Presentation went over really well. Ended up speaking for twenty or so minutes due to questions/answers (about half of which were fielded in chinese! booya!) about all sorts of social-buying related stuff. I asked my boss at the end of it if I was understandable through the broken grammar and questionable vocab and she told me that she got 80% of it, more or less. I’m willing to believe that this was genuine because one of the most endearing parts (at least to me) of Chinese culture is the propensity to be very blunt the vast majority of the time. Especially with anyone who isn’t a very young person from a big city, there generally aren’t personal topics that people stay away from, and people tend to be extremely inquisitive or direct to a point that westerners sometimes see as prying or rude. While this is sometimes a bit awkward — the best exercise we ever did in Chinese was the “deflect-the-way-too-private question” drill — it also means that you can count on people to be basically honest, most of the time. I kinda think that’s worth the trade off.
Note: the “personal/private” is very important here. It’s actually an interesting situation — generally, the same people who will gladly ask about your income, marital status, age, and sexual orientation without batting are an eye are precisely the same people who will avoid conversation about the government, taiwan, the falun gong, and tiananmen (man, if there was ever a list to get your blog blocked by the chinese, there it is) like the plague — and vice versa. Younger people tend to be politically very open and outspoken but are becoming a little more western-minded in terms of personal privacy. While I think the former is fantastic, I see the the latter as a bit of a shame because the I-could-care-less, no-BS approach to conversation fits in so perfectly with the rest of the culture; it’s sad to see that start to fade.
All this to say that the same cultural force that drove a nice middle-aged lady across the street from the hotel where I lived in August to inform Dan and I (completely unprompted) that, because we lived in the same place, she suspected that were probably gay would equally compel my boss to tell me precisely what percentage of my garbled mandarin she could comprehend. Although to be fair, being way too kind with regard to foreigners trying to speak Chinese is far and away the most common white lie that gets told, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Anywho. The speech went as good as I coulda hoped, and I’m looking for a new thing to start working on.

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