Hi, my name's Ian Richmond (my Chinese name is Lin Bin Can). I'm a senior lecturer in English at the Aeronautical department of Nanchang University in China.
I’ve resided in China almost three years in various cities from Canton to Xian. I am a Darlo native born and bred and originally a Engineering Photographer in the North East.
I came to China as a opportunity arose to assist in teaching business English to a large joint American-Chinese automobile manufacturer. Surprisingly it worked out rather well!
I settled into a lifestyle quite the opposite end of the cultural spectrum of back home. Within the three million souls here in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province, I found I was not alone. I met countrymen from Yarm, Liverpool, the South East and most parts of the UK.
Many more Canucks, Ozzies and Americans. All seemed to be pursuing some kind of 'Chinese' dream, a rather intangible concept but it involved a lot of self reliance and more often than not a desire to find rapid success in a chosen field.
After a while you begin to realize the number of foreigners here is not that small. Shanghai has around 100,000, Beijing the same and Canton 50,000. Here in Nanchang it's around the 1,000 mark.
In total there are around 1.2 million foreigners residing in the whole of the country - and it's growing fast.
Small businessmen abound in the bars and cafes catering for western palates. Foreign tourists are arriving at even the remotest resorts.
But as a restaurant owner friend from Liverpool once remarked "your not really a true expat until you've eaten fried scorpions in garlic sauce".
Many foreigners become very well adapted and many are starting families - a new kind of long term atitude in a famously impenetrable country.
But China is beginning to look and even feel like back home, and the rate of construction is truly gargantuan. A town the size of Darlo is a village here, Shanghai has more people than Australia.
But being from the crowded British Isles I quiet honestly don't feel cramped, though the traffic is wonderously crazy like Bruce Willis’ wheel antics in Die Hard done by a learner driver.
Anyway I'm definitely in the long term Category of ‘laowai’ (venerable outsiders) even taking into consideration such sayings amongst old China hands as 'you spend one month in China you think you know everything, spend six months you think you know a little less, spend a year and you start thinking you know nothing'.
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