Imagethief

Tag: Silicon Valley

  • The undefeated gangster squirrel and other first world problems

    I hate a tree.

    No one is more surprised than I am. Trees are green and wonderful. I love trees!

    Except for this tree. I hate this tree.

    The tree I hate is a big Douglas fir, about 100 feet tall. It grows in my neighbor’s yard, right up against the fence along the property line. It is thick and stout and extends half its canopy over my house and yard.

    I didn’t start out hating the tree. When we first looked at the house I thought, hey! Nice and shady! Somehow my real estate agent, who was otherwise superb, did not bring himself to say, “You know, it looks great. But I gotta tell you, you’re going to hate that fucking tree.”

    It didn’t take long. We moved into the house in November. By December the tree was dropping a continuous rain of desiccated needles and pinecones. The first time I went up onto the roof I thought I’d wandered into a campsite. I swept and bagged and spent a merry afternoon on my hands and knees mucking buckets of rotting needles and cones out of the gutters while trying not to teeter off of the edge and become one of those statistics about mundane things that are actually much more dangerous than terrorism.

    The tree has perfected teleportation. It quantum-tunnels inch-long needles into my underwear drawer, under the couch cushions, into my bed, and into the carpet fibers. In summer the tree swaps the needles for drifts of weightless little fir blossoms. These have colonized the house like tribbles. There are always a few stuck to the bottom of my socks.

    Shortly after moving in we called an arborist to thin out the fir branches over our property. He also pruned the Japanese maple in our front yard. It turns out you need a Japanese maple specialist to prune your Japanese maple or apparently you risk a diplomatic garden incident. A Japanese maple arborist is exactly like any other arborist, but more fabulously priced. But I don’t hate the Japanese maple because, being Japanese, it’s well engineered and punctual. In autumn it turns bright red for thirty days and then drops all of its leaves in one glorious, crimson sneeze.

    The arborist pruned the fir tree ruthlessly, but it didn’t occur to him that, unlike a genteel Japanese maple, a thuggish fir tree would bear a grudge. First, one of the pruned branches pierced my roof, which we discovered during a freakishly heavy rainstorm in December when water started dripping into the master bedroom at two in the morning. But at least that was fixable. More insidiously, the tree leaked great gobbets of pinesap from every knot, nick and stump where it had been pruned.

    Pinesap is like a mix of superglue and ground glass. It coats the wooden stairs between our dining area and the garden. It drips onto the skylights and hardens into dusty, sticky little humps that have to be etched off with a putty knife. It gets tracked into the house and leaves indelible pinesap marks on the floors. The cats hate it. It makes gravel stick to their feet. A cat with gravel cemented between its toes is not a happy cat. When it walks across the floor it goes click…click…click…click, and then, when it rabbits its foot against the floor to try to dislodge the pebble, clicketyclicketyclickety. This is funny and tragic in a way that only an aggrieved cat can achieve, and might almost be worth forgiving the tree for. But then the cat sulks away to the bedroom and hides under my comforter where, miraculously, the pebble and any needles also glued to its feet will dislodge so I can find them when I go to sleep. Have I mentioned the satanic combination of pinesap and cat hair?

    At this point you may be thinking, hey, asshole, you managed to buy a house in the Valley, so excuse me if I don’t get all weepy about your tree and shit. And you’d be right to think that. In the playbook of humble-bragged first-world problems, this is dangerously close to complaining about having to get your Maserati tuned.

    But the tree was the beginning of my education in the dark secrets of home ownership. When you buy your first house you stray into a foggy, rumsfeldian arena of unknown unknowns. Sure, you look for the obvious stuff. Closet space. Appliances. A history of gruesome axe murders. (Don’t laugh – a friend of mine got a deal on a murder house in Potrero Hill.) But if you’ve never owned a house before, there is a whole galaxy of things that simply don’t occur to you.

    Crawl spaces don’t occur to you. I have some advice: if your house has a crawl space underneath it, never look there. It’s like gazing at Medusa. Nothing but darkness, hate and serpents. Or, to be more accurate, spiders. I sent an electrician in there to pull some Ethernet cable. It takes a brave and well-compensated man to enter Hades just so I can have better Internet in the bedroom. My strategy for the crawl space is to pretend it doesn’t exist, and isn’t two feet beneath my sleeping body every night. Nope, nothing beneath my head except a concrete slab and the San Andreas Fault, thank you very much.

    Rat urine doesn’t occur to you. When we had the house checked, the inspector pointed out that there were some rat droppings on top of the furnace. We had rat-proofers seal up all the gaps, above and below. They also suggested that the old insulation was probably soaked in decades of rat urine. This might or might not have been true, but it definitely stuck in my head. No one wants to spend their nights sandwiched between spiders below and rat piss above. So, new insulation.

    Then we had a guy come over to clean years of accumulated pine needles out of the air conditioning unit, which is at fir tree ground-zero and seemed likely to burst into flames. While he was there he checked the inside of the furnace and ducts. Full of rat turds. We’d pretty much been blowing atomized rat turds directly into our faces all winter. You can have a slick Nest thermostat and turn on your heat from another continent, but it’s not smart enough to send a message back warning you that your ducts are a rat outhouse and you’re probably going to die of leptospirosis so don’t bother coming home. For $250 you’d think they could engineer that in.

    Squirrels don’t occur to you. And why would they? Squirrels are cute, harmless woodland creatures that eat nuts and stuff. But in the tree I hate there lives a squirrel I also hate. There is no bird feeder that he can’t get to and open. No wire he cannot scale. No barrier he cannot penetrate. He is the Savoir-Faire of squirrels. Which makes me poor old Klondike Kat.

    And he has squirrel balls of solid brass. A couple of weeks ago Mrs. Imagethief and I were sitting at the dining room table when we heard a strange scrunching noise echoing through the house. It took us a minute to figure out where it was coming from. The squirrel was sitting on the alley gate under the tree and gnawing on my house. Just gnawing on my fucking house.

    The squirrel is pure evil. The squirrel dug up the flower pots. The squirrel ate the strawberries off the vine. The squirrel emptied all of the sunflower seeds out of the bird feeder and then, I swear, he laughed at the birds. This squirrel would shoot a man just to watch him die. If he had opposable thumbs, that is, and not cute little squirrel hands.

    I once though of houses as permanent, enduring objects. But now that I own a house, that turns out to be an illusion. The house is really just the contours of the front lines in a foolhardy war that I declared on nature the moment I signed my mortgage papers. Its shape is sustained only so long as I fight. Nature’s arsenal is earthquakes, weather, the tree, the squirrel, the rats, termites, mold, moisture, time and the simple inevitability of thermodynamics. Mine is whatever meager shekels are left in my bank account after a Silicon Valley down payment. In the long run, nature is going to win and claim the house. I win if nature claims me first.

    So you can mock this for the privileged rant that it is. But the fact is that, rich man, poor man, somewhere out there is a squirrel with hard eyes and a shiv with your name on it. Maybe you haven’t found him yet.

    But you will, my friend. You will.

    Is that my soul in your mouth?
    Is that my soul in your mouth?

  • Escape from the cavern of the credit Morlocks

    Note: Originally published on Medium.

    There are two kinds of people in America: those with good credit, and Morlocks who live below ground and emerge at night to steal your children. Returning to the US after my years abroad I found myself condemned to the underworld by one of the big wireless operators. I was in a carrier store trying to open a billed mobile phone account for my wife. How hard could it be? I’m a US citizen with a well-paid job at a brand-name company. I wore a shirt and shoes.

    The discussion went something like this:

    How long have you been at your current address? Oh really, that short? Well, where did you live before that? I’m sorry, where? Are you sure? I didn’t know Americans could live there. Anyway, since you’ve been in your current address less than six months I’ll have to run a credit check. What was your last address in the United States? Really? THAT’S NOT WHAT THE CREDIT BUREAU SAYS.

    And that was where things ground to non-negotiable halt. Twice.

    Six months out of graduate school and flat broke, I hadn’t been a deft steward of my own finances when I left the United States in 1995. I was underemployed and maxed on three credit cards, all charging student-card interest rates that fell somewhere between payday loan and the guy who broke your uncle’s kneecaps. I was also carrying enough student loan debt to notice, although not enough to make me a heartbreaking case study in one of those stories about how student debt is ruining America.

    In Singapore I got my first real paycheck ever, for an amount of money that seemed absurd at the time but was in fact a lowball tradeoff for the equity that was supposed to make me rich someday, but didn’t. I immediately did two things. Less responsibly, I ran out and bought a thousand-dollar, 29-inch 16×9 JVC tube television set. It weighed 80kg and seemed like a television from The Future. It had a remote control so complicated that the button-encrusted top flipped open like a door to reveal a whole second layer of buttons underneath.

    More responsibly, I paid off all my debts. As long as I lived in Asia I was never in debt again. I was terrifically smug about this, but it was less the product of saintliness and more the product of living in places where home and car ownership were simply impractical.

    In 2001, when I’d been in Singapore for five years, the state of California dunned my tiny brokerage account for money it thought I owed for 2000 taxes. This came as a surprise to me as I’d had no income in California since 1995, and precious little before then (though, as a self-employed writer, what income there was had been ferociously taxed). In a kind of reverse green card process, I assembled a mighty dossier to prove to the bureaucracy that I didn’t live in the US and had no interest in doing so. I eventually got the money back, but the episode convinced me that it might be a good idea to sever my remaining links to the suddenly grabby state of California. I closed my inactive brokerage account, cancelled all the credit cards and even let my driver’s license lapse.

    It seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, I had a Singapore credit card and driver’s license, and was getting paid in Singapore dollars and living most of my life in Asia. And I had little interest in moving back to the United States. What could go wrong?

    Smash cut to twelve years later as I stand in the Palo Alto shop of one of the major US wireless carriers, futilely explaining why I, an employee in good standing of a company they buy zillions of phones from, should be granted a post-paid account for my wife.

    Sorry, this is America, comrade. We don’t care how they do things back in Whereveritwasistan that you were living in, or how good your credit is with the Communists. In America the credit bureaus are the unseeing judge. The power on high. The remote, Olympian force that casually dispenses destiny. Woe betide the mortal who has had no apparent credit for more than a decade, and who gives a prior address that that doesn’t match up with whatever is etched into the Great Stone Tablet.

    What was etched into the Great Stone Tablet next to my name, I later discovered, was an address in Forest Hill, West Virginia. This was a surprise to me as I’d never been to West Virginia, let alone lived there. Apparently, one of my Singapore postal codes shared several digits with a zip code in Forest Hill, West Virginia. Who knew?

    I did what one does when the gods are displeased with you. I submitted a request to have my records corrected. With the credit bureaus at least you can do this online, and no goat sacrifice is called for (though they are not actively discouraged). Amazingly enough, my prayers were heard and sort of answered. My prior US address was amended to the correct one, and on my third attempt to get a phone line all my information was confirmed by the Great Stone Tablet. There was rejoicing and 4G connectivity. I’d never been so happy to get a bill.

    But a phone line was just the first, wobbly baby step in the reconstruction of my credit. After all, I was becoming a creature of the American suburbs again. Cars. A house. The respect and admiration of my peers. All of it would require credit.

    Though I had dissolved nearly every other aspect of my US financial existence, I had fortunately kept the checking account I opened in San Francisco in 1991. I’d like to say that this was some great act of financial foresight, but it was mostly to avoid fees when spending money on visits home. An American debit card also came in handy for buying stuff on iTunes when I lived abroad. When I moved back to the US I wired all my savings into that account. After years of wrestling with Chinese banks I am hard pressed to say anything good about any bank anywhere, and my US bank was deeply soiled in the collapse of the housing bubble. But due to my suddenly swelling account of long-standing they were willing to give me a new Visa card on the spot. And you know how it is with credit card issuers. Like a flock of crows, once one of them has its beak in you they all want a taste.

    The other cornerstone of my rising credit edifice was a car. My wife and I started car shopping in earnest a few weeks after arriving back in the US. We were prudent, restrained and utterly Silicon Valley in selecting a slightly used Prius in an un-manly shade of powder blue that demurely suggested, “I will never attract the attention of the police, so give it all you got.”

    As happens in the car buying process, the backslapping salesman handed me over to the finance guy with the slightly-too-wide smile who tried to up-sell me on the warranties, anti-scratch film, Scotch-Guard, and so forth. I was prepared to write a check for the full price of the car when he made his one and only successful up-sell: a loan.

    “We’ll finance it if you like,” he said.

    I made a kind of Scooby-Doo surprise noise. Uhhrrrr? Having been cowed into total surrender by the wireless operator that wouldn’t let me open an 80-dollar-a-month billed account, it seemed astounding to me that I could casually finance a car to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

    Ah, but this is the American car business. A car is a secured loan. Cars are a pillar of the economy. They’ll finance a dead body to buy a car in the US of A as long as it can twitch enough to make an ink spot on the contract. They’ll even finance you, comrade, for the low, low rate of 4.5%.

    This is a totally obscene rate for a car loan, but I wasn’t disposed to ask too many questions. “Hey,” Wide Smile said, reading my mind with uncanny accuracy, “if you want to take out a mortgage someday, this will help.” So I twitched enough to sign on the dotted line.

    In fact, the ghosts of my no-credit years weren’t done haunting me. The Toyota dealer tried to pass my loan onto another giant, gruesome American bank. That bank sent me a letter that said, roughly, “We’d rather not, since you don’t seem to exist.” The dealer then tried their luck with a much smaller, regional bank, which was thrilled to take on my loan. I repaid their faith by paying off the loan in six months, before they could earn much from it. So maybe the big bank was on to something.

    Last month the reconstruction of my US credit hit its logical peak. I took out a mortgage so my wife and I could buy a little ranch house in Redwood City. This was what everything else had been leading up to. The point behind re-establishing credit in the first place. When I started the mortgage process I had been back in the US for a year and a half. I had a colorful assortment of credit cards and two car loans, one paid off and one active. I had credit ratings in the high-respectable band. When the mortgage broker ran my numbers, he positively glowed. “You’re gold plated,” he said. “Start shopping.”

    Ah, but we’d been here before.

    I’d applied for a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage because, let’s face it, interest rates aren’t going to get any lower unless civilization collapses. It was all green lights until it wasn’t. The mortgage broker called me and explained that the tawdry investment bank that buys their thirty-year fixed loans wouldn’t buy one with my name on it because I didn’t have three lines of credit that had been open for at least two years. I only had one. This, I assumed, was my Singapore Citibank Visa card of long standing.

    That meant switching to a ten-year adjustable mortgage because the broker’s company doesn’t resell those, and thus they require only one mature line of credit. And that, in turn, means refinancing sometime next year when my new credit lines are sufficiently grown-up, in order to not have to spend the next decade rooting for civilization to collapse so my ARM doesn’t blow up. Awesome. But at least the mortgage company ate the origination fees – a surprising display of remorse from a financial company, as all the evidence suggests that finance is the industry for which the term “remorseless” was invented.

    It turned out that the one sufficiently old line of credit that I did have was not my Singapore Visa card. As I’d always suspected, my superb overseas credit remained invisible to the American credit-industrial complex, which views everything outside the United States as rumor and innuendo. That helpful, lone line of credit that was the slender difference between mortgage and no mortgage was an old Chase Visa account I’d thought among those cancelled when I’d dismantled my American finances in 2001. An account for which I no longer have any records at all and which, the mortgage broker told me, hadn’t actually been used in more than a decade. I’d been haunted by the ghost of my old credit one last time.

    So here we are. Less than two years after failing to open a phone line for my wife, I have multiple credit cards. I have a car loan. I have a mortgage. I’ve gone from being debt-free and socking money into the bank to owing hundreds of thousands of dollars on an amortization schedule that lasts until my 77th birthday. All of this I desired.

    I’m assimilated. I’m indebted. The system loves me now, and wants me to borrow. If that doesn’t complete my return to America, what does?

  • Reverse Culture Shock and Other Myths

    Early last year I moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area after seventeen years in Asia. The number one thing people here asked me about that was, “What do you think of the Niners this year?” because, when push comes to shove, most of them would rather have a biopsy than hear about my weird foreign adventures in Far Far Away.

    Occasionally, someone would be reckless enough to express polite interest. In these rare cases, they often asked the same thing: was there reverse culture shock coming back to the United States after so long away? The answer they wanted was, “Yes. After my time in the far Orient, your customs and ways are strange to me. Please, what is a ‘Chipotle’?”  Unfortunately for them, the answer they got was: Maybe.

    It all depends what you mean by “culture shock.” If you mean grand mal culture shock, that overwhelming alienation and disorientation that leaves you babbling and wide-eyed, the answer is no. I know what that kind of culture shock feels like because I had it when I moved to Singapore in 1995 and again when I moved to Beijing in 2004. In both cases I was incoherent for weeks. I spent my first months in Beijing staggering around in a daze with my language school classmates like a herd of stunned, white sheep who could communicate only by bleating and clustering together for safety. Just ordering successfully in a restaurant was a nerve-wracking triumph.

    It was also a huge amount of fun. Culture shock is inextricable from adventure, and I’m nostalgic for that time. One reason I moved to Beijing was to recapture the excitement that faded over the years in Singapore.

    As cultural stunts go, China was an epic win. I became competent at living and working there, but the sense of adventure never did fade. One of China’s charms is an enduring, vaguely hallucinatory quality that drapes over even mundane experiences, like a paisley bedspread over an old, vinyl sofa. It has a way of keeping you just a bit off balance, which makes life interesting.

    Or maybe it’s just me. But, at any rate, after nearly a decade there I left and returned to Silicon Valley, which has hallucinatory qualities of its own. Hence, one might think, reverse culture shock. America! Guns, God and Google busses!

    But for modern expatriates I don’t think reverse culture shock is a thing. Maybe if, in the days of the British East India Company, you spent six months sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and thirty years in the malarial subcontinent surrounded by glowering sepoys while your family died of cholera one-by-one, you might have reverse culture shock when you got home to find that James Watt had invented the steam engine in your absence.

    But in the twenty-first century? Hallucinations notwithstanding, I had the Internet, regular visits home, and easy if not always entirely legal access to the bounties of American media and pop culture. Say what you will about Facebook, but it keeps you from feeling all that far away. When I moved back to Palo Alto everything was pretty much right where I left it. The town was richer, sleeker and more self-infatuated, but, under the surface, recognizably the same place I’d grown up in.

    The essence of expatriate life in China is overcoming friction and petty annoyances. Air. Traffic. Dubious food. Spitting. Temporary residence certificates. Endless massage and pirate satellite TV flyers under the front door. Banks. God help me, the banks. Ability to reconcile oneself all of this, and even to find the humor in it, separated the foreigners who would thrive in China from those who would stagger back to Hong Kong or home after six months.

    With a few exceptions, like a nonexistent credit rating, life back in Palo Alto felt frictionless. And we didn’t just move back to my hometown, we moved back into my actual childhood home. Specifically, my mother’s house, where I had last lived in 1988. We did this because we were advised to not change our address while Mrs. Imagethief was applying for her green card, an experience that is not hallucinatory in the slightest unless you hallucinate paperwork.

    Extended-family living led to some tension, several awkward weeks and a few intense discussions about boundaries and space. I’d venture that family shock was more traumatic than culture shock for me and Mrs. Imagethief, who had to deal with that most delicate of Asian family dynamics, that of the daugher-in-law parachuted into the mother-in-law’s home turf.

    Still, it worked out OK, and proximity to family has been one of the great joys of the return. Especially since we got our own place, which is, neatly, close enough to my mother to be filial, but far enough away that she can’t smell the sambal frying.

    As I think back on my first year back in the Valley, there were really only two moments when I was flummoxed into total immobility in a way that happened to me on a more or less daily basis my first few months in China. Both times involved that particular American pathology, overwhelming choice.

    The first time was in the beer aisle of the Noe Valley Whole Foods in San Francisco, on my way to watch the 2013 Superbowl at my father’s house in the city. When I left the United States there was no craft beer movement, per se. In college we drank two-liter Sapporo mini-kegs. The less said about that the better. If we were particularly flush we might pick up a case of Henry Weinhardt’s or Moosehead, which was exotic because it was from far Canada. When I moved abroad, in 1995, you could demonstrate your upscale credentials by drinking Sam Adams, or Anchor Steam, or, if you were feeling dangerously sexy, Red Hawk or Sierra Nevada.

    In Singapore we didn’t drink beer because it was too expensive. In China all we drank was Yanjing, the local brew from Beijing’s northern suburbs. It was cheap, watery swill, but that meant you could pack it away pretty much all evening long without becoming too wasted. This had certain advantages when devouring some incandescent Hunanese feast on Beijing’s sultry, summer evenings.

    In the Noe Valley Whole Foods I stood staring at label after label, each of which was some variation on the formula eccentric behavior + humorous animal + character-filled-location + IPA. Prancing Piglet Barn Brewed IPA. 10% alcohol by volume, 90% hops. Take that, you lager-sipping, orientalist pansy. I hope your skull doesn’t cave in.

    I stood there gawping at the beer menagerie for five minutes. As god was my witness, I had no idea what to buy. There wasn’t a case of Henry’s in sight. Mrs. Imagethief suggested I, you know, ask for a recommendation. But asking a supermarket clerk for a beer recommendation is like asking another man to measure your penis. It’s just not something you do outside of the Frat House. I’m an adult American man. I’m supposed to know which fucking beer to buy.

    Mrs. Imagethief broke the logjam by picking more or less at random. It was fine (though hoppy), and after a year of intense counseling from my brothers I’ve developed a working familiarity with craft brews that enables me to function in San Francisco social circles without making too much of an ass of myself.

    The second time I was paralyzed in my tracks was the first time I ate at one of the free employee restaurants at a glamorous Silicon Valley company that shall go nameless. I finished my meal and dutifully carried my tray to the drop-off, where I was confronted with the most dizzying array of waste receptacles I have ever seen. In China there was pretty much one waste receptacle. About two thirds of the time, it was the ground or a randomly placed pile. In the rare places that had multiple receptacles discipline was loosely observed since everyone understood that, regardless of what you threw where, China’s informal economy was going to handle the sorting more efficiently than you ever could.

    In the employee cafeteria I gawped at six color-coded bins like a thunderstruck hillbilly while sleek young people effortlessly navigated according to some politically correct recycling code that my decrepit, Yanjing-poisoned brain failed to resolve. I waited for a lull, checked to see if anyone was looking, furtively tipped everything into “landfill”, and sidled out while trying to maintain a facade of earnest, environmental conscientiousness.

    Beer and recycling. That’s what counted for culture shock upon returning to the Bay Area. There have been other struggles, but most of them have been logistical in nature rather than cultural. Coming home doesn’t have the glamour or romance of hurling oneself into the smog shrouded, neon-lit nights of Beijing. In its own way, the Valley may be every bit as strange. But even after so many years away, it’s still home.

    Note: I have copied forward the comments from the original post.

    10 Responses to Reverse Culture Shock and Other Myths

    1. Pingback: As Cultural Stunts Go | Simpson’s Paradox
    2. 阿江 says:
      May 17, 2014 at 7:50 AM

      Just to be an @$$, I make sure people know I’m foreign by asking about Chipotle, but pronouncing it as “Chuh-poe-tuhl”. Then, watch their eyes widen, and jaws drop.

      But seriously, even if you started getting a hankering for things from China, there are so many Chinese enclaves in California. You got a 99 Ranch Market in Mountainview, you can get your 火鍋 fix in Milpitas (where there’s another 99 Ranch market), the only difference would be paying bay area prices–that’ll make your wallet cry.

    3. Jen Brown says:
      May 17, 2014 at 8:10 AM

      What a great post. Great description of the joy of serious Asian culture shock. I laughed out loud at the bit about real reverse culture shock being returning and finding that the steam engine had been invented!

    4. Michael says:
      May 17, 2014 at 10:41 AM

      A very thoughtful post. Well done. I have sometimes wondered what going home would be like. Well, only wondered. Not enough to actually pack up and return the way you have.

    5. John Pasden says:
      May 17, 2014 at 3:25 PM

      Loved this post! Thanks or sharing. I have no plans to return to the US anytime soon, but I often wonder what would “shock” me back there.

      I’ve experienced the craft beer reverse culture shock on trips home, too! Fortunately I’ve always gone to the grocery store armed with beer recommendations for friends, and didn’t get too beerstruck.

      Interesting about the cafeteria thing… Google in Shanghai has probably 2-3 waste receptacles in their cafeteria, which I imagine is a compromise between “normal China” and what happens in the California Google campus.

    6. Ryan says:
      May 17, 2014 at 5:07 PM

      Great post, 18 months was a long wait, but well worth it.

    7. Kate says:
      May 18, 2014 at 4:20 PM

      Great post! Most people that moved to California from China don’t seem to have culture shock, I’ve observed. Try moving somewhere else, it is a bit more difficult. China has a fuzzy, warm hallucination – any problems and ayi will take care of it. In the U.S., the hallucinations are like cold water in the face: Home Depot staff, insurance brokers. What language are they speaking? Good luck!

    8. FOARP says:
      May 20, 2014 at 4:50 PM

      Good post. Personally, if there was anything resembling reverse culture-shock, it was back in 2005 when I first returned to the UK for a few months after finishing my Chinese studies, when I discovered that:

      1) No-one wants to hear your humble-brag-laden expat stories.

      2) That protective blanket/fish-in-a-goldfish-bowl feeling you have as an expat is gone.

      3) People genuinely aren’t that impressed by the fact that you’ve lived overseas and learned the language. If anything it marks you out as a bit strange.

      Back in my Taiwan days, in 2001, when British beers and foods were almost impossible to come by, and when calling home involved standing in the middle of the street using the pay-phone at my local 7/11 waiting for my phone-card to run out, yeah it was just about possible to feel pretty far away from home. Globalisation and technological advances pretty much did away with that.

    9. Andy says:
      May 26, 2014 at 6:38 PM

      Interesting that your examples are both to do with choice. I also happened upon this TED talk today, that provides a window into cultural differences in perceptions of choice:http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_on_the_art_of_choosing

      For my part, I found that it was more of a ‘shock’ moving back to the UK from the US, than it was moving from China back to the UK. I put this down to my expectations of similarity – making the differences stand out all the more.

    10. GP says:
      May 28, 2014 at 5:41 AM

      Hi Will, we met a few years ago at AmCham’s MAP Forum through Zeke. I just moved back to Georgia a few months ago. Georgia feels pretty much the same as when we left. Most obvious changes to me were all related to food — similar to what you mentioned. My father-in-law remarked that his generation was all about the music. Ours is food. When in China, I loved calling myself a foodie. Here, I just whisper, “I love eating, that’s all”.

      Though my most embarrassing thing so far is going shopping, thinking I was signing up for one of those membership cards that give you discounts, and then exiting the store 15 mins later with a bloody new credit card, much to my husband’s chagrin.

      I miss China sometimes, but America’s pretty awesome. Have fun in San Francisco!