What am I doing? I am sitting here alone in my flat. A flat that was once busy with life now silent and empty. My wife and son remain in Thailand so its my last weekend in Shanghai and I am going out with a bang. As I sit here I can see my sons toys laying there tidy and gathering dust. I can see my wife’s books on the table. I can see little traces of life that, this time next week, won’t be here anymore. Someone else will move in and these walls will be able to tell a new story but ours is now over albeit far too early. Last night I attended the works annual Chinese New Year Dinner in some godforsaken Holiday Inn in the arse end of Shanghai. I was really not looking forward to it but was pleasantly surprised how good it was. The Chinese, as group, really do know how to have fun. There is something almost childlike in the sheer intrinsic joy they experience putting on shows and enjoying themselves. They are not concerned with being cool or a fear of making fools of themselves but instead put all of their energies into making the occasion as good as they can. They pull together. In the UK the jist at any office Christmas party is to get as pissed as one can but the Chinese have a great time sober and together.
There appears to be some collective release of pressure when these events are staged and although I didn’t understand a lot of it there was no mistaking how funny, creative and enjoyable it was. Each department in the company had to put on a little show and they were all very good. Be it a dance routine, comedy, singing each one had a lot of time and effort put into it. I guess with not much to fill the work days at the moment the Spring Festival provided a nice distraction for the staff and I hope they had fun. I watched wondering how many of them would be there this time next year – already more have been sacked and I think its going to get much worse. My situation is the same and although I haven’t been fired my ‘shift’ to the Middle East is as much about job preservation as anything – if i had fought to stay I would have been fired by now. Looking back I know that they had lined me up as the sacrificial cow but now I have transferred others have taken the bullet. I feel bad for them but being as I have had enough bullets put in me over the last few years I don’t feel it should be my turn again. No, I have dodged this one and my offer was officially confirmed on Thursday meaning that again, I am separated from my wife and son and again I go house hunting. My home, again, packed up and shipped off to distant shores. Shanghai and the Chinese I have worked with and met will stay with me forever and I hope to be back in some capacity some day but for now the karma is not right. I sit here in the fading light of Saturday afternoon in the calm before the storm and I can see out of my window the HuangPu River and glimpses of the Bund and feel a sense of missed opportunities and loss. Next week I will be in Bahrain and all of this will seem like a million miles away but today I want to savor the far too brief time I have had here.