Hardship Posting
Rupert Pupkin shares his thoughts on why living in the mainland is hard, oh so very hard…
The Mysterious Mainland. Unknowable. Precarious. Swelling and sweltering; strewn with cultural pitfalls and linguistic riddles. Dangling infrastructure, instant noodle fables, sundry workplace treachery. And me, virtually breadless, bereft of kindness, the solitary outsider, pressed against the heaving mass, bumped and bullied and blamed, singled out and scorned – the living symbol of old school hegemony.
At least that’s what I tell my managing director.
He’s been here, but he’s never really been here. Flies in first class once a year to review the troops; the Four Seasons’ black sedan whisking him from airport to hotel, where he pretty much stays put for the remainder of his obligatory two-day visit, calling his wife every few hours to assure her he hasn’t forgotten to take his cholesterol meds.
I once contrived to get him out of the hotel for some local food. He contracted diarrhoea, which strengthened my case - that Shanghai was a hardship posting, but that I was dealing as best as I could under the circumstances, and therefore deserved the raise, the expat amenities, the full boat.
The MD lives in Hong Kong and has enjoyed the expat life in that lush green banker’s Eden for twenty-odd years, while I endure life in an emerging market, labouring under duress, coping with the vehicular madness and taking digestive risks, as it were.
Oh yes, I play it to the hilt.
For the better part of 12 years I’ve worked on the Mainland, but it wasn’t until recently that I realised I could play the Mainland card; leveraging the inconvenience of working in a large city that isn’t quite conducive to the maintenance of emotional and physical wellbeing. (The fact that few large cities are bastions of healthy living is somewhat beside the point; there is only a short window of opportunity during which a middle-aged editor can parlay his regional experience and wordsmithery to make decent cheddar before he’s packed off to a one-room condo in Phnom Penh to write his memoirs or drink himself to death.)
Truth is, I am not wholly immune to Shanghai’s charms; the money is mine, all mine, and in the eyes of locals - and perhaps also my sister – I’m paid far too much for rearranging words in this fabled Asian city.
Still, divorced, with no kids and no pets, I finally understand that such factors can be used to my advantage. I have no maid or driver or car, and I live in a small quiet loft apartment in the city centre, for which I pay next to nothing. I ride a folding bike and don’t go out often.
What makes this a hardship posting, if that is what it is, is not the occasional lack of civility, the absence of credible milk, or the mélange of toxic emissions. These are minor nuisances, not uncommon in any major metropolis. There are, however, intangible factors that justify my high salary and utterly irresponsible way of life.
The hardship can be found beyond the stage-managed normality of the Four Seasons’ buffet, beneath the seductive smiles and behind the curtain of the twice-nightly acrobatic performances, in the belly of the fabled East, where there is a collective resentment, steeped in the vagaries of history, that makes working here a bit of a downer. To one who prizes the naughty thought far more than the flute of Moet, being this close to the hand that mutes the Socratic trumpet, the rise of the unquestioning model is a hardship if ever there was one.
