7 Types of Expats You'll Meet in Shanghai

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Obviously trying to condense Shanghai’s vast expat scene into an internet listicle is pretty ludicrous. We know there are more than seven types of expats in this city. However, we do run into these ones more than others. It’s as if god’s running out of extras in a movie about Shanghai. And if this sounds slightly condescending, I'd like to point out that yours truly has been each of these at one time or another. So without further ado…….

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1. Fortune Rookie

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Age: 18-22

Occupation: Intern

Mandarin Level: Nonexistent 

Time in China: Fresh off the plane

Usually an American International studies major who’s interning for a magazine in Shanghai, and puts all their expenses on their dad’s tab. Having just arrived in Shanghai, they're still stuck in that “Lost In Translation” fog where your eyes can’t quite focus and your mood constantly pendulums between “laowai out of water” and daring Indiana Jones-esque adventurer ready to snort rails of stinky tofu and venture deep into the bowels of a fake fabric bazaar. Gets giddy at the prospect of having their work published in a real magazine, and will email every one of their pieces to mom and pop — even if it’s just a listing for a drywall insulation company. 

Pros:

• Hanging out with them takes even the most callused expat back to a time when Shanghai was whimsical and exotic

• Sees the wok half full 

Cons:

• The constant gawping at every little thing from the crowds to the fact that they serve chickens with the feet still on makes them insufferable to any expats who’s been here for more than 6 months

• Optimism becomes cloying after a while too

• As eager to help as they are, bosses sometimes find them more trouble than they're worth

• When they get home, they act like Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves(Dances with Wontons?) despite only being in Shanghai for a month.“Dearest Beatrice, after uttering a drunken “wanshang hao” to the sleeping security guard at my complex, I think these people have started to accept me as one of their own.”
  

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2. Clubber Shang

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Age: 28-40 (David Beckham stubble makes it hard to say)

Job: Posturing at nightclub tables (usually either M1nt or M2) surrounded by ten semi-catatonic Transylvanian models on their iPhones

Mandarin Level: Thinks he's fluent, actually sounds like Vincent D'onofrio in Daredevil

Time in China: 2-5 years

Vaguely European with notes of Saudi Arabian oil baron. Rocks custom John Philips bespoke suits and Caiman-skin Chuck Taylors, is fluent in multiple dialects of how to tap on the bar to get the bartender’s attention, speaks English in French, “stay thirsty my friends,” the whole nine yards. His finger’s so firmly on the pulse of the nightlife scene it’s on the verge of passing out. This walking Tanqueray commercial’s encyclopedic knowledge on the openings and closings of everything from the glitziest nightclubs to the grottiest dive bars would make you think he has access to Batman’s phone-based surveillance system from the Dark Knight. 

Pros: 

• Can get you in almost anywhere

• Will allow you to run in circles you never dreamed of back home -- captains of industry, a Noxzema ad’s worth of models that’ll never bang you in a million years

Cons:

• Commandeers every conversation with a miniseries on himself

• Multiple, conflicting backstories

• Has 10,000 acquaintances, but zero real friends

• Beneath the sheen of magnanimity lies a soulless vampire squid

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3. PR-asite

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Age: 20-30

Occupation: PR, but doesn't have to be

Mandarin Level: Mark Zuckerberg

Time in China: 6 months-3 years

The ISIS-like splinter faction of Clubber Shang. Okay, most PR people aren't like this and you don’t have to be in PR to have a PR personality. It’s not like Shanghai has a monopoly on shameless promoters. 90% of the PR people we’ve met in Shanghai are absolutely wonderful. We’re talking specifically about those Kewpie Dolls who would interrupt a conversation about a dead parent to plug the brand of breath mints they leave on their hotel pillows. Oh, and they want every magazine to publish a ten-page cover story on the promotion of their newest bus boy.

This RMB lamprey in a human skin suit is often found inundating your WeChat feed with photos of moderately edible hotel desserts that are as cloying as their personalities -- god forbid they ever Instagram a photo of actually interesting local fare. You might be saying, “they need to put on a front to sling their product; that’s not what they’re really like.” Wrong. This person is devising new ways to have you shillin’ like a villain for them whether they're at a function or getting up to take a piss at 3am. 

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4. The Hai-Tai

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Age: 40 and above

Occupation: Tai-tai or guy-tai

Mandarin Level: An "I Love Shanghai" T-shirt

Time in China: 3-5 years

They came to Shanghai five years ago because of their partner’s shipping industry. Their nomadic life has forced her to take up various stints around the world in everything from filing paperwork for various Asian diplomats to volunteering at an AIDS hostel in Zambia. But their true passion is their two kids. As a result, they helm various international school boards, chaperone almost every field trip, organize family events, and run a viral blog for fellow parents in Shanghai. 

Pros:

• Provides a beacon of ethics in the Marianas Trench of morality that is the Shanghai expat scene

• Their high standards of living coupled with their spouse's high income is partly the reason for the influx of quality Western brands, schools, hospitals and a Western dining scene that isn’t limited to Saizeriya.

• Is whose really keeping those young, hip millenial-targeting city mags afloat

Cons:

• Despite taking five years of language courses at Jiaotong, still doesn’t speak a lick of Chinese. 

• Lives in a Jinqiao bubble hermetically-sealed from the noise, diesel and street food that defines real Shanghai

• Idea of going native is ordering a tall-drip Green Tea Latte

• Wears Adidas’ active wear to go everywhere but the gym

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5. ABC

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Age: 18-mid 20s

Occupation: Business development, every internship ever, startups, that Asian guy in the Jets jersey at the Camel

Mandarin Level: Fluent (though the minute they open their mouth locals can tell they're not native Chinese, like dogs with terminators)

Time in China: 3 months - 10+ years

The American-born Chinese is like the Blade of China with the perks and pitfalls of being simultaneously Chinese and American. On one hand, their Joy Luck Club upbringing means they have a unique perspective on what it means to be both. They boast an advantage due to their bilinguality, and the fact that they have a foot in both the cultures of the world’s two biggest super powers. Need a recommendation for either Shanghai’s best microbrewery or best snake restaurant? Ask an ABC. 

The Catch-22 is that they don’t feel at home in either culture. Constant bullying from white Americans during their childhood coupled with their parents waterboarding them with the values of the motherland has left them in a state of ethnocultural suspended animation. They have the same complaints about Shanghai as their non-ABC brethren — spitting, crowds, censorship — but the minute a non-ABC voices these, they’ll go all Tom Cruise from The Last Samurai on your ass, and defend the faith to the death. 

If you need any more convincing of this split-personality, check out the comment section of one of the NY Times’ anti-China pieces. You’ll see two commenters going at it, one siding with the piece, the other describing how America is just as bad. Clearly a caucasian American debating a Chinese person, right? Nope, they’re both ABCs.  

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6. Shanghyena

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Age: 25-45

Occupation: Non-certified English teachers, perpetual Jiaotong Chinese students, bad DJs etc.

Mandarin Level: Middling-fluent (but not Mandarin scholar fluent...like "I talk to the neighborhood chuanr cart guy everyday" fluent) 

If you're passionate about English teaching, studying Chinese, or DJing, more power to you. We're specifically talking about the flotsam and jetsam that flit from gig to gig, visa to visa, and internet cafe to internet cafe à la theTalented Mr. Ripley --trying to save up money to realize their delusion of opening a custom yarn bike shop in Shanghai. Some of my crueler expat brethren call them LBHs (losers back home), implying that they'd never come close to landing the caliber of jobs/girls/guys in their home countries that they do here (though to be fair, haven't we all been here?). When everything falls through, they're off to another pipe dream in another country -- harvesting Vicuna wool on a commune in the Bolivian Andes, delivering cruelty-free kale-bacon martinis via unicycle in Williamsburg, Brooklyn etc.

Pros:

• Can sniff out a 1 mao discount in 10 million gallons of water -- cheap, good food, hostels, travel etc

• Can carve out a niche in almost every country

Cons:

• Hiring them for anything long-term is like appointing a mayfly as a supreme court justice; they ain't gonna be around long enough

• If you stay at the hostels they recommend, you'll probably wake up sans a kidney

• Is flakier than a Peking duck with dandruff

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7. Shanghailander

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Age: 40+

Occupation: Shanghai Expat

Mandarin Level: Dashan

You’ll find this fedora-sporting spinster in some country-themed dive bar slouched in the back like Obi Wan at that Mos Eisley tavern with a Jimmy Buffet cover band caterwauling “Margaritaville” in the background. Approach him wrong and he could bite your hand off. Approach him right, and he’ll take you on a Training Day-esque journey through the Shanghai underbelly that’ll turn your world-view upside down, but that he’ll barely remember. Having lived here for 20+ years, he’s done it all: wrote for every blog and lifestyle rag twice, taught English at every school, opened and shuttered multiple business, milked yaks on the Asian steppes, spearheaded wacky startups that never materialized, and ruined more relationships than Ashley Madison.com. He’s the Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now of Shanghai. He’s a professional Shanghai Expat. 

Pros:

• Has an unvarnished view of Shanghai. Can be your Sacagawea to all the aspects of the city not found in a Moon handbook (though there is a subspecies that's been going native for so long that they'll actually forgo local fare in favor of a diet of quinoa shakes and Wagas salads) 
  

Cons:

• Has a tendency to exaggerate his exploits (“I knew Victor Sassoon”)

• His disdain for China makes him kind of a buzzkill

• As does his too-cool-for-the-room attitude

• Can’t really exist outside Shanghai anymore

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