There are three remaining categories of insane China-expats. I will discuss two today, and the final one tomorrow. In my previous entry I focused on the newly arrived type trying to escape from something. Many of the remaining three groups have significant overlap with the aforementioned one, but also have their own unique set of neuroses.

[update: the final installment has been pushed back a few days as a result of other developments. Please continue to check in]

MONEY CHASERS

You know this type. You may even be this type. As the Western media moved away from the mid-90s thrashing of China’s human rights records and anything else they could criticize, suddenly articles began emerging about the country’s great economic prospects. By 2007 the notion of the powerful New China has been so written about it is almost comical, bringing to mind the obsession surrounding Japan in the late 1980s. I can’t wait for Ron Howard to release the Chinese version of the peculiarly named Gung-Ho (since when is “Gung-Ho” a Japanese expression??).

With that hype came the scavengers looking to cash in. In the beginning many of these people made a decision to become “China-hands” learning the language and moving here fairly permanently (this group will be discussed tomorrow). The more recent incarnation of the Money Chaser is overwhelming located in Beijing, Shanghai, or the Pearl River Delta. They tend to be lawyers, consultants, or investment banking/hedge fund types. They have expensive tastes not because they want to show off but because the can afford to.

The new wave of Money Chasers either get their companies to send them ‘out here’ or have already made a bundle at home and can afford to sink some money into a start-up (The Time Blog has a rant about people calling Asia “out here”). One of the odd parts of the phenomenon is that they are almost completely removed from China save the new class of uber-rich. Many end up in Shanghai, which is in some ways distinctly un-Chinese with its bling-culture and snobby/trendy hobnobbers. A consultant once confided that he had chosen Shanghai to be his company’s China base, not because it held strategic advantages, but rather because “it felt the most like home.”

In ‘more Chinese’ cities like Beijing they tend to live in little villas well outside the second-ring road toward the airport with their blond children and chauffeurs. A charming guy I met who falls into this category once joked that you can tell which parents are the most active in raising their kids by the youngsters’ level of Chinese: children who speak fluently are probably spending most of their time with the ayi.

On the one hand you could argue that these are the least crazy of the crazies. The logic for coming here is clear and they tend to do well for themselves. Besides that, if they were living in New York or Washington they would probably be similarly removed from the city center with their little isolated worlds on the periphery of society (think I’m a bit biased?). Most tend not to speak Chinese very well, but who can blame them when they’re busy ironing out the details of corporate mergers. It’s hard enough when you have nothing to do all day to sink your teeth into Chinese.

One the other hand there is something particularly bizarre about coming halfway around the world to have the exact same life that you would have elsewhere. These people are almost entirely chasing the money, and as much as they like the idea of living in China (or sometimes don’t) they really aren’t. Chinese culture barely makes its way into their daily rituals beyond the superficialities of eating Sichuan food and having ancient art on the walls. They live in an isolated bubble, although I have to admit the bubble is furnished pretty nicely.

RETIREES

Some people have figured out that coming to China at sixty is a pretty cool way to retire. Some work at universities, immersing themselves in college life like a long-time American professor. They show up as much in Xining as they do in Shanghai. Other retirees don’t even worry about the job part and just stop working earlier than they could afford to in Europe. They take classes in Taiji and language.

On the face of it this seems like a normal plan, and many of the people in this category that I have met were really interesting. Still, I have to say that a lot of them have been pretty peculiar. One Canadian woman that I met in Chengdu had been in China seven years and spoke so little Chinese that she accused me of lying when I translated our driver saying we were going to the Traffic Hotel, apparently not believing someone could learn four characters in two years. She used her students as personal maids, having them perform all of the chores around town that she could not do herself.

Another guy I met had been in the Foreign Service years earlier and told me he hated most of the people in places they had assigned him (“Especially the Arabs. I really hated them,” he told me about his stay in Egypt.) I wondered why I guy who didn’t like non-Americans seemed intent on continually living abroad.

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Tomorrow I will conclude this three-part series, which in retrospect would have been better titled “The Expats Must be Crazy”, mostly because I love low budget movies not shot in synch sound that frequently speed up the tape for comic effect. The last group, and arguably the most neurotic, will be the medium-to-long-term China hands.

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