China Expat is a cultural and literary forum for expatriates interested in China and has been published by Asia Briefing Ltd since 2001. The sites resident China culture writers have included such expatriate luminaries as 
China is the New Europe
Two centuries ago, young men and women of privilege took Grand Tours of Europe. They were expected to return worldly wise, having strolled the Acropolis and floated down Venetian canals. About a century ago, Hemingway and aimless young gypsies like him flocked to Europe, where they could afford to sit in cafes all day waiting to drink away the night.
Needless to say, those Europes are long gone.
Today, China is the ideal choice for those who would make up for a lifetime of cultural starvation with a two-week banquet, for those who would live like lords without the prescribed thirty-year interval of ceaseless labor. Europe? Well, Notre Dame still has its gargoyles in the right places. But you’re bound to be in earshot of some baseball-capped Yank making Disney Hunchback jokes. If the forbidding majesty of the Reichstag overwhelms your bladder, good luck finding a toilet -it will cost you a Euro when you do (that’s 10 RMB to you and me, China expats).
To play fair, China’s biggest attractions also crawl with tourists even more annoying than you. The land bristles with inconveniences to test both traveler and expat. But China as the new Europe has nothing to do with sightseeing. Which is more inspiring, the Forbidden City or the Louvre? Neither, if you live within a one-hour bus ride of either one. As for hidden expense and exasperation, that’s only the worst part of being somewhere new.
The redemptive part of life abroad has very little to do with what your conscious mind registers. That part of your brain is far too busy checking maps, converting currencies, and convincing you that a chipped marble bust really was worth all the time and expense. The worth-it quotient derives from ambience, chance encounters, and seeing the universal rituals performed with a foreign twist. They are the details mulled over while rubbing your aching feet back at the hotel, remembered long after you’ve forgotten whether you were at the Dam Platz or the Platz Dam.
In China, these details stir the psyche like a shot of bai jiu. In Europe, they’re spumante-strength at best.
Certainly, the chic environs of the Champs d’Elysees could lend Forrest Gump an air of sophistication, were he there window shopping for boxes of chocolate. The problem lies in how preconditioned you are to everything within a hundred kilometers of the Eiffel, the Hague, or the Coliseum. A faint sense of unease comes not just from that double espresso but the fact that Audrey Hepburn is nowhere to be seen. Preconceptions run away with your reality at every turn.
Those preconceptions are media distortions, but the typical Westerner’s preconceptions of China are so distorted as to be grotesques. Witness the newbie taxiing into Guangzhou from the airport. There are glass towers where the pagodas should be, Audis have chased away all rickshaws, and rather than engaging in vigorous exchanges of kung fu, pedestrians go about the humdrum business of 21st century life. Mind blown, the newbie is wide open to the million subtleties that travelers to other locales have to wait days for, if they notice at all.
Most of these subtleties register as annoyances at first. Why do they have to slurp their noodles like that? Are they just making the rules of the road up while they drive? How come they sound like they’re arguing but they’re smiling at each other? If you’re not too busy trying to see everything you’ll soon start reaping small gifts, the baby staring at you as though your spaceship just landed, the stoic octogenarian on his motor-trike negotiating rush-hour chaos, back to back with his equally impassive tai tai.
Westerners up for self-imposed exile in China are currently stymied by new visa regulations. But once you’re in, the bohemian lifestyle is yours at deep discount. For some reason, there’s still a premium on non-yellow hides. Furthermore, all Chinese cities of note have expat colonies, replete with cafes and bars, developed yet insular enough to let even the well-adjusted among us feel a little Hemingway.
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