Open Your Heart
A friend’s advice left me wondering what it really meant to let people in.
Katharine worked in sales at EF and had become both a friend and another informal Chinese teacher. Walking home after a late shift, she asked how I was getting on.
I told her I was fine. I just needed more friends.
‘You have to open your heart,’ she said.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I was supposed to do with that advice. I was meeting people, accepting invitations and trying to learn the language. What else did opening my heart involve?
It was a phrase I would hear again. Later, in Nanjing, a colleague called Angela used it while talking about finding ‘the one’. Apparently, my heart needed to be open for that too.
As I heard more about working life in China, the phrase took on another meaning. People talked about guanxi: the relationships and connections through which they built trust. In some of the business stories I heard, shared meals and drinking were as significant as the formal meeting.
Baijiu, a strong, clear spirit, featured regularly. I heard accounts of long dinners, repeated toasts and conversations continuing well beyond the signing of a contract. The details varied, but the message seemed similar: people wanted to know the person across the table, not simply the terms on the page.
I wondered how much of that closeness came from spending time together, and how much from the things people said once their inhibitions had softened. As someone who had arrived in China barely drinking at all, I found the connection between alcohol and trust rather puzzling.
Katharine had been talking about friendship, of course, not business. Perhaps her advice was simpler than I was making it.
I wanted to know people. I was still learning how to let them know me.