on china, expats and finding myself in a social situation
As if last week's crushing work stress wasn't enough, this week i had two - count 'em - social events lined up to sap every ounce of my mojo.
Actually, they were both pretty great.
One of the things our company does is provide team leads with a small budget for discretionary spending to do stuff like have a team lunch every quarter. Since my immediate boss and most of our team in Taipei are introverted types, we rarely make use of this. But our Gen Z junior dev pushed it, and so Monday night we had a combination Christmas dinner slash send-off for our colleague in Prague who recently handed in his resignation.
Clearly none of us learned during the pandemic how to do an intercontinental get-together, because although we wangled it so our dinner time was also lunch time for our European colleagues, when we wired up the Zoom call in the restaurant, they could neither hear us, nor us them. It ended up being parallel chats, with the European side featuring our soon-to-be ex-colleague from Czechia (feasting on lasagne made by his girlfriend) and our other work-from-home colleague in Slovakia (ordering in a gourmet burger).
Let's not talk about how our European colleagues are paid more, get more annual leave and can work entirely remote while we are mandated to be in the office 3.5 days per week. Let's instead talk about the hotpot.
My boss had thankfully not chosen the Chinese-owned tacky casual dining extravaganza of 海底撈 (where the whole Taipei office recently went for Christmas lunch), she had chosen a restaurant very close to my house that i have never had the chance to visit because there are no tables for one. It was amazing! Typical hotpot experience where they put a steaming cauldron of broth in the middle of the table and you get various meats and vegetables to toss in, but instead of the QR code-scanning, tablet-tapping, soul-sucking predictability of 海底撈, it was a good, old-fashioned joint with a paper menu where you get a pencil and mark down all the stuff your party wants. Grab your own beers from the cooler. Grab your own chopsticks. It was a plastic stool restaurant! I love plastic stool restaurants.
The food was fine. I didn't eat any of the duck hearts or livers the other guys were thrilled to nibble on, but there was 金針菇 enoki mushroom, 平菇 oyster mushroom, 豆腐皮 tofu skin, 凍豆腐 frozen tofu, 高麗菜 cabbage, baby corns, plus plates of 米綫 rice vermicelli with crispy ginger sprinkles instead of plain old rice to soak up the juices. Plus some fresh chilis floating in soy sauce. Not the spiciest condiment in the world because Taiwan, but still nice.
What was better than the food was the team-building. Normally i only see my colleagues in boring, middle class, located-in-the-shopping-mall restaurants where we do company events, so it was great to see them in the context of a plastic stool restaurant. For me, i get anxious in middle class restaurants. I find it awkward - the formality, the way people wait on you hand and foot, the unnecessary treats and fuss and performative excess. It makes me cringe and i can't relax. But here i was in my element, sprawled on a plastic stool, pouring out tiny cups of beer, shouting 乾杯 (gan bei!) over the steam and the hubbub and the passing traffic. I got to be me.
I think my colleagues transformed too. Or perhaps they didn't and that's the point. They are fairly shy in shopping mall restaurants and remained largely so in the plastic stool restaurant, but it wasn't an environment uncomfortable to them. There was no hesitation to tally up the orders, grab a bottle from the fridge, even join a small toast in a way that they never would at the fashionable restaurants that only serve imported booze in pint glasses. It helped me to see them in a less snobby light, and imagine what perhaps their lives might be outside of work. Because i really don't know.
See, in China a lot of my colleagues had no qualms about sharing their life stories. It was a badge of honor, if they or their parents had come up out of the village. I guess that's common in more developing countries - everyone is just one degree of separation from a rags-to-riches story, or at least a "first person in the family to go to university" story. Perhaps that's more more compelling to share than "well, i grew up in the city, had middle class parents, spent my youth in shopping malls, except for the 6 months when i had to do military duty, now i work in an office, and twice a year i visit Japan" which i imagine as the default story for my Taiwan colleagues.
We chattered a bit about holidays, and how one of my colleagues is going to Japan (of course) to go skiing this weekend. "Have you ever skiied?" "I've never even seen snow!" The big weather news of Taiwan is that this weekend it might snow, maybe, on the central mountains, above 3000m. The cold snap is bringing daytime temperatures under 20C to Taipei and i have frostbite already. But Monday it was warm and we were sitting at a rare semi-outdoor restaurant eating a winter feast. I asked my boss about her attempt to make turkey for Thanksgiving. She said it took too long to cook and was way too much food and so the next day they made 火鷄肉飯 turkey rice (a well-known dish from Chiayi) and by the time the turkey was done they were thoroughly sick of it. I guess that's the authentic experience?
I wonder if in Taiwan people get into this whole Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas thing because there are no major holidays between 中秋節 Mid-Autumn Festival and 春節 Lunar New Year, so it's fun to fill the gap with more exotic celebrations? Maybe they just like buying seasonal crap. Or maybe it happened the other way round? All the factories were pumping out tat for the western market anyway so retailers figured might as well try to sell some of the surplus locally... Couple decades later the western holiday season exists in Taiwan too. They are even advertizing a full-blown German Christmas market this weekend in Banqiao.
I got another little insight into Taiwan mindset when i remarked about how my house was just across the big 8 lane road from the restaurant, and how annoying it is to wait for the lights. A colleague explained there used to be more pedestrian overpasses in Taipei but some have been removed because Taiwanese people would prefer to wait at the light than walk up the stairs. With this kind of mindset you wonder how they would ever prevail if China decided to invade.
They were interested to hear about my time in China, especially how it was during COVID. I shared my experiences of living in Shenzhen during the initial lockdowns, back when the rest of the world still wasn't sure how seriously to take the outbreak of this weird pneumonia from Wuhan. I said the straw that broke the camel's back for me was not having freedom of movement. I can accept masking, temperature checks and social distancing, but i draw the line at fencing off entire neighborhoods and having government-manned checkpoints that control who is allowed to go where. If i cannot freely walk from one public street to another one, then i have no freedom at all.
And the ease at which China put that whole system into place was chilling. Because, of course, the infrastructure is built from the ground up for controlling people in that way. Newly-built neighborhoods divided into 小區 gated communities, 保安 security guards on the ground floor of every condo, bag checks at every subway station, every expressway is a toll road, every hotel must register guests with the police (this usually happens behind the scenes so tourists don't realize it), the 高鐵 high speed rail is literally grade-separated from the rest of the country, train stations are set up like airports with multiple security gates... All the government had to do was flick the switch on the security apparatus that already existed. You're from Wuhan? Sorry, can't come in. You're a foreigner? Sorry, not allowed. Overnight, the whole of China became Xinjiang.
Oh, and then the kicker - not being allowed to actually talk about that in an international forum. It still infuriates me that a mystery colleague reported me to HR for challenging the "China is doing great" propaganda video that was posted on an internal company chat room while i was still unable to have lunch at a local restaurant due to movement restrictions. Apparently telling the truth is "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people". Get fucking fucked.
Although, to be sure, China did deal with COVID relatively well compared to the west, right up until their failure to vaccinate everyone with high-quality (foreign) vaccines.
I find it odd when Taiwanese people are curious about my time in China, given they undoubtedly consume a ton more Chinese media than i do. I suppose Chinese media is quite Disneyfied, though, compared to the reality of life in the country. But then one of my colleagues actually has family in Shanghai, so i expect at least him to have a better understanding of the country than me... But perhaps that's presumptious. I mean, i actually lived there for several years, what would someone who just went on holiday to see his uncle once know?
And that right there is why it's so ridiculous for China to claim Taiwan as their own.
Tuesday i continued on the China topic, because i met up with an old colleague from Shenzhen. We got back in touch indirectly due to the fascination that my great grandboss has with cryptocurrency. Our company was never involved in that racket or i would never have accepted a job here in the first place. Alas bosses gonna boss and so now there is funding to launch a new cryptocurrency-related product. I figured might as well reach out to one of my ex-colleagues who ended up in that wretched hive of scum and villainy back in Shenzhen to see if he at least wanted to come to Taipei and try do it right. He wasn't looking for a new job at the time, but he happened to be in Taipei this week for a blockchain conference, so we met up for lunch.
The first and best thing he said to me, i guess because he has had to face the rest of the world's skepticism over the past couple years, is that he thinks cryptocurrency is nonsense and he has no investment in it, it's just a job for him. I can't tell you how grateful i was not to have to spend an hour listening to some true believer harp on about the upcoming split and not-a-car-company fiat and doesn't-rhyme-with-desi defi and better-than-gold stores of value and no really, all this stuff is helping the poor, actually.
It was a great chat. We went to an outdoor noodle stand near work that i haven't visited since i started skipping lunch and shared 炒米粉 fried rice vermicelli, 油豆腐 oil tofu and 滷蛋 braised egg. Then we each got coffees and wandered the neighborhood for another hour.
F talked about being a manager now and how he had to fire half his team due to the economic struggles in China and the tech industry more broadly. He said he doesn't want to be a manager any more after that, and i don't blame him. He's transitioning back into an IC role. He likes having the power to set the direction for his team, but he doesn't like dealing with budgets or staffing. Honestly, i'm suspicious of any engineer who does. I told him i was jealous after he said that in his current company there is a rule that if anyone on the team struggles even a bit with English, the whole meeting must be in Chinese, hell with any foreigners. One of the things i miss about China is being forced to speak Chinese all the time, even if it was due to Chinese chauvinism.
Turns out that he is the last of the expats in Shenzhen. He said that since COVID the city emptied out of foreigners, and he was struck now by the lack of diversity. To be honest, i never really saw Shenzhen as an especially cosmopolitan place foreigner-wise (most of them lived in Shanghai or Beijing) but it always felt diverse to me because of the migrant workers from elsewhere in China, each bringing their own foods, languages and customs. I don't know if that has changed much in the blue collar industries, but F did share that it has changed in the white collar world. White collar workers all moved back to their hometowns during the pandemic and a lot of them bought houses there and now have no desire to come back to the city. His company stayed full remote, so he lives 6 months plus one day per year in Shenzhen for tax reasons and spends the rest of the time outside China. Few months back home in France, couple months in Japan, couple months in Thailand... Full-blown digital nomad style.
He talked about how nice it is to be in Taipei, a place where he doesn't feel like the only foreigner. (He also said he preferred the food which, okay, you're entitled to your wrong opinion.) I said one of the things i need to keep reminding myself about when i miss aspects of China, is how free it feels to live outside of China. You don't really notice the constant oppression when you live with it every day, but when you leave it's like this weight that is gone, and you can scarcely believe you had gotten so accustomed to it. Like, being able to buy a train ticket and just... get on the train. No security checkpoints, no need to have your passport with you, just go. Nobody cares. It's such an incredible feeling. He agreed, but also added that Chinese people don't have the same experience, which i knew when i lived there but it's easy to forget when you leave. People who have grown up their whole lives with that weight, they don't know life any different, so even when they travel overseas and have the opportunity to experience real freedom, they don't notice or value it in the same way that someone who grew up with it does.
That's how authoritarians stay in power.
I said the day i really noticed it was when i went to Pride in Kaohsiung a few weeks ago. The thing that i couldn't get out of my head, marching through the streets with a bunch of out and proud gays, was that this could never happen in China under Xi. In case F didn't have much exposure to the scene, i added that in China gay people still exist - obviously - but they have to exist behind closed doors, in online communities, outside of the public view. What surprised me was the immediate response: "no, it's worse now". I don't know if he's had the standard China expat experience where the longer you live there the more you hate it, or if it really is the case, but F was adamant that things were worse now than a few years ago. More nationalist. More conservative. More xenophobic. More homophobic. I suppose it makes sense. When the economy is struggling, the government is going to double-down on blaming minorities. It's ruthless but effective to pin the blame the smallest and weakest groups. And while that also happens in democratic countries, at least in democratic countries the minorities are allowed to call out the bigotry and unite in solidarity. In authoritarian countries the government blocks the formation of support networks and social movements, because keeping minorities isolated keeps them weak.
So it seems like F is ready to leave China. But i don't think he's ready to leave Asia. We talked a bit about some other places. He said Japan was nice, but it's very regimented. "As bad as China?" No, not as bad as China. "Everything is more cute, even the police are kawaii." He said he liked walking around the small neighborhoods and eating at local diners, but that it was very hard to get fresh fruit and vegetables. I said... what do Japanese people eat, then? Fish? He said "oh, fried food". Say what? That is so far from what i imagine Japanese cuisine to be. We talked about the fruits of Taiwan versus fruits of Guangdong. He said lychees are really expensive now, and i was like bro, lychees literally grow on the side of the road in Shenzhen. He said that's the only time he eats lychees now, off the tree. Taiwan is all about bananas, guavas and pineapples. He said bananas are still cheap and great in Guangdong. He was as surprised to hear that in Taiwan they call sweet potato 地瓜 as my Taiwanese colleagues were to hear that in China they call it 紅薯.
We talked about "expat life". He said that something he didn't like about spending time in "developing countries" is that he feels he can never trust anybody that he meets. It's not just if a girl talks to you is she just trying to score a foreign husband, it's also... if anyone talks to you, are they just 媚外 fawning on foreigners? Are they trying to scam you? Befriend you so you can be a mascot for them, a symbol of prestige? He said he didn't feel comfortable in that kind of environment, but also he didn't really feel comfortable in Europe any more either.
I said i felt the same way when i went back to Canada during COVID. That whole culture... driving cars, owning houses, eating at chain restaurants, tipping for everything, all that stuff is strange and uncomfortable to me. Once upon a time i thought my true spiritual home was the US, but now i don't even think it's Canada. I love the nature and the landscape out there, but the urban experience is decades behind anything in Asia. F agreed. Living here is - over and above everything else - convenient. Life is so much more pleasant when you live in a community designed for people.
I suggested he look into moving to Taiwan, because if you are wealthy and skilled enough (which almost every white collar foreigner is) you can get a 3 year open work permit to start, and if you stay for 5 years of 6 months plus one day per year, you qualify for permanent residence. No need to have a Taiwanese partner or family member, no need to seek sponsorship, you can just get residence because you lived here long enough to pay your dues. That's a much better deal than most countries in Asia. Japan is 10 years. Hong Kong is 7. Most other places you can't earn permanent residence simply by showing you lived there. To be fair, you can't in the US either, but the US is hardly the shining city on a hill in this regard, a country where millions of people work and pay taxes their whole lives and still don't qualify for legal residence.
I have to admit, i have pondered if i could stick out 5 years in Taiwan, if only to scoop up residence. Do i want to be a migrant worker for the rest of my life? Always held hostage by my employer? As soon as i quit my job, i have to leave the country?
Sigh.
Talking to F made me think about this stuff. It's stuff we all have to think about, i suppose, us "expats", especially the closer we get to retirement age. I said to him i don't really think of myself as an expat, and he said no you totally are one.
It's funny that blue collar workers are considered migrant workers and white collar workers are considered expats. Perhaps i prefer to be lumped in with the migrant workers because i am more likely to sit elbow-to-elbow with them in a plastic stool restaurant. Every day when Taiwan's musical garbage trucks drive past my house, i gather with my neighbors in the little park to toss my trash, and there are a couple of Filipino women there every night throwing their trash too...
My colleagues live in condos where nobody has to take their own trash out, although that's probably true of both expat and local colleagues. F was saying that his new place in Shekou district of Shenzhen is like that too. He looks out the window of his apartment and just sees another skyscraper, even though he knows 南山 mountain is just behind it. He said he likes being able to see the mountains in Taipei. It's funny because when i lived in Shenzhen my apartment looked right out at the mountains and now i don't even see the sky.
I guess it's all a bit random, because now i live on the second floor of a four storey building, in a whole neighborhood full of four storey buildings. F said that Tokyo is more like that. Just miles and miles of low-rise, a bit like Berlin or Barcelona i suppose.
If my Taiwanese colleagues didn't already make me curious to visit Japan, this chat did. It sounds like a more difficult place to live than Taiwan, especially if you can already speak Chinese and don't speak Japanese, but it also sounds like a more honest existence, at least versus trying to build a life in southeast Asia. I identify with F's feelings about not feeling like you can have a meaningful relationship with the people around you when you are in a country where there is stark wealth inequality. Even moreso in the places where tourists tend to cluster, which unfortunately also tend to be the places where you can find a stable internet connection to do remote work.
Like, would i really want to live the digital nomad life in Chiang Mai or Da Nang? I feel like i'd want to punch out every dumbass who called themselves a digital nomad first of all, but even ignoring that i'd still feel uncomfortable with the creepy power imbalance of sitting on the beach living the good life while earning a fortune in local money and not paying any taxes to the local government. "I don't know if i can trust local people taking an interest in me..." Hell, what is this colonialist whining, they're the ones who shouldn't be trusting you!
That's how the voice in my head would go.
I mean, at least the food would be great, right? Spicy? Although, now that i hear Japanese food is nothing like what i expected it to be, maybe my whole concept of Thai and Vietnamese is off too. I suppose i could check it out. One of my colleagues just got back from a couple weeks in Thailand, one of which where he was ostensibly working from beach.
How much of an asshole do you have to be to have the kind of job where you can work from beach, while other people who get paid much less have to show up and clock in at the crack of dawn?
Me. The asshole is me. And yet, i still go into the office most every day.
Man, work sucks. I wish i didn't have to work.
Anyway, Monday and Tuesday were interesting days that got me thinking about my time in China, my life here in Taiwan, and my plans going forward. What do i want?
I want to not have to work. Goddamnit.
Actually, they were both pretty great.
One of the things our company does is provide team leads with a small budget for discretionary spending to do stuff like have a team lunch every quarter. Since my immediate boss and most of our team in Taipei are introverted types, we rarely make use of this. But our Gen Z junior dev pushed it, and so Monday night we had a combination Christmas dinner slash send-off for our colleague in Prague who recently handed in his resignation.
Clearly none of us learned during the pandemic how to do an intercontinental get-together, because although we wangled it so our dinner time was also lunch time for our European colleagues, when we wired up the Zoom call in the restaurant, they could neither hear us, nor us them. It ended up being parallel chats, with the European side featuring our soon-to-be ex-colleague from Czechia (feasting on lasagne made by his girlfriend) and our other work-from-home colleague in Slovakia (ordering in a gourmet burger).
Let's not talk about how our European colleagues are paid more, get more annual leave and can work entirely remote while we are mandated to be in the office 3.5 days per week. Let's instead talk about the hotpot.
My boss had thankfully not chosen the Chinese-owned tacky casual dining extravaganza of 海底撈 (where the whole Taipei office recently went for Christmas lunch), she had chosen a restaurant very close to my house that i have never had the chance to visit because there are no tables for one. It was amazing! Typical hotpot experience where they put a steaming cauldron of broth in the middle of the table and you get various meats and vegetables to toss in, but instead of the QR code-scanning, tablet-tapping, soul-sucking predictability of 海底撈, it was a good, old-fashioned joint with a paper menu where you get a pencil and mark down all the stuff your party wants. Grab your own beers from the cooler. Grab your own chopsticks. It was a plastic stool restaurant! I love plastic stool restaurants.
The food was fine. I didn't eat any of the duck hearts or livers the other guys were thrilled to nibble on, but there was 金針菇 enoki mushroom, 平菇 oyster mushroom, 豆腐皮 tofu skin, 凍豆腐 frozen tofu, 高麗菜 cabbage, baby corns, plus plates of 米綫 rice vermicelli with crispy ginger sprinkles instead of plain old rice to soak up the juices. Plus some fresh chilis floating in soy sauce. Not the spiciest condiment in the world because Taiwan, but still nice.
What was better than the food was the team-building. Normally i only see my colleagues in boring, middle class, located-in-the-shopping-mall restaurants where we do company events, so it was great to see them in the context of a plastic stool restaurant. For me, i get anxious in middle class restaurants. I find it awkward - the formality, the way people wait on you hand and foot, the unnecessary treats and fuss and performative excess. It makes me cringe and i can't relax. But here i was in my element, sprawled on a plastic stool, pouring out tiny cups of beer, shouting 乾杯 (gan bei!) over the steam and the hubbub and the passing traffic. I got to be me.
I think my colleagues transformed too. Or perhaps they didn't and that's the point. They are fairly shy in shopping mall restaurants and remained largely so in the plastic stool restaurant, but it wasn't an environment uncomfortable to them. There was no hesitation to tally up the orders, grab a bottle from the fridge, even join a small toast in a way that they never would at the fashionable restaurants that only serve imported booze in pint glasses. It helped me to see them in a less snobby light, and imagine what perhaps their lives might be outside of work. Because i really don't know.
See, in China a lot of my colleagues had no qualms about sharing their life stories. It was a badge of honor, if they or their parents had come up out of the village. I guess that's common in more developing countries - everyone is just one degree of separation from a rags-to-riches story, or at least a "first person in the family to go to university" story. Perhaps that's more more compelling to share than "well, i grew up in the city, had middle class parents, spent my youth in shopping malls, except for the 6 months when i had to do military duty, now i work in an office, and twice a year i visit Japan" which i imagine as the default story for my Taiwan colleagues.
We chattered a bit about holidays, and how one of my colleagues is going to Japan (of course) to go skiing this weekend. "Have you ever skiied?" "I've never even seen snow!" The big weather news of Taiwan is that this weekend it might snow, maybe, on the central mountains, above 3000m. The cold snap is bringing daytime temperatures under 20C to Taipei and i have frostbite already. But Monday it was warm and we were sitting at a rare semi-outdoor restaurant eating a winter feast. I asked my boss about her attempt to make turkey for Thanksgiving. She said it took too long to cook and was way too much food and so the next day they made 火鷄肉飯 turkey rice (a well-known dish from Chiayi) and by the time the turkey was done they were thoroughly sick of it. I guess that's the authentic experience?
I wonder if in Taiwan people get into this whole Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas thing because there are no major holidays between 中秋節 Mid-Autumn Festival and 春節 Lunar New Year, so it's fun to fill the gap with more exotic celebrations? Maybe they just like buying seasonal crap. Or maybe it happened the other way round? All the factories were pumping out tat for the western market anyway so retailers figured might as well try to sell some of the surplus locally... Couple decades later the western holiday season exists in Taiwan too. They are even advertizing a full-blown German Christmas market this weekend in Banqiao.
I got another little insight into Taiwan mindset when i remarked about how my house was just across the big 8 lane road from the restaurant, and how annoying it is to wait for the lights. A colleague explained there used to be more pedestrian overpasses in Taipei but some have been removed because Taiwanese people would prefer to wait at the light than walk up the stairs. With this kind of mindset you wonder how they would ever prevail if China decided to invade.
They were interested to hear about my time in China, especially how it was during COVID. I shared my experiences of living in Shenzhen during the initial lockdowns, back when the rest of the world still wasn't sure how seriously to take the outbreak of this weird pneumonia from Wuhan. I said the straw that broke the camel's back for me was not having freedom of movement. I can accept masking, temperature checks and social distancing, but i draw the line at fencing off entire neighborhoods and having government-manned checkpoints that control who is allowed to go where. If i cannot freely walk from one public street to another one, then i have no freedom at all.
And the ease at which China put that whole system into place was chilling. Because, of course, the infrastructure is built from the ground up for controlling people in that way. Newly-built neighborhoods divided into 小區 gated communities, 保安 security guards on the ground floor of every condo, bag checks at every subway station, every expressway is a toll road, every hotel must register guests with the police (this usually happens behind the scenes so tourists don't realize it), the 高鐵 high speed rail is literally grade-separated from the rest of the country, train stations are set up like airports with multiple security gates... All the government had to do was flick the switch on the security apparatus that already existed. You're from Wuhan? Sorry, can't come in. You're a foreigner? Sorry, not allowed. Overnight, the whole of China became Xinjiang.
Oh, and then the kicker - not being allowed to actually talk about that in an international forum. It still infuriates me that a mystery colleague reported me to HR for challenging the "China is doing great" propaganda video that was posted on an internal company chat room while i was still unable to have lunch at a local restaurant due to movement restrictions. Apparently telling the truth is "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people". Get fucking fucked.
Although, to be sure, China did deal with COVID relatively well compared to the west, right up until their failure to vaccinate everyone with high-quality (foreign) vaccines.
I find it odd when Taiwanese people are curious about my time in China, given they undoubtedly consume a ton more Chinese media than i do. I suppose Chinese media is quite Disneyfied, though, compared to the reality of life in the country. But then one of my colleagues actually has family in Shanghai, so i expect at least him to have a better understanding of the country than me... But perhaps that's presumptious. I mean, i actually lived there for several years, what would someone who just went on holiday to see his uncle once know?
And that right there is why it's so ridiculous for China to claim Taiwan as their own.
Tuesday i continued on the China topic, because i met up with an old colleague from Shenzhen. We got back in touch indirectly due to the fascination that my great grandboss has with cryptocurrency. Our company was never involved in that racket or i would never have accepted a job here in the first place. Alas bosses gonna boss and so now there is funding to launch a new cryptocurrency-related product. I figured might as well reach out to one of my ex-colleagues who ended up in that wretched hive of scum and villainy back in Shenzhen to see if he at least wanted to come to Taipei and try do it right. He wasn't looking for a new job at the time, but he happened to be in Taipei this week for a blockchain conference, so we met up for lunch.
The first and best thing he said to me, i guess because he has had to face the rest of the world's skepticism over the past couple years, is that he thinks cryptocurrency is nonsense and he has no investment in it, it's just a job for him. I can't tell you how grateful i was not to have to spend an hour listening to some true believer harp on about the upcoming split and not-a-car-company fiat and doesn't-rhyme-with-desi defi and better-than-gold stores of value and no really, all this stuff is helping the poor, actually.
It was a great chat. We went to an outdoor noodle stand near work that i haven't visited since i started skipping lunch and shared 炒米粉 fried rice vermicelli, 油豆腐 oil tofu and 滷蛋 braised egg. Then we each got coffees and wandered the neighborhood for another hour.
F talked about being a manager now and how he had to fire half his team due to the economic struggles in China and the tech industry more broadly. He said he doesn't want to be a manager any more after that, and i don't blame him. He's transitioning back into an IC role. He likes having the power to set the direction for his team, but he doesn't like dealing with budgets or staffing. Honestly, i'm suspicious of any engineer who does. I told him i was jealous after he said that in his current company there is a rule that if anyone on the team struggles even a bit with English, the whole meeting must be in Chinese, hell with any foreigners. One of the things i miss about China is being forced to speak Chinese all the time, even if it was due to Chinese chauvinism.
Turns out that he is the last of the expats in Shenzhen. He said that since COVID the city emptied out of foreigners, and he was struck now by the lack of diversity. To be honest, i never really saw Shenzhen as an especially cosmopolitan place foreigner-wise (most of them lived in Shanghai or Beijing) but it always felt diverse to me because of the migrant workers from elsewhere in China, each bringing their own foods, languages and customs. I don't know if that has changed much in the blue collar industries, but F did share that it has changed in the white collar world. White collar workers all moved back to their hometowns during the pandemic and a lot of them bought houses there and now have no desire to come back to the city. His company stayed full remote, so he lives 6 months plus one day per year in Shenzhen for tax reasons and spends the rest of the time outside China. Few months back home in France, couple months in Japan, couple months in Thailand... Full-blown digital nomad style.
He talked about how nice it is to be in Taipei, a place where he doesn't feel like the only foreigner. (He also said he preferred the food which, okay, you're entitled to your wrong opinion.) I said one of the things i need to keep reminding myself about when i miss aspects of China, is how free it feels to live outside of China. You don't really notice the constant oppression when you live with it every day, but when you leave it's like this weight that is gone, and you can scarcely believe you had gotten so accustomed to it. Like, being able to buy a train ticket and just... get on the train. No security checkpoints, no need to have your passport with you, just go. Nobody cares. It's such an incredible feeling. He agreed, but also added that Chinese people don't have the same experience, which i knew when i lived there but it's easy to forget when you leave. People who have grown up their whole lives with that weight, they don't know life any different, so even when they travel overseas and have the opportunity to experience real freedom, they don't notice or value it in the same way that someone who grew up with it does.
That's how authoritarians stay in power.
I said the day i really noticed it was when i went to Pride in Kaohsiung a few weeks ago. The thing that i couldn't get out of my head, marching through the streets with a bunch of out and proud gays, was that this could never happen in China under Xi. In case F didn't have much exposure to the scene, i added that in China gay people still exist - obviously - but they have to exist behind closed doors, in online communities, outside of the public view. What surprised me was the immediate response: "no, it's worse now". I don't know if he's had the standard China expat experience where the longer you live there the more you hate it, or if it really is the case, but F was adamant that things were worse now than a few years ago. More nationalist. More conservative. More xenophobic. More homophobic. I suppose it makes sense. When the economy is struggling, the government is going to double-down on blaming minorities. It's ruthless but effective to pin the blame the smallest and weakest groups. And while that also happens in democratic countries, at least in democratic countries the minorities are allowed to call out the bigotry and unite in solidarity. In authoritarian countries the government blocks the formation of support networks and social movements, because keeping minorities isolated keeps them weak.
So it seems like F is ready to leave China. But i don't think he's ready to leave Asia. We talked a bit about some other places. He said Japan was nice, but it's very regimented. "As bad as China?" No, not as bad as China. "Everything is more cute, even the police are kawaii." He said he liked walking around the small neighborhoods and eating at local diners, but that it was very hard to get fresh fruit and vegetables. I said... what do Japanese people eat, then? Fish? He said "oh, fried food". Say what? That is so far from what i imagine Japanese cuisine to be. We talked about the fruits of Taiwan versus fruits of Guangdong. He said lychees are really expensive now, and i was like bro, lychees literally grow on the side of the road in Shenzhen. He said that's the only time he eats lychees now, off the tree. Taiwan is all about bananas, guavas and pineapples. He said bananas are still cheap and great in Guangdong. He was as surprised to hear that in Taiwan they call sweet potato 地瓜 as my Taiwanese colleagues were to hear that in China they call it 紅薯.
We talked about "expat life". He said that something he didn't like about spending time in "developing countries" is that he feels he can never trust anybody that he meets. It's not just if a girl talks to you is she just trying to score a foreign husband, it's also... if anyone talks to you, are they just 媚外 fawning on foreigners? Are they trying to scam you? Befriend you so you can be a mascot for them, a symbol of prestige? He said he didn't feel comfortable in that kind of environment, but also he didn't really feel comfortable in Europe any more either.
I said i felt the same way when i went back to Canada during COVID. That whole culture... driving cars, owning houses, eating at chain restaurants, tipping for everything, all that stuff is strange and uncomfortable to me. Once upon a time i thought my true spiritual home was the US, but now i don't even think it's Canada. I love the nature and the landscape out there, but the urban experience is decades behind anything in Asia. F agreed. Living here is - over and above everything else - convenient. Life is so much more pleasant when you live in a community designed for people.
I suggested he look into moving to Taiwan, because if you are wealthy and skilled enough (which almost every white collar foreigner is) you can get a 3 year open work permit to start, and if you stay for 5 years of 6 months plus one day per year, you qualify for permanent residence. No need to have a Taiwanese partner or family member, no need to seek sponsorship, you can just get residence because you lived here long enough to pay your dues. That's a much better deal than most countries in Asia. Japan is 10 years. Hong Kong is 7. Most other places you can't earn permanent residence simply by showing you lived there. To be fair, you can't in the US either, but the US is hardly the shining city on a hill in this regard, a country where millions of people work and pay taxes their whole lives and still don't qualify for legal residence.
I have to admit, i have pondered if i could stick out 5 years in Taiwan, if only to scoop up residence. Do i want to be a migrant worker for the rest of my life? Always held hostage by my employer? As soon as i quit my job, i have to leave the country?
Sigh.
Talking to F made me think about this stuff. It's stuff we all have to think about, i suppose, us "expats", especially the closer we get to retirement age. I said to him i don't really think of myself as an expat, and he said no you totally are one.
It's funny that blue collar workers are considered migrant workers and white collar workers are considered expats. Perhaps i prefer to be lumped in with the migrant workers because i am more likely to sit elbow-to-elbow with them in a plastic stool restaurant. Every day when Taiwan's musical garbage trucks drive past my house, i gather with my neighbors in the little park to toss my trash, and there are a couple of Filipino women there every night throwing their trash too...
My colleagues live in condos where nobody has to take their own trash out, although that's probably true of both expat and local colleagues. F was saying that his new place in Shekou district of Shenzhen is like that too. He looks out the window of his apartment and just sees another skyscraper, even though he knows 南山 mountain is just behind it. He said he likes being able to see the mountains in Taipei. It's funny because when i lived in Shenzhen my apartment looked right out at the mountains and now i don't even see the sky.
I guess it's all a bit random, because now i live on the second floor of a four storey building, in a whole neighborhood full of four storey buildings. F said that Tokyo is more like that. Just miles and miles of low-rise, a bit like Berlin or Barcelona i suppose.
If my Taiwanese colleagues didn't already make me curious to visit Japan, this chat did. It sounds like a more difficult place to live than Taiwan, especially if you can already speak Chinese and don't speak Japanese, but it also sounds like a more honest existence, at least versus trying to build a life in southeast Asia. I identify with F's feelings about not feeling like you can have a meaningful relationship with the people around you when you are in a country where there is stark wealth inequality. Even moreso in the places where tourists tend to cluster, which unfortunately also tend to be the places where you can find a stable internet connection to do remote work.
Like, would i really want to live the digital nomad life in Chiang Mai or Da Nang? I feel like i'd want to punch out every dumbass who called themselves a digital nomad first of all, but even ignoring that i'd still feel uncomfortable with the creepy power imbalance of sitting on the beach living the good life while earning a fortune in local money and not paying any taxes to the local government. "I don't know if i can trust local people taking an interest in me..." Hell, what is this colonialist whining, they're the ones who shouldn't be trusting you!
That's how the voice in my head would go.
I mean, at least the food would be great, right? Spicy? Although, now that i hear Japanese food is nothing like what i expected it to be, maybe my whole concept of Thai and Vietnamese is off too. I suppose i could check it out. One of my colleagues just got back from a couple weeks in Thailand, one of which where he was ostensibly working from beach.
How much of an asshole do you have to be to have the kind of job where you can work from beach, while other people who get paid much less have to show up and clock in at the crack of dawn?
Me. The asshole is me. And yet, i still go into the office most every day.
Man, work sucks. I wish i didn't have to work.
Anyway, Monday and Tuesday were interesting days that got me thinking about my time in China, my life here in Taiwan, and my plans going forward. What do i want?
I want to not have to work. Goddamnit.