Now, FOUR Years in China

Prior to our departure, some people shared their concerns that China would be completely devoid of the Western holiday spirit. Well everyone should rest assured that Christmas is VERY much here. It might require that I get my camera out to show the extent of it because, well…it’s extensive.

The clubhouse and front gates of the expat communities are over-the- top with the decorations and trees already. Lights and trees are starting to appear in front of homes. There are at least 100 trees for sale in the courtyard at the clubhouse and at the nurseries in this part of town. Even the big markets in the city are life-size robotic Santas waving people into the stores. It’s nice, but it’s also a little odd.

What’s really strange is that it’s not just for the expat market…there seem to be a huge number of local Chinese who think it’s a fun holiday; just like we adopted the festivities of St. Patrick’s day. Now, I’m sure a few local folks are actually Christians but from what I’ve heard, many think the idea of decorating and gifting during one part of the year is pretty neat and eeing it here at this magnitude really shrinks my perception of our physical distance from home.

I’ve discovered that a great source of discomfort here comes from the pollution. The smoke from coal burning factories and power plants seems to park itself in the Beijing valley and will create a noxious fog. When this happens, your throat starts to feel pretty rough and your eyes burn with a crusty feeling around the edges. Then the winds from mongolia come blasting through and clean it out and the process starts all over.

Beijing has been tasked by various world organizations to provide a number of “blue sky days” as a contingency for being alloed to host the Olympics. Therefore, factories time their output with the weather. We even get a “forecast” from the government. Whenever there is nasty pollution, you can rest assured that a big wind or rain will blow through. When the weather is beautiful, you can count on it lasting only a short period of time.

The coal smoke is the most psychologically invasive because it gets into your house and smells like smoke. It comes back to my “blue bubble” concept where you want to control how much China you let into your world (or vice versa) on any given day. So last weekend we purchased 2 HEPA air filtration units that we placed in the bedrooms and the results are stunning. Not only does the air smell normal, we are sleeping better, coughing less, and are generally happier. It’s great. Today, I will be receiving a quote to have a water purifier installed in the kitchen to provide cleaner drinking water (the bottled water here is pretty nasty too unless you spend a fortune on it).

The cab just dropped us off after a great evening at Mike and Kim’s apartment where we celebrated Thanksgiving with another couple from America, a woman from Australia, two of Mike’s Chinese employees, and my IT partner in crime, Martin. It was a very enjoyable evening with lots of wine, turkey, cranberries, stuffing, pumpkin confections and fried rice.

It’s been a couple days since I returned to Beijing (Sat PM). I’m still cooked with a really nasty cold I caught in California. The combination of the jet lag, lack of sleep, 12 hours of shared-air on the plane, and bad pollution doesn’t exactly help either.

Other than getting sick, the trip to the US was pretty good. It surprised me how underwhelming it actually was in light of the cravings I was having in the weeks prior. I’m trying really hard to grasp this relationship between my desire to hang onto the status-quo versus immersing myself into this new culture. This isn’t just a case of being a Gemini, it’s more about managing the amount of “China” you let into your “blue bubble”. In China, I feel like I’m defending my “blue bubble” by being very selective about the Chinese stuff I expose myself to within a day. Just a taxi ride in the morning can fill my quota. Lisa uses the term “OC” like “OD” to describe this. By the end of the day, it’s hard to motivate yourself to do the language lessons or eat the food. But in America, I was much more motivated to eat Chinese food and learn the language…seems odd when just a week before, I would have killed for some mexican food. This lack of cravings tells me that I was really craving “the familiar” and once satisfied, I felt like venturing back into the exotic. I now see why psychologists talk about the “re- patriation” phase that people struggle with when they return from an overseas assignment.

Beyond this psycho-babble, it was great seeing the folks from Apple and the event was great. I was also able to stock up on a bunch of items that we needed here in Beijing and had a whole suitcase stuffed with contraband for our thanksgiving dinner. I better sign off…I’m sort of fuzzy with this cold.

I’m typing this from the lobby of the Apple headquarters in Cupertino. I just arrived here after an 12 hour flight from Beijing to San Francisco. While I miss Lisa and Maddy and feel bad that they couldn’t come along, I must confess that I’m thrilled to be here for a variety of reasons. Even Lisa was glad to have me leave so I could pick up some things we can’t get in Beijing.

FYI.. We are still waiting for our DSL connection to be setup in the new house. Our email, long distance and vonage wont be up for a few days.

In 20 minutes, I am going to step out of 6832 Capital Paradise for the last time, ride my bike to the new house and go to bed. I’m here using the internet connection because the service hasn’t been activated in the new house yet. We’ve moved all of our things to the new house and Lisa has done a great job putting the new home together.

I will always have fond memories of this place because it was home to the extreme joy of our early victories along with the tears of frustration as we made the painful adaptation to life here. Looking at our life now, everything seems really normal and similar to our life in the US. Everything is much less foreign. Are we really back to life-as-usual? Or have we experienced growth that we won’t realize until we return to the US?

It’s very hard to know exactly where you are until you look at where you came from.

When offered the job, the school promised that we would be able to find a nice, clean townhome within the housing allowance. When were considering the job, I had a copy of City Weekend, which has real- estate listings and none of them were even close to our budget. So I called the director of the school who again, assured me that we would be able to find a nice, clean place within our budget and that the listings were “starting points” for negotiation. Well, after exhausting 5 realtors, looking at 9 different townhomes and making offers on 3, we became incredibly discouraged. With Lisa not working, I felt awful that she didn’t have a house to convert into a home which is really her specialty.

Anyway, the ones in our budget were downright nasty and the decent ones were way too expensive to cover the difference out of pocket. One of the first houses we made an offer on was $300 less than our budget which was incredible for a “Phase 3″ unit but the landlord wanted the tenant to manage the tax payments, management fees, utilities etc. The owner had moved to the city and didn’t want to drive to Shunyi to deal with it. These things aren’t as simple as dropping a check in the mail because this is primarily a cash-based society where you make payments in person and receive a “fapio” or receipt. Secondly, the school writes only one check to cover housing. This arrangement prevents them (or the employee) from having to pay taxes on a cash allowance. So under this arrangement, I would have not been able to maximize my full allowance and still have to “top-up” to cover all the other fees. It would have been close to $400 month out of pocket. So we walked.

Realtors here aren’t exactly like the ones in the states. Most are very young Chinese women who speak a little bit of english. They receive a commission equal to one month’s rent…see the conflict of interest? With that in mind, I started thinking that it might take another tactic so I began making a deal with the realtors that if they could talk the landlord down to a reasonable price, that I would “reward” them with an cash amount higher than the amount they save us for one month’s rent. The ones who I made the offer to seemed interested but they assured me that there was simply no inventory in our budget…at this point, I sort of believed them.

So, last weekend we rode our bikes around to look for available places and couldn’t find anything within $600 of our budget. My hope was that we could cut out the middleman by contacting the landlords directly. Sadly, the phone numbers were for the realtors and property managers. It seemed hopeless until we passed in front of the same townhome that we tried to negotiate with before but whose owner didn’t want to deal with managing it. So I got a crazy, almost distasteful idea, and despite Lisa telling me how inappropriate it was, I gave it shot. From my bike, I called Sabrina whose company provides property management services and it went something like this…

Me: “There’s a townhome available whose landlord isn’t motivated by money but rather convenience…can you help them?”

Sabrina: “Oh…what’s his name and number?”

Me: “I don’t know”

Sabrina: “Oh? Then how do you know about this?”

Me: “We tried to rent it before”

Sabrina: “You what?!!, So, it’s listed by another realtor?”

Me: “Yes”

Sabrina: (concerned) “Oh….I’m not sure about this….”

Me: “It’s house number xxxx…if you can find out who owns it, he might be willing to make a deal”

Sabrina: “I’m not so sure…I’ll need to check with my manager…but we also might have the landlord’s name in our files…I’ll see”.

Me: “Thanks…bye”

So disheartened, Lisa, Maddy and I rode to the clubhouse to have breakfast. Not more than 30 minutes later, Sabrina called to tell us we had a deal within our budget except for clubhouse dues and utilities which is basically $120 month…not a bad amount to top-up. We started moving some things in over the past few days and will officially take it tomorrow. We are thrilled. It’s got everything we wanted - 100% hardwood and tile floors, a finished basement, an ad- on breakfast room, 2 TVs including a huge widescreen, rear-projection Sony with a monster home theater system. It even has a Karaoke laser disk player - “Gam-bei”! The furnishings are bit too “local” looking for our western taste but Lisa is going to do a walkthrough tomorrow to discuss the furnishings with the landlady and maybe come up with some sort of arrangement so we can replace some of it.