Expatriates in China 流在外國

I recently finished a book called Foreign Babes in Beijing 洋妞在北京, which is one of those books that, with the title and the cover, are a little embarrassing to read around others. I’m not one of those who refer to women as “babes” and the photo on the cover gives an entirely different impression from the book’s content. I had to explain to my wife that, no I was getting into reading porn. (All this has nothing to do with these photos which are a test of my DSLR's software update on an upcoming storm.)

It’s a book about a woman, Rachel DeWoskin, who played her part in East-West relations as the ‘wild foreign woman’ in a Chinese television drama 連續劇 by the same name that she later gave as the title of her book. It was interesting to me because we are of the generation of Americans who could move over to the Chinese-speaking world after graduation from college to start our careers and form life goals. Our generation was the first one that has been able to do so because of expanding economies and reduced restrictions.

DeWoskin talks about foreign expatriates who either loved China or who hated it. I agree with her that there does not seem to be a middle ground. Either people seem to love their experience and hang around with mostly Chinese friends or those for whom everything is annoying and who hang around the expatriate bars and clubs. Those who loved it were transformed by the experience. Those who hated it came home after their tours of duty and resumed normal lives in the West, thinking little or not at all about their overseas experience.

In some ways, DeWoskin lived the life of her drama character in Beijing. Reading this book made me think of another book I had read last summer about another American woman, Emily Hahn in China to Me, who lived a similar lifestyle in a bygone era of pre-war Shanghai 上海. A colorful though not always likeable character, Hahn is involved heavily and personally with some of the major characters in China of that era. It was an incredibly rich world with a former generation of expatriate Americans, our grandparents’ generation, many of whom loved China just as much and were just as sophisticated or adventurous as we think ourselves to be today…maybe more so.