We may not be Chinese, but...

Shanghai, like most other big cities with a glut of multinational companies, has its fair share of ex-pats. When you live very far away from your home, from all your friends and family and normality as you know it, it is inevitable that you are drawn to people in the same situation as yourself. It therefore comes as no surprise that I have established a bit of an urban family here for myself; a good group of friends consisting predominantly of fellow ex-pats.

Many people look down on ‘ex-pats’ and everything that it implies to be one. Crikey, the term even sends some kind of shudders down my spine, but I think there are varying levels of ex-pat-i-ness and I have nipped my cultural snob thoughts in the bud, accepted the fact that I am an ex-pat and just hope that my friends and I are of the less obnoxious variety. In any case we all seem to enjoy being here, we don’t live too far removed from the locals, want to learn the language, adopt [some] Chinese habits and make Chinese friends despite the very obvious cultural barriers and totally different way of being.

Some of my friends have been here equally as long as I have and we experience culture shock first hand at pretty much the same pace, others have been here a bit longer and I look up to them for advice and deeper insight into this craziness. Maybe even one day I’ll have friends who will look up to me for advice on things China – it’s the way things work in my world.

One of my friends here is called Gustav. He is Swedish, works for EF where he drinks copious amounts of coffee with me, is married to my friend Nina and has been in China for a few months more than I have. Respect. He started learning Chinese before I did and gives me something to aspire to, although admittedly I am also super competitive and instinctively want to catch up. It was in fact Gustav who taught me the ‘one, two, three’ from my first blog entry.

Yesterday was Gustav’s 30th birthday and he celebrated in style with a party. It was a great evening with all the right ingredients for success thrown in: good company, good food and drink, good music, good conversation, birthday cake and singing. In that there were many nationalities represented at the party we sang Happy Birthday in English. We also gave a nod to Gustav’s nationality and sang in Swedish. Most importantly though, and despite the relatively few Chinese present, we sang Happy Birthday in Chinese. Another lesson thrown my way thanks to big G.

You can probably guess, therefore, that my Chinese lesson of the day is: 生日快乐 shēng rì kuài lè – which of course means Happy Birthday.