How Much Do You Make? The Chinese Art of Asking Everything, and How to Answer It
On the drive in from Capital Airport, the taxi driver asks how long you've been in China, then where you're from, and then — in the exact tone you'd use to ask whether it's cold out — how much you make a month. It's the question that freezes most foreigners. In Germany it lives between a tax office and a bank; in China it arrives from a man you will never see again. Stranger still is what follows: if you don't answer, he isn't offended, he answers for you — six or seven thousand a month, enough to get by. He isn't inspecting you. He's trading. In From the Soil (1947), Fei Xiaotong described Chinese relationships as a differential mode of association: you are the center, and everyone else is a ripple pushed out from a stone dropped in water, each ring further out and thinner, while Western society is closer to a bundle of firewood with clear lines between bundles. One boundary is a rubber band; the other is a drawn line. So what you may ask depends on which ring you stand in — the same 'how old are you' is care from a grandmother and rudeness from someone you met three days ago. Chinese people ask strangers very little; the questions arrive the moment you enter someone's radius, because the asking is itself the act of pulling you inward. 'Privacy' is a young word in Chinese, translated in through Japanese, and the legal line came late: no privacy provision in 1986, independent status in the 2009 Tort Liability Law, the word written into Article 110 of the 2017 General Provisions, a definition in Article 1032 of the 2021 Civil Code. Young Chinese are anxious about these questions too — Spring Festival survival guides and 'boundary sense' are annual fixtures — yet the same people ask new colleagues where they're from and what they pay in rent. A society is renegotiating its own boundaries, and foreigners have landed in the middle of it. Includes a three-layer answer method, five Chinese lines you can copy directly, where counter-questions are safe and where they aren't, and three foreigners' very different outcomes in Beijing, Chengdu and Shanghai.
