Tag Archives: international relocation

“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.)

Sea shipment arrives: the awe of expat transitions

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

It was (mostly) a joy to receive the 40 foot container full of our stuff this weekend. The house is filling up, there are more toys and books for the kids, and I’m writing this sitting on an actual couch.

But I also find these starkly marked transitions to be oddly melancholy: What will happen in the next “x” years? What will the day feel like when it’s all boxed up again? How old will we all be? Where will we be going? Seattle? Shanghai? Amsterdam? Around the corner?

Moving to a new country (relatively) frequently has forced me to notice and mark every change according to where we were/are: Wow, I bought this sweater back when we lived in Seattle. Hey, these clothes from Zhuhai work again now that I’m back in the semi-tropics. Did I really ride this bakfiets cargo bike every day only 8 weeks ago?

My beloved bakfiets

I’ve been slowly reading the novel “Sea of Poppies” by Amitav Ghosh. In talking about a group of migrant, indentured Indians traveling by sea to a far flung, foreign destination, he includes this description of their day of departure:

“… The long-planned-for rituals of departure were forgotten in the confusion, but strangely, this great outburst of activity became itself a kind of worship, not so much intended to achieve an end – their bundles and bojhas were so small and so many times packed and unpacked that there was not much to be done to them – but rather as an expression of awe, of the kind that might greet a divine revelation: for when a moment arrives that is so much feared and so long awaited, it perforates the veil of everyday expectation in such a way as to reveal the prodigious darkness of the unknown.”

The big, interesting question that these stark transitions force: What will be?

Songs in all the wrong places

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

Country Western duets on Java

Terraced emerald rice paddies, swaying palm trees, dramatic volcanic mountains all whizz by as we listen to “Islands in the Stream.” Again and again and again.

After the fifth or so cycle of Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, I politely tap on the driver’s only other cassette and request a switch. He gives me a resigned look and pops in the Balinese folk music tape. An audible sigh passes from the lips of the other passengers as their eyes roll and they think: “the damn foreigner wants the folk music, give me a f**king break.”

“Hotel California” in a far-flung hotel bar

The only thing worse than hearing this Eagles’ song, is hearing it played by a live band in the lobby of your lonely hotel. And the only thing worse than that, is when the band replaces “Hotel California” with the name of the actual hotel you are staying at.

Heard several years ago in Kigali, Rwanda:

“Welcome to the Hotel Umubano! Such a lovely place, such a lovely face. Plenty of room at the Hotel Umubano. Any time of year you can find it here….

“Last thing I remember, I was running for the door, I had to find the passage back to the place I was before, relax said the nightman, we are programmed to receive. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.”

When you hear the “Hotel California” intro-strains, the only smart move is to make a swift dash to your room. The endless BBC News loop is less depressing.

“All the Lonely People” in Ikea anywhere in the world

Moving to a new place (especially to an empty house awaiting a sea shipment) requires a trip to Ikea. However, the mid-week–why did I think it was a good idea to move yet again?–blues are not helped by hearing the Beatles’ “All the Lonely People” while wandering an empty Ikea.

“Ah, look at all the lonely people…”

Throw the cheapest set of punch metal forks, knives and spoons into the cart.

“Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been…lives in a dream…”

Debate whether to buy four ceramic plates. Remember the house has hard tiles floors. Throw four cheap plastic plates meant for picnicking into the cart.

“All the lonely people, where do they all come from?…”

Pull three folding chairs from the tall shelves in the self-service area.

“All the lonely people, where do they all belong?…”

The three folding chairs slide off the bottom of the cart into someone’s leg in the check-out line.

“Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name…nobody came…”

The three folding chairs slide off again entering the elevator.

“All the lonely people, where do they all come from?”

Remind myself that the first four to six months after an international move are just plain hard.

[Comic] Channeling “The Jerk”: moving into an empty house

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

Right now I’m channeling Steve Martin as “The Jerk“:

“… I don’t need any of this. I don’t need this stuff, and I don’t need *you*. I don’t need anything. Except this. (picks up ashtray)

And that’s the only thing I need is *this*. I don’t need this or this. Just this ashtray… And this paddle game. The ashtray and the paddle game and that’s all I need… And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that’s all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control, and the paddle ball… And this lamp.

“The ashtray, this paddle game, and the remote control, and the lamp, and that’s all *I* need. And that’s *all* I need too. I don’t need one other thing, not one… I need this. The paddle game and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches for sure. Well what are you looking at? What do you think I’m some kind of a jerk of something!…”

Thank God there is an Ikea 15 minutes away from our new place.

[Comic] Relocation Insurance: Pirates-Yes, Terrorists-No

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

Having just finished studying the fine print of our moving company’s “Transit Protection Program,”  I can summarize their coverage–if all of our household possessions are destroyed by certain unexpected events en route to Hong Kong–as follows:

In sum, if all of our worldly possessions must be stopped and destroyed by someone between Cambridge and Hong Kong, please let it be by Somali pirates rather than Al Qaeda terrorists. Oh, and if war flares up, let it be a “conventional” war rather than a nuclear war.