Comment

Privileged expats lead an alien life

By Lara Farrar (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-02 07:30

When I was a reporter in Boston, I covered the city's exploding population of immigrants from Latin America. My articles centered on their lives there and how they did, or did not, coalesce with the local population.

I was fascinated with both the intangible and tangible aspects of their experiences: How did their culture intermingle with America's? What media did they consume? Where did they shop? Where did they socialize? What challenges did they face?

In the media and among social science scholars in the West, much research is dedicated to studying the nature of such communities.

However, attention is rarely given to another immigrant populace that here in Beijing is categorized as the proverbial expatriate class.

This may seem obvious - though I don't think it necessarily is - we expats are also aliens, migrants, immigrants - labels that, at least in America, are associated with usually underprivileged ethnic groups, often treated with hostility, or unfairly portrayed as a burden on the communities they infiltrate.

Those labels apply to us. But because of the connotations they hold, it is difficult for us to apply them to ourselves. And thus makes it difficult to even initiate a self-reflexive study on our place in Beijing, or even China, as something other than expats - as immigrants.

In essence, I, you and anyone else who is a foreigner here is an immigrant, part of a diaspora of skilled migrants: elite professionals who acquire a privileged position within the societies in which they move. Some academics call us cosmopolitans, global citizens who partially adapt to new cultures but never fully live within them.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Relating my experience here as an immigrant to the immigrants I covered back in Boston.

How Beijing has pseudo-foreign enclaves (expat apartment compounds or areas like The Village in Sanlitun) not dissimilar to those in Massachusetts. Or our relationships, or lack of relationships, with Chinese and what they think of us.

Of course our social positions are markedly different. The places expats hang out are in the center of town instead of on the fringes. And here, foreigners are mostly privileged outsiders. Or in the words of James Farrer, an American sociology professor in Tokyo who is researching Westerners in Shanghai, Westerners form a "special category of 'strangers' within the Chinese city" who are "negotiating a complex outsider-insider relation to the host society typical of diasporic community formation."

I recently spoke to Farrer about the significance of studying, well, us.

To understand, he said, how expatriates attempt to acculturate themselves within a society they may never, truly, be a part of.

To see how foreigners try to become part of that society and whether there are other possibilities for greater integration.

To explore how Chinese and expats coexist.

"As China rises, what happens to the relationships between Westerners and Chinese on a social level?" said Farrer.

"Is a new ideology emerging? Are these communities more mixed? In what ways are they still segregated and what way not still segregated?"

In Beijing, the influx of immigrants from the West will not only continue, it will also increase.

Those of us who stay will have to find ways to become part of this society and this society will have to become part of us.

There will inevitably be divisions and differences. Acknowledging expats as immigrant communities and exploring their coalescence with China's society is at least a starting point to begin narrowing such divides, and to cultivating a greater self-awareness among all of us.

"We can't have a global society in which people only hangout with themselves," Farrar said. "This will not be a healthy society."