rumours
It's amazing the things you hear through the expat grapevine. I suspect this holds true regardless of where you're from or which country you're in. Some of the rumours I heard floating around the expat community when I lived in China were beyond daft. Obviously wrong. Sometimes fuelled by simple racism, often self-serving. I won't repeat them here because I don't want to add to the disinformation that is probably still floating around. And if you're a relatively recent arrival just starting to learn the local language, culture, customs, you tend to rely on the expats you meet who've been there longer. Some of them are good, solid, reliable people. Some of them are not. Some of these rumours you hear can get to be dangerous - I mean, literally dangerous, as in leading people to take unnecessary legal risks or delay seeking medical care.
In Taiyuan I made some choices about who to hang out with. Some of these choices, in hindsight, were unwise. None of them were bad people, but psychologically they were not in a good place. Culture shock can be wicked. Hanging out with them did not help me work through the culture shock I was experiencing, and that helped put me in a bad place, too.
However, I did meet some much better-adjusted expats and a few local people who helped provide a bit of balance, and I'm glad for that. Looking back, I think it was their balance that helped me decide to move to Beijing rather than just quit China altogether.
It always amuses me that after I moved to Beijing, I went back to Taiyuan twice to visit, and the people I visited were those better-adjusted expats. I loved my time in Changsha, but apart from sitting on a train as we rumbled through the city on the way north one time, I've never been back.
the key
One of these better-adjusted expats told me once that the key to lasting in China long term was to learn the language and make friends with a few locals. It seems so astoundingly, stupidly obvious, because it is, but what you see happening far too often is expats retreating into little expat ghettos, interacting with the local population only so far as is necessary. This isn't just an expat-in-China thing - I see the same thing happening here in Aotearoa, and the news often throws up a story suggesting the phenomenon happens around the world. But a sure-fire way to not get trapped by the more negative aspects of the expat rumourmill is to be able to read information in the local language and talk directly to trusted locals.
remember it's dirty out there
Another was keen to give out a certain piece of advice to newcomers:
Always wash your face and hands when you get home - get the dust off so you don't ingest any more than you need to. That dust ain't clean. Also, brocolli is supposed to be really good for leaching heavy metals from your system.
I don't know about the brocolli and heavy metals bit, that sounds a bit scientifically suspect. But this was a good reminder that Taiyuan, at least back then, was horrifically polluted, and you really do need to take care of yourself. I found this became particularly important in the spring when the sandstorms started to blow.
but it's home
I met a couple of local people who had gone to Canada to study then returned to Taiyuan. Their attitude to Taiyuan was quite healthy - yes, this place is a shithole, but it's home.
Yeah, so that doesn't sound overly positive, but it actually is, really. There's no sense in pretending the city you live in is anything other than what it is. It is well worth remembering that it is the city you have chosen to remain in - and yes, how much choice one has depends on so many factors out of one's control, but the people I am referring to were the kind who could afford more choice than most. Most importantly, I respected the acknowledgement that Taiyuan was the city in which they were born and raised; the city of their family and lifelong friends; maybe not the city, but at least the province of their ancestors. As shitty, rundown, and polluted as Taiyuan could be, it was home, in that deepest, most fundamentally emotional sense. They had experienced life in the big, wide world and decided to return home, and now that they were home, they weren't going to try deluding themselves or anybody else, but they were going to make a go of it. And fair enough.
there were more, of course..
The above is just a few little snippets of a year in Taiyuan, that's all, but a few little snippets that really burned themselves into my memory, and that made my time there actually quite positive. It is thanks to these people, and a few others, that I was actually happy to return to Taiyuan a couple of times, and honestly, I wouldn't mind going back.