Middle Kingdom
As a fresh-face, bright-eyed graduate, degree certificate looking bright and clean and free from coffee-rings I landed a job in an engineering firm in the East Midlands. "Yay, great!" I thought, and threw myself into the new job with gusto, thinking that I would be trained and coached and generally guided into the dizzy heights of engineering by wise and sympathetic men. That's what it said would happen in the IChemE manual: how could I doubt that?

Mr Boss, however, had slightly different ambitions. The new company had a plant being built in the Far East and, at this stage of construction just needed bodies out there. The ability to tell one end of a spanner from the other, breath and a pulse were all optional - it was bodies that counted! Having at least two of the three options I was almost over-qualified. So less than three weeks away I set off for Red China.


Now most people on "the China Project", had a local girl. Or two. Or enjoyed the whoring scene with no censure applied, partly because China has manufactured whores since the Tang dynasty and partly because decent people don't go to the sort of bars expat engineers do.

I arrived with excess baggage in tow. I was still embroiled in a four-year on-off relationship with a girl who, for all that I loved her, did her level best to trash my esteem and sense of self at every step. On the side I had a couple of girlfriends who were up for parties and sex and not too interested in "long term"-ness (or so I believed until I tried to end it with one of them, who went completely doolally). So believing that I should try to be a "good man", or at least that I shouldn't complicate my life any more than I already had, I held out longer than most men, but got talking with this local girl who worked in a nearby restaurant where I liked to eat. Over successive nights we talked. Loads. When she wasn't busy she'd come and sit with me just to chat. And we became very good friends.

Ultimately after a number of nights sat on the sofa watching TV and talking until I had to run for the bus to work having never rumpled the bed we admitted we were boyfriend and girlfriend. We had an amazing few months together.

I was strongly advised by colleagues to opt for a clean break on leaving China. She would be broken-hearted for a while, but would recover... perhaps with a healthy caution of expats and a few tales to tell, but recover nonetheless. I was resolute that this was the correct move... but, things flourish in the most unlikely places. As I was in the hotel in Beijing, on an overnight stay before my flight back home, I used the free hotel broadband, and that wonderful system that is Skype, to call her to end it and say a last good bye. The words that actually left my mouth are indelibly etched: "I love you, I can't leave you". I was in hell all day and half the night tearing my own soul in half before making that call. And I'm damn pleased I've made the choice I have.

Anyway, long story short, over the next couple of years I halfway bankrupted myself over flights to China whenever I'd saved enough holiday, extended myself further for the wedding, further still for a decent house, further still for the costs of the UK visas and immigration and all that, and still further to make our life together. We've been married for a little over 2 years and have an amazingly handsome son together...

... and to pay back the gods for making the RIGHT choice for a change, she's in China again with our son, he's learning to speak, but not English, and I'm roasting my bollocks off in Saudi Arabia, building yet another Earth-destroying refinery so that we can afford the "happily ever after".

I hate everything about this 14th century hell-hole, and would crawl down the phone lines to see them, have a hole in my heart every day that I can't hold my son and have 3 more weeks to wait for my vacation when I can.

My wife, though, she's perfect!
(daizi last tried to escape on, Fri 29 Aug 2008, 9:40, 1 reply)

Lovely story, good for you.
A thousand clicks if I could.
(Oil Slick, Fri 29 Aug 2008, 9:53, closed)