What are we doing here, anyways? This isn't a blog entry about why I love China, this is more of an entry asking YOU why you do. What drives you to stay? What makes it all worthwhile?
There's something magical about this country I've learned to call home, and even after a year and a half, I can't quite put my finger on it.
Whether I'm struggling through rush hour traffic (when is rush hour, anyways? by my count, it seems to be from 7am - 11pm, but surely this can't be right), fighting with the delivery guy because he screwed up my order again, bargaining down goods from a ridiculous price to a somewhat decent one or rolling my eyes at the horrible service in restaurants, there always seems to be a million and one things to complain about. Still, there's something about this place that keeps me here, month after month, through misery and happiness and smog and grey skies.
It's surely not for the scenery or natural beauty - anyone working in the never ending grind knows how hard it is to get a glimpse of anything truly beautiful outside of the fifth ring road, and it's definitely not for the social graces or general feelings of hospitality sprung forth from the customer service industry. Maybe it's the abundance of cheap restaurants, cheap groceries, cheap rent and cheap taxis, or maybe it's this idea that in China, you never have to grow up.
I've been known to many as a cynic, and I've told off more than a few people for being overly optimistic and not owning up to the realities of life, so maybe it's my natural aversion to wearing rose coloured glasses that leaves me unable to truly understand what it is I love about this country. There are moments in where I am beaten down and at my wits end, when traffic and bad drivers and blind cyclists make me want to take the next plane out of here, but at the end of the day, and in the very earliest of mornings, I am always very glad that I decided to stay.
This isn't a blog entry about why I love China, this is more of an entry asking YOU why you do. What drives you to stay? What makes it all worthwhile?
For me, it's the little moments. Walking down hutong alleys, watching the hustle and bustle, giggling about little children wearing the traditional assless pants, making friends with the ayis and the odd friendly fuwuyauns or shi fu, all those late nights with friends from around the world and the natural wonders that you get to see on short holidays around the country. In my every day world of getting groceries and speaking English and going for meetings and taking taxis, I'm finding it harder and harder to connect with Chinese culture.
How do you do it, why do you do it and what drives you to stay, day after day and year after year? What are you giving back and how is it all going to change or stay the same? The new year is coming up, and maybe my resolution this time around will be to put real words to this love affair I've started with this country. What's yours?
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Good question Jennwong,
With just about every foreigner including myself having enough complaints about China to write a book about (I'm sure its been done) we often forget the fact that we are still here. You are right there must be something keeping us here. I have had a kind of fascination with China for a decade now. I have been here many times but never lived here until now. Each time I visited I thought I must come back again. There is something curious about this place. For me it presents a kind of insight into human behavior. For instance, we can chose to react to certain human situations we face in China or we can chose to understand what is behind those behaviors. That has been the fascinating part, that has taught me more about myself more than anything.
So for me China is a playground of insight more than a place to settle down.
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Swiss people (like me) must have a million and two complaints against Beijing and the PRC. ("Switzerland is much cleaner, everyone observes the law", blah blah blah. I know.) But at the end of the day, they settle in (especially your Swiss-Chinese version) and follow the flow.
Then again, if they did NOT spit when the spirit moved them, if they could DUMP the "er-hua yin" (me no really like it, that's why; more a personal bone to pick), if they could stop at pedestrian crossings for the poor homo pekinesis modernis (there goes my Latin), and if big bad trucks would NOT run through red lights on Chaoyang North Road or nearly bang into my car on Municipal Highway 220, THAT would be a better, more "harmonious" Chinese capital.
But hey, am I one to complain? I've settled in and integrated quite a bit. Subscribe to local newspapers and still get to see the dark side of things (through "reroutes", that's what -- I call 'em, anyway). I actually love that Mozart in Line 5 so much that was the first song I played heading into 2008. And jeez, I'm dying for the opening of those freeways.
Like those are incentives for me to hang up on Beijing? I... don't really think so...
Plus, my career in essence FEEDS on Beijing. No Beijing = no nothing, niente di niente for me. So yeah -- Beijing for me in the long run.
Every city has bits and bobs that make you lose more hair than is declared healthy by your doctor. And yet, every city has the other bits and pieces that attract you with a force bigger than those magnets you were supposed to toy around with back in physics class in school. For me, Beijing's too big a magnet. I surrender. ;-)
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Nothing beautiful outside the 5th Ring Road? Mountainous Mentougou, Huairou, Miyun, anyone? Go there and you've been a place more Swiss than Switzerland in terms of the scenery. It will take your breath away.
(And then you'll need to be rushed to the emergency room.)
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What are we doing here anyway?
Now that's a good question.
Some came for work Some came to play Some for a day And some to stay
Apart from being a a terrible rhyme I very much doubt that the last line is true. I think very few people came with the intention of making Beijing/China there permanent home.
I think that for most people the reason they stay is the result of a series of, often unrelated, coincidences and events. Business opportunities, love, fascination with the pace of change, interest in the imperial & recent past, and the relatively low cost of living, are doubtlessly some of the factors that help people to flow from day to day.
Many of the long-term expatriates that I know never actually decided to stay. Just day follows day, season follows season and then suddenly one morning one awakes with the "wow, is it really 10 years" syndrome.
I was sent to China (not Beijing) by my company for work in 1998. I now work for a different company and stay because, despite the occasional bad day, I enjoy being here.
No, not the pollution or the traffic (both good reasons to relocate out from the City Centre to one of the quieter, and cheaper, suburbs) but the daily contact with other people living here.
For me, despite all the complaints, Beijing is a warm and friendly city.
In short, the answer is we are not prisoners we stay because we are happy here!
Now go and define happy :)
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forest, i think i agree with you on most of your reply. in fact, i originally came to China on a 3 week holiday, and my boyfriend came to work at a university summer camp. collectively, we've been here for nearly 5 years now, and have just signed on for another year. strange chains of events have led us both to stay here for longer than originally planned, and even our plan to leave beijing for yunnan province was foiled by opportunities so good we just couldn't pass them up.
however - daily contact with the people living here makes me wonder. on the whole, and as horrible as this sounds, i sometimes feel like my interactions with "some" local people make my stay all the less satisfying. standing in supermarket lines and getting shoved out of the way by pushy assholes, people who don't do their jobs properly, people who cheat & lie - these are things i come across on a nearly daily basis, and though it's only a small sample of the population who engages in this kind of behaviour, it sours my opinion of the country as a whole. true, every country in the world i'm sure has simliar complaints, but i really believe that china is one of the worst.
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@jaytb -- what insights into human behavior have you gleaned from living here?! not trying to put you on the spot, but am truly curious & interested. i agree with you on some levels, but there are some human behaviors in & out of china that completely baffle me.
for instance, there are some people i know who say they have found the zen in beijing driving habits & traffic. walking down crowded streets or through crowded shops is no longer a blood pressure rising experience for them and they say that they've found the rythym and now it's totally easy. no matter how many times it's explained to me, i can't figure it out. WHERE IS THIS ZEN?!
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If I were you , I 'd leave China, go to Vietam,
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@ Zhaopeng,
why?
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The excitement of an economy in transition, and the optimism that goes along with it.
Got my first taste back in the bubble days in Japan, and its addictive. Tried living in the states for a while, and it was stale. No one has ever seen rapid growth like what we're experiencing in China now, and the enthusiasm of the local people is palpable, even contagious. I guess that's what I like most - that energy. I may put on my cynical "just you wait and see" hat from time to time, but it is so much better than being inundated with jadedness.
Still, I must say, as of late, I too have been casting a longing eye on Vietnam. I went and visited in 2006, and found it reminiscent of the quaint China I first visited in the late 80s, transitioning into the somewhat less quaint China of the 90s, but with beautiful beaches and endless summer.
Still, I didn't really detect "the buzz" that I seem to thrive on there tho. No one seems to notice that they are the next big thing.
Maybe that's a good thing.
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In the resonant words of Leonard Cohen, "We are ugly, but we have the music."
At the end of the day, it's always the dynamism of Beijing's arts and cultural atmosphere that keeps me here. There's something utterly beautiful about the constant movement, and the fact that people believe they can create a vibrant environment so long as they try.
Being focused on electronic music for almost a decade now, I've been involved with a couple of the world's supposedly most flourishing scenes, and ironically found more mafan everywhere else than here.
It may be broken, but Beijing is still my home. It's not where we are, but the endless possibility of where we might be going.