He came to China when he was posted in his country’s embassy in Beijing. That was way back in the Nineties, when the American embassy was probably among the biggest of its kind. He had already learnt Chinese. Travelling across the vast and amazingly diverse country, he decided he wanted to stay on beyond the three-year posting. So strong was his desire that he left the prestigious foreign service and decided to start off his own enterprise.

It bombed. But the lure of China wouldn’t leave him. It was like the Wild West, he wrote to his father, only wilder.

He then got into manufacturing components of MP3 players. Starting small, the business slowly grew and grew till he was in a position to compete with the world’s largest companies in the same field. This year, his company was listed on Nasdaq.

“I suddenly find myself in the big league, but in my mind, I’m still a nobody,’’ he said to an expat family he had only just met. Within the span of 45 minutes — the time it took them to have their pizza and beer — he had told them the story of his life in China.

He had lived through China’s profound changes in the last 10 years. When he came, every foreigner had to learn Chinese to survive. Today, a foreigner could live here for years and return home without learning to say anything beyond Ni Hao and Xie xie (‘Hello’ and ‘Thank you’). At that time, foreigners, even in Beijing’s diplomatic corps, couldn’t live in their own little world. Today, the expat community is so vast, even in small cities, that a foreigner need never bother to make friends with the locals.

Insider from outside

This man had gone beyond making friends — he now had a Chinese wife. It was difficult to find an expat who didn’t have a Chinese girlfriend, but not many married them. This man had dated the girl for six years and then decided she was “a good woman”. His criterion? He had been warned that Chinese girls expect expensive gifts from their foreign boyfriends all the time. “When she told me she wanted a new mobile, I said, ‘Fine, Work harder and buy yourself one.’ I never gave her anything in these six years. But she stuck with me.” His family were Italian-American, for whom even the word divorce was taboo. So he had to be sure when he married, it had to be forever.

Had his parents accepted her? He paused. “You could say it’s work in progress.” Her parents, like most Chinese, had no objections to the marriage. They had warned their daughter that he would never marry her. But when he did, they welcomed him into the family. Their only problem was that the marriage was already two years old, but there were no children yet. He hadn’t yet got used to their constant nagging about this. They couldn’t understand the delay, specially since after marriage, like most Chinese working women, she had left her well-paid job and was now a housewife.

His parents also wanted a grandchild. Their daughter was married, but she was a career woman who had decided she didn’t want children. “So now I’m left to fulfil my parents’ expectations,” he grinned ruefully. There was another thing different about this expat — he had seen to it that he was the only foreigner in his 600-strong company.

But for all his acclimatization, it was obvious that this American, like other foreigners married to Chinese, spent huge amounts of time away from home and in the company of others of his kind. The Sunday on which he met the expat family, he had left home saying he’d be back in an hour, and ended up spending six hours with other foreigners in the pizza parlour. His wife’s calls didn’t seem to make much of a difference — when the expat family left after their meal, he stayed on.