Recruiting in China

By Alan Paul

From The Wall Street Journal Online

Please don't call me a trailing spouse. It's a horrible term -- sexist and demeaning when applied to a woman and downright emasculating when slapped on a man. But lingo is lingo and facts are facts. And the fact is, in expat land, I am a trailing spouse. I became one the moment I put my career on ice, packed up the house and three kids in suburban New Jersey and moved to Beijing in support of my wife and her new job.

This isn't all new to me. I haven't set foot in an office for nearly 10 years, working from home as a magazine writer and editor. As our three children's primary caregiver I am used to being the only adult male in a room, having chaperoned field trips, assisted in kindergarten classes and shown up for countless midday assemblies. Still, the dividing line is much sharper here. After all, we have uprooted our family and moved to the other side of the world for someone's job. And it's not mine.

While my wife, Rebecca, has long had the job that parents like to brag about, as a rising editor at The Wall Street Journal, I'm the one who has managed to live out the widespread male fantasy of getting paid for a state of perpetual adolescence. As a senior writer for Guitar World and the basketball magazine Slam, I was paid to write the kinds of things that most men call procrastination: Who are the five greatest power forwards of all time? Name rock guitar's 10 greatest riffs. Why isn't Lynyrd Skynyrd in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? When it was time to leave home and go to work, my destinations were press-row seats at NBA games or New York rock shows. It's not a life I could easily abandon.

Yet when Rebecca casually mentioned to a friend last December that the Journal's China Bureau Chief job was posted, I urged her to go for it. She was shocked. I had, after all, nipped in the bud talk of moving to Chicago, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, hesitant to give up my gigs and support system to head off into the great unknown. "But this is different," I explained. "It's China!"

Six months later, worn out and frazzled from preparing to pull up stakes, I found myself asking my doctor for a sleeping-pill prescription to help me get some rest. A simple thought ran through my head: "Me and my big mouth."

For months, I had wondered what it would feel like to board a plane with a one-way ticket to Beijing. When the moment came last August it felt like a huge exhale. A tremendous sense of relief washed over me, knowing that our 15 suitcases were secure in the cargo bin, life as I knew it was fading in the rearview mirror and adventures were looming ahead. Whatever difficulties the transition posed had to be a piece of cake compared to the painstaking, numbing process of erasing our existence in Maplewood, N.J., and emptying the house we had lived in for seven years.

Moving to China with three kids -- Jacob, 7, Eli, 5 and Anna, 2 -- seemed so wild and ambitious back in Maplewood. Then we arrived here -- to the Western style "villa" my wife's company owns in a tree-lined, European style gated housing compound called Beijing Riviera -- and felt anything but exotic. Standing on the playground watching my kids run around, I was surrounded by dozens of moms from around the world. One of the first questions people ask upon meeting one another is, "Where was your last posting?" We were not only fresh off the boat, but fresh on the scene in a larger sense. Our most exotic traits were the reversal of gender rules and our straight-out-of-the-burbs background.

I met an 8-year-old girl whose mother was Indian and father Dutch but who had never lived anywhere but Beijing. Eli became good friends with a 5-year-old British girl with a perfect English accent who was born and raised in Hong Kong. At a school assembly, the principal asked how many kids spoke four languages and about 20% raised their hands.

Fellow expats were not the only ones not quite sure what to make of me. The company driver had to get used to not only having a lady boss, but figuring out how to deal with a male tai tai (lady of the house). Like most people in his position, Mr. D is a bit of a heavy. He is also indisputably loyal, officious and efficient. He has driven us around town to perform the many bureaucratic errands required to live here -- processing visas, getting press credentials, applying for driver's licenses. He also provides invaluable assistance in many of these tasks.

On one such errand, Mr. D's view of me was stood on its head. I am credentialed and sanctioned as the Beijing Bureau Chief for Slam magazine. We waited in line at the massive, bustling government office where visas are issued for Chinese and foreigners alike. When it was my turn, the policeman processing my paperwork looked up from his stamping to say, "I very like Slam."

Next came a fairly intense, in-depth basketball discussion. He wanted to know who I thought was the best Chinese basketball player, "after Yao Ming." Mr. D watched and listened in amazement, then turned to the officer and asked him something in Chinese. The two had an animated chat, and Mr. D looked at me and smiled and laughed. Afterward, something seemed to change in the way he regarded me.

While my wife went off to work, burying herself in a demanding new position, the kids were adapting to life halfway around the world with remarkable ease, nonchalantly starting at a British-run school complete with uniforms. Frankly, they inspired me to keep moving forward and never look back, as I walked to Starbucks everyday, laptop bag slung across my shoulder, grateful for the free wireless service as I waited for my DSL hookup to be activated. It didn't take long to sell a story on bike riding through crowded, downtown Beijing and start interviewing the stars of the Chinese national basketball team, in search of the next Yao. You know -- getting paid for the kind of stuff most people call procrastination.