Stage 1: Completed

There is always a sense of nostalgia when your life changes dramatically. I guess even prisoners might feel a hint of it on the day of their release. Which is not say that Beijing was a prison. It’s just a city I could never really get warm with that nonetheless is home to a lot of people I will miss. Except for one weeklong trip I didn’t travel recently, trying instead to spend my remaining weekends with my local friends. The Hutongs become more inviting in late spring and summer, with lots of cafés and bars opening up their rooftops and alleys that remain lively until the wee hours.

Time for a resume, the most important question being the one that I will have to answer an estimated 100 times when I’m in Germany: 

My room

My class

My mates

How’s your Chinese? Depending on the day and my mood, my answer will range from “I manage to get around” to “I’m pretty impressed by my progress”. Objectively speaking, I still can’t read a newspaper properly, I still fail to understand conversations that are not about everyday topics, I still fail to express nuances or emotional content. But as it is our nature, we don’t usually compare ourselves against an ideal but against others and on this measure, I’m pretty satisfied. I learnt faster than expected by the university and particularly in speaking and listening (as a pretty social person these two were always more important to me) I’m well above the level I’ve been tested in (HSK5). And even for the challenges that lay ahead of me I can see light at the end of tunnel as my Chinese slowly becomes good enough for unsupervised learning, meaning I can read a magazine or hold a conversation and while not getting 100% right I’m still good enough to get the gist and thereby improve. One thing I should’ve done better and more is talking Chinese to Chinese, not just exchanging phrases with cashiers and waiters, but longer conversations with friends. To be fair, there’s barely a foreigner I know doing that, since the kind of Chinese people you become friends with are the ones who’ve experienced Western culture in some way, which usually means they know English pretty well. Which brings me to my thesis that I’ve learnt more spoken Chinese in the few weeks traveling alone in China than in the eight months studying in Beijing in an international environment.

How’s China? I think I talked about that in length before, so I’ll just drop a few words here: Big, fast-paced, competitive, cold, miraculous, challenging, inhospitable, crowded, delicious, exhausting.

Could you imagine living there long-term? Not really

Did you find a girlfriend? No, fortunately I won’t have to make a decision between breaking up or maintaining a long-distance relationship with limited chances for survival

What’s next? First, holidays from China. Since the guidelines for when to start our internships are relatively loose, I can afford to go to Germany for nearly three weeks in exchange for working a bit longer at the end of the program in December/January. I am really looking forward to the time with my family and friends. For once, simply because it’s time spent with them, but also because I do need a reminder of my other, normal life as a German among 80 million others every now and then. China has a lot of annoying sides, but one thing is undeniable: It is exciting and challenging. Just compare the burgeoning app-economy with the current situation in Germany where I still have to go through a fucking bank transfer or have the right amount of hard cash with me if I owe a friend money. On top of that, as an expat in China you automatically live kind of a high-live (not necessarily in terms of money spent, but rather because the expat community mostly consists of people in politics and business). I am objectively very well aware that quality of living and my environment in Germany are far better, but I do need to see it with my own eyes every now and then to not get trapped in my fascination for the pace of live and opportunities that come with it in China.

After that break I’m heading back to Beijing to extend my visa under adventurous circumstances. A Chinese philosophy of living or dealing with problems is subsumed as yĭróu-kègāng (以柔克刚), overcoming hardness with flexibility. I was always skeptical of this approach, and trying to get my visa extension for the internship clearly showed its limits. While the company which is supposed to provide the documents and lots and lots of stamps (Chinese really love stamps, no matter if they actually make sense or give authority to a piece of paper) took a flexible approach, meaning everything they did was about right, but not entirely up to standards, Beijing’s foreigners office preferred to take a hard stance, meaning they rejected my first application due to insufficient documentation. The extension process, once initiated, takes 10 days during which the foreigners office retains your passport, so travelling internationally is impossible. Because of my limited time in Beijing I had two options, I could either cancel my weeklong trip to Manila and Singapore in the week before my final exams to guarantee that the visa extension would run smoothly, wasting 300€ in the process, or use my one remaining day in Beijing after coming back from Germany and before continuing to Guangzhou to go the office and apply. The latter option has the risk that if my application is rejected again I’ll have to somehow start my internship later or travel back and forth between Beijing and Guangzhou (2500km distance), since the only place to extend my visa is Beijing. I took the risk nonetheless since I didn’t see why I should (literally) pay for the stupidity of whoever at the company had so carelessly drawn up the first application document. Whether to regret or rejoice at that decision, I’ll know in three weeks.

For now I’m pretty happy I took this one week to meet to old friends briefly. One is a mathematician / data-scientist in Manila’s start-up scene (the type of qualifications that make company’s HR departments drool uncontrollably) during the week and a DJ on weekends (the kind of qualification that is the foundation of our friendship – we met at a techno club in Manila two and a half years ago). The other one used to be my student buddy during my exchange semester in Taiwan and thus one of my gateways to Chinese language and culture, though she herself is more Latina than Taiwanese. Born and raised to Taiwanese parents in Latin America, she studied in Taiwan and is now working in Singapore.

I spent only two days in Manila, just enough to see my friend, go out twice and visit one amazing art museum in the outskirts overlooking the city. There are a lot of positive things to say about Filipinos, like their openness, friendliness and relaxed composure. There are unfortunately at least as many negative things to say about their government and Manila as a city. Under Duterte, the country went from economic gridlock to economic gridlock and killing drug traffickers and -users indiscriminately. Inflation is high and the country remains a poorhouse in a booming region. Gridlock is also the first word that comes into mind when thinking of Manila. In the absence of a larger plan, the city is mostly a product of private investments through which traffic somehow has to find its way. Streets are zig-zagging between high-rises, highways end all of a sudden and for 15 million inhabitants there are 3 metro lines. Jakarta and Manila compete annually for the title most congested city on the this planet and studies have repeatedly named dizzying numbers for the cost to the economy of the hour-long commutes their inhabitants have to endure. Maybe growing up there one assumes an air of resignation towards the chaos around, but I would seriously go insane if I had to get to work and back every day in this traffic. On average, walking is about as fast as taking a car in Manila (to get to the museum in the suburbs 20km away, we needed about 2,5 hours on a Saturday).

The traffic is horrible...

The poverty is striking...

But you really can't complain about the nightlife in Manila

Singapore then is about as opposed to Manila as it gets. I don’t know if there’s a place more orderly, organized and planned-out than this tax haven at Eurasia’s southernmost bit of land. The downside: It’s expensive and quite boring. Though I have to admit that after uninterrupted months of Beijing’s gigantism and coming straight from Manila, I did appreciate this dull flawlessness. If you are an ambitious, talented person in your 20s or 30s and primarily concerned with your career and making money, this is the place to go. Salaries are high, standard of living is high, pressure is high and people define themselves through their jobs even more than in other large cities. I think there’s a direct correlation between the amount of urban-affluent generation Y people in a given area and the number of third-wave coffee shops that also sell instagrammable salads, super food, juices and avocado + x dishes and somehow manage to appear like they all belong to one franchise despite usually being individual stores. Well, in Singapore those are everywhere.

Having a pool at 1,5m distance from your bed is one of the better
features of living in a tropical country

My friend works in HR for a local competitor to Amazon and managed to find time for me even though I came from Monday to Friday (being able to leave work at 6pm is anything but sure in office jobs in Singapore). She’s no doubt ambitious and really likes her surroundings for now, but her long-term plan is to save up money for an MBA program in Europe that will make it easier for her to get a work visa for the Schengen area and eventually settle there. Smart move, if you ask me. Which brings me back to the beginning of this post – I should be grateful for the privilege of being able to live and work in Europe without a visa and think twice if I wanna exchange that for smog-suffused Chinese cities just for the thrill of being “where things happen”.