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Feng Guo recently went onto Chinese game show If You Are The One, and all she got was a holiday in the Maldives and a bunch of life lessons…



So here we are. Sitting side by side on a seaplane headed for the Maldives. I glance sideways at Ben, hoping that things aren’t going to be awkward and that we can enjoy the free holiday that we won as a result of being contestants on the Australian special edition of Chinese game show, If You Are The One.

The Maldivian archipelago is located around 500km south west of the Southern tip of India and comprises of a beautiful string of 1,190 low-lying coral islands scattered across the equator in the vast Indian Ocean. Only 201 of these islands are inhabited by local people. The Maldives is a former British colony turned 100 percent Sunni Islam state. I turn to Ben, having read this fact in the travel brochure and ask him out of pure concern, “surely they have cocktails on the island?”

The seaplane slows as it circles around our island, Herathera, which is Dhiveli for “happiness,” and it is one of the most beautiful sights that I have ever seen. Herathera is a long triangular island that is surrounded by a shallow lagoon, with sand that is white and pure like diamond dust and water so clear and turquoise blue that it shimmers like an endless pool of opal gemstones. I speak with Ben in Shanghainese and he responds in Mandarin so that this way, we can practice these respective languages. The other guests on the seaplane pretend not to eavesdrop into our amusing conversation since most of them can understand, themselves being Chinese tourists. Ben reads out the greeting card on the back of the seat of the plane, which is written in Mandarin: “Dear guests, we welcome you to the Maldives and hope that you have a pleasant, safe and happy trip. Please keep in mind the following to ensure a pleasant stay on the Island: do not spit out chewing gum or spit on the ground; do not litter; do not relieve yourself in random places; do not pick your nose, pick your teeth, cough, sneeze or engage in other vulgar behaviour in front of others.”

It turns out this is a direct quote from the Guide to Civilised Tourism released by the China National Tourism Administration in September 2013. I recall a speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping during his official visit to the Maldives in September 2014, urging his countrymen as follows: “Do not leave water bottles everywhere. Do not damage coral reefs. Eat less instant noodles and more local seafood.” I wonder what is in store for us. Another twelve contestants from the mainland version of the show If You Are The One are to join Ben and me on the island.

The fact is that the number of Chinese tourists travelling abroad has ballooned in recent years, with 8.43 million Chinese tourists in 1997 to more than 100 million Chinese tourists in 2015. Sadly, however, Chinese international etiquette has not quite caught up to the travel and shopping sprees brought on by burgeoning middle-class wealth in China. As a result of this, global newspapers are often awash with stories of badly behaving Chinese tourists, and indeed the Chinese National Tourism Administration itself has even created an online blacklist that names and shames “uncivilised behaviour” by Chinese tourists travelling overseas. China’s state-run broadcaster, China Central Television, has aired a very tongue-in-cheek public service video titled Bad Panda which encourages Chinese tourists to behave better when overseas. Having been born in China and raised in Australia, I felt keen to observe my fellow contestants on the holiday from a “Western perspective.” I don’t have any mainland Chinese friends, so I thought I would spend the week in the Maldives getting to know the other contestants from the mainland show in order to try to understand a bit more about my overseas contemporaries.

First impressions

The first morning Ben and I eat breakfast prior to meeting everyone on the beach. I’m relaxing with a book, and the first thing one of the girls asks me is “are my fake eyelashes falling off?” Her eye makeup has been smudged so that a deep black line shadows her slender eyes and there is a streak of white where the glue has fallen off the plastic that she has stuck on the top of her eyelid for a “double eyelid” effect. Her face is pale – almost a translucent white – and the apples of her cheeks have a pink glow from sunburn because she has refused to wear sunscreen in order to get a tan. Another male contestant has devotedly agreed to follow her around, taking his expensive Canon EOS 1D Mark III camera into the water to take “model shots” for her. He carries it with trepidation, stepping lightly so as to not to drop it into the clear ocean amongst the fish as she twirls around in her fashion swimmers, searching for the most flattering angle for her slim white body. There aren’t many others on this part of the beach, but the few German tourists nearby look at the spectacle taking place with a quizzical eye bordering on bewilderment. She steps out of the knee deep water and approaches the rest of us with a scowl, commenting in a strong Northern Chinese accent, “I’m getting burnt and I can’t swim. I’m done with the photos so I’m going back into my room and sleeping.” The other girls follow her lead. The rest of the girls are covered up to the nines with long sleeved clothes and colourful pants and are sitting under parasols that have been pierced in a row in the sand to create a shady haven in the middle of the stunning Maldivian shoreline. I look at my watch and it says 9:00am. The warm tropical breeze flickers through my hair and I decline their invitation to join them. They gather their belongings, take some more selfies beside the palm tree that is tilted at a precarious angle, and hail down a buggy headed back to their condos.

Selfie culture

I had never witnessed anything like it – certainly not to this extent. Every five minutes throughout the entire week, each of the female and male contestants would whip out their phone and take a number of selfies before uploading them on WeChat Moments. Having a cocktail – selfie. Lying on the sand – selfie. Wading into the water – selfie. Eating lunch – selfie. Putting sunscreen on – selfie. Skin red from sunburn – selfie. I would not be surprised if they took selfies whilst sitting on the toilet. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not immune to the selfie culture; which Asian girl doesn’t like a quick selfie? I just had not witnessed anything like this my entire life, not even during trips to mainland China. There are cases of people dying from taking selfies, of selfie taking being linked to obsessive compulsive disorder and even suicide. Incredibly, more people have died taking selfies in 2015 than from shark attacks.

The next day, the mainland contestants of the show, Ben and I drift out to sea on a motor boat and get ready for our first group activity. The girls are wearing frilly cotton bikinis with skimpy lace covering and take turns taking selfies at the bow of the boat. They sit across the deck on the yacht as we charter out to the bright reefs, and reapply their lipstick so that they will look good in the underwater photographs. Some of them are wearing fake eyelashes whilst others have a full face of make up on. I watch as they struggle to put on the snorkeling mask and then pull away the wisps of hair around the sides of their face whilst at the same time not ruining the makeup that has already begun to melt in the harsh Maldivian sunlight. I am worried about their swimming abilities and I hope the following hours don’t hold a fatality. The boat anchors at the reef and we are instructed to jump off into the sea one by one. The water is warm and three to four of the Chinese contestants hold onto a life buoy as they back in, slowly taking the steps down to the water. A couple of them splutter around the sea for a bit before clinging onto the life buoy fiercely. I watch as every so often they pop their head into the water to have a look around at the fish for a few moments, before popping back up above the water. I breathe a sigh of relief.

What I learnt

The Chinese are proud, and it appears as if it is this very pride that makes them act in certain ways – whether it be pretending to swim when they clearly can’t, taking a hundred selfies to upload them and maintain their social image online, or splashing hot water onto a flight attendant’s face after being denied a seat next to a boyfriend (okay, the last one is pretty bad). “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Narcissus died from admiring his reflection in the river, and regrettably, in the case of some Chinese tourists, this Greek mythology has a rather morbidly literal application. At the Maldives themselves, nine tourists had died snorkelling in 2013, most of them Chinese nationals.

On the flip side, I come to discover the generous side of the Chinese contestants we holiday with. They make sure to tip $1USD per person at each meal, because they had read that the workers supplement their low wages through tips. They look out for each other and try to reach a group consensus before making any decisions. Quite often Ben and I were the selfish ones, going off to engage in activities such as water skiing whilst the rest of the group stuck together. I thought to myself, so what if they like to take a lot of selfies, more so than the average? Newly-moneyed, cosmopolitan and open China is highly appearances-based. “I have to do it,” one mainland girl explains to me, “because otherwise my WeChat friends will think that I am dull and uninteresting.” She posts another four photos of herself jumping on the shoreline with a Chinese caption to her WeChat Moments before flippantly telling me, “what else am I supposed to do in the Maldives? It is not like I can go shopping here.” Touché.

Living through WeChat

And what of this WeChat? As it stands, over 60 percent of WeChat users report opening the app more than 10 times daily and 25 percent of users check WeChat more than 30 times per day. Four years after its launch, the China-based instant messaging app has around half a billion active users and functions as both a social and business connector for people with an account. It is an all-encompassing, streamlined app that allows users to video call, voice chat, web chat, group chat, “shake” for new friends, “look around” for new friends, “drift bottle” for new friends, and socially connects with other apps. You can think of it as Facebook, Skype, WhatsApp, Messenger, PayPal and Tinder all wrapped up in one.

Imagine how easy it is to fall down the WeChat rabbit hole, constantly updating your status and uploading photos of yourself in different social settings, while never actually being present in the moment. Indeed, the average amount of time spent on WeChat per day is 40 minutes, and statistics show that there are some people in China who spend a mind-boggling 24 hours per day in WeChat! Perhaps this article is a comment on the all-consuming pervasiveness of such applications. Let’s face it, if they didn’t exist, perhaps my fellow contestants wouldn’t feel compelled to engage in embarrassing photo-taking behaviour and get dolled up to pretend to go swimming. Or am I the one who is wrong for judging them in the first place? Either way, it is like wading through murky water, traversing the cultural differences between the Chinese and the rest of the world, and mobile app services such as WeChat add a whole other layer of complexity. This is particularly so, with the pressure for users to keep their online account up to date and to “keep up with the Joneses” – in this case, the other 650 million WeChat users who are constantly updating their profile.

China is changing. It is undergoing rapid growth and her culture is being overhauled, remade and remodelled, and the very means by which this process occurs and the tools that its citizens use unavoidably end up greatly shaping the thinking of the generation. It is a good thing that China is opening up to the world, but at what cost, when all of its young people are engrossed in their phone using apps like WeChat all the time? There are only so many sunsets one can experience, especially in the Maldives.

Sydney Ideas and Confucius Institute present a live panel discussion with seven contestants of the Australian special editions of If You Are The One on March 8, 2016 at 6pm. Register for free at http://whatson.sydney.edu.au/events/published/sydney-ideas-and-confucius-institute-if-you-are-the-one-forum