I don't like that I'm making a habit of apologizing for the amount of time between posts. This time, however, I have a decent enough excuse: a recent news item informed me that Qinghai has the slowest internet speed in all of China. I have been trying for days to open weebly. I finally managed to today.
Anyway, on to the post: the title of this post is true. I caught myself saying this to a friend the other day, and realizing that this is the kind of sentence that really makes no sense in American English. How on earth could there be any causal link between my nephew being hospitalized and the amount of milk in our home? Well, it just so happens that out here there is a logic to the sentence. While people in America give flowers and hallmark cards to people in hospitals, people out here (at least in Western China, I can't speak for other places) give milk and fruit. This is a much more practical gift than flowers or hallmark cards. When I discussed the differences with my wife, she said: what good are flowers? There's more to this, however. In the States, hospitals are more or less full service places for those unlucky enough to need to stay in them. People in the USofA also have insurance and credit, which allows people to (at least temporarily) delay the full impact of the high costs of healthcare. In Western China, neither of these exist, all people in need of medical advice must pay for the tests before they can have them done. Not being able to defer these costs means the burden on these families is extremely heavy, particularly because one nurse remarked that most of the hospitalized come from poorer families. Hospitals here also don't exactly provide food for people who are ill. Hospital food has a bad reputation in the states, but at least they serve it. In light of this, I suppose it makes perfect sense that people should give milk and fruit to the families of ill people. They are (supposed to be) guaranteed to be healthy, and so may perfect sense as gifts for convalescents.
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About TimAs you can see elsewhere on this webpage, I conduct research on ethnic minorities in western China. This blog offers semi-academic musings on the minutiae of daily life out here--the sort of information otherwise destined for footnotes. Categories |