Ich Bin Ein Beijinger: Peking Purgatory, Is Beijing a Black Hole For Smart Slackers?

“Ich Bin Ein Beijinger” was a magazine column written by Kaiser Kuo that ran in every issue from October 2001 to October 2011. Kaiser offered one self-proclaimed Beijinger's take on the city that he's come to call home.

September 2002 - I heard an estimate recently claiming there are now a whopping 200,000 foreigners in residence in Beijing. I don’t doubt it: New expat-oriented businesses are popping up like mushrooms, an international school seems to open every year, dui wai apartment complexes and suburban developments break ground practically every week, and the bars and clubs are overflowing with young folk from every corner of the globe. Twenty years ago, besides a cliquish diplomatic corps and a handful of hardened journalists, there just weren’t that many long-term laowai here. Now I’m constantly running into young people who come here just to visit, fall in love with the city and then scheme some way to stay on. Some never leave.

Beijing, after all, has much going for it in these heady days. Possibilities abound. Opportunity knocks. There’s a buzz here, a palpable energy. It’s a city with edge, full of quirky characters doing interesting things. Change is the one all-pervasive constant. The Beijing zeitgeist is a shape-shifting polymorph, the city a suitable setting for self-reinvention. It’s impossibly big and yet it offers the intimate charms of a small town – that sense of community that many of us found missing back home.

Beijing’s attractions and comforts are indeed many. But so too are its pitfalls. Young expats here grow complacent easily, convincing themselves that they’ve “made it” when really it’s just that the bar, like the cost of living, is much lower than it would be back home. They manage to find work despite an appalling lack of tangible skills – witness the untold thousands of untrained English teachers whose only qualification is native fluency in the Language, or all those people who found dotcom jobs here back before the bubble burst. They settle for dead-end jobs that don’t teach them any new skills, believing erroneously that time spent in China is itself a quali¬fication. Mediocrity somehow cuts it. Meanwhile, they enjoy a lifestyle that would be untenable on their income back home: eating out in restaurants every night, going out to the bars four or five nights a week, getting foot massages and riding around everywhere in taxis.

Beijing, in the words of a dear friend of mine, can be a black hole for smart slackers. People spend a couple of years here and feel inexorably compelled to write screenplay, or a novel: Thousands of them lie there, unfinished, in hard drives all over Chaoyang. Some thing about the place brings out the dilettante in many a young expat and while there’s nothing at all wrong with dabbling in the arts, the absence of reality checks leads too many to take things too far on too little talent. Far from home, they just don’t have the dear old friends and the family members who will tell them, with their own best interests firmly in mind, “Don’t quit your day job.”

It’s easy to see how this happens. We’re flattered by the celebrity who occasionally comes through town – the writer, the odd filmmaker, or the TV personality who finds us impressive simply because we live here, speak the language and know a few hip party spots. We’re right in thinking that it’s a cool town, but we do get carried away. I suppose it’s the same way with all cities that have become “the place” to slack for a few years after college – Prague in the early 1990s comes to mind. I confess that I’ve been party to a few late-night, wine-fueled conversations in which I’ve joined other young expats in comparing our Beijing, with shameless exuberance, to Paris in the 1920s. We are, after all, living in China in a time of genuinely momentous change, and I think we can be excused for our mistaken assumption that just by being here we’re playing an active role in all the change swirling about us.

The truth is that the foreigners come and go, and many can’t be bothered to lay the foundations for a real life here. The impermanence, the rootlessness of expat life in Beijing creates the sense of unreality so many feel, and it’s this insubstantiality that breeds the escapism and decadence, the complacency and dilettantism.

Yet I genuinely like most of the expatriates who wind up in Beijing. They tend to be decent, worldly, open-minded people with good attitudes toward China and the Chinese. There is, thankfully, a self-selection mechanism at work here: Those who can’t hack it – the whiners who never see beyond the primitive bathrooms, the spitting – simply end up leaving. And the ones who stay? Sure, there are a few lost souls still looking for direction who end up doing – well, not much of anything. So what. Young people slack, right? And at the end of the day, are the Pitfalls of Peking fatal in most cases? I’m inclined to think not. Truth be told, I remember my time spent mired in them rather fondly.