Don't bother changing the channel

You know, it can be tough living abroad sometimes. Don’t get me wrong - for the most part I love it. I believe that the whole point of traveling is for things to NOT be like home, to have new adventures and experience a different way of life. This expat concept is not new - people have been doing it for hundreds of years, for the very point of being somewhere different, somewhere exotic, to remake oneself into a new person by the benefit of living outside the country of one’s birth.

I get that, and I embrace it. But sometimes it hard and you just have those days where you long for something familiar from home. That’s why I’m willing to spend close to $10 on a box of Cheerios. Insane as that may sound, don’t judge me - all you other expats our there know what I’m talking about. It’s not just that you are desperately craving those Cheerios, but those Cheerios are a part of the culture that you are missing and are so nostalgic for.

And it doesn’t stop at groceries. You never appreciate home so much as when you realize you can’t just hop in the car or go on-line and pick up whatever you want: books, magazines, craft supplies, shoes in the right size, clothes that fit, good running gear. It takes a lot of time and effort just to try and find these items and I’m not always successful. So in the end, it’s a good lesson in needs vs. wants. Things you think you need, you can actually learn to live without. But it doesn’t mean you have to be happy about it.

A prime example is entertainment. The English language options on official Chinese TV are limited to CNN International, BBC News, Discovery Channel, and ESPN (I really don’t even count that last one - there are no hardcore sports fans in this household). For someone who grew up in a TV culture, this is a tough one. So what do you do?

One of the first things our new arrivals agent told me when we first moved here was where to get illegal DVD’s. In fact, on our orientation outing when she showed us around the local grocery store, the IT mall for mobile phones, and the American grocery store, she also took us to a DVD store which was down this rather scary-looking alley. At least, it looked scary to us as new arrivals, but it was more or less just local color.

Again, don’t judge me. You can’t buy a legal DVD in China even if you wanted to. It feels wrong at first until you realize that everybody’s doing it and you can get really good quality movies for a buck and a half! Not that the quality is always something you can count on. Sometimes there are pauses or blips, it may suddenly change to another language, or the sound may have kind of a tinny quality. We recently bought a copy of the animated movie “Up” which for some reason would only play the English soundtrack if we kept on the English subtitles at the same time. Now, this was a good movie in it’s own right, but the most entertaining aspect for us was reading the bizarre translations they came up with for the subtitles. They must have been done by a Chinese person who had taken one or two years of English in high school. It was beyond funny.

Option number two is, of course, illegal satellite TV. We were given the name of a guy who spoke just enough English who could hook us up to a system out of the Philippines. The problem was, after a few months the system would stop working and he would have to come over with a new card, box, or dish which cost more money. It was obvious we were being taken for a ride, especially when every time I tried to challenge him on something, his English suddenly got a lot worse.

We stopped calling him after a while and our channels gradually dwindled until we had to resort back to the Chinese TV offerings. So no more cartoons, no more dramatizations - just news and documentaries. I was getting a really bad case of news fatigue. It gets depressing when you’re constantly exposed to hard-hitting issues like terrorism, war, and natural disasters. I’m sure even the newscasters like to go home and watch The Office or Cash Cab.

I couldn’t take it anymore, so finally I contacted our realtor and she gave me two options: legal or illegal satellite. For an extra $150 I decided the legal hook-up was worth it this time. Though I’m not really sure in what sense it is “legal”. I think it just means we are paying the provider, because I still don’t think China allows it, with all that American indoctrination and free speech going on. I can tell these channels aren’t monitored because CNN can say anything they want about China without being blacked-out like they do on the local feed.

Speaking of blacking out, our internet access has been getting steadily worse over the last six months or so. In addition to not being able to access my blog (Russ is posting this entry for me from Singapore), we can’t get onto Facebook or YouTube, and many of Russ’s podcasts are being blocked.

But anyway, last Tuesday two guys came to the house and hooked up our “legal” satellite and the boys and I marveled at all the channels we now have - not just one, but two cartoon channels! And that night as we sat on the couch and watched a particularly annoying episode of Spongebob which they’ve seen at least a dozen times already, I thought, “Man, this sucks”. Do you think this is what they mean when they say “You can’t go home again?”