Noise in China - a lesson in patience
As I write, a man and his friends on the table next to me are performing what my university dorm friends used to call 'the wall of harsh'.
The Wall of Harsh was something that built up slowly, mostly on boring nights in front of the TV. One person would start by irregularly tapping a glass, quickly followed by another person clearing their throat. Someone else would tap their foot, and the cacophony would build up into an irresistibly annoying wall of harsh, grating sounds until someone finally cracked and shouted for the aural torture to stop.
In the past 4-5 years living here in China, noise has been one of the hardest things to adapt to in China. In the UK, we aspire to peace, quiet and at the least, pleasant or harmonious noises - birds singing, kids playing, the wind gently brushing the leaves in the trees. In China, stinging and unpleasant noise forms a backdrop to life that (perhaps across all Asia) the locals manage to simply block out.
From my time here, I remember a few standout examples:
- Watching a magical sunrise on the peak of Huangshan only to be interrupted by a man belting out opera songs on his own.
- Waking up at 4am to catch a plane and watching a street sweeper intentionally setting off bike alarms (I guess to break the silence)
- A quiet moment of introspection staring at a tiger at Fuzhou zoo broken by parents encouraging their kids to shout at the top of their lungs and bang the tiger's windows.
- The bus yesterday, with the onboard TV blaring out one set of pop music, the radio also turned on playing classical music, and an old man sitting next to me singing 1950's songs to himself.
- A coffee shop playing the same 'Hotel California' cover version on repeat for 2 hours.
- The organisers of an event in my housing area testing the speaker system at 7am on a Sunday (the event was due to start at 8pm that night)
I think it's both an interesting and an annoying feature of life here - in China, an absence of noise is undesirable and distracting. Something must fill the void, whether it's music on repeat, or mechanical noises. Perhaps it's a long-standing cultural thing, or perhaps it's a feature of the last 50-60 years of the Communist-inspired breakdown of public and private, but noise is considered an essential part of enjoyment.