It’s been a little while but I’m back with the tenth interview in my Adjusting to Expat Life series.  I’ll be running two interviews a week over the course of six weeks, writing about my own experiences adjusting to expat life in Peru, and rounding up the best expat resources on the web.

Today I’m talking to another serial expat, MaryAnne Oxendale, Canadian, who’s been living abroad in all kinds of presumably exotic corners of the world since she was 19.  Her advice to prospective expats, however, makes light of that exoticism, pointing out that we’re all just human, and living abroad is neither terrifying nor some great spiritual experience.  Life is just life, whether you’re in Shanghai, Sofia or Sydney.

You can check out two of MaryAnne’s blogs – A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai and Away, which is something of a hub for her numerous online activities.

Where do you live?

I am currently living on the 16th floor of the only tall building in my neighbourhood in Shanghai. I live in the former French Concession, which is a very old area full of lots of scuffy little shops and little houses and people doing their business (tailor/barber/fishmonger etc) out on the sidewalks. It has a lot of energy and funky smells and lots to watch.

How long have you lived there?

I’ve been in Shanghai since February 2009 but in my current flat only for a month. We used to live down the street until our landlord decided he wanted to move back in.

How old were you when you decided to move there?

Um, 34? I’m 35, turning 36 in Sept.

What made you choose to live there?

My boyfriend and I had left Turkey in September 2008, after I’d been living there 6 years and he 2 years. We left because the economic downturn was making it really hard for him there, work-wise. So we decided we’d try to decide where to go next whilst on a journey from Mexico City to San Jose, Costa Rica in autumn 2008. It was a 2-month brainstorming session, really, with many hours spent in internet cafes in Antigua and Granada and such. We considered Oman and Tunisia and actually got a solid offer teaching together in Dalian in northern China. In the end, I found a university job in Shanghai and for some reason my intuition just clicked and stubbornly decided it had to be Shanghai for us…even though my boyfriend hadn’t found a similar offer in Shanghai at that point. It took him another month to find something (huge relief). Why Shanghai? Partly impulse/gut decision; part curiosity. Back in my undergrad days (or rather, decade– it took me 9 years to finish my BA because I kept going away to travel) one of my majors was modern Chinese cultural history. Shanghai featured heavily in the art and culture scenes of several eras in the past century (cinema in the 30s, po-mo art in the 90s, etc.) and I really wanted to see the subversive creative scene in action.

How do you make a living?

I teach English. I’ve been doing it since 2002. My current incarnation is as an EAP instructor (English for Academic Purposes) for an Australian university that has a joint venture with a Shanghai university. I teach first year students the academic skills (writing, presentation skills, note-taking, etc) that they’ll need to enter the degree program in their second year. It’s an interesting but lonely job: I’m the lone foreign teacher in a tiny department (me and 3 part time Chinese teachers I never see, teaching a grand total of 48 kids) so I basically run the program and have no colleagues. I do, however, only work 4 days a week (and two of those are half days!) and just under 8 months a year. I love academic time tables! Last year we were able to squeeze in trips to Indonesia (4 weeks), Hong Kong and Macau (one week), Beijing, Hangzhou, Harbin, Yangshuo (all long weekends), and Canada (5 weeks) to see my family. We’re heading to Myanmar in 2 weeks for a month.

Have you lived abroad in other countries before? Where? Was it easier or harder to feel at home?

I haven’t actually done anything except live abroad since I was 19. I’ve officially ‘lived’ in Ireland, England, South Africa, Ghana, Turkey, Dubai and now China, for durations of between a month and six years.  I’ve worked as a care assistant for the elderly, as a sound/lighting engineer for a children’s theatre company, behind the counter in a pagan shop in exchange for meals and pints of Guinness, and as a teacher (everything from grade 5 in a primary school to corporate training in a big company to being an academic director of a school).

Was it hard to feel at home? Good question. I always feel at home because I’m used to my home changing a lot. Give me a bit of private space (say, the bottom bunk in a hostel bed) and a bungee cord curtain for privacy and I’m at home. I would say, however, that the place I felt the least at home was the first city I lived in in Turkey, Kayseri, particularly in my second year there. It’s the main city in Cappadocia in central Anatolia and it’s quite conservative, religious and traditional. I loved living there (google Cappadocia and check out the landscape!!) but I was reminded at every turn that I really really didn’t fit in. I had many problems with men, with staring, with gossip, with loneliness. There were only 4 foreigners there in my 2nd year and for whatever reason, we didn’t gel. So I was pretty much on my own in a city where most women my age (28 at the time) were all married and having babies and being housewives and the only people I met that I could talk to were the men. The men were more worldly, educated and interesting than the women (who gossiped and talked about housework and dieting mostly, unfortunately) but if I hung out with the men, there was a lot of really bad gossip and it got pretty unpleasant by the end. I spent a lot of weekends in my room feeling pretty miserable and lonely.

Are you part of a close-knit expat community, or are you closer to locals?

I work at the small north Shanghai campus of a much bigger university and I am the ONLY foreigner there. In my 10 floor office building, only my admin assistant speaks English. I have a whole office to myself (6 cubicles!). So I don’t have many opportunities to befriend foreigners there! My boyfriend works for a bigger university and has about 30 foreign colleagues and through him I have made one good friend that I see regularly for lunch and two others that we meet about once a month for drinks. There is no tight expat community here that I can see – every one keeps to themselves, it seems, and really aren’t keen to open up to newcomers. It’s quite cliquey. For the first half of this school year (Sept-Feb or so) I was pretty miserable because I only really ever saw just my students during the day and my boyfriend at night, for days on end. I was lonely and going stir crazy. Most of my interactions on a day to day basis have been with locals but because my Chinese is still pretty limited, these interactions have been mainly impersonal shopping-cafe-taxi interactions rather than anything deeper.

How much longer do you plan to stay?

We’re thinking we’ll be here another two years, as we like our jobs and love our lovely new flat (it has fabulous views out over the French Concession) but unlike a lot of the foreigners we know here, we really don’t think we’ll be here long term. The energy in this city is dynamic and intense but the money-money vibe just gets annoying. We’re saving up to buy a house in Mexico or maybe Nicaragua.

Do you think about your adopted country as home, or as somewhere you happen to live, at the moment?

Yes, it’s home, just as Istanbul was home for 4 years and Kayseri for two years and London for three years and… When I was in my early 20s I didn’t allow myself to put down even temporary roots anywhere because I knew I was just passing through. This became difficult to maintain over the years and I started to allow myself to relax a little, to lay down my hat and buy some pretty curtains and make myself at home, if only for a short time. I got tired of living on sofas and floors and in hostel dorms. I wanted a home.

What were the greatest differences you noticed when you first arrived?

For me, because I had come here from Turkey, I noticed the differences between here and there rather than between here and Canada. I noticed that although all the expats here complained about the noise, the traffic, the disorganization, etc, it was significantly better on all counts than Turkey. The Foreign Teacher Assistant at my first university marveled at how little help I needed getting settled in and how little I complained– and really, I had no reason to! It was so much easier than what I’d had for the previous six years. Turkey is chaotic organization; China is organized chaos. There is a big difference.

What are the greatest differences you notice now?

I miss being able to read and speak. I thought that by now my Chinese would be better but it isn’t. By this point in my Turkish sojourn, I was nearing pre-intermediate level in my abilities. Here? Still beginner. I can’t wrap my head around the characters and my tone deafness is making speaking/listening a nightmare. I’m going to take an intensive course for a month when we get back from Myanmar, before my university classes start in September, so hopefully having that time to dedicate to learning only (rather than teaching full time AND trying to study after work when I’m drained) will work.

I am also really appreciating the honesty here. Taxi drivers are insanely honest; cashiers will run out the door after you if you forgot some of your change. I appreciate not being harassed by men like I was in Turkey, India, UAE, Egypt…And the cleanliness. I know a lot of people would argue with me on that point but seriously, they have people hired to wash the public garbage cans every morning!!!!

To what level did you speak the language when you arrived?

Basic greetings- hello, goodbye, please, thank you, how much is that? and some numbers.

How did the language difference affect you?

Immensely, though not at first. Shanghai is much more international than Istanbul is so while I needed Turkish there, I haven’t really needed Chinese here. It would mainly help with making more monolingual Chinese friends and being able to give better directions to the taxi drivers or to read restaurant menus or to stop feeling like an ignorant fool when my neighbours try to engage me in incomprehensible small talk in the lift. Inexplicably, you can do a lot in English here – the landlords for both of our flats here have spoken fluent English; our local cafe is managed by a woman with a degree in English Literature from Nanjing SouthEast University (very prestigious) and hundreds (maybe thousands?) of restaurants, bars, clubs, shops have bi/trilingual staff. I’ve never encountered such a flexibly multicultural/multilingual city before.

Do you have a local partner? How does or doesn’t that help you integrate?

Nope, my boyfriend is American and so at home I live in a little bubble of North American’ness. A local partner might have helped but as I’m a big, stubborn, mouthy western woman I seriously doubt I’d have any luck with local men. I’m just not their type at all. In Turkey, my frustrating series of local boyfriends didn’t help much with my Turkish as they wanted to improve their English with me…

Have you taken out or would you consider taking out citizenship?

I briefly considered fake-marrying a local in the UK when I was about 22, as I wanted to be able to live in Europe longer than my 2 year visa allowed. I’m Canadian so I can have dual citizenship but I couldn’t find anyone worth marrying. As for China, no way. No desire (or ability, legally) to ever become Chinese. It isn’t even an option.

If you don’t have citizenship, what are your feelings on living in a country where you have no political voice?

Even if I had citizenship, I’d have no voice. I live in China – they have only one party so political options are limited! After having been out of Canada since 1994 (with a few stints back for a semester or so of university at a time), I’ve been pretty far removed from direct political activity. It doesn’t bother me though. I keep up with world events online and stay informed and try to do what I can do on a global level but I don’t feel like voting is the only way to make a difference.

Was there a moment when you suddenly realised the extent to which you had integrated? To which you hadn’t?

No, but I’ve come to realize that I’ll never ever be fully integrated anywhere, even back at home, as I’ve had too many outside influences affecting me and changing me. I’ll just keep on being me in whatever geographic location I find myself in. Here, I eat with chopsticks and speak my limited Chinese and try to make sure my students save face… but I know I’ll never be Chinese and I don’t think I need to be. I’m still just me. I think it was harder for me to accept that in Turkey because Turkish culture was much closer to my own so I thought I ought to be able to integrate better and when I couldn’t I became frustrated.

What advice would you have for ‘newbie’ expats? What do you wish you had known before moving to your new home?

I’m not sure there is any universal advice that I could give except maybe to relax and enjoy it. It isn’t nearly as difficult as many think it will be (like those who often comment on Nomadic Matt’s site who are aching to go abroad but are not sure exactly how to do it). Yes, I live in China but I still get up and drink coffee in the morning and walk to the metro station and go to work every day. There are buses and taxis and restaurants. There were also restaurants and buses and houses and streets in Oman, Cairo, Sophia, Springbok, Mumbai, Jakarta, Harbin, San Salvador, Accra…

I’ve come to realize that daily life is wonderfully mundane in even the most ‘exotic’ corner of the world and rather than being a bad thing, I think it’s great – it shows we really are just all human doing gloriously mundane human things. It helps to stop you from ‘othering’ the people you live amongst.

I read a lot of travel blogs and feel frustrated at times because there are two themes that run through many: one, it’s too scary and hard to move abroad (but they so want to do it because it will solve all their frustrations with cubicle life), too unstable (it isn’t!) and two, locals of exotic country X are so much more enlightened/wise/mystical/whatever than folks back home in, say, Saskatoon or St Louis and they must go travel (and not talk to other expats!) because they’ll never get the same wisdom from Bob in Poughkeepsie. Not true! They’re all just people too.