A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

Welcome to the eleventh instalment in my infinite expat interview series. I really hadn’t expected it to last this long (I didn’t think anyone would respond, to be honest) but it seems to have taken on a life of its own, slowly taking over this blog, my email inbox and a significant part of my thought process.

This interview is with the remarkable, eloquent Liv of I Eat My Pigeon. Liv is living in a small town in Italy, where her mother is originally from, where she still has relatives around her and where she can speak the language after a childhood of it spoken in her home.  Yet, even with all of these advantages, it hasn’t been the easiest move.  A lot of what she said in her interview rang true for me- about home, about movement, about friendship, about allowing her roots to dig into the earth.  To be perfectly honest, I think I would love to be where she is right now, doing what she is doing. I think she’s on a good path, even though it hasn’t been easy.

A brief pause to enjoy my parents' window herb garden, which I aspire to have

I had started this series originally as a slightly pathetic plea for confirmation that I wasn’t the only one with doubts about the choices I had made to live where I have lived. I had been trying to filter through the cacophony of shouty voices out there in the intarwebs which extolled the unquestionable merits of a) quitting your soul-sucking cubicle job, selling all your stuff and travelling the world FOREVER as a digital nomad (or any other kind of nomad except the herding kind), and b) quitting your soul sucking cubicle job and moving to the marvellous general area known as Abroad to reinvent yourself and live happily ever after.

I wore that skirt for a full decade due to living out of a backpack.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I really like to travel. I do. I tend to spend most of my savings on plane tickets and hotels and overpriced cocktails in Foreign Correspondents’ Clubs in places where cocktails aren’t part of the national cuisine.  In the past two years, I’ve spent almost all of my time off running around Indonesia, Burma, Cambodia, China and, as of this summer, Sri Lanka. It’s exhilarating.  When I travel, my skin looks happier, I lose weight, my brain fog lifts and I’m generally a less cranky person than I am when staying in one place, working.

I don’t, however, want to be a nomad. Not even the kind with herds of grazing animals, though, admittedly, life in a yurt with a herd of goats certainly has its appeal. I like having stuff though. I like building up shoe and book collections. I like, as Liv notes, to have salt and pepper shakers. I like to know where I’m waking up. I used to be a lot more flexible in my 20s, waking up on sofas and on floors and in dorm beds and thinking nothing of it.

For three years in my early 20s I lived full-time out of a back pack. I didn’t think of it as a hardship, merely as an aspect of life that could be a little limiting (one pair of Docs for all occasions!).  For most of my 20s, I was constantly moving around.  I liked it. By my late 20s, I wanted nothing more than a flat of my own and a regular job, just as the current crop of restless cubicle dwellers want nothing more than to run away and travel forever.  I get it, but I also know it’s not a miracle solution.

I also really like living abroad, in spite of what you might gather from my blog posts, which is why I’ve been doing it for the past seventeen years. It just works for me on some subconscious level that I have yet to identify.  I like having an excuse for not fitting in. I like being peripheral. I like being able to take a step back and decide for myself how much I want to join in culturally, socially, intellectually, and how much I want to keep to myself.

However, as the lovely Fiona once said, living abroad is not all beer and Skittles. It’s often hard. It can be dreadfully lonely, even if you are living abroad with someone. Not only do you have to deal with the crap that normal life flings at you but you also have to do it in another language, in another culture, in a place where you may or may not really fit in. The friction is there.  The knowledge that you are not really of that place is always lingering under the surface, even on the best days. I’m not Chinese. I never will be. No one will ever mistake me for a local here. Even when I lived in England back in the 1990s my Canadian accent always gave me away and marked me as an other.

Oddly enough, in England I was usually marked incorrectly as Irish (which I’m not), which opened up a whole ‘nother can of worms in a decade when the IRA was still considered a major threat. When I worked as a cashier at Selfridges in Oxford Street in London in 1997 I went through two days of IRA-specific bomb-scare training. Luckily, I was repeatedly assessed as being from Co. Donegal (or, more specifically, Gweedore, Co. Donegal, as determined by two different old ladies I looked after when I was working for London social services), which was not so active as other parts in presumed terrorist intent.  One Jamaican nurse I worked with repeatedly insisted that we (the Irish and the West Indians) must stand in solidarity as outsiders living in the UK.   I agreed. During my time in London, most of my friends were African and most of my colleagues were West Indian.  I felt like I fit in with them more than I fit in with the general British culture.  Outsiders find outsiders, I suppose.  It hasn’t quite worked this well in China but I’m slowly building up a small, disparate group of outsiders that I feel connected to. It’s a start.

On that note, I’d like to introduce you to the lovely Liv, whose blog I’ve been reading for quite a while now but I don’t think she ever knew.  Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the Pigeon Eater.

Here's looking at you, kid

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