there goes the neighborhood

Last night was a friend's birthday. Len's a pretty popular guy, so a lot of people turned out. It was also reggae night at the busiest expat bar, so a few people were there who don't know Len at all.

At one point, a few of us who came here a decade ago took a head count and realized there were more foreigners in the bar on Saturday night then there were in the whole city back then.

Most of the other old timers seemed to have no idea who most of the new people are. being kind of a new person in some ways, I knew more. Still, there were plenty of new faces.

It was kind of cool having this brought to my attention. It made me realize how weird and mixed the community of expats is. people who have lived in larger Chiense cities tell me there are different groups. Business people don't talk much to teachers, Germans, italians, and others have their own cliques, etc.

So last night, I started off with a group of English speaking teachers, then drifted over to hang out with some Russians. I then fell in with the old timers, wandered off with a few French people (mes amis, c'est vrai. Je n'ai jamais etudie le francais. Je parle, mais c'est parce que je suis tres fute. un genie), and wound up back with Americans and Aussies. We then went off to the club, where the lines continued to blur.

There is an odd sort of tension for expats here. I think many of us kind of dislike being lumped together as "foreigners." A canadian who has lived here for 10 years is very different from an Aussie in his third week. For french, germans, Italians, Russians and the various Arabic speakers, it must be tiring to constantly need to speak English, as very few Chinese study your language. No one likes being lumped in with the Americans, and we, in turn, deal with constant misconceptions about our country (two of the biggest gripes we have is that we are criticized for only speaking one language, and for knowing nothing about the rest of the world. While those criticisms have some merit when applied to Americans as a whole, it rarely applies to Americans here. There's generally not much difference between Americans and other expats in our knowledge of Chinese, and I'd respectfully say that if you made a list of the most knowledgable, well educated, cerebral expats in Zhongshan, Americans would be overrepresented. Of course, we left the States behind :) Still last night I got to see the foreign community as a community. A large, diverse group of people where language, religion, nationality, gender, and race don't matter. it's not always the case, but when things align right, it feels good..