Category Archives: expat life

Sorry, I’m new to this! Notices for novice expats?

Posted by expatlingo in cartoon, expat life and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

On my first walk around Mainland China, I should have hung this apologetic public notice on a placard around my neck:

New China Pedestrian Comic

As a new pedestrian in China, I initially looked for official painted crosswalks, waited for the biggest gap in traffic I could see (because no one yielded voluntarily), and then ran across the road at an unpredictably jerky fast-slow pace. A practice no other road-users anticipated and which caused a lot of confusion and honking.

Fortunately, with a little observation, I soon got the knack of stepping out into the traffic-filled roadways, walking at a steady pace, and marveling as the cars predicted my path and opened gaps for me.

Why am I flashing-back to a time I should have notified others of my ‘novice’ status? It’s the fault of this cartoon man’s guilty, sweaty, stupid grin:

New driver notice in Chinese

I pass this ‘new driver’ notice daily in the rear window of a white station wagon here in Hong Kong. He reminds me of my own red-faced — ‘sorry I didn’t realize…!’ — moments.

Thinking back, I can recall several times when a “sorry, I’m new here” notice could have been helpful. Here is but a small sample:

  • Being ‘over-friendly’ during my first weeks of English life and attempting far too much eye-contact with neighbors and semi-strangers.
  • Assuming that check-out clerks would bag my groceries in Holland.
  • Thinking that any Hong Kong Island ‘red’ taxi would happily drive me to the middle of nowhere in the ‘New Territories.’

What about you? What mistakes have you made as a novice expat that could have been softened by an “I’m new to this” notice?

*****

Notes: For those who are hooked on Chinese, I translated the ‘new driver’ sticker into both Cantonese and Mandarin:

新手駕駛: Novice driver (In Cantonese: san1 sau2 gaa3 sai.2 In simplified characters and Mandarin: 新手驾驶, xīn shŏu jià shĭ)

请多包涵: Please bear with me/I feel apologetic! (In Cantonese: cing2 do1 baau1 haam4. In simplified characters and Mandarin: 请多包涵, qĭng duō bāo hán)

Propaganda: North Korea is a “Socialist Fairyland” and Expat Life is Glamorous!

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North Korea: Kim Jong Un's "Socialist Fairyland"

If censorship is a blunt tool used to sway public opinion, propaganda is its softer twin. As a long time watcher of North Korea’s (unintentionally) highly entertaining Korean Central News Agency of the DPRK (KCNA), I was treated to a hearty laugh in early April.

The KCNA’s news typically focuses on: commemorative wreath-laying events for Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Sun; inflammatory bashing of the United States, South Korea and Japan; and, of course, on delusions about North Korea’s grandeur.

On April 8th, 2013 (or Juche 102 using the North Korean calendar), a particularly amusing story popped up about Kim Jong Un’s determination to:

 ”turn the beautiful country … into a splendid and highly civilized socialist fairyland and socialist land of bliss where the people’s ideals becomes a reality and they enjoy happiness.”

A completely insane aspiration and skewed view of North Korea’s potential given its present state of affairs. A “socialist fairyland” where millions of people do not have enough to eat…

Pondering Kim Jong Un’s delusions of grandeur, I am reminded of my own tendency to sanitize my expat experiences through selective Facebook propaganda. Viewed generously, expat life is full of travel, new experiences, foreign friends and funny anecdotes involving miscommunication with ‘the locals.’ I, for one, often leave out the true (and unfunny) negatives when talking about my own life abroad.

Here is a possible Facebook post of my own from May 2008, but with the negative subtext added:

Expat (me) on Great Wall Run

Three months after this picture of me was taken, our daughter was twice hospitalized and we finally figured out why she was so ill: celiac disease. This discovery came after months of being told by her pediatrician overseas that she simply had one stomach illness after another and that it was all nothing to worry about. An American pediatrician finally figured it all out when we were on “home leave.”

One year after this picture was taken and after months of alternately thinking that we might move to Singapore/Hong Kong/Eindhoven/Seattle, we moved from China to Cambridge, England. Our expat life, despite what many might think, is not a case of being asked by “the company” to move to a new place. No, it is more a matter of my husband looking for a new job within his global company every two years.

I had been consumed with worry about both of these topics for months. Until it was all settled, however, I never shared a peep of true concern with anyone other than very, very close family.

Fortunately, unlike Kim Jong Un’s, my propaganda does not impair the lives of millions of people.

“Who are you?” Watching “Lawrence of Arabia” through expat eyes

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"Who are you?"

“Who are you?”

Shouts the unknown motorcyclist across the Suez Canal. He is calling to T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), who is dressed as an Arab and who has just emerged from the Sinai Desert. In the forgoing weeks, he has been transformed from a bookish, but adventure-seeking, junior-something-or-other in the British Army, into a murderous leader of the Arab revolt ready to launch a guerrilla war against the Turkish. This moment is his first contact with “civilization” since his transformation and it is clear that he, himself is also wondering, “Who am I?”

From there, he returns to Cairo where he is both morally sickened by the deaths he is to blame for, but also fiercely drawn to the cause of the Arabs, despite their interests not always aligning with the interests of his own country.

Who are we? Surely many expats and immigrants face this same tension between new and old lives and questions of identity, belonging and loyalty. You’ve also probably stepped off a place back home, looked around and thought “Who am I?” and “Who are you people?” (And why is everything so big and expensive?)

While few are as brave, adventurous and history-making as T. E. Lawrence, most of us have shared this feeling of being changed, having our loyalties divided, and wondering what to do next.

It’s not all camel riding adventure. But, the world of the “romantic internationalist” is not always glamorous. We all — even Lawrence of Arabia — also have our share of tediously boring days abroad waiting for something to happen or for the chance to make something happen.

"Dark little room"

This sense of tedium is perfectly captured by an exchange near the beginning of  the film. Regular — just another face in the British Army  – Lawrence is in a below-ground-level room in Cairo (camel and human feet can be seen passing outside). He is painting in a survey map with watercolors and talking lackadaisically to a colleague (“Hartley”). Here is the exchange:

T.E. Lawrence: Michael George Hartley, this is a nasty, dark little room.
Hartley: That’s right.
T.E. Lawrence: We are not happy in it.
Hartley: It’s better than a nasty, dark little trench.
T.E. Lawrence: Then you’re an ignoble fellow.
Hartley: That’s right.

There are plenty of expat days spent waiting for things to happen: waiting in the small hotel room on first arrival for life to re-start, waiting in an empty apartment for the telephone/cable/internet engineer, waiting for decisions to be made by unseen people that will influence next options. This waiting for the adventure to begin (or change) is a “nasty, dark little room” that none of us are happy to be in.

Sometimes we’re happy to stick our heads in the sand. But honestly sometimes, we’d also just like to be “Hartley” and keep things as “safe” and “normal” as possible. Aren’t there some evenings when you simply want to watch an old TV show while eating imported ice cream, rather than venture out to that hole-in-the-wall down that street with no English menu that’s supposed to be very tasty?

The film. ”Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) stars Peter O’Toole, was directed by David Lean and won almost every Academy Award (including Best Picture) in the year it was released. The cinematography is epically beautiful and T. E. Lawrence’s story is gripping. Re-watching “Lawrence of Arabia” as an expat is to see this classic film through fresh eyes. Make a night of it.

Lawrence at sunset

Birthdays Abroad

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My birthday is this week. Counting up the years, I find that it is the eighth birthday I have spent as an expat.

That first overseas birthday in Zhuhai, I had only been living abroad for a few short weeks. We were still living in temporary housing, strangely enough the “Nanyou Oil Hotel.” Tired from a day in Guangzhou spent shopping for a fake Christmas tree, I was surprised by a knock on the door at 6 pm. Opening the door, a staff member stood before me with a birthday cake, some candles and a packet of matches. I was truly touched.

My First Chinese-style Western Birthday Cake

Apparently, taking passport details in China not only allows Big Brother to track foreigners, but can also be used at a force for good: treating homesick guests to birthday surprises.

This year, my husband and I went out to a fantastic dinner at the winkingly faux-retro, northern-Chinese-style restaurant, Bistro Manchu, and a late showing of “Skyfall.” As a lover of Asian kitsch, dumplings, lamb and James Bond, it was spot-on perfect.

Birthday dinner at Bistro Manchu

Revisiting Old Expat Haunts: Returning to Zhuhai 珠海

Posted by expatlingo in China, expat life and tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Zhuhai (with thanks to my mom who took this picture in 2005)

The last time my feet touched Zhuhai, China was in 2009. That day, I stepped onto a ferry bound for Hong Kong and then onto England with wet eyes and a gloomy heart.

Last Saturday I stepped back off that same ferry and re-entered Zhuhai to celebrate an early Thanksgiving with old friends. For someone who likes to play nostalgia mind-games, it was a special treat. Many things remain identical to the day we left:

  • A cluster of half-constructed, concrete luxury villa skeletons still stand half-completed and occupied by a few squatters.
  • Lover’s Road remains as well-kept and greenly lush as ever. During my morning run along the seaside, I could trick myself into believing we’d never left.
  • Motorcycle taxi drivers still smoke, chat and wait for fares at the corner of Jiu Ba Jie and Lian’An Lu.
  • The aggressively hard Chinese-style foot massage is still a slice of heaven.

But newness has also crept in:

  • Where once there was only sea, there is now a growing man-made island that will one day connect Zhuhai and Macau with Hong Kong by a 50 kilometer bridge.
  • Eerily, our former house has been converted into an office. The entrance area where my daughter learned to walk and put on shoes, now holds a reception desk and is lit by fluorescent tube lighting.
  • A new Carrefour meant that our Thanksgiving hosts could buy the turkeys and a wide selection of exotic cheese right in Zhuhai, rather than crossing the border to Macau or traveling to Guangzhou.
  • The foot massage ladies might still guess my nationality wrong (Russian? Really?) but now shamelessly ask for tips.

It was a delight to re-trace old steps and especially to drink wine with wonderful friends. But I didn’t feel homesick for Zhuhai anymore. Seeing the place “in-the-flesh,” I realized that I’ve moved on. And so has Zhuhai. It can no longer be the static place of my memory ready to be dredged up during a comforting day-dreamy reminiscence.

And so, arriving by ferry back in Hong Kong late on Sunday evening, I felt at peace. I am happy to call this vibrant, efficient, international Chinese city my home (for now…).

Happy Thanksgiving!

“Low Expectations:” Your Guide to Successful Relocation to China

Posted by expatlingo in China, expat life and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

People often wonder how I happily lived in Mainland China for 3.5 years. What about the pollution/censorship/unsafe food/spitting/high road casualties, they ask?

The key is strategically low(ered) expectations.

With my personally tried and tested three-step plan, you too can successfully relocate to China.

First, spend two months traveling around India as a cheap-living, grubby backpacker. An exotic, but difficult adventure in India will serve to positively color your impressions of China. For example, after India, I was very grateful for the small things that China has to offer, such as:

A fought for auto-rickshaw ride.

  • Taxi drivers who automatically use the meter without first requiring several minutes of haggling, bickering, and swearing (certain border crossings excepted).
  • Males who will not stare at you and shout, “Hey, madam want to have sex?” because you are wearing Capri pants that reveal your ankles.
  • Food that will not require you to spend the wee hours of the night vomiting on your hands and knees into a communal squat toilet.

(A hedging aside: I have heartily enjoyed my many travels to India for work and leisure. I appreciate the diverse culture, tasty variety of food, and rich and complex history of the Sub-Continent. Despite this, it can be a soul-crushingly hard place to be a young woman traveler on a budget. My subsequent business travel with proper contacts and hotels made later trips to India much more pleasant.)

Second, ensure that you are given the initial “look-see” tour of your new Chinese city by someone who has little grasp of life outside of China. I recommend a delightful, fluent English speaker named “Sailing Ko.” Highlights of his tour include:

Photo source: JinKou

  • A massive, concrete sporting facility featuring an Olympic-sized swimming pool filled with pensioners and a giant room of tightly, packed ping-pong tables.
  • A “spa” dwarfed by a vaulted, marble foyer and filled with beautiful young women ready to provide company for the day/evening/night.
  • A grocery store with amazing international products such as tinned tuna, Green Giant canned corn, and Campbell’s oxtail soup.

After this tour, when some soon-to-be fellow expats invite you to a party filled with very drunk Brits singing offensive words to the historic American Negro Spiritual “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” you will be grateful to have found them because at least they know where you can buy cheese.

Third, hire a real estate broker who will only show you over-priced apartments with the following key features:

  • Tiny kitchen with a patina of ten years grease on every surface
  • Blue-tinted windows throughout
  • Gaudy Louis XIV-esque golden chandeliers
  • Non-stop, renovation-related jack-hammering in the apartment above

You will be all the more delighted when you are forced to use your own ingenuity to find an “acceptable” apartment that is both more pleasant and cheaper than anything the agent turned up. Magically, an apartment in a building with this elevator becomes “acceptable:”

After following these three steps, you will soon happily find yourself in China:

  • Laughing over the immigration-required physical exam, including a “streaming” chest x-ray in a room with a rat.
  • Running along the seashore despite the heavy, brown “haze” that can be smelled as well as seen.
  • Singing an off-key duet in front of 200 people at a company Christmas party.

And you will miss it all once you are gone.

(This post is my “love letter” to Zhuhai where I will be returning to celebrate Thanksgiving with friends this weekend. I can hardly believe it will be our 5th Thanksgiving spent in Zhuhai. Every word of this post is true.)

You Only Live Twice

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Is expat life living up to your dreams?

“You Only Live Twice,” is the overblown Nancy Sinatra-sung theme to the Sean Connery-led Bond film of the same name. You know, the one where he supposedly “passes” as Japanese for half the movie?

As a “romantic internationalists” I’m easily emotionally entrapped by mythic tales of global adventure. See for example the post, “I Blame James Bond.” Similarly, I’m wildly sentimental about the line, ”I had a farm in Africa … ,” from “Out of Africa” even though Karen Blixen’s old-fashioned expat story ends in syphilis, heart-break and ruin.

So, you won’t be surprised to hear that I read the over-wrought words of “You Only Live Twice” as an exotic expat-living theme song. For those unfamiliar with the song, you can hear it on YouTube here. It was also the music used for the final scene of last season’s Mad Men. The key lyrics are as follows:

You Only Live Twice or so it seems,
One life for yourself and one for your dreams.
You drift through the years and life seems tame,
Till one dream appears and love is its name.

Substitute “love” with (the rather un-snappy) “life abroad” and you get a hint of what I mean.

And love is a stranger who’ll beckon you on,
Don’t think of the danger or the stranger is gone.

“Danger” like abandoning a practical and prudent career-track and wondering when, how and if one will ever get back.

This dream is for you, so pay the price.
Make one dream come true, you only live twice.

The “dream” was (and remains) too interesting to resist, safe career path be damned. After all, I could have spent the last seven years talking about kitchen renovation.

God, I’m a sap.

What about you? Does “The Year of Living Dangerously” make you want to up-sticks for Sukarno-era Indonesia? Did “Lost in Translation” make you want to visit Japan, despite that they spent most of the movie holed-up in the Tokyo Park Hyatt?

Do expats judge their “own” more harshly?

Posted by expatlingo in cartoon, expat life and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Interacting with foreigners of any kind is an interesting cultural, character-study: 50-something-year-old German women with that unique purple-red hair color; Chinese businessmen surreptitiously smoking on planes; binge-drinking Brits.

All simply splashes of unique “local color.”

But upon encountering a fellow-American, the cross-cultural interest falls away and I more swiftly evaluate, label and judge. Better-understanding the “markers” of Americans — conservative/liberal, East Coast/West Coast, hyper-religious/non-religious, SUV-driver/bike-rider, Pepsi/Coke — facilitates swifter categorization between the like-minded potential buddy or to-be-avoided weirdo.

Conversely, I can suffer a mildly neurotic foreigner for a much longer time before deciding one way or another.

Is it just me?

[comic] Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Posted by expatlingo in cartoon, expat life and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Please note that this entire strip is a figment of my imagination: none of the “dreams” have come true, nor have any of the anxieties. Perhaps I’m a wee bit anxious about my re-entry into expat life after a long summer break. While I’m not a new expat, I am new to Hong Kong. In the few months we’ve lived there I’ve had extreme culture shock over the weird neighborhood we live in, have received threatening letters in Chinese from loan sharks, and have faced the roughest “homesickness” in seven years (It’s actually possible to be homesick for mainland China, England and America all at once).

It will all be fine… but it sure feels good to “write” a strip about it.

A few notes:

If you’re a student of Mandarin, please have a look at the very well done site, Chinese Reading Practice. My vulgar Mandarin in the cartoon was lifted directly from this entry. (And yes, I realize that Cantonese is spoken in Hong Kong; being understood in Mandarin in Hong Kong is another one of my fantasies.)

Also, if you like comics, please check out the talented artist C.C. Yi (釋拾一) at the blog Macau ’41. The blog features a very cool (work in progress) graphic novel based in Macau. As C.C. Yi puts it:

“Macau ’41″ is my graphic novel project about a story in 1940′s Macau. It starts as a parody or insinuation to the 1942 classic movie “Casablanca”, but it goes much further. It’s a story about movie, Colonialism, WW II, China, and the contemporary vintage culture in general. It’s Noir + romance + adventure + a slight of nostalgic indulgence.

[Comic] “You Can’t Go Home Again”

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As a child, I loved “The Bamboo Noodle Parlor” in Ogden, Utah, mainly for the table-side jukeboxes and friendly owner who liberally passed out dum-dum lollipops. While dreaming wistfully about this now non-existent Chinese restaurant run by a Japanese man, it occurred to me that he probably spent time in Utah, USA dreaming about his own childhood spent (possibly) back in Japan. Hence the cartoon with each of us dreaming of another time in another country.

I haven’t run across any actual photos of “The Bamboo” on-line, but I did find this advertisement for a grand re-opening in 1957:

Bamboo Noodle Parlor 1957 advertisement.

Cheers “Bamboo Noodle Parlor”! Thanks for giving me my first Americanized taste of “The Orient.”