The great American past-time helps to make Shanghai feel more like home.
By: Jimmy Hoeland
Basking there in the setting sun, I smiled through my panting breath as my teammates congratulated me with a round of high-fives for having just completed a breakneck tear around the bases. I had hit a home run. It wasn’t, however, one of the steroids-aided, whiplash-inducing rockets that you’re liable to catch on a highlight reel these days. Mine was more of the gapper-on-a-field-with-no-fence, race-against-the-relay-throw-home variety.
Nevertheless, I felt like I had finally proven my mettle to this group of softball players, a team that I had joined a few weeks earlier. Sure, I had gotten along fine with the guys in the couple weeks prior, but with this latest exclamation point I finally felt fully at ease, confident that I belonged on the team and that I had gained the respect of my teammates. Having played sports my entire life, this feeling of finding my place on a team was not altogether new to me I had experience adapting to new teammates and team dynamics from my previous involvement in sports. The setting for my latest foray into organized athletics, on the other hand, was quite new.
Growing up in Princeton, there was little that could have foretold that I would end up living in China before my 22nd birthday. I come from a half-American, half-Chinese household, and while I was always quite aware of my Chinese heritage, I never really actively explored that part of my background. I was much more inclined to spend my days as any other kid, playing sports, collecting baseball cards, and submitting to weekly piano lessons. In fact, the one activity that had any relation to my Chinese heritage Saturday morning Chinese language school came to an abrupt end after three years because it conflicted with Saturday morning rec basketball.
Yet, despite the ostensible lack of activities relating to our Chinese background, my mom (who grew up in Hong Kong before coming to the U.S. for college) always did a good job of instilling a sense of awareness and pride in my brother and me regarding our mixed heritage. We celebrated Chinese New Year with traditional red lucky money pockets and customary New Year’s banquet dishes, took a month-long trip to Hong Kong during the summer of 1995, and were continually in contact with scores of Chinese relatives and friends. Indeed, even the ultimately doomed stint at Chinese school provided significant exposure to Chinese culture and language while it lasted.
I continued along in this aware-but-not-curious mode through middle school and high school, but by my sophomore year in college I began to take an active interest in learning more about China. I think the embers of my ethnic pride were stoked a little when I saw a bunch of non-Chinese students running around campus who could speak perfect Chinese and who knew Beijing from bok choy.
I started with a modern history course, then got into language courses, and later took literature, economics, and cinema courses related to China. It seemed like with every further course I took, my interest in China only grew. Before I knew it, I had signed up to spend my last summer of college in Beijing, participating in a language immersion program with about 150 other college students. The program was quite intense, but a lot was learned, and the little time we had to ourselves was put to good use: trips to the great historical sites, scouring the city for good (and cheap) restaurants and bars, and of course many, many visits to the beloved Silk Market, the brand-conscious shopper’s dream and the trademark lawyer’s worst nightmare. Throughout my stay in Beijing that summer, it was the air of energy, excitement and unpredictability that implanted in my mind the notion of returning to China following my graduation.
The following spring, as my graduation was nearing and my job search was steadily inching toward desperation, I was alerted by a neighbor (to whom I am still eternally grateful) to a potential job opportunity with a large accounting firm in Shanghai. Following a few e-mails and a rather harrowing phone interview conducted half in English and half in Chinese, I was offered a chance to join the firm.
I deliberated a little bit at this point, realizing that I’d be leaving all my friends, all my family, and almost everything I’d known up until this point in my life yet, in the end, I knew that I wanted to go to China, and that now was the best time to do it. I set off for China that June, at once both nervous about moving so far away and excited to return to such a dynamic environment.
Upon arriving in Shanghai, it seemed like there were an endless number of adjustments for me to make. Some were simply a matter of routine, such as remembering to pay my electricity bill, a lesson that really sunk in after a couple of heatless winter nights. Other adjustments, such as becoming adept at maneuvering through hordes of people while dodging mopeds charging along the sidewalks, simply came with the territory of moving to China.
Yet, by far the most difficult adjustment for me was starting from scratch making new friends. I found that a lot of my coworkers have vastly different values than I do, have completely different senses of humor than I do, enjoy different leisure activities than I do in short, I found much more of a culture gap than I would have imagined.
For instance, I, as a young 20-something, strongly value my independence and enjoy spending my free time out with friends in a social setting. Many of my coworkers, in contrast, place little emphasis on independence, choosing to live with their parents through their mid-to-upper 20s and give their parents half of their earnings, and are content simply staying at home during the weekends, watching movies or listening to music.
While I can certainly understand and accept these culture differences, I nonetheless find that they make it hard for me to deeply connect with people over here.
As a simple example of the disconnect I am talking about, consider this: one of my first times at the gym I frequent (actually, "exercise purgatory" is probably a better term for the place), I was laboring on the treadmill when the distinct aroma of cigarette smoke wafted up and hit me. I figured some outside passerby must be smoking, and dismissed the shroud of smoke surrounding me as a temporary annoyance. When I looked up in the mirror facing my treadmill, though, I saw that three guys who had just been lifting enormous weights were now taking a short respite and each was enjoying a cigarette. Inside the gym.
Now, I can’t speak for others, but when I go to the gym, my primary motivation is to maintain my health and fitness. If developing bulging muscles and rock-hard abs comes with that, sure, I’ll take those too. But it seems that these guys completely missed the part about being healthy, and instead just wanted the big biceps and an accompanying sense of coolness. Obviously, this story is not representative of everyone in China, but I feel that the behavior of these guys is symptomatic of the culture gap that I often experience here.
As such, joining the softball team has been a great opportunity for me. It has given me another outlet for meeting people people with whom I’ve found it easier to connect. While the team is completely made up of expatriates, it is still quite a motley crew. We have Americans, Latin Americans, Australians and Europeans on the team ranging in ages from 21 to 47. Certainly, as the majority of the team members are Westerners, there is less culture gap to overcome.
In addition to that, though, I think a big reason I’ve found it easier to develop a bond with these guys is that every week we are competing together with a common goal to beat the guys in the other dugout. If anything, it’s proven to me that athletics and the accompanying camaraderie that is forged should not be underestimated in their power to transcend barriers and bring people together.
At this point it remains to be seen how long I will stay in China a recent trip home showed me just how much I miss my friends, family, and Hoagie Haven but for now, I’m enjoying the new doors that softball has opened up for me here in Shanghai.