Previous: 2009 to 2010 The Expat Life: A new decade living it up in Shenzhen, China
2011 and 2012, beginning with my Guangzhou year. Didn’t work out well, so I returned to Shenzhen. Meanwhile so much travel, all over Southeast Asia and returns to Israel and Japan. Plus foreshadowing in Taiwan, and Hipster Pacific Northwest too. And I go to both my sister’s wedding and my best friend’s wedding. Growing up!
DATING IN CHINA
(Table of Contents)
Firstly, from 2008 on:
Prologue: How I came to China
Part 1: Burning Man
I go to a big trippy festival
Part 2: Doing LSD at Burning Man
I expand my mind and receive an invite abroad
Introductions
Intro to Dating in China
First things first, let me explain how this thing will work
I arrive in China
The story officially begins, I get here
Girls
Mona
My first China-based girlfriend, and how that didn’t work out
Julia
The next level… Sigh, was it love?
Mary
A summer romance, a brief flight, all too innocent
Annie – Sky – Lulu – more
Singlehood, bachelor life, the learning process, playing the field…
Zoey
The Beginning
Long-term relationship begins, a defining point in my life
An American intermission
You can’t go ‘home’, and I try and I fail and I drift
The End
Finally, and sadly, nothing lasts forever
GUANGZHOU YEAR
In the city… the city of Canton…
And now, 2011 to early 2012:
My Guangzhou Year 1
An intro to the new status quo, as I pack up move to the ancient land of Canton/
the modern megacity of Guangzhou
Dating GZ Edition – Kendra
First story, I meet a crazed American abroad and adventured therein
Public nudity and disrespect, among other themes
China to Thailand to Cambodia
I travel, I bring a certain Cynthia, I make mistakes
But hey, that’s life and at least I got to see a new place
Dating – visitors and friends, others
Some characters from previous entries reappear, old friends reunite, a funny story happened one day
This time it’s not just about me
Rejected in Guangzhou
The stories everyone seems to want to know. Rejected!
Featuring Josephine, Seline, and more
The End – my humble successes
On a final positive note, sometimes life works out rather fine
It was a good year, I experienced a lot
I really shouldn’t complain
2012
Back to Shenzhen
In which I return to this town that somehow suits me
Emma
I begin the online game~
Jeanie
I have a girlfriend! I really did!
Yuki
I must admit, things got a tad gross.
Hope this wasn’t the beginning of a certain pattern…
2013: Epic Clusterfuck Year
Not Dating in America (and Hong Kong, and Canada)
2012 comes and goes and the world doesn’t end,
Meanwhile a bad start as I embark upon a year of drama bullshit
The Stalker
In which I make a foul choice which ends up following me around all year.
Dark times. No fun.
Carmen
I meet someone cool and travel to the Philippines
A brief positive note, albeit all too brief
Sonia – Jing – Amelia
POF, a site, met some peoples from differing lands, times are had,
and then I quit online dating forever more
The Very End
And I do mean it, the very very end.
I reflect and I consider and now it is time to move forward–
SZ
PREVIOUS MEGAPOSTS
Dating in China 1
From Burning Man to Shenzhen, covering mid-2008 to early 2011
My Guangzhou Year
In the city… the city of Canton…
2012
Back to Shenzhen
In which I return to this town that somehow suits me
Emma
I begin the online game~
Jeanie
I have a girlfriend! I really did!
Yuki
I must admit, things got a tad gross.
Hope this wasn’t the beginning of a certain pattern…
2013: Epic Clusterfuck Year
Not Dating in America (and Hong Kong, and Canada)
2012 comes and goes and the world doesn’t end,
Meanwhile a bad start as I embark upon a year of drama bullshit
The Stalker
In which I make a foul choice which ends up following me around all year.
Dark times. No fun.
Carmen
I meet someone cool and travel to the Philippines
A brief positive note, albeit all too brief
Sonia – Jing – Amelia
POF, a site, met some peoples from differing lands, times are had,
and then I quit online dating forever more
The Very End
And I do mean it, the very very end.
I reflect and I consider and now it is time to move forward–
Not to be continued.
–Thanks for the memories!!
Ray
A picture of me I took yesterday
2013, as I keep saying, was my Epic Clusterfuck Year.
Online dating, star-crossed romance, stalking, embarrassments abroad. I had it all.
Meanwhile, my so-called ‘career’ began to slowly take off. I published many an article, worked as a copy-editor, got a certain book deal. I moved, I moved again. All the while searching for that perfect match, and when the search availed I started again, with more baggage piling up and more losses to show for it.
It used to be that I did my thing, make the ol’ money and moderately exercise and read books and study, and I was more or less productive. I was prolific, and nobody in the world knew. Then this year came, it all escalated, I had no more time to myself, and I know my craft suffered for it.
In the end, I had very little to show. Very little to brag of indeed.
And yet, it got even worse. The story was far from over.
And yet, I will not continue this story.
I thank all you readers for being interested in my petty life, and for letting me share and purge. It’s been very therapeutic. I do hope it’s been a good read.
Unfortunately, we are now catching up to the present, and it is still too soon. It is getting a bit too real.
It’s awkward enough when I’ve written these things and someone out in real life tells me they remember that time. I shan’t do that anymore. I’m not out to expose secrets here; I’m obviously not completely into anonymity either, but I do have limits.
So that is that.
Allow me merely be reflective upon a memoir’s epilogue not yet written.
Wait a year or two or ten, and I may get back to you in more detail.
It’s a shame, it would have made for some great writing… Woulda’ been ten blogs worth at least…
Sigh: One. Her. Pejorative Nickname. I had a whole internal dialogue about what pseudonym or pronoun to use and what level of respect is accorded, and I will not share the conversation with you! Sorry.
Nevermind that.
Look. I know I’m not particularly innocent. I know I’m not.
But there was one day I lost the very last shreds of my innocence, and I can never ever get it back.
I heard things I never heard before, I was told things no one else has ever since told me.
That lasts.
I am, however, so over it.
I’m slightly better at relationships since that time. A little bit. A teensy, tiny, very little bit. But slightly better nonetheless.
A better class of person has graced my own personage, and know that it is appreciated.
I learned about all I could learn from the scenario. Okay? Okay?!! Okay.
At this point in my life I’d prefer to play it cool. Grow somewhat, take things seriously, and simultaneously be cool.
To get over myself, as it were.
Enough already with the self-indulgence.
It is 2014. In fact, 2014 is almost over. It is an even-numbered year, and I tend to do better in even-numbered years. It has been a year of much reflection and evolution, it truly has.
I hope I can keep it up.
Soon it will be another odd-numbered year, and it will be hard on me and I’ll need all the help I can get.
There are new challenges to consider, new stages in life and amazing things yet to occur. There will be novelty. There will be grace. There will be magic and fire and art and power.
Time to seize this living thing.
The dealing-with-my-issues stage is over. It is now time to go go go–
Wish me luck.
Thanks again for reading.
–Ray
For me, 2013 was the most dramatic of years. It started slow, with early episodes displaying a simple lack of confidence and success. Then I tried to make up for lost time, and went too far. I found myself stuck in the quagmire of drama and heartache and stalking.
Throughout the year, while I did go to a whole other country for romance, in the meantime I tried my best to put myself out there and meet cooler girls, and was subsequently rejected multiple times. Chinese and foreigners alike. Former coworkers, girls I met on the subway, all those I met in real life seemed not to be impressed by me. So I went by the tried-and-true method of online dating, and that means the website of POF…
Sonia
Early into the year’s journeys, I emailed a pleasant helo to Sonia. She was an engineer from Iran who lived in the outer suburbs of Shenzhen. (A suburb in a Chinese doesn’t mean picket fences. It means desolate places near factories and far from the interesting, modern parts of the city.) We flirted and I invited her on a tour of downtown, with me as guide.
Being from Iran, it was very interesting to talk to Sophia about politics and culture. Nothing was off-limits. I was left with a very good impression of modern Iran, which sadly is an impression that many Americans do not get these days.
I could put out a disclaimer to everyone: Not only am I Jewish, I was born in Israel. It is my heritage and my ethnicity, but I don’t think of it as having that much to do with my identity these days. My father is American and I moved to the U.S. as a baby. I know no Hebrew. I am basically an atheist — I like to call myself a “mystical atheist” but no time for an extensive theological discussion here — and I feel great antagonism towards organized religion. I have zero interest in going to Israel and joining the military to fight for an apartheid state surrounded by brainwashed lunatics, thank you very much.
Culturally, the Jewish people have brought great advances to Western culture as well as science. I think history has shown educated liberal Jews going to America is a perfect fit. Politically and culturally, Israel is another story. It is a somewhat messier and more complex place, and I do not think history has shown that Zionism has accomplished much of anything at all. Well, too late now. The region is what it is. I do not wish to delve too deeply into controversial politics, that’s not the point of this blog. Just letting you know how I feel, just letting you know where I’m coming from when it comes to meeting Persian girls.
Sonia did not seem to be racist against Jews whatsoever. She came across as a very worldly open-minded person, and she gave me a hell of a chance. She did tell me that it was hell to be in Saudi Arabia, and Iranians liked traveling to Turkey so they could act out more freely. She was politically very much against Israel, and on that I pretty much agreed.
Iranians abroad, from my understanding, tend to reject theocratic-conservative values and do whatever they want to do as 21st century human beings. Sonia confirmed this. She had no issues with being the naively feminine sort; and yeah there was intimacy that first night.
She wasn’t my type, to be perfectly honest. Attraction-wise. A big girl albeit with a pretty face, but I’m simply not into big girls. What we had between us was an opportunity I wanted to experience, and hence we shared an experience. I have now learned on an intrinsic level that young Iranians are absolutely not religious fundamentalists, I know it as deeply as possible, and hey I hope that can be good for American-Iranian relations.
So, it definitely wasn’t any potential boyfriend-girlfriend dating situation and she knew it. I guess we were supposed to be fuckbuddies, as certain expats abroad like to do to pass the time, but we never ended up repeating the experience.
She invited me to her place to cook one another time, and it was very nice of her. But I didn’t like that area. I didn’t stay over. We made some other plans but kept cancelling and it didn’t develop. I don’t remember the details, but I do recall a text saying that it was over and she got mad at me. Perhaps I was dating someone else, perhaps there was some overlapping drama at that junction. It all became something of a blur in the midst of that year.
I hope I wasn’t too rude.
I hope I didn’t leave her with a poor impression of Jewish Americans.
Jing
I met Jing on POF, and we corresponded a while before meeting. Always too busy, she was yet another girl who lived far away, and even our first date when we finally did meet it was a bad date. Luckily, she gave me another chance.
Somehow, over the course of the year, Jing became my most stable friend-with-benefits. For several months, she was my most drama-free of dates and for that I will forever be grateful to her.
Paradisio beach
Although 2013 was, let us say, a bit of a mess —
… it wasn’t all bad. One of the most positive things of that year was my correspondence with Carmen.
I’d been emailing her for months before we’d even made any plans to meet. She was a longtime penpal, someone I could share the updates of my life with, someone who would tell me of her challenges and experiences. Time permitting, I like having penpals and someone to write long letters to.
I first met her on OKCupid. For some reason, I thought she was in Shenzhen and her profile stood out to me. She’s not Chinese, I thought. Yes! The algorithms led me to her, led me to Manila…
We wrote long emails about mermaids and books and music and movies. We graduated to gmail and talked about our personal lives. It was nice; talking about my issues of the day and sharing and going over my various fandoms. It was so refreshing that she got the pop cultural stuff, that she was from a culture so relatable to my own. I must say, I would come to appreciate the American/Western influence on the Philippines.
Now, I’ve mentioned before how OkCupid never seemed to work for me. My theory is that the format of the profiles results in too much detail, and extensive lists of similar hobbies makes for more platonic friends rather than romantic attraction. The air of mystery from the vague profiles of that other sites always worked much better for me.
Carmen was the one and only ‘success’ story I’d ever made on OkCupid. I eventually deleted my profile there, and she will forever remain my OKC one and only.
Besides being fluent in English and familiar with my general music and tv shows, she was quite international. She’d been to America, even California specifically, and regularly goes to Hong Kong.
Beautiful exotic face. Tall, elegant. Literary. Worldly. Cool indie style as well. A bit Catholic, a bit family-oriented and relatively conservative compared to my mainland China scene these days, but that’s okay. All in all she seemed perfect.
And, get this, she worked as a journalist. A professional writer. A humble newspaper tagger, but she did often travel to foreign countries on writing assignments. How amazingly cool is that?!
One time I mailed her a fun gift: I was uprgrading iPod nanos and thought about what to do with my perfectly-good old generation made. So I decided to share all my favorite songs and made some customized playlists, and I mailed it to her. Although a sort of hand-me-down, I think that was about my greatest gift idea ever.
Finally, May Day holiday was was approaching and I decided to try to be serious serious and we planned a vacation. I bought a plane ticket to Manila. She helped set up everything else, and an itinerary was formed.
It was the first time I’d ever traveled so far to meet someone online, let alone going to another country to meet. The first time I was ever in Philippines, unless you count the airport transfer in my 2010 trip. Honestly, I was never particularly interested in the country. Sure I had some Filipino friends in California, I was aware of Jollibee. I’m a big fan of Neal Stephenson’s historical novel Cryptonomicon. Beyond that, it wasn’t high on my list of Southeast Asia travel destinations. Yet destiny sent me there and I went for it with all my heart.
It’s always nervous to meet someone for the first time, and this was exacerbated by the pressures of travel and planning. I asked an old friend for advice; he had met a girl like this in Australia before. He gave me some solid talking to, and said not to force anything.
I packed. I prepared. I flew. Jetlagged, she we met for the first time outsideNinoy airport. It was somewhat weird. It was mostly chill. Ears popped, hearing all distorted, and one already feels surreal after landing. I do think it went well.
We took a taxi to the hotel. She had an American accent. It was pleasant, and felt natural, and we talked and talked and got to know each other better. We ate my favored Mexican food that evening. She even took me to comic shops! (I’m very impressed by Manila’s many English bookstores and comic shops, even better than Hong Kong. Not only that, but this perfect trip overlapped with freakin’ Free Comic Book Day.) What a keeper. I enjoyed Manila, the upper-class part anyway, because it was basically like America. That may be shallow of me but that’s the truth. The thing about the Philippines is that it is a mixed culture with a varied history of colonialism, and the influence today is clear.
Free Comic Book Day
She lived with her family, as Catholic family-oriented Filipinas tend to do, and bounced back and forth from the hotel to her place. It felt natural to kiss for the first time, and then to become more intimate as the night progressed.
Not that this was the same time period, but here’s me in Tokyo!
I sincerely try not to judge people.
I really do. I try, and I don’t always succeed, but I try. Intellectually I know I shouldn’t be judgmental.
When it comes to sexually promiscuous women, I can be torn. On the one hand, we are all adults and we should be free to do whatever we want. Me included. Some people express themselves sexually and they are healthy about it, they want to give themselves pleasure and society shouldn’t force arbitrary rules causing unnecessary shame. It’s simple, really.
Yet, there is on the other hand: how some people seem to warrant further psychoanalyzing to see why they are having all that wild anonymous group sex. Certain peoples with issues and acting out. Can’t help but wonder what’s wrong. Or at least, can’t we be morbidly curious about why people are the way they are?
I still have some enlightening to do myself…
Honestly, I don’t even care that all that much. It’s not my business. Let me start over. This is all from a totally amoral standpoint.
I simply don’t want her to text me those pictures of her fucking multiple men, and often pictures of her fucking those multiple men at once. I’m just not into seeing that. And she kept sending them unsolicited again and again. Emails, text apps. Skanky invitations (for lack of a better term), I’d tell her to leave me alone, and she continuously pushed at me and pushed at me the most graphic sexual imagery possible.
That’s weird, right?
Yuki
I don’t think it was a moment of desperation or anything like that. A mere moment of playfulness. Not particularly special or anything.
Well, after online dating for so long, the odds were in my favor that eventually I’d meet someone off and the drama would begin.
So. I was single now and feeling frisky one day, as single men tend to do, and I messaged some lady on POF and said I was doing a survey on hand jobs. Rate your skill 1 to 10. Funny much?
She was apparently intrigued and messaged me back.
Yuki was my age. She’d done some kind of trading business. I know she’d been to Vegas before and was internationally-minded enough. Her ‘name’ was a Japanese (Chinese people rarely use their real names when speaking English to foreigners, they usually choose a Western name but some people do like to be called something more exotic). She wasn’t all that hot. She was curvy for a Chinese woman. She was quite willing. How was I to know it would turn out bad?
After a latenight dinner we took a taxi to my house and so on. Whatever. We met a few times after that I guess. It wasn’t like that memorable. She wasn’t supposed to have turned out to be this big a deal still bothering me today.
Some time passed, there was no indication that we should become a serious couple, and one day she asked if she could stay at my place for several days. Um, what?
She had been telling me she was looking for a new place, looking to move. She was just in-between. It happens. Or, does it?
It was terrible. I can be such a sucker. I laid out some ground rules, and I let her bring over luggages and crash. She went out to work or something in the days, and then came over at nights and left many dirty dishes and crap lying around.
Worst of all, she was always around. My whole personal routine was interrupted. I like to be alone most of the time, to be honest.
I do invite people over from time to time. I’ve written about Couchsurfing, for example. Thing about those situations though, is that there is a plan beforehand. A specific date of when the guest leaves, an endpoint.
Yuki soon overstayed her welcome and I told her she needed to get out. This wasn’t cool. She needed to get the hell out of my house.
It was hard to read this person. I mean, she’d been abroad. A moderately middle-class Chinese woman, I’d suppose. Didn’t seem like she was broke. It’s not hard to find an apartment in Shenzhen, so why did she need to be in-between like this?
Was she actually homeless, drifting from man to man’s houses? Or, just desperate for human contact?
I don’t know. I don’t want to know too much. Just stop taking advantage of me.
Then, another day a month or so later, it came eerily close to stalking.
That time she came over without warning was unacceptable. I hate when women do that. I have a routine, I need to be alone to be productive. I don’t like surprises. Sure I let her stay over, but I told her in no uncertain terms that she could never ever come over unannounced again.
When I later moved, I made it a point to not forward her my new address.
And lest you think I’m some pig rejecting an innocent Chinese girl who only wanted to be my girlfriend… Then the explicitness began.
Now, I’m not necessarily opposed to sexting. I may indulge in such from time to time. But when the unsolicited nude pictures started, and were then followed up by pictures of sex with other men’s dicks, I had to politely ask her to stop. She can be exhibitionist all she wants, but don’t I get to inform consent?
And they kept on coming. Dick pics. Other men’s dicks. More dicks. Then two dicks at once. Then a video. Then more.
Finally cutting the long hair, an era ended. She took the picture
In the midst of my general soul-searching of late, I realize that I put too much prudence on the idea of having a girlfriend. As opposed to the specific individuality of a person and how her personality and vibe would match with mine. I tend to rely too much on false hope, without any real foundation, and reap the consequences of such later. This kind of thing may go for this episode.
Mid-2012. I was meeting girls from time to time, whatever. I wanted more. I wanted a partner, stability, someone to hang out to always be there to hang out with me. Tired of the chase, I wanted the idea.
I met Jeanie on the ol’ website. She thought I was interesting, and funny! Believe it or not.
She was Chinese; she was educated and worked in some international company. I think she made more money than me.
She had the most perfect skin. She wasn’t the most beautiful woman I ever met, but she was the most beautiful woman I ever met online.
The problem with meeting a partner online, I always say, is it’s not a good story of how you met.
But who really cares about the stigma of dating online that in this day and age?
I suppose the simple truth of why it didn’t work out is we didn’t have all that much in common. We ran out of things to talk about. I’d repeat myself. There wasn’t that much to confide, not that much to be deep over.
For a while, we did have a pleasant routine. She was always busy with work, which was far away in Luohu. We went to all the cool dating places early on, such as when we went to the top of the KK Building – tallest building in Shenzhen. I tried taking her to parties but she wasn’t into it. The rave was a particularly bad idea, she was so bored. There was one cool episode when she babysat me tripping on smuggled psilocybin chocolate at Lianhua Mountain.
But sooner or later, every weekend would roll around and she would be too tired to go about town and she just wanted to chill in my Meilin apartment. I suppose nothing wrong with that. Just the two of us tended to be quite nice. We watched a lot of Mad Men.
I was very serious about writing back then, and spent most of my free time on my novel. I didn’t need to be a super fun-time-all-the-time social butterfly type, and she didn’t want that from me. My popularity in the Shenzhen scene was waning. “Didn’t you move to Guangzhou?” everyone said, unaware that I’d been back for a while and uncaring. Which suited me fine. I was in my own little world.
We did travel once. We only went to Zhuhai, but we did go there together and it was nice.
Zhuhai is beach town two hours away from Shenzhen. I’ve been there several times. It borders the former Portuguese colony – and current gambling pit – of Macau, and is one of the four original Special Economic Zones of reformed China. (Shenzhen, by the by, being the first of the SEZs.)
Zhuhai happens to be her hometown, and she was visiting her family one holiday three-day weekend and I decided to tag along. After her filial duties, I bused over and met her at a hotel. She showed me around some islands and we taxied around to eat and to shop and to see the sights. It’s a fun place to explore at night.
“Welcome to Zhuhai,” she said on the hotel bed.
Not directly related to post below, but when I went to Taipei later that year. The mood seems to apply somehow
Spring of 2012. Upon returning to Shenzhen, I was in a bit of a dry spell. Or rather, continuing a bit of a dry spell. Life was going well enough, I was productive and working out often and biking and writing and generally getting used to my newly familiar setting. Self-growth, nicely, for the most part. But I guess I was out of practice in one regard. It happens.
Various rejections. In person and online. Whatever. Finally, I decided to take some dreaded pickup advice. Ach, that whole thing. Off and on I must admit I’ve been into that. Not something I need consider these days, but at the time I figured why not…
I went on POF and made a new profile. I took a blurry picture of myself in goggles and a funny hat – a bit apprehensive that anyone might recognize me – and proceeded to create the most ridiculous profile possible. The kind of thing you can’t even mock, a total caricature of an entitled prick who thinks he’s some gift to women and is totally arrogant about it. All intentions put out there. It is total bullshit, and I’d have no need to do this thing nowadays, but it was the time to rack up experience. What can I say?
“Run away,” I wrote. “If you know what’s good for you.”
That’s called disqualification, or some such shit.
Wouldn’t you know it? The damn thing actually worked.
Thing was, I was funny. Nobodytook it seriously, they just enjoyed the crass humor because was something different than the usual horde of desperate lonely men on dating sites.
First, I met a nice girl named Emma. I peaked her interest; we chatted for a while.
I do like communicating by email. I am in control of my thoughts, no awkward pauses, and I can edit accordingly before hitting send. People usually get my sense of humor, although I sometimes can get myself in trouble. Naturally, the emails then upgraded to phone texting. Which is a medium I am also well experienced in though not my preference.
Everybody has their own preferred method of communication. Some people like long phone conversations. Some, a dying breed, write actual letters. I guess even my breed’s long emails is slowly becoming endangered. Most everybody is cool with just texting these days, for sure.
After texting upgraded to talks, we made plans. She bussed over to my neighborhood. Upon meeting in person, I immediately had to give up the facade and just act my usual dumb self.
She’s cute, I though. She was short. She wasn’t a knockout, but she had a certain style about her I could appreciate. I took her to a little whole-in-the-wall pub, escalated and so on, made out a bit.
She was a Chinese English teacher. That is, she’s a Chinese person who works as an English teacher. Hence, her English was rather good. We had good conversations. I liked talking to her.
My dateable standards definitely preclude fluent speakers of English only. Though I’m studying Mandarin as much as I can, to go on dates and make a human connection I need to have real conversation.
I don’t get that breed of expats who fuck girls they can’t even talk to, but those are a muddy breed indeed.
A symbolically-numbered birthday, lookin lame. Note long hair at the time
In February of 2012 I had been living in the megacity of Guangzhou (Canton) for one year. My search for companionship had yielded mixed results. I had a bit of fun, sure. But nothing ever seemed to turn substantial, and I was getting lonely.
That, and my favorite bar had closed down. In no hurry to leave China whatsoever – I’m still here for the long haul – I decided that the path of least resistance was to go back to Shenzhen. It was the city I knew best, the city I had people in, the city that’s next to Hong Kong (while simultaneously still a Mandarin-speaking insanely developing mainland locale). I just wanted to go back.
I went over and spent a day apartment-hunting. First I had some bad results from online recommendations, then I simply utilized those real estate office guys you see around, and I found the perfect flat in the middle of the city. I soon met the landlord, signed the lease, and went back to GZ that very night and moved in a week later.
It was the best apartment I’ve ever lived in. I stayed there are year-and-a-half, which is quite long for me. For whatever reasons, I tend to move a lot. About every year I get anxious and seek out a better place to live. Yet, so far, I haven’t found anything better that that amazing apartment. Sigh, I do miss that place.
It suited me. Unlike other places I’ve lived in China, it wasn’t too glamorous. The place had character. It was, of course, cheap. It was a one-bedroom and living room, roomier than those big one-rooms. The building had no elevator, but that’s okay I lived on the first floor. It was close enough to downtown, but just a bit outwards of Futian District in the quieter Meilin neighborhood. There was a subway station nearby with a line led directly to the Lok Ma Chau border to Hong Kong. And only a 30 yuan latenight taxi ride to the obvious weekend haunts of Coco Park. It had everything going for it.
I unpacked. I redecorated. Life went on. I got a gym membership in the area, I biked around and explored and discovered my new favorite restaurants. I celebrated my birthday with a few friends. I met new people and hung out with some Couchsurfers; with my conveniently-located new apartment I could host and invited more than a few travelers to stay with me.
My writing was kinda-maybe starting to take off, and I kept myself busy freelancing. I visited Guangzhou a few times, on assignment of sorts for a magazine. Mostly, I worked on my novel and slowly but surely I was to take that more seriously. It was a productive time in my life.
Oh, and I traveled to Taiwan. (I traveled to Japan the most recent trip, by the way. I apparently skipped that part in previous writings. Well there was no hooking up to be had there. That trip to Taiwan was the last time I both stayed in a hostel and stayed at a Couchsurfer’s, with the coming of a symbolically-yeared birthday I decided I was too old for this kind of backpacking travel…)
Ray-Comics 