Pearls From The Orient

There are many reasons why this blog had more or less gone to sleep for a couple of months over the autumn.  First of all we had visitors from the UK and we had trips out of China, to Hong Kong, Japan and to the UK.  By the time we got to August it was obvious to me that we were going to be doubling the length of time that we were going to be asked to stay here – but we didn’t get anything in writing until the beginning of November, which led to a huge amount of uncertainty throughout September and October.  When it came, it was good news in that it was affirmation to Richard that he is doing a good job here – only 50% of people make a success of their time in China – and to me it was a time for expanding my horizons, whilst troubled that I needed to use my extra time here well, to avoid falling mentally into a black hole.  So I went out and finally joined the quilting group that I had tried to join in March.  I signed up for a series of photography lessons.  I joined The Shanghai Expat Association and started learning to play Mahjong.  I had a trial Ikebana lesson, went on an a couple of trips, visited a couple of restaurants with hordes of women and got involved in organising and leading walks around Shanghai for the Brits Abroad and trying to devise a new one for them. And I have just started to learn spoken Mandarin, as I am now going to be here for longer than a year.  All this has meant that what had been my über-tourist and writing time has been devoured up into almost nothing……..  but now that many expat orientated things have gone quiet over Christmas I have found time to start writing again and trying to catch up with all the things I’d like to tell you about – there are dozens of them. I’ve learned too, that I actually really like exploring and writing – perhaps a book will eventually come out of this experience…….. They Said It Would Be A Year In Shanghai.

A particular mindset is needed to survive this expat life in Shanghai.  The more you have it, the easier life is here.   First of all it’s not static. It must be continually, observing, absorbing, accepting, adjusting with an attempt all the time to just go with the flow.  But there are influences that I need to avoid to stay positive about my life here.

I am an ENTP personality type (Extraverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving) – which only make up 3% of the population and only 2% of women.  It makes me an extraverted outsider wherever I go.  I’m not one of these women who think that life is all about feelings – for me life is about thinking, analysing and debating and usually I don’t really care what anyone else thinks about me, or where I stand in comparison to others.  Don’t get me wrong I have feelings, but I like to try and keep them in check. However I do have an evil twin, like everyone, that emerges under stress.  My evil twin on the dark side, is an unhealthy version of the ISFJ (Introverted, Sensing, Feeling, Judgemental) personality – my exact opposite, which reveals itself occasionally with emotional outbursts, or caring deeply about my social status or comparing myself to others – “Most people I’ve met have a driver. I only have to rings and a microwave, everyone else I’ve met seems to have an oven. I only came out with 3 suitcases, everyone else seems to have come out with a container load. I didn’t have a look-see visit to choose where I’d like to live”.  All these have come out in the last four months, when I’ve been feeling sorry for myself, dealing with the stress of uncertainty of the year end, of my son who has been through so much starting university without our help to get him set-up, of post-cancer pain and fatigue, with my father’s stroke and other frail lonely elderly relatives on the other side of world, with our daughter’s uncertain future (She heard this week that she has an unconditional place for her MA in Comparative Literature (Chinese, French, German & English)), but is waiting for an alternative institution to respond).  It’s not like you, to compare yourself with others, Richard would say.  And he’s right, normally I don’t.  And now I’m back to normal and I’m back to looking at the differences in circumstances of the various people I meet with amusement and getting enjoyment from the look on a woman’s face (horror) when I say I only came out with 3 suitcases…….It’s been a rather elevating experience, actually and I’m impressed with myself that it will now be for 2 years. My outburst did mean that I managed to persuade Richard to drag a worktop oven home from Carrefour last week with the promise of better bread homemade from a sourdough starter (now in the fridge), so perhaps the stress of the last few months has been worth it.

I have made new friends, some very special to me. And I have met quite a few others who don’t quite have my take on managing China: I find their attitude stultifying and ultimately damaging.  There are people on the organic food track who are paralysed by the air pollution, the soil pollution, the chemicals on their food or their adherence to eating western food no matter what.  One I met recently complained that most of her three years here have been spent going from western shop to western shop trying to find ingredients to make that day’s meal.  “I’m not going to eat what they eat” she said. But now the new online organic food company that delivers to her door has allowed her to get out more and start doing things, which is where I met her………… I’d already talked to some of the people at this online organic food outlet at an exhibition where they were making all sorts of assertions about the quality of their food, but with no evidence to back up their claims.  “How do you know that your supply chain is refrigerated the whole way through as you have just claimed” I asked “Have you actually used tracking temperature probes to prove it?” Er, no……… She was messing with the wrong person – I’ve got an inside track.  There are others who won’t eat anything that looks foreign to them, poking at food and complaining about it all the way.  You can tell their parents didn’t grow up in a war-torn Europe.  And complaining about the quality of the hotel they are staying in, when everything in fact is just Dandy.

There are others who just won’t use the Metro system.  They have drivers to take them everywhere and some feel duty bound to use them “to keep the driver occupied”. They rarely get down and personal with the local population; floating into and out of one expat event to another isolated from reality, in circumstances way above their normal existence back home.  In the words of my hairdresser “I can’t stand the expats who forget where they come from………”.  Their conversations are often vacuous and mind-numbing and make me just want to scream.

Then are those people who don’t know how to make fresh faces feel welcome – The Chinese themselves appear to be rather bad at this, too.  If I go into Richard’s work I have to introduce myself and find out who they are and at meals together they prefer to keep to their end of the table.  We’ve been here for almost a year now and I have yet to meet Richard’s Chinese boss, although I have met his Icelandic-American boss a couple of times, when he flies into country.  Some of the Americans I’ve met are rather bad at this too, they like to keep in their own clique – especially the ones who haven’t lived abroad before, although there are some wonderful exceptions.  The Brits, I’ve found, are rather good at making everyone feel welcome, no matter where they float in from and making sure that as much as possible everyone gets to know everyone else.  We as a nationality come across as quite amateur in what we do – the American-dominated Shanghai Expat Association have a glossy professional-quality monthly magazine, but when they meet up it feels that you have to fight to be part of any social gathering and to me it feels very competitive – The Brits meanwhile organise everything behind the scenes, making it all happen without a fanfare, making sure everyone is included and enjoying themselves, even if that means being rather eccentric.  The British in action looks a bit like a swan floating down a river in fact – gliding along in an effortless way not really minding what others think, but with a lot of hard paddling going on out of view, but no great fanfare about how they do it.  It makes me quite proud of them, actually.

Now that I’ve been exposed to quite a few other expats in this city I’ve decided to limit the extent of my exposure to those that I have found whom I like and get on well with, who are open-minded and genuinely kind.  The rest do me no good, and I’ll avoid them as much as I can.

So now we are definitely here for another year – as long as the Chinese government renews our visas until the end of 2016. The Security Bureau have our passports at the moment – we won’t get them back until Christmas Eve, which is one of the reasons why we shall be staying here for Christmas, the delay by HR in the autumn in formally committing to our being here for another year has meant we won’t be with any of our family at the end of this week.