Back to China? from reality, then possibility, to you wish

Return or not, a topic of our life every now and then. For us, it is never in envy of the high life of our peers in China, not the elated satisfaction of being successful many would imagine, nor the hormone driven desperation of ‘love and lustre ’. It is always how feasibly you could re-establish yourself back in China, once your home, with comfort, with ease, with peace of mind, without regret after you lived and experienced a life, longer or shorter, that you believe one should decently live.

Surprisingly, it was quite a reality in the 90s. We actually seriously thought about the return after my PhD graduation. The economy was going fast in China. We felt we could really do something. The political system was far from ideal, but there was still live hope that reform will eventually come after economic success.  The only thing was that we naively thought we should make our first ‘bucket of gold’ before returning home. Like it or not, the short lived reality didn’t wait for us.

Still talking about the possibility of going home shortly after the turn of the century. But only honestly realized that we fell behind simply because we were only making our gold, slowly. But many of our peers were taking and getting, almost everything, money, fame, degrees up to PhD (from U of Clayton, or West Pacific U, or U of Whatever), and other resources including women in China. As a result we were much depreciated in China. You would need a hard fight for some decent positions with all the mixture of real and fakes. You’d barely stand a chance to compete with many local businesses if you wanted to start your own financially or socially. With the flush of returning kids of the rich and the officials, many of whom can hardly write a decent English resume, from overseas schools; unwanted ‘Sea Turtle’ became our name and fate if we dare to try our luck in China.

Now into 2011, back to the question: how feasibly could you re-establish yourself back in China, once your home, with comfort, with ease, with peace of mind, without regret after you lived and experienced a life, longer or shorter, that you believe one should decently live? The answer is ‘you wish’.  Not only, from commercial point of view, we are not hot ‘commodities’ in China any more,  we could hardly even afford ourselves a decent home in many cities in China either.  We are not young anymore and we are not even Chinese anymore to the Chinese government.  That is before we even talk about the political and social construct that drove us away 20 or so years ago. In this regard, the system only gets much worse and rotten, and to a point that we lost our patience, hope and faith for any political reform that may give us an incentive to go back to China, once our home.

We wish…