn’t gone out of their way to make friends with us we would have been relegated to a very small corner of the room and totally ignored.