A sky filled with paper scraps and plastic bags

I have yet to see it, but it is common enough that there is a phrase to describe it. 纸屑塑料袋满天飞。 It is supposedly a frequent site in the country side whenever there is a slight wind. Disposal of modern garbage/manmade garbage is mostly in piles where it will set for who knows how long. Along comes the wind and puff its gone. Into the trees, rivers, fields, and sky. Blown away to become someone else's problem. The results are easy to see. Trees are decorated with american pride, full of red, white, and blue plastic bags. Fields are littered with wrappers, bags, newspapers, and bottles. In the rivers plastic bags and bottles swim by.

These little insights into chinese life keep coming up in conversations.

Another dichotomy, this one about interpersonal relations

USA
Blunt, frank, put everything on the table (ie no secrets,hidden motives or opinions)
Dont like someone, think someone screwed up, just say it.

China
Read people, then base actions on your perception of their demeanor and disposition.
Speak in circles, around a topic
Use tact
Implied meanings, indirect approaches
Say one thing, and mean another (Good job, you worked really hard =*this is terrible, maybe you'll do better next time)

I asked where these ideas come from and apparently there are chinese books on Chinese vs. American psychology and interpersonal relations differences.

坐月子
A month of sitting.
A traditional custom/practice for new mothers in China. After the birth, the new mother is confined to the house and her bed for one month. During this month she is to lay in bed and breastfeed. She will be attended to by her mother or her mother-in-law and fed a diet of boiled eggs and millet porridge to replenish her nutrients.

Sparrow Eradication
Back in the days of the big MZD. Someone got the idea that sparrows were pests and eating all the grain. Grain production was very big in the planned economy. A sparrow eradication campaign was begun. Sparrows were netted, stoned, and killed in mass numbers country-wide until there were very few left. Lo and behold, an ecosystem imbalance ensued. While sparrows are seed eaters they also happen to eat insects. With the sparrows gone, a plague of locust was unleashed causing far more damage than the sparrows ever did. It is unclear whether the locust plague and the sparrow eradication were related or just coincidence, but the sparrow eradication campaign was dropped.