By now it should clear that this lockdown is beyond anyone's worst nightmare.  The natural response is to find any way out of this that you can.  But you can't just jump on a plane tomorrow and escape it.  That being said, there is a 100% guarantee that when the conditions make it possible to leave, we are going to see a flood of expats permanently cut ties with China.  That is an absolute certainty.

Already the preliminary surveys indicate that nearly half the expats plan to leave China permanently.  This lockdown was the last straw.

As for me, well obviously I have the same sentiment and plans, but I have a more complicated set of circumstances since I married to a Chinese local.  That, combined with how long I lived here and accumulated possessions, it's not like we can just bounce tomorrow.  Still no matter what happens after the lockdown, it is safe to conclude that the the Shanghai we once knew and loved is finished.  It will never go back to the way it was before.

Taking a step back however, some really good results came out of this ordeal that wouldn't have happened otherwise.  That is, the lockdown laid the framework and the motivation to declutter my stuff and make an exit plan to leave China at some future point.   Fact is this was already on the radar screen pre-covid.  The pandemic and the lockdown only made me more motivated to leave.

Here's the problem:  when life was good in China, I never really planned long-term.  I lived through all those years by skimming the surface like a rock and hovering from one short-term plan, assignment, activity, tour, club, party, and/or project to the next.  That's how it is with expats here, locals too.  It's how we all live live:  we bounce around with constant interruptions, roadblocks, opportunities, and changes to plans.  So you can't really blame anyone for not making long-term plans.  It is insanely difficult to do so.

But then maybe you don't even need to plan.  Maybe you just simply have the guts and courage to walk away from it all, stuff be damned.   Just get on a bicycle, ride somewhere, and figure out the next moves.

Regardless, the time to make an exit plan is now.  If you still haven't started with that after all that has happened, well what can I say.  Something is wrong with you.  Whatever form the exit plan takes is another story, you can get as creative or as simple as you want with it.  But the bottom line is that you have to be prepared to leave.  As a friend wrote perfectly well in my chat group:

For years, expats have talked about Shanghai like it had some kind of special status and now everyone is shocked and outraged that the boot of Beijing is on our necks for once.  But that boot didn't come out of nowhere.  Most of us heard plenty of stories of its use on others.  It's like that old Italian American proverb:  'We love to eat sausage but we don't like seeing how it is made'

Right after covid struck in 2020, I assembled all the belongings that I had and put them in storage.  For over two years I had been slowly chipping away at a massively complex project to attain the bare minimum of stuff which ties me down.  Mostly it involved doing the following which is still ongoing (about 90% complete now)

• Ripping, downloading, and copying all old CDs and DVDs into digital files and storing them onto a 'black box', i.e. an external hard drive.
• Copying all contents from old computers onto this black box.
• Scanning old books and papers into digital PDF files.   This was an enormous amount of work and involved multiple photocopy guys.  What couldn't be scanned was manually copied into computer files.
• Downloading ebooks of what could be downloaded, then arranging a book sale of the hard copies.
• Assembling, selling, or giving away to charity a huge collection of random items and clothes
• Taking pictures of albums, greeting cards, or any other memorabilia and tossing the originals.
• Organizing all the photos and videos from various devices into a hyper-structure
• Uploading the contents of this 'black box' to an online secure storage site as a backup

Heart

0

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply

At the time when I started it, the project was intimidating and it seemed like there was no way I could make progress.  But there was major motivation because of the pandemic.  Even after days of hard work I didn't see any measurable results from looking at the storage room, and still had to face all the hassle in moving house with whatever belongings I had with me at the time.  But then I was reminded of what James Clear wrote in his famous book "Atomic Habits"

We convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Actually, the inverse is true: Small improvements accumulate into remarkable results.  Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.  The effects of small habits compound over time They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. A slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination. 

Making a choice that is 1% better or 1% worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be.  Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.

The author hit the money shot with that quote, and it changed the way I plan.  Instead of always looking at goals, I've started to do more project-based planning.   

The lockdown is perfect for such planning because when you're stuck in the house for weeks on end, these drudgery tasks take on new meaning.  You can type for 2 hours a day copying journals for example and it appears that nothing gets done.  Repeat for the next few days.  Then a week later, you're shock edwhen a huge amount of progress gets made seemingly out of nowhere.  All this would be very difficult to persist with during normal times when the next endless distraction comes along and makes it so you just give up on the project.

Heart

0

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply

So in a strange way, the lockdown could be the best thing to have happened for my future because it motivated the crap out of me to make changes to leave China.