Topic: news Homebound: 10 Things Expats Miss About China When They Leave

"1) There is just nothing quite like food in China" - true enough. Once you try it, there's some stuff you'd definitely miss, but that depends on how much you want to experiment. "2) The cushy hours" Had better hours in my old job, better salary, and without being humiliated. "3) The buzz of life" Do foreigners hang around outdoors for the buzz? I usually retreat to my apartment as soon as my work shift ends. "4) The conveniences" Which are outweighed by the inconveniences, as well as difficulty to get fair treatment from greedy merchants. "5) Taxi drivers" Agreed, Chinese taxi drivers are the nicest I've encountered anywhere in the world. Recently one said "keep the change" to ME because he couldn't break a 100! I was amazed. "6) The cost of living" Definitely useful, to make the decent salary into something you can actually make savings with. "7) The vast amount of cheap services and goods" It's nice, but good luck finding what you need without a translator, though. "8) The locals" Nah. Homogenous bourgeois mediocrity interspersed with local habits and superstitions. No character present, nothing of interest said. To think they're proud of their cultural revolution is hilarious. "9) The perks of being foreign" If you thrive on attention, then maybe. Perhaps Chinese think foreigners should all be happy to be singled out, because Chinese are taught to love gratifying atention. "10) The language" NO! The Chinese character system was designed to make written language exclusive to officials working for the imperial court and inaccessible to normal people. It has defined the system by which the government, society and even education are handled, and it is completely broken. You have to be cruel to a child to force them to learn these characters - how on Earth could an adult learn it? I could have learned any other language much better than this myriad of thousands of nonsensical hieroglyphs. I wish China would switch to an alphabet (pin yin - letters correlate to sounds) instead of using this secret insider code.