Did China buy the American Dream?

When I called for information about Chinese classes, I got offered a job teaching English.

While admiring a friend’s calligraphy scroll in the university foreign affairs office, a school marketing person asked if she could hire me to pose for pictures holding the scroll.

When I was late to my friend’s TV show appearance and got a nosebleed seat with no view, the director asked me to move to the front row so I “could be seen.”

Many things come with difficulty in China, but jobs and networking opportunities aren't among them. Flocks of Americans are traveling to China for jobs, higher than average incomes and a wealth of foreigner-only opportunities. I’m starting to wonder if China bought the American Dream when it bought two-thirds of our bad debt.

Take me for instance: I came to China to travel with an income. I may stay because the income and opportunities are better than I’d get in the states, especially in the current American economy.

And I’m not the only one. 

Tianjin is a mega-city with a scant population of foreigners. Still, there’s an American style coffee shop that plays Janis Joplin and serves Earl Grey tea. The Spot Cafe is owned by Daygan Sobotka, a 30-year-old Virginian who’s lived in China for three years. Sobotka said he came here to learn Chinese, got hired as a Chinese TV actor, and then wanted to own his own business. 

He stays because no where else in the world could he have so many options in so many career fields.

Then there’s Hank, a gruff, former Chicago stock exchange worker from the Southside. He came to China nine years ago on business and “just never went back.”

He now owns Hank's Sports Bar, which serves real cheeseburgers and Italian sausage, packed by Hank himself. On Sunday’s, Hank opens the bar at 8 a.m. for an American all-you-can-eat breakfast and he does city-wide catering on Thanksgiving with real stuffed turkeys.

It’s not the same story for Chinese, as my Chinese friend Sarah reminded me. 

When she graduates, the best she can do with her English degree in China is work in tourism, Sarah said. Pretty Chinese girls with English fluency look great in front of tourists.

I know my weekly job offers exemplify the unequal playing field, but I’m taking advantage of the American Dream in China as long as I can, lest the bubble burst here too.

China smells

Petter Hessler wrote in River Town that, at first, China was just sounds to him. He described the sounds of freighter ships passing through the Yantgze River channel locks at Fuling, the sound of the 24-7 Peking Opera station inevitably blaring out of some cabbie's stick-shift, King Long jalopy and the sound of sandaled feet padding up the mountains of stairs in the river town.  

If Peter Hessler's river town was sounds, mine just smells.

The Haihe River,  called the "Mother River of Tianjin" by locals, dissects the city and surrounds my campus. Walking over the bridge that leads out to a six-lane thoroughfare, I pass through clouds of algae plume/seaweed vapor, the sulfur smell of underground sewers and exhaust from the perpetually congested Weijin Lu. 

During the afternoon, the river attracts grandfathers who fish while their grandchildren are in school. The old men smell like mold; it is a warm climate with some sweaty days and older men seem to wear a uniform of dress slacks pulled up to the naval and stretched out white, tank-top undershirts. Washing clothes is not done as frequently here because almost all clothes are line dried (dryers are considered selfish wastes of electricity). Chinese people also don't use deodorant because, as a Chinese friend told me in Shanghai, "Only white people sweat."

There are sporadic clouds of cigarette smoke, but not as many as Western media encouraged me to expect. Women rarely smoke because, like drinking, smoking is improper for ladies. Most men, like the one in this picture, smoke a pack a day.

With far fewer street vendors than Shanghai, Weijin Lu mostly smells warm, like sweet tofu, cooked in cylindrical, steel drums and sold underneath the overpass. It's here that young Chinese teenagers roll out blankets of faux jade and amber jewelry.  The smell here is more a feeling of dinginess because these hard-working people live in a city where the dirty air leaves dust behind.

Peter Hessler may have had a romantic depiction of pleasant sounds, but I enjoy every one of the unpleasant smells in Tianjin. Tianjin is often called a real Chinese city, a working city, and the smells are comforting in their Earthiness.