I just could not take looking at the front of this blog any more. I created the titles before we moved here when I had visions of this grand journey to an exotic land to the East. Well, it’s not that exotic and not that grand….as a matter of fact, it can simply be a big pain in the ass sometimes. I’m sure those of you following this blog from your expat post in Asia were wondering when I was going to crack. I’m not sure I will be able to adequately convey this feeling to my friends in the states.
The school hands out literature to families who have just arrived in Beijing which includes a line graph chart. X = time, Y = the average expat’s psychological state. The line starts out a few months before coming and ends a year after you return home. When the first few months into the assignment starts, the line is very high - this is the “honeymoon phase” where the adrenaline is pumping and everything seems great. In some ways it’s natural excitement but in others it’s probably your body’s reaction to the wholesale replacement of daily stimuli. But two months in, the line falls into the deep trench. In general we don’t feel bad…just tired at the end the day.
It starts when you step off the plane…you are bombarded with new smells, new air, new pollution, new bacteria and so on followed by the more invasive food and water. I kept thinking of the reaction our plants have to being re-potted and/or moved to other locations in the house. Despite the fact that we drink bottled water here, produce and livestock are fed the local water and food is usually cooked with the local water. The local water has it’s own smell and I’ve concluded that this is where the “China smell” comes from. I asked a neighbor who sells industrial water treatment systems here about it and he said that the local reservoirs contain huge amounts of algae and the treatments required to deodorize it could be more dangerous than the algae itself. Either we’ve adapted or the cooler temperatures have made it less funky but we don’t notice it anymore.
If you visit China, you will be able to experience some amazing food before you head back home. We’ve had some amazing things too. But after a while, you start to miss the items you enjoyed back home. Heck, I had cravings for Texas BBQ the entire time we were in Georgia…now I’d kill for any BBQ from the US. But here, the cravings for specific things take a back seat to the basics such as a hamburger or hot dog. There seems to be an attitude here of “ground beef is good…but it would be much better if we added xxxxx”. That’s why almost every hamburger I’ve had here tastes like meat loaf. So everywhere we go that serves western food, I order a hamburger with the hopes of finding a decent one. With each subsequent failure, I start to accept defeat. Maybe I’m due for a trip to the Hard Rock Cafe here. I never imagined that I’d ever choose to visit a Hard Rock Cafe nor would I have imagined it would be for the food.
The odd reality is that this place is very westernized and we can get lots of the same brands here albeit for a premium price but we can’t always get “our brands”. Knock on wood that we can at least get Old El Paso salsa, beans and taco mix but even these items aren’t consistently on the shelves. Our grocery stores are small places with a combination of Chinese brands offset by a greater number of German, French and American brands of which many are the Chinese-produced/labeled versions…yes, Heinz isn’t just catering to westerners in China.
Next is re-learning how to get simple things done in a place where you are virtually retarded. When we first arrived, I characterized it as “fun”, followed by “challenging”…now it’s just a pain in the ass. This is what killed Lisa a few times here. With the knowledge that things are hard here, she set 2 seemingly reasonable goals…order water and book a doctor’s appointment. Neither places she called “hway sho-wa yinguin” and she couldn’t complete her task…China wins again. It all has to do with managing your own expectations and making compromises with yourself. Without help, you (the average expat worker family) will never have the level of independence that you had in your home country.
The next thing that beats on you is the “prolonged repetition” of the little things. Excuse the metaphor but Chinese water torture comes to mind (note: that would make a great title of a blog entry). It’s not the dirty squatter toilets that you occasionally encounter…sure, it’s foreign but you know it’s foreign. It’s the really little things like the light switches. Oddly, I like the switches here better than US ones, but again…it’s different and you have repeated exposure throughout the day. To date, I’ve flipped a US style light switch close to 250,000 times in my lifetime…thats a fairly ingrained sensation. The same holds true with the skinny rectangular license plates on cars…years of visual impressions are tying to be replaced with new ones. I wouldn’t have realized this until I had a short burst of euphoria after seeing a car in my ‘hood with Texas plates.
Then there are the things which might have nothing to do with China or living in a foreign place. I think the car has a lot to do with it. We’ve gone from being a 2 car family to a 0 car family in the outer ‘burbs. Lisa and I used to live in a warehouse loft in downtown Dallas and really enjoy urban living. But our choices within walking distance are pretty lean. It’s 1 mile on a dark road to a tiny strip of stores, restaurants and Starbucks. The charm of riding a bike everywhere is lost when you get back from the store and realize that you forgot to get a key ingredient for dinner.
While you might think we’re hating life here, we’re not. It’s still fun, interesting, entertaining, overwhelming, exhausting and so on. We’ve avoided acknowledging the bad and ugly stuff here out of fear that it would make it more “real” but we seem to have room to do that now. We knew parts of this would stink…little did we know it would be all-encompasing at first. In retrospect some might call the first few months the “honeymoon” but I think I’ll remember it more like “boot camp” where simple pleasures have a euphoria because everything else is so hard. We’ve pushed our boundaries and tested our strength and have a pretty good idea about how to be comfortable here.
Between the prospect of driving soon, in conjunction with (the possibility of) finding a town home within our budget, we are on track to settle in a little better. It may be far from “total immersion” into the culture here but trust me when I say that all the culture you would ever need is only a few hundred meters outside the gates. Despite the affluence of the compounds here, we are in a rural area north of Beijing where news about good hygiene habits gets lost somewhere between 4th ring road and Jinshung Lu.
I think you can officially call yourself a resident here when a visitor says “what’s that funky smell?” and you honestly answer “what smell?”.
Leave a Reply