Fr Hector Suano gives us an idea of the difficulties of working in China today.
Place
China is huge. My sense of space expanded when I stayed there and travelled in some of the provinces.
Its expanse is so wide that the geographic and climatic differences of the north and south of China vary tremendously. By train, it takes days to get from the southernmost to the northernmost parts, even longer from the easternmost to the westernmost areas of China. China is so large it is impossible to have a sense of the entire place. It feels like living in a big town where the only place you know is the house in which you are staying. Quite unsettling.
People
The population of China is about 1.5 billion. While they enjoy the idea that a greater number means greater power, they also feel its burden. Their great number is the main cause of the nagging anxiety they feel. In this massive population, opportunities seem always few.
They are almost always compelled to compete on every level, circumventing rules when tolerated. Competition may be civil at a surface level but can be intensely entrenched at a deeper level. A foreigner who wants to live and find work in China has to have exceptional skill and talent to ride the tide of this massive culture of competition.
Language
Mandarin Chinese is probably one of the most difficult languages to learn in the world. The spoken language is tonal, its script system a modified sketching of thousands of images in the natural world. To learn it well, one needs to have a good musical ear, an enhanced pictographic memory, and a total dedication and love for the difficult.
Once the fundamentals are overcome, one still has to massively expand one's vocabulary to gain mastery of modern Chinese only to learn afterwards that having some knowledge of the classical Chinese language is needed to engage in a meaningful way and to be taken seriously by the Chinese. This is a humbling and long exercise taking years of practice. While this exercise may not only be for the elite it is certain that learning the Chinese language is not for the fainthearted.
Culture
Chinese culture is fundamentally agricultural. Land is at its core. It is highly valued and fiercely protected. Human relations and values are ordered in accordance to the life-demands of the land and its seasons. Chinese history has many stories of how land was lost or gained, and how seasons reveal dangers and opportunities. It is in these stories that heroes and enemies are revealed, countrymen and foreigners are defined, sages and fools are known.
The Chinese reach agreement and settle disputes using common sense rationality but may express it in the most indirect manner.
It is my opinion that in the long course of their history, land as central to the life of the Chinese has either expanded to include or has metamorphosed to become the self. Self here is not defined as meaning the individual alone. To the Chinese, the idea of self is strongly identified with the idea of family.
While Filipinos and Chinese share many values in common and are at ease in using indirect discourse, I still find the Chinese too reserved, perhaps an expression of their xenophobic tendency. It normally takes a long time for the Chinese to trust a foreigner. If it takes years for a Chinese to trust another Chinese, how long does it take for him to trust a foreigner, and how much longer still a western foreigner?
It took me years of just accompanying my contacts and acquaintances to gain a little of their trust. Projects commonly planned and implemented between the Chinese and the foreigner may not be true signs but could be taken as building blocks of mutual trust.
Columbans
When I was still in China, we Columbans were few and scattered, numbering 15. Most of us learned Chinese, though at varying stages and intensities. Only a few, the younger members, finished degrees in the Chinese language. We were thinly spread in China, but about half in small groups, consisting of members either studying or in administration work and the rest were teaching in schools. In the mainland, we were in schools most of the year, and we met three times a year for meetings, almost always in Hong Kong.
Lastly, I can summarize my China experience this way. I feel like that small stroke that represents a human being in a beautiful Chinese shan-shui painting. I am that small before the immensely overwhelming reality of China.
But that small stroke only appears meaningful in the picture because it left its former state; from just a drop in the ink dish, it rides the brush of the Chinese painter, follows the painter's movement, to arrive at its final destination, to that spot, its proper place in the whole picture.
Hector Suano was ordained in 2000. He spent nine years in China as a student and priest and is assigned in the Philippines at present.