You met your expat China friends on… My Space?
Apr 16, 2009
By Andrea Hunt, www.eChinacities.com
I know what you’re thinking. MySpace? Only losers use MySpace to meet people! I was one of the last people to even get a MySpace account, never used it, and it sat idle in cyberspace for over a year before I moved to China. I never saw the utility in using it and never imagined meeting friends there. In addition, there are stories of sleazy perverts and psychos just waiting to meet you on MySpace, right? So let me explain what would drive a regular expat living in China to even consider such a thing. Now I live in a big city so I, like you probably, couldn’t imagine making friends this way. Oddly enough, now I can’t even remember my MySpace password.
But it wasn’t always this way. This is going to appear more as a confession than anything, but it is to inform those who know no true cultural isolation. I have heard expats lament at times how they went to some remote area in Beijing where for two days they couldn’t find any foreigners anywhere. In Shanghai, you can’t turn a corner without seeing another foreigner; in Beijing, we are everywhere. We have literally infiltrated the major cities to the point where Chinese people don’t even stare or really notice anymore.
Photo: Andrea Hunt
This is not the same in a small town. In small towns like Zhuji, children will run out into the streets to point at you while the other people in the town cackle “Helloooooossss” behind you as you walk by. People are always fascinated by what you are buying at the supermarket and will blatantly stand over you in the check out line to see what magical products you have added to your grocery basket. This provides conversation and entertainment for the rest of the customers as does pulling out a Vanguard Membership Card – for those of you unaware; Vanguard is one of the main grocery chains in China. In the small towns (population 1 million), this is the only place you can buy skinless boneless chicken breast. Consequently, this one item in the meat section creates a favorite shopping ground, in a meat section which otherwise,to us, often resembles a pet store.
Small town people in China are wonderful. They will do anything and go out of their way to help you out. Whether it’s recharging your phone card for you or showing you how to use a locker at the grocery store, they spot our flailing helplessness and will do their best to placate our debilitated egos.
When you live alone in a small town in a country where you don’t speak the language, you can end up feeling extremely culturally isolated. I loved the Chinese people in the small town and could speak English with the girls who worked at my school. The men were scared of me for some reason and wouldn’t talk to me. Sometimes, my colleagues and I would go out at standard Zhuji winter dinner time (5pm), but my colleagues would return home by 7 pm and I would end up going home to sit in my cold Chinese dormitory with minimal internet, completely cut off from the outside world. Notably, they had families to return home to, etc, but admittedly I felt culturally isolated. In addition, having read that in the West girls drink alcohol, they insisted on ordering me beer at every dinner. Unfortunately, against Western tradition, they ordered me beer and let me drink alone. This wouldn’t have bothered me quite so much if when they declined my offer to share, they wouldn’t have replied, “Oh no, I cannot, I am nice girl.” Gee, thanks.
Well, these “nice girls” have no problem, however, with “gan bei’ing” (bottoms up) you all dinner long mercilessly with their juice and tea, and then leaving you to walk home tipsy at 7pm.
Photo: Andrea Hunt
In my dormitory, I had nothing to connect me with the world besides my computer. I admit I sat on the computer for hours every night watching DVDs and chatting online to my friends online. Out of curiosity one night around 7:30 pm, accepting that I would be in for the evening, I realized there was a feature on MySpace where you could actually check to see if there were other foreigners in your area. I did a search and found out that there were, in fact, other people in Zhejiang Province. They were mostly in Hangzhou of course, but there were several girls in small towns like Lishui and Anshui, there was even a Zhejiang group that had a mind blowing 4 members.
We ended up chatting online and after a few weeks of sitting home Friday nights, we decided that instead of continuing to be socially pathetic, me and the two other girls would meet up in Hangzhou. The girls were hysterically funny and from the Midwest part of the US and we ended up at a Mexican Independence Day Party somehow and I met friends who I am still friends with over 2 years later.
A few months later, I gratefully met some Chinese friends and an amazing Aussie lady, and we became instant dumpling-buddies and great friends. Again, I found a girl in Zhuji on MySpace and saw that she had also been living there for about the same amount of time as I had. The fact that we had never seen each other was baffling to me since we were deeply convinced that there were no other foreigners in the city. We literally chased down blonde Chinese girls in the street, mistaking them for other foreigners. I sent the girl a message and told her she should come out for dumplings with us sometime. She wasn’t in any hurry since she had actually moved to Zhuji with another friend. We all did meet up for dumplings and became extremely close friends, through the Zhuji bond that is created through being the fifth foreigner in the city.
Photo: Andrea Hunt
In my last experience with MySpace friend-meetings, consider Jared. Jared was alone in Zhuji for 2 months by himself. Like me, he had also been heading home every night around 6:30 or 7pm with nothing to do in the evenings besides heading to the gym or buy DVDs. When he asked his employer if there were other expats in the town, the boss replied with a firm, NO. So Jared continued his life believing he was the only one. One day, I was doing a general scan of the Zhejiang group and found that, lo and behold, there was a new member in Zhejiang also in Zhuji, could it be true? Were there really more of us lurking around, blissfully unaware of each other’s existence? By this time, our little group had grown to include some hilariously funny locals and 7 total foreigners. I decided to write him so we could see just what kind of person Jared was so I invited him out for our regular Monday Night BBQ. He literally wrote back only a few hours later and anxiously replied, “Us? Come out and meet you guys? There is more than one? Yep! I’ll be there at 7!” He met us there, and my other friend offered a seat to him with a head nod defined his fate, “Jared, meet your friends.”
Photo: Andrea Hunt
The strange thing about living in such a small town is that you meet people who you normally wouldn’t even meet in your own country. Even though five of us were Americans, in the US we would never had anything in common, never have been at the same places, and most likely would never have thought we could ever relate on any level. But cultural isolation is a strange thing, and you can appreciate people for who they are simply because you have given them a chance to be your friend. I am not recommending that people living abroad start searching for friends on MySpace.com, I am simply explaining to the rest of the expat community what measures people go to in smaller towns to meet people they can relate to.
In the end, the friends I met in Zhuji became some of the closest I have ever had. And the strangest part about the friendships we created in Zhuji is that they were oddly enough, as a result of MySpace’s “Browse.”
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