Living and working abroad

Caroline Miceli! I know you! I remember you when you were working in Xiamen.

I don’t know about the numbers of young Americans moving overseas temporarily on a ‘gap year’ type of career move, and it’s interesting that it’s one of the most popular e-mailed articles on the New York Times website today. Lots of people come to Xiamen (and probably other parts of China) to, IMHO:

1. take a holiday and earn a bit of money (illegally) while they’re at it
2. do whatever it is their company sent them here to do
3. earn a fortune being an entrepreneur in ‘trading’

As you can imagine, those doing option 3 tend to be disappointed. One of the things that gets me about people who come here seeking their fortune is that they don’t seem to realise that EVERYONE IS DOING IT. And those who have done very well for themselves have put in YEARS AND YEARS of hard work and experience building.

I am certainly not the only gay in the village who understands this, but why is it so many foreigners here have this expectation of big money in a short time? Chinese people aren’t going to fall over themselves to buy your product or make your product irresistable to sales channels you might or might not have. If you’ve spotted a good product, there’s a good chance a VERY LARGE CORPORATION in the developed world with LOTS OF MONEY AND MIGHT has already had their sourcing agents go in there with promises of HUGE VOLUMES to get low prices, so you’re not going to get the ‘best price’, no matter what the factory says.

I don’t know when this became a rant but I’m going to stop it. I came to China with no plan, having been told that if I wanted to teach English as a stop gap I was going to find it difficult to find work since I’m ethnic Chinese. One thing I certainly did not expect was to end up doing what I’m doing now. I also did not expect to still be in China.

What I think is the most striking thing — nothing happens as you expect or even remotely anticipate. Come to China for a holiday, find yourself still there three years later teaching English. Or something. Meet a girl, she gets pregnant, suddenly you’ve got a family. Life just surprises you. It changes you (me) in such subtle ways that when you (I) emerge at the end of the experience, you (I) am quite, quite different.