Why Do Americans Live In China? | STREET INTERVIEW

hey everybody it's stephen from asian boss one interesting thing that we noticed from the u.s capitol riot was americans saying that china is laughing at the u.s right now well is that true we actually try to do a street interview in china but we're rather surprised to find out that pretty much everybody we talked to had no idea what was happening in the u.s these are ordinary chinese citizens you would think that something like this would be all over chinese social media but apparently not so we did the next best thing and interviewed a group of american expats living in china to get their unique perspectives on the us capital riot as well as their experiences living in china before we hit the streets of shanghai be sure to subscribe to asian boss and turn on the notification bell so that you don't miss out on any of our latest videos now let's go hear what these american experts have to say what's your background and how long have you been living in china uh yeah hi i'm from tennessee originally i've been in china for about five and a half years i was in new york city for four years before here so i'm from the us and i've been living in china for about eight months i go to nyu shanghai i'm from washington d.c and i came here to china to study um i go to nyu shanghai well i'm originally from california and i've been living in china for more than three decades i've been living in how long have i been seven years eight years since 2013 let's say that been living in china since 2013 moved to shanghai in 2014. what brought you to china in the first place well i got on the wrong flight no i'm joking i just needed a job like everybody else came over here to check it out for a year and seven or eight years later still here first time i went to china it was in the 90s my mom was doing business here and she was like always telling me and my sister that china was like the future and that we should learn chinese and i think it like stuck in the back of my head i spent like a summer here in the 90s with her and then i came back in college i wanted to study chinese and i got a scholarship to study in beijing and like a year wasn't enough and like i really wanted to come back and so after i graduated i came to shanghai there was just some some uh i don't know existential draw there like i i just felt like shanghai was like the place to be right and i think part of it also was was a sense that like what was i going to do in america right like i i just felt like there were like what opportunity was going to have with just like a a bachelor's degree and nothing else right um like what what could what job was i going to get and how is that going to be like in any way uh fulfilling in america i didn't see opportunity there maybe there was maybe i'm wrong but i just didn't see it did living in china meet your expectations it exceeded them um because i want to say prior i really didn't have any um expectations of china it was just like this is china's a big country they make stuff but when i came here and shanghai really was like took him back as far as the convenience the difference in the lifestyle how global it is i never thought it was going to be a life sentence like 3 30 years 36 years a very long time so when i came it was a one year one year two years what would you say is one of the main things or a few of the main things that have kept you here well i established a family and my husband is from shanghai so we decided long ago that chiang would be our home and that's but also the opportunities you know the business opportunities i worked for large corporations at some point and then as i raised our children having a bilingual bicultural life has kept us here really i think it went beyond my expectations originally i didn't really have much i thought it was going to be similar to the states but actually it's a lot more advanced than i thought it would and going back to the states after my first time kind of gave me like a reverse culture shock for example wechat alipay like you just scan the qr code and you do something and then back in the states we're still using credit cards i was living in san francisco before i came here and i loved san francisco but i couldn't it got to the point where i couldn't afford it anymore and a lot and a lot of people that i was friends with also also had to leave san francisco because they're like to do what we want to do with our lives like we can't do it and pay rent and so i feel like that's something i feel like i've seen in america a lot since i've lived like for the past 12 years of living here like more and more this like kind of divide of like like i could go back but i would just be like doing a job maybe i don't love for you know i don't know i have a grind yeah actually that's that's really the difference the grind in and new york is just brutal you you end up you know i like there's the fantasy there's like the idea of like if i can make it here i can make it anywhere right but actually so much of like the stuff that we do is all online it's all digital right this idea of like i have to basically not be able to pay rent and then like eat trash food every day and then like living like the starving artist life actually no it's probably healthier for you to just have a place where it's you can have a stable life right and like you don't have to worry about like uh how am i gonna pay rent next month right and like that's the biggest thing we're like coming here being able to kind of find these like part-time jobs or full-time jobs that kind of jump-start your career in some ways and then realizing like a lot of the work that you make it's all gonna go online so you know as long as you can survive and you know you can actually be more creative what was your biggest challenge in living in china as an american i think at the beginning just learning the language and not just the translation of the language but how it's applied how it's used by people because a lot of misunderstandings can happen if you don't really understand what's behind their phraseology and then getting used to their customs you know i'm i'm the visitor i'm the one that has to change to fit in here not the other way around it takes time before covid my biggest challenge was just finding products i guess you know for my hair finding products that i can use that cater to me but now post covid i think my biggest challenge is just being a foreigner because everyone's so scared of the virus even though i'm here and i've went through the quarantine process people on the subway will back back away even like earlier policemen just said to put on a mask but he only told me which i'm a foreigner but he didn't tell the other people that were nearby that weren't wearing a mask so things like that i think the biggest challenge was losing my sense of american exceptionalism here in shanghai specifically you are in constant contact with people from all over the world and so you get exposed to new ideas such as you know health care as a right free college tuition uh strong welfare states and you know it's really sad that you know every once in a while you get asked by people like do you own again just because they've heard of a recent school shooting in the states um and so i think that was my biggest challenge was kind of understanding that there are a lot of things that you know we the states could have if we feel our potential that we just don't have right now it's kind of heartbreaking actually how are you able to keep up to date with what's happening in america if you live in china yeah so i read the news um there are a lot of sources of news some of them are censored here so i have to use a vpn so regarding um access to information outside of china regarding the affairs in the states is it easy to do yes yes yeah yeah i just have a vpn on my phone i press like one click and then i'm on and then i can see everything yeah okay is it easy to do uh it's almost like too easy uh literally i work with a bunch of americans and when capitol hill was happening everyone was like i just can't get off twitter so what was your reaction to the recent u.s capitol riot honestly i i was rather disturbed um it was quite shocking too because you know i went to sleep the night before and then i wake up and my cousins in england are like hey have you been checking the news and i was like what news you know like they're in england so there's a lot of things going on there too um and yeah and you wake up and you're just like wow like my my capital like in my country has been attacked so it was very yeah it was very disturbing and very shocking to me i was surprised um especially because i was in the states during the whole black lives matter movement and coming here i thought you know things things in america would be better um and the what happened in the capital it really surprised me especially because because how forceful they were during the black lives matter protests um my mom got pepper sprayed um battered shot shot at and she was also like a veteran and then people were able to storm the capitol go in the building and nothing happened to them not even close to the same level it kind of hit me personally and i was really actually really upset about that too just being over here i could see it from perspective with the outside looking in and it made it really made like it made it seem like i could say your house isn't as in order as you thought it was um but it was like a reality that um people are upset no matter where country they're from um and that these type of things happen in poorer countries and the richest countries so it was like a mixed feeling personally it was it was all of the above it was disappointment um embarrassment being a little bit of shame but also just understanding that these people felt so overwhelmed that they couldn't make you know this is what the only outlet that you felt as an expat in china how do you perceive the state of how things are going at home right now it's a mess um it could be a lot better a lot further along if there was more unity i guess you could say if there was more people on the same page about what's real what's fake news but uh a mess in one word a lot of the people in my family are conservatives um and i i can speak firsthand of when i was living in the u.s it's easy to to get sucked in uh to the cyclone of the media cycle um and to to where you you only hear kind of the us perspective but living abroad uh being on the outside it opens your mind um and you hear different perspectives or different angles about things that are happening and it it really broadens your horizon you just have this this tinderbox of political um anger uh uh especially from the the far right that i think you know we saw it explode once uh already and and who knows you know what's going to happen in the in the near future or even in the next five years i you know where does that take us i think a lot of the anger stems from people who grew up believing their life was going to be a certain way and then it's not right and they don't have the opportunities their parents did i think uh uh my generation is maybe one of the the i guess i'm a very old millennial um the oldest millennial um uh they're older than you think um but my generation is i think the first one that is going to do less well than their parents um in a while right um in at least a few generations so i i think that's kind of at root of a lot of this anger a lot of the frustration people feel is is expecting life to be a certain way and then being like nope you can't afford a house you have to pay back all this college debt um uh you can't afford health care because that's gone up crazily and and you know all this stuff i think makes people feel just frustrated and angry they want a place to to to lash out and maybe it comes in the in in the ruse of of far-right politics or or whatever else but um i think that problem has to be addressed when you hear some people at home say things like the chinese must be laughing at the u.s what kind of insight can you share as someone who's actually living in china it's true um not just the chinese i would say maybe everybody's laughing at the us not just people in china not just chinese people but foreigners in china the uk was laughing but they're not laughing anymore i would say everybody just because of the unnecessary negativity in the states right now there's many different ways to see the us from the chinese point of view and of course there's one group that all have always aspired to go to the us to study and to absorb what they perceive as our great democratic tradition and how we live and treat each other but there's also a group that i suppose would say i told you so there was always a mirage and there's a part of china of the united states they don't understand and that is an evolving conversation i think one of the results of it is chinese people become more proud of themselves they feel that look around look what we've done and we don't have that system but maybe our system for chinese people is better for achieving the common good you know developmental results and improving lives for the common good than the u.s system i've heard that conversation i wouldn't say they're laughing at china i mean at the united states i wouldn't say that but they're definitely analyzing and comparing um it's true i don't like the world is laughing at the us like china must be left in the us everybody's laughing at the us it's not it's not just china i think i i don't know like who's not i mean it's and it's it's deserved like we deserve ridicule right now uh because we're acting ridiculously and like we've been acting ridiculously since since trump took office and that was very much foreseeable like you could see that in the election i felt that like like in 2016 like oh we just elected a clown everybody's gonna laugh at us and then we've spent four years of having everybody laugh at us i mean this was the most predictable thing ever so my interactions with local chinese have especially with regards to the events that have taken place this year have generally fallen into two categories the first is confusion chinese who have for years looked up to and admired the us are just baffled by the things that are happening they cannot believe it but on the other hand and i wouldn't say this is another category because it generally follows this first part is that they tend to be very sympathetic actually very very sincere in saying like i'm sorry this is happening they have no malice towards the u.s average chinese people are are really sad for us they see that you know in some parts the u.s has fallen and they're not cheering that on at all i would say that when all of the news breaks about big events in the us most of my chinese friends are like how are you doing with that news is there anything you want us like to talk to us about um like is your family okay i think when kova got really bad in the u.s a lot of my chinese friends were like oh do you need us to send you anything like are you guys staying safe um when the capitol riots occurred the same thing they were like how is your family like is there anything we can do for you can you see riots like the one at the capitol hill happening in china never ever never ever they have happened um i'm i'm i mean there has been social un unrest here um do i think it's possible that it would happen now it's possible but unlikely um because i think it would be there there would be uh the strong hand of the government putting a stop to it pretty quickly i would say one like two big differences are that you can't own guns here so like people were heavily armed and like had like military style stuff and like that could not happen here number one and then number two a lot of it was organized using social media that was like totally un regulated which is like this thing that i think america's gonna have to figure out of like yes yes free speech it's very cool but like you can't yell fire in a crowded building and like how does that apply to social media and like how do we stop hate groups from organizing and in china they're just like no we're like absolutely not we're just cutting that off right now what have you heard from your chinese friends about trump how favorably or unfavorably is he perceived in china a lot of people ask me why they are why we elected trump and i mean i always tell them i didn't personally elect him but they they genuinely asked me why do americans elect him and they don't they they just find him funny and like they don't understand why he's president and neither do i so sometimes i chit-chat with taxi drivers about trump but i've never really talked to any my friends about trump from 2016 until now not really what are some of the things you hear taxi drivers say uh he's gonna wreck your country get him out of there why did you put him there in the first place is his hair real where is he from do all americans think like that stuff like that i think in china trump trump is a joke uh the whole presidency is a joke but realistically trump is the greatest thing that's ever happened to china i mean just the ability for china to make significant gains in international politics and through soft power because the us is handling everything so poorly i mean like from an environmental perspective like for trump really scaling back a lot of these like green initiatives so china has the opportunity to say hey we'll be the leader in a greener world we tried to interview the chinese in the streets before but we're surprised to find that locals actually don't know much about the capital riot we thought it'd be all over chinese social media why do you think this is that's actually a good question um i mean i i think that you know i think that americans as as americans we kind of think that like oh our politics are the most important but um you know i think that not every little thing that happens um matters or like it's not as important to other countries as we as americans might feel it is for us yeah there's there's a there's a large disconnect with what's happening abroad um and what's happening in in any political sense to the reality of day-to-day life here on the ground um i'm not sure why that is uh to be honest but yeah i i can i also sense the same thing there's there's a a a a lack of thirst for current events uh and it's it's people tend to be more con concerned about improving their own lives rather than thinking about the big picture i didn't know that i also thought it would be heavily published in chinese media just because i feel like any example of democracy not going well is exciting from a chinese government perspective but i suppose the idea of broadcasting riots is still not in the chinese government interest how do you feel you get treated by chinese society as an american well you know what i've always said this i think it's more foreigners as a whole than just americans when i was living before i came to shanghai i was living in a small town and it was more like all of you foreigners get out of here versus you americans go but you canadians can stay it's not really like that at least in my experience and there were some places that didn't really serve foreigners i guess you could say but it was more i guess because foreigners caused a ruckus in the past and like i said it wasn't like a white or black thing a canadian british american thing it was just like all of you foreigners get out of here back 13 years when i first arrived here there was this rock star effect where you say you're from america and everyone's like wow you say from you're from california they go wow again now there's been somewhat of a desensitization amongst chinese here because there are you know about a quarter million foreigners who live in the city but still um regardless i think that there is still somewhat of a cowboy or a grandeur effect to saying that you're an american um they still look up to us in some ways i've had really no issues i mean even even from the perspective of myself being lgbtq um where in the states i might feel uncomfortable going one place or another here i have no fear of being who i am here there's not much judgment that takes place um it's a kind society as a black guy black american i'm treated better than my i would say my african counterparts i can i can say that it's a noticeable difference it's noticeable right i don't know what it i don't know but it's noticeable based on my passport places i can go and etc as a foreigner i want to say yes i am treated with a lot of passive aggressive i don't say xenophobic discrimination like when people see me they make sure to put their mask up uh the most noticeable incident i had was maybe last week i got in this elevator and i had my mask on this girl local she was on the elevator with her friend no mask on she saw me and she turned around and put her head in the corner and her friend in chinese asked her like what are you doing and she said to him in chinese and i could understand she said i don't want to get sick because of the foreigner and i would say those things start to add up so i want to say the treatment is not physical so i never feel like i'm physically in danger but there is the emotional and a mental passive attack on you because you are different so i would say that's how i'm treated living here in china having lived in both the u.s and china which country would you prefer to be based in now at this very moment because of the covid i am perfectly fine where i am [Laughter] honestly speaking right now i would say china shanghai specifically shanghai is safe you got to wear masks on the train and outside we just got yelled at by the police for not having mass on the street but uh it's safe people are at starbucks people go to the nike store you can hang out and do regular stuff in the states it's not really like that but as far as forever shanghai and china can never be forever because you can't own property here it's kind of hard to get a driver's license it's kind of hard to do forever life things here unless you i don't get married or something like that this is a question that i actually think about a lot because i have a three-year-old son and you know where where is he going to grow up um weighs on me and of course i want him to grow up in america i really want him to like have some time in america at least right even if he grows up partly in china partly in america i wanted to have some of that cultural experience but i cannot see moving to the us right now i hope things get better uh and that and that like there there are more uh uh opportunities there i hope that like the healthcare system gets fixed and so it's not so ridiculous because these are like practical concerns that i have in in going back if i were to go back with like my family like okay well well what are we gonna do for healthcare what am i gonna you know like i would probably have to go there with my own business and so i'm gonna like that that gives a whole host of things that i would worry about that i don't worry about here um and so yeah like it just it's a no-brainer that i would rather live in china right now with or without kovid um but i really want the u.s to like step up and do better and make it so that i can go back there with my kid and and that he can experience life in the u.s like like like i did growing up um i hope that can happen i hope you know by the time he's in middle school is my is my fingers crossed hope you know give it give it 10 years but i'm not that optimistic and what message would you send to your family and friends back home everything is so politically fraught that i don't feel like any i don't know i don't know any message that would like i feel like it would be two entirely different messages for like two entirely different groups of people people who are republicans or democrats because you can't like talk the same way to um to to to those people i want to say stay safe don't do anything silly like stay strong i know things right now in america aren't the best as what they can be but it will get better yeah come together right now there's a lot of back and forth a lot of unnecessary fighting infighting between races cultures uh what's true what's fake all of that stuff just get on the same page and get past the virus you know and then deal with all that other stuff later you know

Channel: Asian Boss

Views: 903,119

Rating: 4.8557172 out of 5

Keywords: Asian Boss, Asia, Stay Curious, Capitol Hill riot, riot, US, America, United States, News, Relevant News, culture, real people, real issues, personal experience, Expat, trump, foreigner, living abroad, living alone, overseas, cultural gap, cultural bridge, stereotypes, China, Communism

Id: XXWYPeEfOb8

Length: 26min 56sec (1616 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Medical_Officer]

I challenge the premise of this segment.

They start out by claiming that not many Chinese knew about the whole affair. But that can't be true. It was covered pretty extensively on state TV and social media picked up the story on all platforms.

Sure, it's Shanghai so people are proudly apolitical, but still seems far fetched they couldn't find enough Chinese to put together an interview segment. They're sort of implying that the reason why Chinese don't know is because the story got censored, to fit with the stereotype that everything gets censored in China.