How difficult is it for foreigners to make real friends with Chinese?

[FennySH]

I am sure the forum is to help everyone solve some problems related to China/Chinese language, but recently I have a problem that is bothering me more and more, as a Chinese.

 

Many foreign students have told me in the past that it is difficult for them to make friends in China. Of course their Chinese colleagues or neighbors are friendly to them and would say hello in the elevator.

From my experience, most of my students’ Chinese level is around HSK4. We can talk about some topics about the world/human beings. Of course, if they talk to me in Chinese and English, we can communicate more smoothly. But when it comes to real friends, friends with whom we can talk about in-depth topics, there are very few or almost no friends.

 

The beginning of a cross-cultural friendship is especially difficult.

I usually get to know my students in the first class and we become friends later.

But recently some foreigners in local chat groups added me as a WeChat friend, and we started chatting casually. I find it difficult to find some agreement between us, and I'm usually the impatient one.

 

Question 1: They don’t speak Chinese, don’t want to learn Chinese, and are very unfamiliar with local life. If I ask about their hobbies, they will only answer, oh, I like swimming, no more. If I ask how the family are, they say I am married/I am single, no more. If I ask how the job is, they say I'm a student/I'm an engineer, no more. How should I continue the topic?

Question 2: I think our chat is awkward, so I paused the conversation. But they would continue to send greeting messages, which are very abstract (to the Chinese).

examples:

Good morning my dear beautiful. 
Whenever an unexpected joy passes through your Heart and suddenly you smile for no reason, 
Remember, someone somewhere is wishing you to be Happy Always.
Have a Splendid Day Today. 

 

Good morning my dear beautiful. 
Every positive thought, is a silent prayer, which will change our life. Enjoy your Sunday. 

 

Seriously?

The point is, EVERYDAY, FOR TWO WEEKS.

 

I tried to politely tell them (yes, more than one person) that I had no interest in any of this and could we just chat? They still stick to this style.
This week I couldn't bear it anymore and said some rejection words directly, and then one of them said that I was too judgmental.

I think there may be something wrong with me. After all, my native language is not English, and my personality is very straightforward.But I still insist that there is no way to make friends with Chinese people by chatting like this, unless the Chinese people have some intention towards them. I have been exposed to foreigners at work for many years, but this is the first time I have encountered this situation. Since I started to work independently this year, I also started to feel that dealing with foreigners was not ( I could say easy) like before in school (with the selected foreign students). 

Someone here please help me with it, like, how do foreigners begin some friendship with adults? Do foreigners have any uncomfortable feelings when you try to make friends with Chinese, apart from some privacy issues？What stopped you from making friends with them?

[Moshen]

Answering as an American who once worked in China for a year: The "foreigners" who are communicating with you seem to me quite strange and not like anyone I've ever met, except perhaps some evangelical Christians who believe that it's their god-given mission to spread their version of peace and love on Earth.  Are these people religious?

 

If "They don’t speak Chinese, don’t want to learn Chinese, and are very unfamiliar with local life" then I am not sure why you would want to be friends with them or them be friends with you.

 

Friendship has to be grounded in some sort of common interest, whether that's practical (cooking, Tai Chi) or philosophical (what's the meaning of life).  Of all the people I meet as an adult, I feel a spark of possible friendship with less than 1 out of 20.  So in my view, don't be upset if you simply need to write off some people as not good candidates for your friendship.

[Flickserve]

I’m an overseas Chinese living in Hong Kong. I grew up in the UK only speaking English. I’m totally English educated to postgraduate level.
 

My fluency is Cantonese is quite good. Putonghua is difficult.

 

 I find it quite hard to make friends with local HK Chinese because my fluency in Cantonese is not deep enough. There’s a language barrier. 
 

I don’t have many non-Chinese friends either even though there are no communication problems with English. The few I am friends with tend to be from school or university. I remember going to a father day party for my kid at a kindergarten. This one happened to have many non-Chinese. I was one of two Chinese fathers in a group of maybe 20. Not one of those non-chinese fathers made an effort to say a few words to me even though I introduced myself and tried to make conversation. 
 

So who are my friends? Mainly it’s those with a similar background - many overseas second third generation chinese. My drinking buddies are those from my profession where we also have team sports.

 

 

There’s nothing different to “foreigners” making friends to Chinese people or any other people. You find the group you’re most comfortable with. It tends to be with those who have had a similar experience or similar interests. 
 

As for native mandarin speaking friends from mainland, I have very few. There are two from the same profession and we play the same sport. I joined them on a trip and they were very impressed with my ability to drink 白酒 and keep walking straight. 

[Jim]

Are they native speakers? Those messages read like someone writing English as a second language.

I've made a number of proper local friends in the years I've lived in China, and looking back the circumstances have all been quite different, related to stages in my own life and Chinese ability I'd suppose. Some have been friends of friends, some people I met through work, though not many actual colleagues, some people I knew from a local bar when I lived down town and now I have a family, people I know through the kids' school. I'm pretty poor at keeping up with friends whatever their nationality, but a couple of my oldest friends here I've managed to stay in touch with even through moving back home for a couple of years.

[markhavemann]

On 9/11/2023 at 4:51 PM, FennySH said:

Question 2: I think our chat is awkward, so I paused the conversation. But they would continue to send greeting messages, which are very abstract (to the Chinese).

examples:

Good morning my dear beautiful. 
Whenever an unexpected joy passes through your Heart and suddenly you smile for no reason, 
Remember, someone somewhere is wishing you to be Happy Always.
Have a Splendid Day Today. 

I've actually seen this kind of thing a lot with university students that I used to teach, and there are posts online about it too. 

 

My students would go onto language exchange apps and make friends with "native speakers" who would do things like this. As far as I could tell, and from the information I could gather, most of the time they are from India/Pakistan/Sri Lanka/etc. (no offense to anyone from these countries, and I'm in no way inferring that everyone from there is doing things like this). They are either:

 

1. Looking for a Chinese wife/girlfriend. Apparently, thanks to Japanese internet porn, some people have gotten the idea that Chinese (east Asian?) girls are "easy", and just by saying ridiculous things that no native speaker would ever say, like "my dear beautiful" or (my personal favourite so far) "my queen", they can get themselves a Chinese girlfriend or wife over the internet.

OR 

2. They are scammers. After "talking" like this for a while and confessing their love for you (the most beautiful queen they have ever seen), they will start saying how they are going to visit you (if they are outside of the country) and eventually ask you to send them money for a plane ticket, or they will start being in financial difficulties and ask to borrow increasing amounts of money.

 

Whatever the exact reason, be careful with making friends on the internet, and if something feels weird, it usually is. Don't feel bad about deleting these people from your wechat.

[FennySH]

On 9/11/2023 at 5:44 PM, Moshen said:

Answering as an American who once worked in China for a year: The "foreigners" who are communicating with you seem to me quite strange and not like anyone I've ever met, except perhaps some evangelical Christians who believe that it's their god-given mission to spread their version of peace and love on Earth.  Are these people religious?

Exactly how I felt. I have many Christian friends, but they never say these words every day. I even joked with them about whether TA is an AI.

As for my bad feelings about them, I think it's from my deep disappointment for people, I really hope that the relationships between people could be more simple and more trustworthy. Maybe I just want to find some reasonable explanation for them.

[FennySH]

On 9/11/2023 at 5:53 PM, Flickserve said:

As for native mandarin speaking friends from mainland, I have very few. There are two from the same profession and we play the same sport. I joined them on a trip and they were very impressed with my ability to drink 白酒 and keep walking straight. 

干杯！可能我也需要一杯白酒，哈哈

Thank you for sharing your story. It helps really.

Actually I moved from my hometown to my current city more than 10 years ago. Although I have always been in mainland China and have always only spoken Mandarin, still it is difficult to enter the local circle, just like you, because the locals all speak dialects with their family and local friends. They see me in a different way. The good thing is, my son is like a mixed race, we speak Mandarin at home and kindergarten,  he can understand the dialects, but he doesn't need to speak it, and so are his friends.

[Lu]

Writing things like 'Good morning my dear beautiful' is weird and off-putting. I don't know in which culture people talk to each other like that, but it's not a culture I'm familiar with. Just delete people who talk like that, they're a waste of time.

 

How to make friends: usually by meeting someone repeatedly, in some shared event, and gradually finding you enjoy each other's company. This is often easy in university, where there are many regular shared events (classes, clubs, friend groups...). It becomes more difficult after you start working. If you want to make foreign friends specifically, perhaps you can join some club that has many foreign members and get to know some of them. If a foreigner wants to make Chinese friends, they need to be Chinese people with some interest in different cultures, who are at the same time not just interested in the cultural difference.

 

I have a few Chinese friends, but it has taken me many years to make them. Different language, different culture, often also a different financial situation: that made it difficult to find people I truly got along with.

[Flickserve]

On 9/12/2023 at 1:17 PM, FennySH said:

They see me in a different way. The good thing is, my son is like a mixed race, we speak Mandarin at home and kindergarten,  he can understand the dialects, but he doesn't need to speak it, and so are his friends.

The connection is different to those who speak your own dialect. In fact, I do recommend you help your son also speak some local dialect or parents hometown dialect. True that he doesn’t ‘need it’ but it’s very useful later in life when you want to make connections and network. You never know when it might help and sometimes very unexpectedly. A lot of parents in China can’t see that value. Why does it help? Because you have an extra ability to make a deeper connection with some totally random situation. 
 

 

One of my mainland friends living in China is Cantonese but only speaks Mandarin to his daughter. I asked him why and he said because of school education. However, it’s like learning another language. Ha, I wish I could have learnt dialects that I was exposed to as a child - 客家話， 閩南話，粵語。I was recently with some cousins and they were using some 閩南話 in conversations. Honestly, I really regret thinking as a child I was poor at languages. 
 

The other good thing is sometimes people talk dialects thinking you don’t understand. A friend told me a business story of two people speaking 潮州話 in a car taking a third person around. The third person actually understands 潮州話 but never let the first two people know. The two people were discussing how to 騙 the third person! Obviously, the business deal wasn’t successful. 

[Dawei3]

On 9/11/2023 at 4:51 AM, FennySH said:

Good morning my dear beautiful. 
Whenever an unexpected joy passes through your Heart and suddenly you smile for no reason, 
Remember, someone somewhere is wishing you to be Happy Always.
Have a Splendid Day Today. 

As a native English speaker (American), this is very weird language.  On Linkedin, scammers are using AI to create profiles and send messages to create contacts with people.  As Mark noted above, what you received sounds like from a scammer (I get about 2 fake Linkedin requests/week).  I would never write "Good morning my dear beautiful". (never)

 

Even though my Chinese is just at Intermediate level and pre-pandemic and I only stayed in China for relatively short stays of 10-14 days, I've found it relatively easy to make good friendships with Chinese.  However, like Lu noted, most have interests they share with me:  Toastmasters speaking clubs (an international non-profit speaking organization), at the university where I teach, those I met when they were in the US,  or some other connection.  Some I've met on-line during the pandemic.  In addition, our personalities need to match 我们的个性很合.  Even when we both have limited skills in each other's language, friendships are possible if our personalities match.    Their friendships are an invaluable part of my life.  

 

So to answer your question, I think very good cross-cultural friendships are possible.  

 

 

[abcdefg]

@FennySH Welcome to the forum! I lived in China most of 12 years and have a generous handful of close Chinese friends. Agree with the others, above, that this person who has been sending you such odd messages is probably up to no good. Personally, I've always found it better when possible to start a friendship in person, face-to-face, instead of through instant messaging chat or on the internet. It's easier for a 网友 to pretend to be something he or she really isn't. 

[FennySH]

Thank you all the friends here! I think it's really a good lesson for me.

My parents often say that I am naive, even though I am almost 40 years old, haha. But I still enjoy being able to choose to trust other people in life, when we first met. The recent strange experience will not affect my attitude towards strangers in the future, but I will no longer have social pressure and force myself to be friendly, which may be hypocritical friendliness.