Crestfallen.
Another wonderfully temperate day in Beijing with blue skies and warm air. Yesterday was like today, and so was the day before that. Just a month ago I would walk outside and shiver. Now I can wear sunglasses and drape my coat over my arm. I walk home and wonder things.
One nice thing about me right now (my job, my living situation, etc) is that it might be better than it would be in the states. I will compare myself to my best friend. Chelsea, a small girl of 25, has sharp wits and a quick mouth. After graduating with a nothing degree Politics from UVA, she found herself working a few law firm stints in our hometown in rural Virginia. Around this time, I had planned on going to China, and I advised her to do likewise. Chelsea, a lover of Spanish language and soccer, decided she would go teach in Argentina, and I'm not sure how but she found an ESL program that arranged for her to go down and teach on a stipend of 100 dollars per month. She wondered how she would pay back her loans, got a deferrment, and took off. Now she is back and living in Southern California (Spanish speakers aripe) and works for the Agency of Missing and Abducted Children. She lives in a trailer, albeit very nice trailer, just an 8 minute drive from the agency and she is paid 48,000 dollars a year. She has few friends but enjoys soccer twice a week.
It's too bad she has to disappoint her Argentinian friends by adopting the Mexican accent. Chelsea confesses that she will speak to parents who have lost a child and yet she does not understand their Mexican Spanish. Argentines are proud people, especially soccer-playing Argentines. I mean, hello, did anyone watch the World Cup 2010, didn't Argentia do extremely well then? At that time, Chelsea, too was living and playing soccer in Argentina and living with her soccer-playing Argentine boyfriend. They are still together, and takes the piss out of her when she says thigs in her newly-developing Mexican accent.
Our lives are parallel and though she has more luck in the steady relationship department, I do see the two of us one day uniting in a common American cosmopolitan city.
The thing about Beijing is that everyone wants to become an entrepreneur. The desire runs rampant among 20-something Chinese-speaking foreigners. All I hear about are the businesses people are starting, their start-up websites, their blogs, their companies, their aspirations, and it's true, it is quite easy to get something started in Beijing if you have some money and find a good private equities investor. My mind lingers to the guan xi I have developed this past year and a half, and the list is meek but powerful. My roommate, an investment banker, would like us to start a project wherein we undergo the transfer of great works of art to an American museum who is willing to take them. There are thousands of pieces, and the artists, an old couple, are on the verge of death. Unwilling to surrender their works to the Chinese government, they intrust her, my roommate.
Other guan xi I have made include directors, screen writers, producers, actors and rich rich rich Chinese men. This is all in good humor and good company, but I wonder if I hadn't come to China, would the concept of making guanxi in order to start a business and make money etc even exist to me? None of my normal, white-girl/boy American friends think like this, and even some of the elders in my hometown do not say things such as, "well go out there and meet people. Make connections." Sure, there is the phrase, "It's not what you do, it's who you know," but such abstractions are taking on true form as my Beijing-ness spirals into an actual life of comfort here.
As I was saying, comfort. I can walk to work, I can walk home, and I can walk anywhere fun. Sure, friends are fleeting, but am I the most stable of individuals myself? Boyfriends, forget them. I have determined that I will tell my parents to arrange a marriage for me. Yes, when I go back home to the states, a strapping local lad will await me. Perhaps he will be a football player and own a jeep and a good chunk of land. I can wait here and be single, and, oops! No I can't marry you and live here in China forever because back home I've got pickings.
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| my hood Beijing |
Sound like a familar story? Yes, it's a man's story.
