Before moving to China one of the top five questions I got was, "What if you meet someone over there and fall in love?" Now that I am in China the number one question I get is, "What if you meet someone here and fall in love?" Often times this question is followed by a story about how they knew a Westerner who fell in love with a Chinese person and it is all roses and sunshine. While I think it would be really cool if that did happen to me let me address a few things that kind of put the "fall in love in a foreign country" in a more realistic situation.
The first is that I am not good at speaking Chinese so the person I would meet would have to be good in English. Or I would really have to get good at Chinese fast.
This is possible but when you live in "smaller" areas that can be hard to find. My city is considered small and it is 4 million people. The only people I have met that speak English fluently work in my bilingual school. Shanghai or Beijing would have more English speakers.
It also takes 5 years of living in a country to be considered fluent according to psychologists who have studied language acquisition.
Two is that I have no idea what dating culture is like here. Is it okay to hold hands on the first date? Is a movie and dinner a normal date here? What are taboo subjects I should avoid? To add on to this I noticed that PDA (public displays of affection) are rampant here. People hold hands, hug, and make out on sidewalks, elevators, escalators, and in front of the sock display at the mall. (I just want socks. Get out of my way, lovebirds!) I am super duper uncomfortable with PDA so that adds another layer of why dating here would be hard.
Three, let us say that I do meet the right person. We are truly in love! Now we are going to get married but there is a catch...a big one. You can not be a dual citizen of China. That means one of us would have to give up their nationality to be with the other person and we would have to choose a country to live in. For instance, I could stop being American, marry my Chinese husband, get my Chinese citizenship, and live in China forever and then have to apply for travel visas to America to visit friends and family OR my husband would have to do vice versa. Would one of us be willing to give up our citizenship for the other? I know I will not give up mine.
The other option is that we could keep our citizenships but that means we have to keep applying for work visas to be with one another. Let us say I stay in China with my Chinese husband and keep my teaching job here. Even though we are married I would have to keep applying for a work visa to legally stay in China with him. If he were to move to America, he would have to do the same.
If we are really in love we can do these options but it is asking a lot of the other person and that is not even counting the other difficult parts of being in a relationship such as family, religion, money, or politics.
So while being in love in China sounds romantic and awesome there can be a lot complications with it as well. I also low-key wonder if men get this marriage question as much as I am getting right now. Not to mention the reason I came to China was to have a life changing experience and learn a different culture...not to fall in love.
As I read on twitter once, "I want to catch flights, not feels."
No comments:
Post a Comment