The Pearl River Delta

I'm still looking for work in China but I feel very positive about my prospects here. Yesterday I went down to do an interview in Shenzhen, the city directly across the border from Hong Kong, and the interview went pretty well. I feel good about moving to Shenzhen, though I don't know a huge amount about the city. Here's what I know: Shenzhen is the strangest of cities in China. In a place where cites are referred to as 'new' if they're less than 2000 years old, Shenzhen didn't exist when I started high school. In the early nineties Deng Xiaoping declared the area across the border from Hong Kong a 'special economic zone'. It would be the first of many, but it was meant to allow business to be conducted more like Hong Kong than mainland China, thereby taking advantage of the enormous amount of wealth that is generated in that world financial center to the south after the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997.

Over the course of the next twenty years Shenzhen grew at a staggering pace, and not just in numbers of people, but in wealth as well. The border town went from basically no one to twenty million people in under two decades. Now it's bigger than Hong Kong itself. It's also one of the wealthiest cities in the country. Number two just behind Shanghai.That means Shenzhen is generally a nice place to be. It's a thoroughly modern city and has all the western amenities. And the pay is much better there than in Chenzhou. 

Shenzhen is also part of a region called the Pearl River Delta which includes Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, and several other smaller cities, most of which get very good ratings for livability. Guangzhou is the biggest city in the region and Hong Kong is the most famous, but the best part about being in the area would be that all of these places are within a couple of hours of each other.  Of course, what city I pick will be hugely important: Mega City Guangzhou has a long history and an endless supply of things to see and do; wealthy, new Shenzhen has the best of everything on offer and it's less than an hour to get to; Hong Kong, the most amazing city I've ever been to and my ultimate target; or Macau, small by Chinese standards, but a former Portuguese colony and also known and the 'Las Vegas' of China.

(not my photo)

 Besides the dilemma of if and where to move after this school year is over, life in China has gotten pretty normal. I still don't speak enough Chinese to live normally, but I can get by. I've been making trips to the grocery store and learning to cook with just a wok. Dairy products are hard to come by and expensive when I do, but other things have gotten downright routine. The food here, if I haven't  mentioned it, it super spicy. Everything is insanely spicy and I've become a regular at the McDonald's when I can't take any more of it, so they know me there now and several of the people working there like to practice their English on me when I come in. I think McDonald's must give English lessons to their employees because an unusually high number of people know basic English.

While we're on the subject of fast food... KFC kills McDonald's here. There's a KFC on every corner, but only one McDonald's in the whole town. And two Pizza Huts. But the Pizza Hut is upmarket here and not a very cheap place to go. That is not to mention, of course, the many Chinese places here that serve really good, if overly spicy, food.

One thing worth mentioning is that if I were to move to the Pearl River Delta region (any of the cities in it), there would be a lot more English speaking. My Chinese language skills have not come far in the past year, but that progress would almost certainly stall completely if I made this move. Besides speaking English widely, that region also speaks Cantonese as their main language, not Mandarin. And that can be hugely different. In Hong Kong, Madarin is rare enough that teaching Mandarin is almost as highly valued as teaching English. And to further complicate things, Portugese is one of the official languages of Macau.

Then there's celebrity and western-ness. First, many of my foreign friends here in Chenzhou are shocked that I would want to live in one of the bigger cities. All of the foreigners here in Chenzhou are in a very close clique and get along very well (okay, there are always a couple of exceptions). In the larger cities, we've heard, not only does that not happen, but foreigners hardly associate with one another unless they work together, because there are so many of them.

The celebrity status a person gets in Chenzhou, where there are very few foreigners, is astounding and a lot of the younger people here love it. I don't love it so much. I don't find it so entertaining to constantly be assailed by a barrage of questions I can't answer, even though they're coming from smiling people with only the best intentions. In the Pearl River Delta, my presence wouldn't be anything of note. I could blend into the crowd and enjoy the anonymity offered by the big city.

And finally, western amenities. To be fair, larger grocery stores in Chenzhou generally offer anything I could need. But there are always a few things that are difficult or impossible to find. Any of the larger cities in the Pearl River Delta would have everything a westerner needs. I'm glad I lived for a year in a place where I had to learn to live without dairy products and make do without canned goods. But if I'm going to stay in China long term, I thing I'd rather have those things available. Of course, that just icing on the cake of getting to live in one of these amazing cities.