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bobbarker's journal
The life and times of Robert G. Barker
I should preface this by saying this was written in haste today. It may not be grammatically correct or even make sense. It was written during a bout of grief, several cups of coffee and antihistamines. You may not like the things I say in it...they are probably not fully formed ideas, but somewhere in there, there might be.
hopeful
It is a lonely thing over here. It feels a lot like LOST when you think about it. We are on a beach. If you take the American expats together we number about 20 people. 35 in all if you count the Romanians and other Westerners. Sometimes we get together and do things, but a lot of times you are on your own. So you fall into your fandoms. For these guys here their passions are usually golfing or drinking. Five miles from the village is Tiger Beach, the only links style golf course in Asia. It is remarkable that it is here. It is really world class. Golfers from Japan and Korea fly here to play this course. With the climate we have here, you would never guess that you were in China, it is really an amazing facility. They give you these really cute Chinese girls that caddy you. They’ll pick your club, make suggestions and they make the game really fun. For a job that is in the middle of nowhere, if you are a golfer, an expat assignment in Haiyang is a plum gig. For everyone else, they drink and try to pick up women. Me, I read my kindle and watch videos.
I have been on a big Doctor Who kick for a while, but I made it a point to watch the rest of the David Tennant episodes while here. I finished up the end of fourth season here Friday. http://youtu.be/zXh3sbzzIAA Go to 2:31 in this video and watch this scene. I started crying when I saw it. Why do I identify with this show so much? Surrounded by friends and yet alone in a crowd and maybe that is for best. He has the bad habit of taking away people’s girlfriends, not to romance them, just because he wants to go have an adventure with them. On some level that is not cool, probably to the boyfriends back home, but he has no intent beyond that. He just wants to go somewhere and do things and share it with someone who would appreciate it. That "somewhere" and "doing things" just happens to be all of time and space, everything that ever was and ever will be. He is always upbeat, always positive. He always does the honorable thing, the right thing, even if it is not the correct thing. He learns a lot still from the people he brings with him. And the stories, everything works out in the end. It may not always be a happy ending, but it is at least a hopeful one. And where my head is, it needs a hopeful ending. I need stories with hopeful endings.
I got my passport back today with my new F Visa. I am good until August 9th with no re-entries. I don’t know if they are going to pursue me getting the work permit and if they do I have no idea if I will have to go home to fill it out. I am filled with dread that I will be here until August. I am also filled with dread that they will try to keep me here many more months beyond that. People that are assigned to come overseas for six months or more get several trips home and a 40% boost in pay. I get none of that because I am here short term… technically. But if my short terms goes well over six months… then too bad… they don’t give me those things retroactively. I am beginning to think they knew this would be a long term assignment, but they pretended it wouldn’t be so they wouldn’t have to pay me… or compensate me…
What can you do?
chipper
I got a massage this weekend. I was a little nervous about the place I was going to since getting a massage in this country has so many connotations. But I was told that I could get a real and legitimate massage at our destination. The place was called “Rome Palace” and it honestly looked like a Roman palace with all the architecture to go with it.
The establishment was finely appointed and when we walked inside the foyer we were invited to take off our shoes and put on slippers. We were then issued wrist straps with numbers to account for everything we did. We then walked into a dressing room where we stripped down and put on something akin to pajamas. They didn’t have a top that fit me but the bottoms fit just nice. That was a bit odd because it is usually the other way around. The RP has a series of pools and hot tubs but we were not here for that. We went upstairs and had a beer in an area that looked like a banquet hall. I was not much for drinking a beer before a massage, I know that you just want to be drinking water after you get one and I didn’t want to be too dehydrated.
We were on the second floor only for a few minutes before we were led to the third floor. I gave a description of what I wanted and was then led to a room. Five minutes later a girl who looked like she was in middle school in a masseuse uniform entered and told me how to lay on the bed. I was confused with her instructions. She had to show me how I was to orientate myself. I laid on my chest with my face towards the foot of the bed.
In a lot of ways what she did was unremarkable. I was worried that she would not be strong enough to do anything, but she was more than strong enough. She worked on my back, then my legs, starting with my thighs down to my ankles. She had me turn over and she worked on my legs again, this time from the front. She also massaged my arms. Everything down to my fingers were massaged and she did this thing where she pulled at the fingers and there was a crack with each digit like she was cracking her knuckles. She finished by massaging my head. She put some kind of hot compress on the small of my back after she finished that area and used some oils with everything else. Fully one third of the massage was just hitting with small judo like chops. She used her knuckles and elbows a lot. I don’t think she ever tried to stand on my back and crack it. This lasted for fully an hour and ten minutes. She watched Chinese soap operas on the television as she worked. She looked bored whenever I caught a glimpse of what she was doing, but then I was just another customer.
Afterwards I went downstairs to the second floor where I sat in a recliner with a built in television set. I had a foot massage here that lasted 30 minutes. There are two places on my right foot that are sensitive. I bit down on a towel while the girl worked on them. She laughed when she saw me biting down. You could lay there in the recliner all evening if you want, but we went back down to change into our street clothes. Total cost? 281 RMB. It made the evening a lot better… especially since I can’t remember the last time I have had my calves massaged. It was very nice and I think I’ll be back here again on another weekend. The guys asked me if it was the best massage I ever had. I said "No, the best was given to me by Jemma Hartsouk from Florida years ago". I then went "wow, I haven't thought or spoken her name in so long.... I guess the night woke up that memory." LOL
sad
What is hard about living in the other side of the world? You are isolated. The people that surround you that speak your language are all that you have. Of course you can email friends and family. Posting pictures is slow. You need a VPN to use facebook and twitter. Skyping can be done with faster connections. But is it not easy to just pick up a phone and call people. At $2 per minute, you just don’t. And you realize how disconnected you are with things.
I have lost two people that were important to me since I came here almost a month ago. Tonight I will lose a third. I had known him since we were teenagers in college, we are fraternity brothers. Actually he is my little brother in my fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau. We lived in the same hometown for a while after school and then he moved out west and we lost track of one another. I got in contact with him again two years ago. We caught up online and played video games on Xbox live. Xbox live is a great place where you can spend time with people if you are playing the right game. Borderlands was our game, where Chris and I were seeking the fabled vaults of Pandora. Not long before I came to China he had some medical troubles and had to have surgery. The results were terrifying, he had extensive colon cancer. A fellow brother went to visit him and afterwards he asked me if I would be able to visit him. Two weeks out getting ready for my trip to China that could last five months, I didn’t have the time or money to go. I said I would be back by the latest in August. At the time, there was no reason why I couldn't see him then.
I got a message this morning that he had taken a turn for the worst and that they were gathering the family to say goodbye. Shawn, a fellow brother, was in Africa as he told me this. Shawn’s work with the CDC takes him everywhere in the world. He is often not home when he most wants to be. He knew every feeling that would be going through my mind. I sent him a message back and just sat in my room and cried for a while. What could you do? The company would not send me back for anyone other than a parent or a sibling. Getting tickets on short notice for an international flight can be difficult and they often run $6000 with fuel prices the way they are. Chris’s father had the exact same cancer. He was scared of getting it. He was scared when he did get it. I just sat there on my bed and cried thinking of him. That is the time when you realize that you have had no physical contact with another human other than a handshake since you have arrived here.
I got to work and opened Microsoft Word. I always write as I work. It is not a means of goofing off. It helps me keep focused. As I do other things, my mind wanders, so I write a few sentences and then go back to what I should be doing. Sometimes at the end of the day I have a document that is worth posting. Most days it is just garbage or disjointed. Today I wrote all of the reasons why it was great to be alive. Some profound, some stupid. But all of them were good reasons to be alive. Not every death is a sad occasion. If you have lived a long time and done many things, that is a life to be celebrated, one to be held up. A life cut short is one where the individual will miss out on much. And we will miss out on much not sharing those experiences with that person. My mind always goes to what they will never get to do, what they will never get to see, what they will never get to experience, what they will never get to say.
I have friends that get so depressed they lock up. They don’t go anywhere, they don’t want to do anything, they just isolate themselves and shut down. They give every reason in the world for why they "can't". They wear that like a badge of pride because it is comfortable and it gets them compassion from some. They have the means, they are physically able and I just want to jump up and down and scream “GET OUT THERE, you are missing out!!!!!" I know it is not the right thing to say to someone who is depressed, but it is always there with me under the surface.
I wrote and I wrote all day. I had to go to the site for a few hours twice today. At lunch, I ate my soup and thought of more things to write. I thought about this Roberta, a girl I knew in high school. Hadn't thought of her in years. I remembered hearing her play for hours classical music on a grand piano. I thought of friends that were far away. I thought of Zebby. I thought of scuba diving. I thought of my favorite meal, linguini with white clam sauce. I thought of the times I slept outside and watched the stars. I thought of Fiona, the bulldog puppy next door. I thought of riding the trails on my bike near my house. I had three pages worth of things worth doing, worth seeing, worth sharing, worth remembering. I might post it someday... if I can merge it with the other pages of stuff that is similar in nature.
Life is so worth living, but no one is going to hand it to you. You will have to go out and get it yourself. And you will meet people along the way that will want it like you do. If they don’t want to swim in the same direction as you, that’s OK, there will be those that will. But don’t be a stop along the journey. Keep swimming, keep learning, keep improving, keep positive, keep giving, do the right thing….always. Don’t do it for a reward. Don’t do it for an expectation. Do it without any thought of a return other than the intrinsic experience of doing it. And along the way you will be surprised.
Tonight is May the Fourth, so I am going to watch Star Wars. And I’ll think of Chris and take it easy.
apathetic
Service is interesting here. You can get amazing service in stores and the most horrible service in restaurants. I purchased a player for my television in my apartment at Jesco, their version of a Target store. I was followed by an attendant in whatever section of the store I went to. Whenever I touched something, they would quickly pull out a copy of it for me to look at. In the case of my player, they put in a disc and showed me how it would look on a television screen. When I decided on what to buy, they took me to a counter to pay for it. They then took me back and opened one of the boxes and pulled out my player and plugged it in to show me that it was working correctly. You leave with no doubt that what you are buying works and is what you wanted. They even changed the language to English for me. I was impressed with their service and how they took care of me.
Restaurants are a different matter though. It is not for effort though. In the Western styled restaurants, they don’t understand that you just want drinks at first… then maybe an appetizer and then your main course. It is not their fault. Not many of them speak English. One server got so frustrated that we wanted to put two tables together to seat four of us that she quit being our server and had someone else do it.
For the second day in a row I have made it a point to go on the track in front of my apartment. The track is a quarter of mile in its circuit and there is a viewing stand on one side. The stands have three sets of stairs with 18 steps each. I ran the stairs up (and went down them a little slower). I did two miles of that this morning and then went for a walk along the shoreline in Haiyang. Yesterday I did four miles in the morning and the evening. Running up the stairs is great for me and there is not much else to do here in this village. That is not a bad thing from a fitness standpoint. Lots of available walking, a gym and a track, what more do you want?
We unpacked our first shipment of material Monday at the work site. We have enough to get started. More should be here in a month’s time, but I eager to get it started and finished so I can go home.
calm
Wrote this yesterday. Found out the person I am about to speak about Peter was a victim of the Cultural Revolution. His story is an incredible one. I'll ask more about it soon when he returns. It needs told.
There is a middle aged Chinese engineer named Peter in my office. He is very sharp and very kind. He is from up near the North Korean border. He left early yesterday for the May day holiday, but I have been quietly told that he left for cancer treatment. He has quietly resolved that it is his time, but he is going through it for his wife’s sake. I sit next to him for 9 hours a day and have known him for only three weeks, but it is crushing to see such a gentle person resolved to a fate this way.
Everyone is so friendly here, especially the day laborers working on roads or coming back from farming. You see them on vehicles that resemble a motorcycle with a cargo bed, a three wheeled vehicle, except it is carrying 6 people on it. They see you are a westerner and they all wave and say hello smiling. They are just happy everywhere. Not like the middle class or upper class people. They seem to always have a perpetual scowl on their faces.
This weekend is one of the biggest holidays in the Chinese Calendar, May Day weekend. They bill it as their version of Labor Day which ironically ties back to an event in America. At a labor protest in Chicago, IL someone threw a bomb into where the police were and the police responded by firing into the crowd. The next year there were calls to mark the anniversary of the event and in 1891 it was declared an annual event at International’s Second Congress. Ever since then it has been the day to wear red and march in protest of “The Man”. Though ironically, “The Man” is a shifting concept.
I have read a lot about Marxism, Communism, both of the Soviet model and the Maoist model long before I got here. I try to avoid conversations about politics with people while I am here. Maybe if I get to know people better I might engage in some discussions. It is difficult to have discussions because so many things are a moving target with Marxist dialectics. Simply put, contradictions are part of the game. The Chinese embrace of Communism in the 1940s had as much to do with it being the only real vehicle for nationalism as of any love for the philosophies of Marx and Engels. You DID have true believers like Mao, but then you had party founders like Deng Xiaoping who scandalized the Communist party in the 1960s by saying things like “It can be a yellow cat or a black cat, as long as it catches mice”. The party achieved the long desired goal of removing foreign influence, but from an economic standpoint, the lot of most people advanced very little.
There is so much tragedy that was caused by the Communist party in this country. The party cannot even hide it nor does it try to anymore. Tens of millions died because of failed policies and the climate they created makes it very difficult for anyone to feel secure in speaking out. I have traveled through deforested areas, heard the story of how the party turned the Beijing area into a dust bowl, by killing all of the pigeons… which allowed the bug population to grow rapid killing all of the trees… causing a dust bowl.
In the 1970s, it became apparent as the price of rice continued to drop and peasant farmers could not make a living, that something had to change. That is the one thing that the Chinese government and Communist party fears: The peasant farmer. Those are the people who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by overthrowing the system of government. Limited experiments in free market businesses started. The low cost of labor, large market and hunger for opportunity let things take off at an accelerated rate.
Still, it IS a communist system. The government owns all of the land. They control everything and you don’t get a say in it. The parliament meets only once a year for two days to rubber stamp whatever the Politburo determines. There are some people that would say that what it is now is not a Communist system. I could agree with that, it is more of a Fascist system with a close collusion between business and government, with the government as an active partner. But some would also say that it never was a Communist system here (nor was the Soviet Union).
The Trotsky myth is one I have heard more and more in the past 20 years. Trotsky was a founder of the Soviet Union, father of the Red Army and friend of Lenin. He was denounced by Stalin and ended up with an ax through his head in Mexico City in 1940, but he has many followers even today. Every abuse that ever occurred in the Communist system he would argue that what occurred did not occur under “True Communism”. They would say that “true communism” is a democratic system perverted by others, that the revolution was hijacked. Sadly, I don’t know how you can have a system with that much concentrated power NOT be perverted by others. You may have a wise and altruistic Lenin, but concentrated power always attracts the Stalins and those that would abuse it. It is hard enough to keep systems of government with checks and balances from becoming corrupt or repressive…. But even the Stalinists and Maoists don’t have much regard for the Trotskyites. They are helpful for winning a revolution, but not in governing anything afterwards. They have always been a part in the revolution and always quickly and quietly disposed of afterwards. Silly Trotskyites, they never learn.
The Communist Party in China is divided into two factions. One faction is a group of hard liners that want to return to Maoist and stricter Communist principles. The other faction is the reformers who want to do whatever it takes to make China grow and assert itself on the world stage. Both sides hate each other. A hardliner that was predicted to be the next leader of the country is in a scandal right now. His wife is accused of killing a British businessman that was supposedly laundering money with her. The businessman’s body was quickly cremated so I don’t know how there will be a proper investigation, but the damage is already done to this guy’s career. That this is playing out in a very public way on Chinese television is staggering. That Chinese engineers at work even talk about it is staggering. The Chinese government is not very big on airing its dirty laundry. Which makes me thing that it is all by design.
Capitalist or Communist, they need to keep people fed and idle hands moving. The day that they don’t have the growth they have enjoyed for the past 15 years is the day that the government in this country is finished. I have no doubt that they are very aware of this. World realignments are always interesting and hardly recognized until years after they have happened. I think we are going to live through a few more in our lives.
Today I learned that power outages of various lengths are a weekly occurrence in the village. I have no plug in clocks so I have not noticed if this happens while I am away or when I sleep. The authorities blame it on sunspots or testing of electrical equipment, but the real reason is that there is not enough power for this area. That is why we are building this power plant. When completed there will be eight to ten reactors on site providing that many gigawatts of electrical power. There are only so many places on the planet where this much power is generated in one place at one time. This will be one of them. From an electrical desert to one of the biggest providers in human history… quite a jump. But that will still be many years away when it is completed.
I attended a yoga class yesterday. Going to it is part of my plan of “do something every day” to keep active. Monday and Wednesdays are spent weight lifting. Tuesdays and Thursdays are yoga. Yoga class has twenty people in it, a mix of Chinese housewives and some expat men. We bring our own mats and the class lasts an hour and a half. Mostly it is relaxing as we stretch and let the troubles of the day float away. I need stretching. I can’t touch my toes and a dozen other basic things I need to be able to do. I am told that if I do my best at every session I will get better and better and eventually be able to stretch and do all of those things that I want to do. The last 30 minutes of class is a torture session, the sort of thing that was done to us whenever we screwed up and were punished in military school. We lay on our backs and lift our legs off the ground at different elevations. We scream and yell in pain as we do this, but it IS good for a variety of muscle groups. By the end of class you soaked with sweat and loose as a goose. And since the class is from 5:30 PM (the moment we get home) until 7PM, you miss dinner. Even today as I walk around I feel what I did yesterday to my legs and torso.
I get back to my apartment and make myself some ramen. Most of the ramen here has little packets of additives that smell scary. Sometimes I have no idea what I am putting into the bowl with the noodles. At least the spicy ramen bowls taste good because they are so spicy hot. I supplement my meal with a protein bar and see if the television is going to work for the evening. Sometimes we get the BBC World News, sometimes we do not. Even HBO is so scrubbed by the Chinese censors the only thing showing is children’s programs. So you browse the web (if the internet is working). It can take up to 20 minutes to load a 4 minute youtube video. It usually ends up that I read a book on my Kindle.
I am so glad I have a Kindle. I am glad that I loaded it up with books before coming here. All of the Harry Potter books… all of George R.R.Martin Song of Ice and Fire series, a half dozen books on the Titanic, a few Star Wars books, complete collections of H.P.Lovecraft, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dickens, Thoreau, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Alexander Dumas, Arthur Conan Doyle. I have all of the Oz books by Frank Baum, the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, the Hunger Games trilogy, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Dune. I have 60 ancient works by Plato, Cicero, Flavius Josephus and other ancient histories, 19th century mystical writings on Atlantis and its fall, several versions of The Bible, a couple of zombie novels by Max Brooks and Colson Whitehead, many classic books from the past 300 years (many of them free from Amazon), two dozen books on the Civil War written by people that were there, Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a couple of David Weber’s Honor Harrington series of space adventures, classics of science fiction like Asamov’s Foundation Trilogy, Haldeman’s Forever War and Christopher’s The White Mountains. Everything Shakespeare wrote, essays from Christopher Hitchens, Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s dictionary, army field manuals, books on Viking myths, Chinese philosophers, Greek and Roman myths, Brave New World, 1984…. And a bunch more books, more than I could read, but I would be glad to try. My Kindle changed how I read before I came here. I take my Kindle everywhere I go in this country. I have it to read on the bus in the morning, on the way home after work, on trips to Yantai or Qingdao. I take it to lunch, breakfast and dinner. Many times there are people to talk to and I am sociable, but if no one is there or no one speaks English, I just open it and read. You then start to consume books at an accelerated rate as fast as when you were young and at that age that you could read anything effortlessly. It goes even faster now that you are often left alone with your thoughts here. Reading and writing becomes an outlet for sanity.
My visa situation here is ambiguous at best. Nothing much is going on at the moment. The real action will occur in July. So why am I here? It makes certain people happy to have a real live honest to goodness Westinghouse engineer on site on this particular project. But unlike all of the other engineers, I don’t get a dime extra to be here. I only make extra money on not having to put gas into my car or having my food paid for. In a way I make money by not having anything to spend my money on. It is easy to have no distractions while living here. But back to my visa situation. I have a 30 day multiple re-entry visa. That means I can only stay 30 days and I must leave the country. Now I can come back the next day after I leave as long as I have gone to another country: Hong Kong, Korea, Japan… they don’t care. I am in the process of getting that extended to a 90 day visa. I have to surrender my passport tomorrow and sign some papers in Yantai on Friday. I’ll get my passport back on May 7th and my visa will be extended 90 days. The problem with this visa is that when I leave, I am gone. I will have to reapply for another visa in order to return. They are also trying to have me get a work visa…mostly so the Chinese government can tax our wages, but to do that I need a FBI background check and to get that I must sign papers and have them notarized and you can only do that in America. Once you sign the papers, it can take 10 to 12 weeks for me to get a background check completed, then a few more weeks to finish the work permit. If I leave right now, I might have a work permit by July…. But I am being given very little direction over what to do… very little. I make suggestions, but I am not sure if anyone listens to me very much.
I am starting to come to the conclusion that I may be here for a while. Some people can stay here a long time and never accept that they are going to be here for a while. Maybe I should treat it like I will be and pray for an early return. Accepting that means you will buy certain things, arrange your apartment in a certain way, participate in certain activities. I mean to get a bluray player (or some kind of player) to watch movies on my TV. I wish I had my xbox here to play games, even if I could not play online with them. When the internet is out and I am not in the mood to read I play Civilization on my computer trying to conquer the world. My laptop is not a fast machine and I can’t see playing a FPS or anything that requires internet connectivity. I have not decorated my apartment in any special way, but I think I should make it more inviting, more like home.
I have a list of things that I will bring back here if I go home and am forced to return. More pillow cases, another new pair of shoes, more long sleeved shirts. I am starting to see my clothes get torn and worn up more easily just by using the washing machines provided to us. I am half tempted to buy Star Wars on Bluray here just for the novelty of owning it in a Chinese format. I saw a legitimate copy in a steel case and everything.
I want to write, I want to write, I want to write. I write about everything. I scribble notes in a book. I type things on computers all day long. When I am doing work there is at least one page on Word open where I write about anything and everything. Writing makes me think clearly and improves my efficiency. You don’t see most of it because most of it is rubbish or not worth keeping. Maybe it will be someday. I very badly want to be home. I want to see the people I love, talk to the people I love, text the people I text and I cannot do that except in limited ways. I feel like I am emotionally kelating myself, pulling out poisons and bad habits that I should have been doing years ago at home, but am only doing now out of necessity. Maybe at the end I’ll be that much better of a person when I come home, physically and emotionally. Bob Johnson, the 85 year old Methodist minister who has traveled to 37 different countries in his lifetime and was a student of mine, put his hands on my shoulders and said “You will not be the same when you come back, no one ever is”. He was not describing the change as being a bad thing.
I should write about a few dining experiences I have had recently while here. Or about my trip to Qingdao. Maybe later this week. Today was spent being antisocial and not hearing any word in English outside of a 3 minute phone call this morning.
I walked the track 10 laps and did some lifting in the gym, but I didn't want to be anywhere. I am so often on the go around here. Today i wanted to stay in the "village" here. I mostly watched Doctor Who's third season or alternated reading the second Fire and Ice book "A Clash of Kings". The Martin books always entertain... and Doctor Who always cheers me up.
I have an entry brewing in me for some time. The news of recent events keeps adding to it. I may post it tomorrow.
rushed
I should probably preface this by saying that an ex patriot is someone who has chosen to leave their country to work somewhere else. The term came from an artist community of Americans that lived in Paris after World War I. Most expatriates I know are hard working people and there are many happily married and loyal to their spouses. That said, I have never seen any of them have an easy time of it and all of them are special in their own fashion.
I met my first ex patriot when I was 13. Mr. Fedorka was the husband of the Brooke High School librarian. He didn’t seem to have a job as far as I could tell. I was told that he didn’t need one, he was wealthy. My parents had bought a house in the development he had built. The story went that he was an engineer and right out of school he had went to work for an American company in India as an expat. His expenses were paid for there and he made a lot more money than he would have made here in the United States. Another thing told to me was that there was not anything he could really spend his money on over there, so it just kept piling on up. He did this for 10 to 15 years and then he came home. He bought some land, built a concrete road on it and ran utilities to lots that he divided up. People started buying the lots and that was the start of Tierra Estates.
But Mr. Fedorka was more than a bit odd for many reasons. He didn’t get along well with the people that moved into his development. He had the habit of walking around everyone’s property and sometimes picking up things to use like it was all his property when no one had lived there. Some said he was that way because he had servants when he was in India and he was just used to treating people that way. In any case as a teenager, I regarded him not as a bad person, just too much money and not enough social interaction.
I met other expats as a teenager. The Wilsons were everything I imagined Canada to be. They had lived half of their life in the United States, but when you entered their house, you entered Canadian territory. It was a recreation of everything they left behind on the island they grew up on off the coast of Nova Scotia, from furniture to food. They talked about Canada all the time, but when they talked you knew they were not talking about Ontario, Quebec or the “those people” out west. They were talking about their fishing village community. Their kids born and raised here had little connection to their parents home, they were essentially Americans in every respect.
Many of the Germans at Bayer and Japanese at Nisson Steel were the same way. A lot of them went native and became citizens. Here they could golf every weekend at a reasonable price and with little or no wait. They could own guns and go hunting if they chose. They could own a house and not just rent an apartment. I remember the story of one German engineer who was a member of a sportsman club, crying openly when he was recalled to Germany. He had sell all of his guns as he was not allowed to take them with him.
The American engineers I worked with in Korea were not waiting to go home, they were home. They had Korean wives, they lived here now. There was no return on the horizon for them. They spoke Korean, their diets were Korean. I met a twenty something engineer that had been in Korea for over a year. He said it was impossible that it didn’t happen. When he went home, his relationships with people there would be distant. His cultural information would be out of date. He wouldn’t know the new songs, would not see the new movies. The people he had known where heading in different directions from where he was. And when you were in Korea, the pressure was different for another reason.
It is so isolating if you do not speak the language. You could be surrounded by a sea of people and yet deathly alone. Things like simply touching someone becomes painfully absent. I am not talking about a sexual sense, though that is a component too for many. A handshake and a hug become important. You need someone. Sometimes you see people together in what might look to be an impossible combination back home, but they are not here because the needs here are different. It is hard to judge a person or a couple without knowing the needs that drive them or how they both satisfy that need. A lot of these guys and girls do what they do out of emotional necessity and then one day they wake up and find themselves home with their origin country seeming to be the strange place.
Not everyone is as wholesome as that. There are the drifters. These are the guys that spend three to five years in different places. Three years in Israel, five years in Argentina, three years in China, four in South Africa, two in Italy. They have no homes and no cars, but they are very wealthy. Many of them can make $200k a year with expenses being taken care of for them. Their apartment paid for. How much do they sock away? I am not sure. Some of these guys are up there in years and I wonder about their money making decisions. I don’t envy them. I don’t know how you can if you have been in their shoes.
The apartments are lousy, they are almost always are. I consider the accommodations I had in college better than these places. A lot of these guys have been divorced multiple times. One guy here has his two sons with him and they don’t treat him very well. He is divorced also. There is no school for them here, so they attend classes on line. I am sure that they just blow it off every day. There are two major preoccupations in the area for people. A world class golf area that has a links course. The other place is a roman bath where you can get a massage and a lot more if you catch my meaning. It is heavily frequented by more than a few people. Is it any wonder that Mr. Fedorka behaved strangely when I met him? One engineer I have breakfast every day is 60 years old and from Ohio. He introduced me to his hot 25 year old girlfriend he met here. In Korea, an engineer would gladly show you pictures of his wife and kids living in Hawaii and in the same breath show you pictures of his three girlfriends that he has locally. I was told that some of the guys would wander off from the main group to go indulge in what they wanted: Chinese women. I was told not to say anything and it is a common thing. Some of these guys do this like I would go to the store to buy a DVD on a whim. Some of their conversations are vulgar and make me uncomfortable and you have to remember that I lived in a fraternity house and thought I could get vulgar and obscene with the best of them. It has to be something when I get bothered.
Not everyone is like that though. There are those that make the most of it and make what they do a TRUE adventure, the kind that would be worth reading about one day. Dennis, who should be over here soon, told me that after he finished a job in Sweden, he became a crewman on a sailing boat that crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean to get home. He took some classes, stood a watch on the boat, steered it, cooked and worked as a sailor with a crew of 12. Dennis has a fullness to his life that makes him look satisfied with what he did and saw, not worn out and burned out like some I have seen.
This is not a life for me. The first two weeks of coming to a new country is exciting and the orientation during that time is kind of like a vacation of discovery. After that it becomes work and unless you are prepared to entertain yourself in the evening, it can get boring really quick. Some of the expats here in Haiyang started a bar called Freddie’s. It is not a bad place. It has a pool table upstairs and a nice view of the beach. It is still cold here this time of year, but there are places you can close your eyes and forget that you are here. I woke up this morning while dreaming. I knew then I was still dreaming of home.
exanimate
irritated