“How can someone who exists on the fringes of a society understand that society?” Jack said. “You’re a laowai, a wai guo ren, an outsider. You can’t understand pigs without shoveling pig shit, you shouldn’t even fucking eat bacon. How can you be an expert on death without taking the occasional life?”
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The 7-Year Laowai: Part 4 – Contract Renewal
“Freshman?” Jack said. “The first I taught freshman English, all the girls came up to me after class and asked if they could come home and fuck me.”
…and we never had another group dinner.
The 7-year Laowai: Part 2 – Wei Wei
Those first few years were the worst. You enter a period in your life where you can’t say for sure what you’re doing or even who you are. Each day the same as the last, they blur together like a flipbook. You can only see flashes of what you did, what you were. Little isolated fragments that do nothing to illustrate what happened and everything to add to the mystery.
“Why do you come to China?”, my students ask me, which is pretty much “What’s a nice laowai like you doing in a place like this?”. Well…I suppose I came here for a better life. I suppose. It’s hard to say. It’s hard to know what I was thinking. Look at it like this: I was treading water in the middle of the ocean, waiting for a boat to come by.
China just happened to be the first.
The 7-Year Laowai: Part 1 – Introduction
I was a foreign teacher in China for seven years.
They say life is too short. Well, then they ought to come to Wuhan, China. Life here is not short. It drags on; on through the scorching summers, on through the wet, freezing winters, on through the smog and the sun lying concealed beyond it like something peeking at us through mesh. On through the nights in bars, in KTVs, or alone in your apartment as you visit what sites you can, thinking about your life. Still trying to scratch that itch, that itch you can never quite reach no matter how many miles from home you go.
I spent all seven in our loud metropolis. It takes a special kind of person to stay in Wuhan for seven years–indeed, it takes a special kind of person to come here and teach in the first place. But I differ from them in two key ways. First, I left China. They don’t, won’t, and most of all, can’t. They’ve spent years working themselves into a nook of drinking, fucking, smoking, rambling, drinking, traveling, and drinking. Trading all that away for the destitute lives they left behind is simply not an option.
Hong Huang tells laowai, ‘don’t assume you can be one of us’
I just finished reading Hong Huang’s opinion piece in the China Daily entitled, “Dear laowai, don’t mess with our Chinese-ness” and I can’t figure it out. What I’d like to think, based on Hong’s reputation, is that it is self-depreciating humour actually directed at Chinese about Chinese superiority and penchants for stereotypes. If this is [...]
A foreigner’s perspective with Steven Weathers
Recently I was in Shanghai as part of the China 2.0 tour. Though much of the tour revolved around visiting local Web companies, the organizers did provide us with some high-class networking opportunities. During one such event, at Shanghai’s newest hotspot M1NT, an enthusiastic stranger came up to me and slipped a USB flash drive [...]
Help a Laowai Win In China
Should any Beijing Laowai have a free schedule tomorrow and wish to support a fellow foreigner in his bid to show a national TV audience that he’s got some guanxi too, while also helping raise awareness for a charity that secures micro loans for poor rural women, please read the following from American expat, Henry [...]
