Comment: Returning to Beijing as an expat

By Qi Zhai (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-30 10:36

I remember the day I left Beijing. It was February, two decades ago.

The schoolyard was still covered in whitish patches where the snow hadn't thawed. I walked across the lonely yard carrying all the contents of my desk in my backpack.

In my mind, I had only a vague notion of going to live in this "overseas" place with my parents.

In my grade school universe, the outside world was so remote that I never even wondered about it.

Apart from my father, I didn't know anyone who had left China. I wasn't entirely sure that leaving was a good idea. Just earlier in the day a friend had pointed out a good reason to stay,

"Why would you leave now when you're ban zhang (class monitor)? Next year you'll be da dui zhang (a promotion of sorts)."

I didn't say goodbye to my classmates. Nobody in our small world had ever left for anywhere so we simply didn't know we should've bid farewell. I just walked on out of the school gates, turning back to take one last look.

After leaving Beijing that year I often came back. All the way through university I came at least once, most times twice, a year to see the city I grew up in.

But as I got older and my American corporate life took over, vacations were harder to plan and I began to see less of Beijing.

The city felt less and less like home.

Meeting my husband in the US made Beijing even more foreign to me.

I started seeing the city through his American eyes. I translated menus at every meal. I became wary of roadside stalls for the unaccustomed foreign stomach. I longed for clean Western-style toilets. I lost my patience with pushy people who refused to line up.

Little by little, Beijing became a place I "visited" instead of "went back" to.

But now I'm back, not entirely as a local but more native than an expat. I've brought my lao wai husband with me.

For the first month, we either felt like colonists arriving in a primitive land or someone's poor country cousins.

We griped about not finding accurate listings of phone numbers and addresses on Google Maps.

Yet we were impressed by restaurant staff efficiently commuting our food orders to the kitchen with handheld devices. We bemoaned the ever-growing size of the city and its prohibitive traffic.

But we were dazzled by the new subway and bus systems, that are cleaner and more clearly marked than any public transportation we boarded in New York.

We complained about Chinese chefs' liberal approach to MSG.

Meanwhile, we gave the thumbs up to the international dining scene, where we can find authentic fare hailing from Morocco to Brazil.

While I was gone, Beijing kept changing ahead, now welcoming me back as a worldly metropolis with its contradictions and quirks.

It's been two months and we've settled in. A super-sized Jenny Lou has opened up in my building and the lao wai in my household is taking Mandarin lessons.

Beijing is once again feeling like home. Even my husband can now say, "Wo men hui jia ba."

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