One day, he wrote, he was dragging up a slope a bike loaded with a large carton, when he was bombarded with questions by his Chinese colleagues about what he was carrying. After he had finally managed to survive the bombardment with an evasive "nothing important", he was amazed to confront the same question the next morning.

He wondered why Chinese are so persistent in their effort to pry into other people's personal affairs.

Where foreigners attach importance to privacy, we Chinese generally adopt a nonchalant attitude towards it. We rarely think we are infringing upon someone's privacy when we pose questions or even take action that may be interpreted as trespassing on one's realm of privacy.

Just as the British people start a conversation by talking about the weather, we are apt to ask, "Have you eaten your breakfast?" or "Where are you going?"

Rather than taking the literal meaning of these questions, we'd better look upon them as a sort of greeting, an attempt to start a friendly talk.

Whether you give an explicit answer is unimportant. What really matters is if you take a hint and happily engage in a pleasant conversation.

Of course, there are questions that are embarrassing, such as "What's your salary?" or "How old are you?" The latter is especially stinging when put to a woman.

You can either laugh it off by talking about something else, or indicate your unwillingness to reply in a roundabout way.

There are occasions, however, when we can hardly brook the intrepidity of intruders. Whenever I draw money from the ATM, I invariably find one or two strangers hovering around, casting a blank stare at the buttons when I'm feeding code numbers.

I'm not sure if they have done this on purpose. Whatever the excuse, it represents a rude intrusion on my privacy.

Worse still, of late I've found my mailbox cluttered with trash adverts, with my name and address glaringly printed on the envelope. Some of the senders are located as far away as Guangzhou in South China.

If possible, I would surely file suit against the person or organization for leaking my name and address without obtaining my assent. But under the present circumstances, I can do nothing but put up with the onslaught of the trash ads.

The way leading to confidence in privacy is long and tortuous. After all, it lies in a good, all-encompassing education revamping our outmoded thinking, and the awakening of self-esteem.

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