Nag Nag Nag, Yak Yak Yak, teachers getting on your back…
To the Swiss-educated David Feng, this is probably too old school. After all, he was being yelled at, shouted at, and yak yak yakketed at back already in school. The nagging continues, with mom yelling at David to get off the Net at around 11 PM ever day. (Traditional family practises, apparently, don’t mix very well with the virtual world online.)
Yet the yak yak yakketing continues online in the private (ahem; we mean the “mentionable” bit, lest you think otherwise) realm of David Feng — to be precise, in his Twitter World. Having passed his 5,000th tweet just today, it’s no wonder that bits and bobs of paint on his MacBook is coming off. (The thing’s been put to excess use; read: tweeting.)
So back with this tweeting and yakketing. There’s one thing about China that kind of gets to your fellow co-blogger: it’s this bit of laoli laodao or simply laodao (唠叨), or the average nag. The laodao is a special kind of nag that’s present only in superiors (be they the corporate boss or the average parent), and it can get that bit annoying.
The laodao bit, in fact, has gotten so “widespread” that teachers skip over entire lessons in class in the name of fearing laodao. Thus, “We’re skipping Lesson 5 because I don’t want to laodao over it” is a much-heard refrain in the average Beijing university.
Laodao, too, although in a less “commanding” or “big-guy-nags-small-guy” manner, is omnipresent in the roads of Beijing. The average bus conductor mumbling incomprehensible Beijing Chinese (and at that, we’d like to see how the rumored-”equally-indecipherable” Jay Chow fares with the average bus lady) can also be thought of a bit of a laodao.
So what’s the big gap in terms of laodao? First, laodao is more common in China than you think it to be. And we mean that there’s, to some extents, a certain irritating factor to all this laodao-ing. On a very personal level, I have yet to see the average Western parent get laodao-ish to his or her kids (except for the always-longing-for-absolute-precision Swiss parent, probably).
The question, of course, is why this laodao “problem” (if it can be called one, that is) is present in the first place. It turns out that Chinese society is a family-based society, and the whole thing can’t be made any clearer than in the layout, in fact, of the average Beijing compound. The traditional compound would be where at least an extended family would live in — see, that’s another sign that Chinese society is very much family-oriented. Granny is a weekend-only sight in the West; in the East, she’s with you every day in a big, extended family. And along with the family effect comes the need to tell all members of the family how to do things the right way (or how to “behave” to the little ones).
There’s little you can do about the whole laodao phenomenon in China except to (pretty much) accept it at face value — and learn to do things in ways that won’t land you in the laodao mess. For yours truly, that means being offline at around 11 PM, for a start…
Because the laodao-ing is supposed to be there to help you (although it can at times provoke quite a different reaction).
