Expat in China: A Family Adventure

By Greg Rhodes

At age 40, Greg and Heidi Rhodes kept a rash promise to each other made 17 years earlier, when the naive, mortgage-free expats swore to return to China with their own children. Arriving back in the Middle Kingdom in 2005, they were surprised to find their former home city, Chengdu, unrecognizable. Familiar landmarks and expectations had been swept away by China's rushing tide of progress, replaced by glass skyscrapers, McDonald's restaurants, and a frenetic scramble to get ahead.

Armed with a scant few remembered phrases of Chinese, two unsuspecting offspring, and (sometimes) healthy curiosity, the Rhodes set about learning to navigate their city, and their family, on brand-new terms. Join the family as they toast China with drunken college students and battle a Buddhist monk with inflatable baseball bats. Always honest, often funny and at times poignant, Expat in China tells of a year filled with surprises, challenges, and adventures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781623090906

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Chapter 1 – Getting There Is Half the Battle

We weren’t lost; we just weren’t where we’d planned to be. That was the most we could say for more than 24 hours of uninterrupted travel.

Somewhere around hour 4 our plans were blown off course (pun intended) by Typhoon Matsa, which parked itself directly between us and Shanghai, where we had hotel reservations and extended family waiting. Instead, Air Canada offered Hong Kong, and we boarded a different plane along with an extra flight crew; flying around the storm would add several agonizing hours to the already long trip.

If we couldn’t be in Shanghai, we liked the idea of Hong Kong. We’d been there with the kids a couple years earlier, and they enjoyed it. If felt familiar. We could see ourselves eating pizza and making ongoing travel arrangements to our final destination: Chengdu (capital of Sichuan Province, deep inside China). If we couldn’t land in Shanghai where family was waiting, at least we could land in a place we knew. As wrong destinations went it was a good choice.

Plus, we didn’t want to wait three days for the next flight to Shanghai, presuming Typhoon Matsa had cleared by then. We were launching a year-long family adventure living in China. My wife Heidi and I would teach English at a university, and the whole family would travel throughout Asia in our free time. Our daughter Nikki was all-in, but our son Tommy was not. He was traveling under orders, and a year away was an eternity to a ten year old. Goodbyes to friends and family had been painful for him, but he pulled together and boarded the plane willingly, if not eagerly. We didn’t want to lose our forward momentum with Tommy, and waiting three more days to leave North America seemed pregnant with that peril. We had been encouraging the kids to show a sense of adventure and Nikki showed promise here, but at this point we just hoped Tommy would come around.

It was an appallingly long flight to the former British colony. Any flight across the Pacific was an endurance test, but that typhoon was huge. For me the flight felt even longer because I got sandwiched between a skinny Chinese guy and an overly-ample Caucasian woman. The skinny guy sat between me and the aisle and slept the entire flight. As he slumbered I was trapped without easy access to the bathrooms or opportunities to stretch my legs. The large woman on my other side spilled into my few precious inches of personal real estate as she also slept for hours. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t see the movie because the screen hung too many rows ahead. I couldn’t read much on the bouncing plane without needing the barf bag in front of me. All I could do was sit there, begging the hours to pass.

Nikki sat a row ahead of me, also trapped between two strangers, but she tolerated it better. She was a slender thirteen year-old and neither neighbor invaded her space. She loved to read and didn’t have any problems doing so on in flight. Originally Heidi and Tommy were scattered about the plane, but we convinced a surly gate agent that our ten year old would make a delightful travel companion for a couple strangers. In the end Heidi and Tommy enjoyed a cozy pair of seats in the very last row of the plane. They could get up and stand behind their chairs as long as they wanted. I was painfully jealous the one time I got out to see them.

Despite more than half a day trapped above the Pacific Ocean in a metal tube with nothing to do, we landed in Hong Kong without any ideas about where to stay. While other travelers zoomed past us to their pre-arranged destinations, we stood there with our Lonely Planet guidebook to pick a couple places to call. Some people were met by drivers who whisked them away in luxurious Mercedes sedans. I hated them. Thank goodness we hadn’t spent the flight time making a plan. Hong Kong had lots of places to stay, most of them expensive. Our adventure had a budget and our family in Shanghai had arranged a cheap but comfortable room there. As I scanned the mid-priced choices I struggled with sticker shock; I began considering budget guest houses.

Tears leaked over Tommy’s lower eyelids. He had thought staying awake for the entire 17 hour flight sounded cool, and had done just that despite our repeated suggestions of nap. Now we were all going to pay the price. There would be no audacious tantrum, just a quiet melt-down outside of immigration. Clearly we didn’t have time to go from one cheap guest house to another to find the best low-cost, low-cockroach option. Tommy had reached the end of his rope and the rest of us were approaching ours. We needed to end this day.

The airport hosted a hotel-booking window. A kind young woman there offered us two rooms at the Kowloon Sheraton for $200 a night each. That was eight times what we’d planned to spend in Shanghai and a real budget disaster.

Tommy complained that his stomach hurt. I left Heidi to get the best deal the window offered while I took the kids in search of some food. Tommy was very sensitive to his blood sugar, so we hoped calories would buy us a little more time. The kids and I bought fries and Sprite at McDonald’s and found a few seats, quietly munching and sipping until Heidi finished. The kids slumped while I stewed over our inauspicious start. It was going to be a tough year at this rate.

With Tommy we always knew where he stood; his emotions were permanently on display. Nikki was the opposite, generally inscrutable. She wasn’t a pouty or moody teen, but she kept to herself, and always had. I wondered what was passing between her ears at that moment. She was born 30 years old, so knowing her it was something like, How did my parents get to be in charge? They can’t even find a place to stay.

Heidi returned with reservations at the YMCA on Hong Kong Island. The good news was they’d squeeze us into one room with a double bed and two cots. The bad news was the room would cost $100 a night. One hundred dollars at the YMCA! This was definitely not shelter for those down on their luck. I swallowed any protest I wanted to make because it wasn’t Heidi’s fault Hong Kong was so expensive; besides, I’d left her to make the decision so it wasn’t fair to question the result. Even more, I was just too damn tired to care.

Tommy perked up a bit after our snack of the four basic food groups: starch, fat, salt and sugar. Heidi studied the Lonely Planet about how to get to the Y. This was a chronic disease: Heidi’s compulsion to solve every travel problem with public transport. She thrilled from stringing together seven different vehicles to reach the same place a single taxi would go. I respected that concept, but today I wanted to grab a cab and end our ordeal.

To my dismay and her delight, Heidi declared we’d need only three legs to cross Hong Kong to our hotel: a train from the airport to a bus that would take us to the subway. There was a subway stop just a few blocks from our hotel. Heidi beamed while I wilted, thoughts of dragging mountains of luggage on and off buses and trains, up and down escalators, and through crowded waiting rooms. We were awfully tired for such folly. The good news was that we’d lost one of our checked bags somewhere over the Pacific, so we had less to carry. I was not modeling a good sense of adventure for the kids.

This story has a hero – Jackie Wan – who strode up and offered his taxi. I asked the fare to the Y. It was barely more than buying all the different train, bus and subway tickets we’d need. I looked at Heidi pleadingly and she relented. Public transport would have to wait for another day. This was just the kind of break we needed. Suddenly I was back in love with Hong Kong and my wife, despite the fact that the Y cost a hundred bucks.

Nikki and Tommy sniggered together about the similarity of our driver’s name to the famous kung fu actor as we followed him outside, into Hong Kong’s swampy summer evening. Jackie tied as much luggage in the trunk as his little Toyota would hold, and we piled the rest on our laps. He talked ceaselessly in semi-intelligible English, offering his service as guide or future transport, whipping out his card in a blur. The kids were laughing and we were enjoying one of the random joys of travel, an appealing person thrust into our lives. Jackie entered at just the right time, when we needed some energy and a break from the grind of the journey. The ride to the YMCA passed quickly.

With two cots wedged into our room we barely had passage to the bathroom, but we didn’t care. We were terribly relieved to be done. We wound down watching Chinese TV and reading books, and Nikki and I waded into the sultry night on a mission for food. We found numerous night clubs beckoning to us in neon, but no noodle stalls. We settled on a hot dog of sorts, some unidentified take-out Chinese, and rice. Tommy immediately claimed the hot dog when we got back to the hotel. Fed but not satisfied, we collapsed for sleep at 10:00pm. Unfortunately, none of us were still asleep at 2:00am; our body clocks overruled our exhaustion. The TV came back on and the books back out for a couple more hours.

We stayed near the Y for the next two days, until we moved on to Chengdu. We bought air tickets at a local travel agent and ate from nearby restaurants, but mostly we stayed in the cramped room, watched TV, read our books, and played games. We showed no appetite for adventure of any kind, to my great concern. Just outside stood Hong Kong’s famous convention center, right on the harbor. We could walk there in three minutes. A Star Ferry terminal stood just beyond that, granting us access to Kowloon and the New Territories beyond. So many explorations waited just steps away. We were beginning a grand trip, an epic quest, and we spent the first two days of it sitting in the YMCA. When we did go out we ate at McDonald’s, to Nikki’s dismay. I couldn’t imagine that great travelers just sat at the hotel and ate at the Golden Arches. I chided and pressed the rest of the family, but truly I had little more appetite for adventure than they did.

We were exhausted. For reasons no longer clear as we collapsed in Hong Kong, we hosted company – lots of company – while making final preparations and packing for a year away. Twenty or so guests passed through our lives during several weeks in late June and July. We were delighted to see everyone, but it did mean our already packed schedules were crazy. In addition, Heidi and I had been working for eighteen months to make this trip a reality. We had run ourselves ragged for the final 6 months dealing with our regular routine while preparing to abandon our lives. We were all exhausted before we left, to a depth I didn’t comprehend at the time. We were tired far beyond jet lag.

So we stayed primarily to our hotel, me feeling anxious and frustrated. Heidi assumed her regular role in our relationship – telling me all was fine, to relax – but I’d spent the last six months in a dead sprint. It would take more than one long plane flight to wind me down. I looked forward to arriving in Chengdu so our adventure could begin in earnest.

Chapter 2 – You Want to Go to Communist China?

For Heidi and me this trip was back to the future, and we dragged our kids along for entertainment. Seventeen years before – in August of 1988, as innocent college graduates with a thirst for adventure, no foreign travel experience, little common sense and even less money – we embarked for a year in China, teaching English to university students and factory workers.

It was a difficult year; we were young and felt isolated living so far from family and familiar culture. We received little mail from home and even fewer phone calls, which were arduous both to make and accept. We led a life of mild deprivation, experiencing the power blackouts and natural gas shortages of our neighbors, living in a brick and concrete apartment with virtually no heat, and finding it difficult to make any real friends, Chinese or foreign. Food played a central role in our feelings of deprivation; the local food tasted wonderful, but ingredients were often of low quality and the calorie count was minimal. What calories we did eat too often came back out prematurely, since the vegetables were grown with human waste as the fertilizer. There was virtually nothing familiarly western to savor when we needed a comforting taste of home.

As we struggled to adapt we nearly cut our year short, returning home after only one semester. We would alternate days of despair, one wanting a February departure and the other carrying the torch for a full year. A few days later the roles would reverse. It was nip and tuck for a while.

In other words, it was a great year. Our perseverance brought new confidence and interest during the second semester. We still struggled, but far less frequently. The year challenged and stretched us. We laughed and cried together. Youthful pretenses of pride and modesty evaporated as we shared dysentery and other diseases. We learned to appreciate each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We fell more deeply in love as we relied on each other in new and more serious ways. There is nothing more serious than a plea for more scratchy Chinese toilet paper when one is suffering from food poisoning.

Even though the second half of the year went better, we were really ready to leave by the end. We missed family, friends, and pizza. Our final two months were dominated by the massive student protests in Tiananmen Square, mirrored in Chengdu’s own demonstrations, and marred by their tragic end. Still, Heidi and I both agreed China had become part of us. We confidently promised we’d return in the future, bringing our kids when we had them. It seemed such a clear and logical choice at age 22.

Such promises of youth had the ring of irrational exuberance as we grew older, facing a home with mortgage and careers with commitments. We continued to nurse the notion of another year in China, but without much conviction, more like Wouldn’t it be great to go again? We were mature, sober people. Mature people didn’t upend their lives, endanger their career paths, interrupt saving for retirement, and delay the purchase of a new car. It just wasn’t done.

Somehow we did it anyway, and all because Heidi listened to National Public Radio while driving her car one sunny June Saturday. Rudy Maxa offer his deal of the week on The Savvy Traveler: airfare and five nights in a luxury Hong Kong hotel for $500 per person. That wasn’t just cheap, that was virtually free. A half-day guided tour was included. Even breakfast was gratis. Arriving home Heidi burst through the door and declared, We should go to Hong Kong. This was quite rash and decidedly uncharacteristic of my math-teaching, plan-ahead wife. However, she loved an adventure, and I loved that about her. She was also cheap and $500 was too cheap to ignore – probably an 80% discount off the real price. Bargain shoppers, we had to pay $2,000 to save $10,000.

There were a couple reasons for the deep discount. First, we had to travel soon – very soon, like within the next 5 weeks, landing in Hong Kong at the miserable height of its heat and humidity. We didn’t generally choose the tropical summer as our favorite weather in which to sightsee. June through August was the off season in Hong Kong for very good reason, yet weather alone couldn’t explain these prices. Such bargains required something dramatic, like war, pestilence or plague. This case was a plague: SARS. Few people were traveling to Asia unless they had to; Hong Kong itself had been a center of the disease, with over 1,200 people quarantined. That made it a real bargain for those willing to risk their lives, including us. We figured it would be a great experience for the kids, an opportunity to get comfortable wearing surgical masks while walking the streets. We checked the Centers for Disease Control website for information, and the World Health Organization as well. Both reported that the virus seemed on the wane, and careful travelers should be safe. We decided to roll the dice and buy tickets while monitoring the situation, and even extended the trip a few days, betting on good news. We submitted expedited applications for passports, which cost almost as much as the rest of the trip.

Four weeks to the day after Heidi declared her interest, we boarded a Singapore Airlines flight in Seattle, packing all the required tourist gear and a generous supply of hand sanitizer. It coincided with the 21st day in Hong Kong without a new SARS case, leading the World Health Organization to declare the area SARS free. We crossed our fingers that they were right. How badly had SARS affected Hong Kong tourism? The guide for our half day tour hadn’t worked one day in the prior three months, as opposed to normal off seasons when she might only work four days a week. She was delighted to have an audience and we left a generous tip.

Despite the tropical swelter we had a grand time. Every day we spent at least 5 or 6 hours exploring, and some days we were gone from the hotel the entire day roaming the outer islands or the wilder parts of Hong Kong’s New Territories. Because of Heidi’s love for local transportation we didn’t make these journeys in the air conditioned splendor of tour buses and hydrofoils. Instead we sweated in cramped minibuses and creaking, leaking ferries while both the temperature and humidity hovered near 100.

The kids endured the hardships with good humor and energy. We had a strategy to keep them going: the pool promise. Our wonderful luxury hotel – the same one the Chinese Premier used when he was in town – boasted a glass-walled rooftop pool where we could swim while surveying Hong Kong Island and the harbor. We promised each day to return to the hotel in time to swim before the pool closed. Following our dip we’d wander down the street to the Pacific Coffee Company for Haagen Dazs ice cream and a chance to check our email on their free computers. When the kids would flag we’d mention the pool and ice cream. It was never a threat, as in failure to adventure equaled failure to swim. It was a promise that their agenda mattered and we’d get them there. Unfailingly they’d perk back up, we’d buy some cold bottled water or pop, and the adventure would resume.

In addition to stamina and humor our kids showed curiosity. They enjoyed trying different foods—within some limits, of course. They liked seeing a different way of living. They were engaged in the experience. Heidi and I began to think of a year in China in terms of how well the kids would manage it and how much they would learn. It was not the original intent, but Hong Kong became a test drive of the more extended journey, and we liked the way it drove.

* * *

If Hong Kong started the consideration of returning to China, San Francisco finished it. That was Heidi’s doing as well.

In the same way she unexpectedly burst into the house proposing a trip to Hong Kong, she called me from San Francisco and declared we were definitely returning to China. It had been a year since Hong Kong. Halfway through that year we started telling people about our plans for a second tour in China before Nikki went to high school. But we didn’t get too public – didn’t tell too many people in case it didn’t come together. We wanted to go, hoped to go, but didn’t say we were definitely going. We started planning, but our commitment left too much wiggle room. Soon practicalities began wiggling. Our mortgage was terribly expensive. I ran my own business – how could I leave it untended, and what would my partners think of that? After just a few months of planning the desire was still there, but the opportunity was slipping away like a handful of sand passing through the fingers of reality. By summer we hadn’t admitted it aloud to each other but China was off.

Then Heidi went to San Francisco for some training. Coincidentally, the Bay Area was the home of Max, one of Heidi’s favorite students from our original tour of duty in China. Like many of his classmates Max found his way to the U.S. during the 1990’s to work in the tech sector and build a better life. Though she hadn’t seen him since we left China in 1989, Heidi scheduled a dinner with Max and another former student, which became two dinners after the first was so delightful. Following the first dinner Heidi called me, gushing, We’re definitely going back, Greg. We’re going. She wasn’t asking my opinion, but reporting the decision. The excitement and energy in my wife’s voice was impossible to ignore, and it provided great clarity. Luckily for me I agreed with the decision.

Our final commitment didn’t change the enormities of planning for this adventure, but it did change our perception of them. They became problems to be solved rather than unsolvable problems. Our two largest issues were budget and employment. The year wouldn’t be cheap, even at a base budget. We wanted to spend more, though, so we could travel around Asia. We needed to find that money. Also, we needed jobs, so we had to again find work teaching English at a university in China.

We began with the budget. Sums mounted as we added to the list of things we’d like to do and places we’d like to see. I thought wistfully of our experience years before, when we had spent $800 each for plane tickets and about $250 for medivac insurance. That was all we needed. We left the US with $1,000 in travelers checks, hoping those and our $180 a month salaries would cover us for the entire year (since it was all we had in the world to our names). We came home at the end of the year with most of those traveler’s checks uncashed. Life was simpler then. Jumping forward to 2005, air tickets would together cost us nearly $5,000 and medical/medivac insurance almost $3,000. That looked great compared to the $16,000 we eventually budgeted for travel around Asia once there, a number that had continued to climb as our ambitions grew. None of this included our house payments if we couldn’t find renters, a pitfall we desperately needed to avoid. Other miscellaneous items drove the budget – and my blood pressure – yet higher.

Heidi helped add to the list of costs since there were a lot of places she wanted to visit, but she didn’t worry much about how to pay for them. That was my job. Six or seven years earlier I had decided to work for myself and eschew a regular paycheck. From then on it had been my job to manage the family finances; the trip became an extension of that. Heidi chose instead to stress about employment: what if we couldn’t find a job? Financing wouldn’t matter without someplace to work. She desperately wanted to go to China to be appreciated by students, desperate in a way that interrupted not only her sleep but her lucky husband’s as well. She’d swim there with two nickels in her left pocket if that’s what the budget required, but she couldn’t work without a job. For several weeks after the first of the year this anxiety dominated her life.

I wasn’t worried about jobs. Our first choice was to return to the same university where we had taught before so we could see how things had changed. We had an inside man on this job: Max. He was close friends with a vice president there. Things in China happened because of relationships. I figured we were as good as hired at our first choice, but saw the wisdom of a few alternatives. We searched the web for other jobs – the web made it much easier than it had been so many years earlier. We applied to several other universities in cities that interested us, just in case.

January rolled past with no word about any of our applications, and Heidi really began to worry. She considered sending additional applications. She fidgeted, fussed, and fretted. Looking back on it, Heidi remembered wanting an answer so we could move to the next step in our planning. However, she couldn’t sit still when talking about lacking job offers – and we talked about it constantly. The circles grew darker under her eyes. Despite my confidence Heidi’s anxiety became overwhelming by mid-February. We hadn’t heard from any place yet. Her job in the States was exhausting her emotionally and the trip to China was her lifeline. She needed it securely fastened at the other end. She wasn’t ready to face the choices she might have to make if we weren’t going to China. Heidi contacted Max for intervention, and a written job offer arrived in our email the next week. Everything in China happened because of relationships.

In the end that was the only offer we got. We never even heard from any of the other schools, not so much as a terse rejection email. However, like every financial and logistical arrangement necessary to make this trip real, what we needed arrived when we needed it, without exception. Our budget came together as well, without resort to bank robbery, organ sales or indentured children – the latter two definitely on the table if necessary to make ends meet. This trip constituted an act of faith, one that was re-affirmed with each issue resolved. We were meant to go to China again.

* * *

As our plans progressed a surprising number of people began asking, Why? Why do you want to go to China for a year?

I found this question baffling. There were people who understood intuitively; their specific motivations might have varied from mine, but they immediately grasped the appeal of an extended trip just for the sake of it. Those kind of people, the kindred spirits, often asked where?, what? and how? questions, but never why? The notion of going somewhere (almost anywhere) to do something (almost anything) was complete in itself. It was like asking why someone would climb a mountain – simply because it was there.

For those who didn’t understand I developed a series of ready answers. It was better than standing there with my mouth open looking stupid. I would explain that we wanted to show our children the world and how other people lived, or that we hoped to step out of the rat race and spend time together as a family, or that we were curious to see how China had changed, or that we just wanted have an adventure. I’d give the answer I thought would most satisfy the asker. Really I couldn’t imagine not wanting to go. Many people struggled with the notion of leaving established careers; that was against all the rules. A few couldn’t understand the attraction of China. One of