"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafés."- Ernest Hemingway
Thursday, 24 May 2012
The Sun Also Rises
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6 comments:
I for one welcome our new expatriate overlords.
You hang around cafés
That wouldn't have happened in North Korea.
And all said with Joyce sitting at his elbow saying "Hit him, Ernest, hit him!"
You see, this is the face of the real average expat, not a sleaze-bag or criminal, but also not exactly the kind of person a prim-and-proper mother would be happy to, say, see going out with her daughter.
Yang Rui can go hang - his comments show him to be a xenophobic idiot - but I'm not going to go along with all the "really their mostly educated hard-working people" stuff either, mostly because it strikes me as inaccurate and disingenuous. Expats are expats, some are saints, some are sinners, most, in China at least, are part booze-hound, part fly-by-night. Of course, I may just be speaking for myself here.
Most mothers (or fathers, for that matter) wouldn't be proud if they saw their offspring abroad. One big problem with foreigners in China is that they stay until they hate the country, and then start overstaying. I've heard people from different countries (including mine) say things about China, in China, which they'd never say at home.
We're longterm expats. We are that rare percentage. We weather it all, and come through to the other side. We bear our chests to the best and worst of the vagaries of human existence and we keep on a-tickin. In your face, Yang Rui, and all your ilk. We are the future, and the petty-minded can choke on it, be they Chinese, American, or whatever.
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