HOW LIVING IN DENMARK IS LIKE LIVING IN CHINA

When I arrived here five months ago, it was not as a tourist, but as a migrant. A tourist has the luxury of operating in a bubble, protected by hotels or guidebooks, rarely expected to know how much bus fare is, or how to find the post office, or where the grocery store is hiding the goddamn chocolate chips. A migrant looks around with different eyes, trying to figure out how things work, trying to adjust to how things feel, constantly reminding herself ‘this is my life now.’

I remember thinking then that I should write things down because any anthropologist worth their salt knows that new sights, sounds, and other various phenomena become normalized by your brain at lightning speed and what is first strange quickly becomes commonplace (of course this is not true for everything – I still find Danish door locks totally weird). I am obviously not worth my salt, because I was so busy manically nesting and wading through bureaucracy in those first few days that I didn’t write down a thing.

I definitely like the climate here, and the bike lanes, and the concern for human well being I see reflected in national policy, but some of the things that make me happiest are those that remind me of my life in China. I love that I can roll home on my bicycle in the wee hours feeling perfectly safe, that I can be confident that no one is carrying a gun, that my laundry room is full of drying racks, that it wouldn’t occur to someone here to sue another for not warning them against doing something stupid. The similarities are not many and they’re definitely not obvious, but I see them every day. I know Chinese people living in Denmark and Danish people who’ve been to China, and they don’t seem to share my feelings, but then they didn’t grow up in the United States. The fact is, America is a global anomaly in many ways, both good and bad, and by comparison much of the rest of the world has much in common.

Home is a word with so many overlapping meanings and ideas crammed into it that I wish I could carve up its territory and divide it among other words. I’d like to call America my homeland and ideally not have it sound like I’m imagining myself at Ellis Island. Are you still allowed to have a homeland when you can fly back there in a day? I think so. I know America, in a sense it’s still really all I know. I know myself as a citizen of a young nation, I know to admire ambition and innovation, I know how to recognize a ‘bad part of town’. I know the presence of police, and that they’re there to protect you, except when they’re not. I know the logic of grocery store organization, the limits of acceptable behavior at a baseball game, and to expect a happy ending. Back in the homeland my mind can turn off while my body crosses streets and calculates the acceptable distance to establish between a stranger and myself. I feel at ease there (except for the guns), but also a little listless. Obviously I wouldn’t have the life I do if I didn’t like the heightening of the senses that comes with newness and unfamiliarity.

Seattle is my hometown, obviously, because it made me, with all its liberalism and passive aggression and lurid topography. But I need another word: homelets? homebergs? homettes? For me home is present-tense, the place where I feather my nest, but most of the places I’ve lived are still fragments of home, places where I’ve spent some time, put down some shallow roots. I’ve left a little part of myself in all those places (they’re where I keep my horcruxes, after all), and when I go back to visit I’m greeted with the ghosts of former selves – a not unpleasant feeling.  Maybe those places are just time machines – whether they’re dorms where you lived in college, the house where your ex-boyfriend used to live, or far-flung foreign cities. We carry places and people with us, but there is no doubt that the spaces themselves preserve some of our feelings and memories – it’s one reason it’s almost painful to be in parts of Seattle that have been so transformed over the last decade. 

Hmmm, this did not take the direction I had intended. But I’ll leave it like this, and try to lighten up the mood with a handful of silly observations.  

How Denmark is like China

Litigation is rare

I almost wiped out on a patch of ice in my courtyard tonight. The florist must have watered his plants there today and left a little pool. "I didn't know that was there -- someone could slip on that and die!" I thought with a panic. Then I realized that to be warned that water turns to ice would be even more infantilizing than reading the signs like "Do not jump over railing" and labels like "Warning: coffee hot" designed to deflect lawsuits in the US. I concluded that I enjoy being treated like an adult.  

The legal drinking age is 18

In both China and Denmark kids can legally drink right around the time they actually start drinking! Mind blowing. It certainly helps that most of them aren’t driving cars.

Few non-nationals enjoy the national spirit

My supermarket has more than a dozen different varieties of licorice schnapps and another dozen varieties of shooters combining licorice and pomegranate, licorice and pepper, and so on. Unless you’re someone who loathes licorice, you’d probably take any of these over the everclear with a floral bouquet that is baijiu, but I still get sentimental about that terrible stuff.      

Racial homogeneity

It sometimes feels as if there is even less diversity here than in China, but obviously in China I lived in a ginormous city and here I live in a tiny town so that skews things. I do think Americans tend to forget that despite all the ongoing problems with racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, we are a thoroughly multi-cultural society, and that is a rarity in this world.

People wear fur!

From a materialist point of view it’s just animal skin, and I’ve seen plenty of that made into apparel, but I’ve been enculturated to imagine only bloodthirsty Cruella DeVilles would wear brand new fur. In China I often saw fur scarves and vests and trimmings, here it is more common to see substantial fur coats, whether on young fashionistas in Copenhagen or on tiny little old ladies here in Odense. This national linkage is economic as well, as a series of creepy posters at the CPH airport constantly remind me

A blanket for every body

As far as I’m concerned this is the most brilliant idea America has never considered. Here’s how it works: you have a bed that two people sleep in and each one has their own blanket. This does not preclude snuggling, but it most certainly cuts down on sleep-disturbance-fueled resentments. Brilliant! This probably says something about American ideals of love and partnership but I’m too lazy to think about that. Here's a traditional kang bed from a hotel in China I once stayed in featuring a neat pile of blankets and pillows.

Automobile logic does not dominate

You might contest this if you’ve ever been stuck in a Beijing traffic jam, but that’s precisely the point: most of the world’s cities weren’t made for cars. Both China and Denmark heavily tax automobile purchases and licenses, though in China this is contradicted by heavy investments in the car industry. This also means…

People walk to get places

I bike much more than I walk here, the opposite of China, but in neither place have I ever felt like a hobo trying to get somewhere public transit won’t take me. One illustration of this I enjoy: use google street view most places in the states and you see mostly cars, use it here and you almost always see people.

This is a pedestrial street so it's technically cheating but you get the idea.

The streets are safe, even for women

I love strolling around a sleepy city. One of the hardest things to get used to after coming back to the states from my longest stretch in China was that I could no longer step out my front door at any hour. When I came home late I was on hyper-alert on that block-long walk from the bus stop to my front door. I’ve never experienced street harassment in either China or Denmark either. Once more I suspect there is a bigger story here about gender relations and power, but it well exceeds my point, which is merely that the feeling that as a woman you are a target is not universal (though it persists in far too many places).

Conservation is standard practice

Companies and local governments in the US like to loudly praise themselves when they step up their conservation efforts, and I’m sure that’s for the best, but ways to save energy and water are built into the structure of life in many places, simply because it makes sense. In China, Denmark, and lots of other places, refrigerators are small, toilets all have two different flushes, dryers are few while clotheslines and racks are many, and the lights are never on in stairwells and hallways unless someone is in them (in China lights are almost always noise activated, here there are switches near most doors that turn the lights for a minute or so).

Funny English signs

Although the Danes’ English is exceptional I still find things to amuse myself with. These salons are my two favorite local examples

"Fancy Hair makes people"? In the sense that consumer choices are constitutive
 of our conceptions of individualized selves I cannot disagree with that.

Of course the Chinese are way ahead in this arena. I dug back in the archives for some classics

And if you still doubt the similarities I see in these two homelettes have a looksee here. Apparently naming your restaurant “Mr. Pizza” is practically a cultural universal