The Relationships of a "Long-Term Foreigner"
Three Thanksgiving meals in three days is a bit too much gratitude. But I do feel lucky getting to spend time with these lovely people in Shanghai. 🫶
Thinking in threes, I’ve recently been ruminating about the three types of relationship that have defined my experience as a “long-term foreigner”.
1) Relationship to locals.
Integrating into local communities is the most basic aspect of life as a foreigner. And yet it’s arguably the trickiest, especially if your partner is also foreign. I’ve been better at this in the past, like when I was young and single in Japan, or when I was an office employee in Singapore. But these days I think I’ve integrated quite poorly. I have a good number of Chinese acquaintances, and I love my everyday interactions with Chinese people of all descriptions. But deep and close friendships? Not many. Not enough. I attribute this to a combination of personal factors. But I could also substitute the word “factors” for the word “excuses”. I need to make more of an effort to nurture these friendships.
2) Relationship to other foreigners.
Belonging to networks of other foreigners is another key element to this long-term lifestyle. Because it’s grounding to match your specific life experience to those around you. Simple as that. And yet what makes these friendships highest in relatability can also be what makes them highest in unpredictability. Many don’t stay in the same place for extended periods. I’m grateful to be able to travel the world and catch up with a diaspora of international friends. But that’s a luxury. The plates that need the most regular spinning are the ones belonging to this category of relationship in Shanghai.
3) Relationship to authority.
At certain points in your existence you need to butt up against the authorities. These interactions are what help you understand the wider society in which you live. And how welcome you are. And what particular combination of control, competence and corruption makes things tick along in any one place. In an ideal world, the work of an authority figure should be like the work of a Hollywood movie editor. Their job is to keep the story running smoothly and cohesively, and if they’ve done their job correctly then you shouldn’t even notice them at all. And that’s all that I’m going to say about that.
I’m writing this as a “long-term foreigner”, but that’s the stealth phrase that I’m using for the word “immigrant”. Whether or not you relate to either identity, I hope that reading this helps you give a little extra grace to the foreigners in your midst.
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Texas & Louisiana Road Trip
One weekend in Austin, TX; one weekend in New Orleans, LA; and a whole lot of road in between.
I tried to keep the travel video compilation short, but I’ve failed miserably. So it’s an embarrassing indulgence to post it. If you watch only one bit, please let it be the swamps of Louisiana (around the 11-minute mark), they were an unexpected highlight. Of course the *expected* highlights were the family wedding in Austin, and the party in New Orleans.
00:00 Austin, Johnson City & Elgin (TX)
04:46 New Braunfels (TX)
04:54 San Antonio (TX)
05:08 Luling (TX)
05:23 Schulenburg (TX)
05:44 Houston (TX)
06:51 Beaumont (TX)
07:47 Lake Charles (LA)
08:20 Lafayette, Avery Island & Breaux Bridge (LA)
11:41 Baton Rouge (LA)
12:13: Laura Plantation (LA)
12:40 New Orleans (LA)
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High-Functioning ADHD
After putting it off for years now, I finally went to a specialist in Shanghai and got officially diagnosed with ADHD. At this point it came as no surprise to me whatsoever, but that’s because I’ve learnt what high-functioning ADHD actually looks like. So before you jump in with the thought “isn’t everyone attention deficit these days?” (which is exactly how I first reacted), see this list of symptoms. You may think a few of them are relatable. But if, like me, you’re off the scale on all seven, then you might want to embark on the same research journey that has led me here.
1. Overcompensation through perfectionism - using strict organisation systems to cover for inadequacies, and obsessing over small details to avoid mistakes.
2. “All-or-nothing” productivity - alternating between hyperfocus and avoidance. Avoidance (and burnout) often mistaken for mild depression.
3. High creativity and idea generation, coupled with a baseline level of inconsistency - achieving great results but not always on a reliable basis.
4. Strong verbal or social skills - masking inattentiveness or impulsivity by being articulate, charming, or funny.
5. Emotional sensitivity - a hypervigilance to rejection, and also prone to impatience and frustration. Often mistaken for anxiety or mild bipolar.
6. Obsession with fairness - perceiving injustice more frequently and intensely, and showing stronger emotional and behavioural responses.
7. Chronic self-criticism - a sense of “I should be doing better,” despite good external achievements.
In short, I’ve seen it defined as “Someone who appears successful but is secretly exhausted from keeping all the plates spinning. They may not fit the stereotype of hyperactive and distracted, but underneath there’s a lifelong struggle with attention regulation, impulsivity, and time management - hidden behind effort, intelligence, or external structure.”
I still have many of the signs of classic ADHD: the excitability, the irritability, the forgetfulness, the oversharing, the trouble with auditory processing, the intrusive thoughts on constant loop. But this high-functioning version is all about laboriously trying to conform to the norm, and masking the feeling of shame about your true nature. That’s an all-too-familiar feeling for a gay guy who grew up in the eighties. So I’ve decided to “come out” today. To help spread awareness, and also to be totally honest and accountable to myself. Pictured is the trial course of medication I’ve just been prescribed, but I don’t think I’ll continue. Partly because I don’t need to be consistently productive these days, and I’m already regulating myself with a daily dose of self-awareness. But also because China has assigned this drug as a class one controlled substance, requiring regular face and passport scans to procure very small amounts at a time. And you don’t need ADHD to have zero patience for that… 😬
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Ten Years of One Seconds
I’m just about to reach the ten-year anniversary of moving to mainland China. The realisation that I’ve lived over a fifth of my life here is… sobering. But what it also means is that there’s another milestone to record: ten whole years of daily one-second videos. That’s 3,653 seconds, over an hour of one-second diary entries. (And yes, that means there were three leap years: 2016, 2020 and 2024). I Benjamin Button-ed it and put the whole thing in reverse (and on speed). It’s impossible to watch, I’m just posting it here for posterity.
It started on a solitary walk in Hong Kong, I listened to a podcast interview with the founder of an app called 1 Second Everyday and decided to download it and record my first video. That was 10th October 2015.
2015
I thought I would use the app simply to record my gradual transition between living in Hong Kong and Shanghai. According to the paperwork, my residency in Shanghai officially started in October, but I counted my flight from Hong Kong on 13th Dec 2015 as my first day in Shanghai. (That’s why these annual compilations always start on Dec 13th).
2016-2017
For these next couple of years, I continued using the app, capturing my life as an international headhunter. My life was in Shanghai, but I spent over a third of my time overseas.
2018-2019
After stepping back from my company, I started studying Chinese and also launched a podcast. I see these as the years during which I finally integrated properly into life in Shanghai.
2020-2022
The COVID years were sometimes tough, but you couldn’t ask for a better education about how China works. The podcast continued, and I also completed a Masters in Chinese Philosophy.
2023-2024
The post-COVID “PTSD years”. Still enjoying life in Shanghai, but now with a slight sense of dislocation, and with eyes to setting plans for the future.
Of these 3,653 seconds, 2,902 were in my home city (the first 40 while home was Hong Kong, then 2,862 in Shanghai), and 751 were from travels. So a fifth of my time - or, a full two years out of ten - were spent traveling away from home. That’s a bit of a shock. 3,004 seconds were in mainland China, and the next five places were USA (157), Hong Kong (95), Japan (62), UK (52) and Singapore (49). There are altogether 42 territories represented, in this order: 🇭🇰🇨🇳🇬🇧🇸🇬🇺🇸🇲🇽🇰🇷🇮🇳🇯🇵🇦🇹🇬🇷🇵🇷🇻🇮🇰🇳🇦🇼🇨🇼🇻🇬🇨🇦🇹🇭🇦🇪🇧🇭🇰🇼🇶🇦🇴🇲🇪🇸🇮🇩🇱🇧🇹🇷🇬🇪🇦🇲🇲🇲🇧🇩🇫🇮🇪🇪🇦🇺🇨🇿🇲🇹🇵🇹🇲🇻🇳🇱🇸🇦🇮🇹.
But my favourite seconds are not the ones from traveling, they’re the ones that capture life’s daily contrasts. Frenetic activity and blissful inactivity; loud celebration and quiet mourning; illnesses and accidents; adventures and misadventures… just the regular cycle of life, in tiny snapshots. They also chart the relationships: old relationships, new relationships, and now disappeared relationships. Social media has become more vile over these last ten years, but I have made an effort to continue using it for conscious connectivity. I hope the reason you’re reading this is that you feel the same.
It’s not just a video diary, the project now helps shape my lifestyle. I try to live life in the moment, waking up to the promise of a new adventure. Getting out of my own head, and continuing to keep curious about the world. Saying yes to experiences out of the house, even when my happy place is sitting on the couch next to my husband.
But more than that, it has become a gratitude project. I often take the time to look back at these compilations, to appreciate what I’ve done rather than constantly trying to chase the next novelty. I will always be that chaser. But I’ve realised through this project that happiness isn’t in the pursuit of the next glass of wine. Happiness is in the realisation that your glass is already full. 🍷
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Sixty in Sicily
I will never tire of seeing how people react when they learn of my husband's age. There's usually a mixture of shock, confusion, joy and jealousy. And now the game just got even better...
We concluded our epic two-week Italian trip with a 'Sixty in Sicily' celebration. Happy birthday Denny, and a massive thanks to everyone who could share the occasion with us. 🫶🥰
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Lakes and Mistakes in Lombardy
Our two full days at Lake Como were not without drama. Severe weather warnings (which luckily didn’t transpire); severe traffic snarls (which sadly did); a severe tyre puncture (which sadly did involve us); and a severe bike crash (which luckily didn’t). But we made it out in one piece, and the weight we put on through eating too much pasta 🍝 was offset by the weight we lost from our wallets. 💸
We needed to catch a flight from Milan, so we spent a half-day shopping in the city, and an evening meeting with a fantastic group of people. It’s a city that represents the commercial capital of Italy, so in that respect it reminds me of my home city of Shanghai. But that’s where the resemblance ends. There’s a much greater emphasis on lifestyle here, where slow food and quality time is prized higher than making money. And there’s a greater reverence for tradition… for good and bad. Heaven help you if you try to change the recipe for carbonara, or if you match the wrong condiment to a beloved regional dish. But that’s all part of the fun of Italy, and behind these little inflexibilities lies a lot of flair, imagination and warmth. 🫶🇮🇹
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Two Gentlemen of (Venice And) Verona
When we booked our weekend in Venice over six months ago, we had no idea that it would coincide with the annual Regata Storica (Venice Regatta). So having spent day one walking over 30,000 steps, it worked out perfectly to spend the second day mainly watching ornate boats go past us while sitting on our butts.
Since our onward journey had us traveling westwards, we took the opportunity to make a stop in Verona. It’s a beautiful UNESCO-listed city with Roman, medieval, and Renaissance architecture, and is famous as the romantic setting for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. But the main reason we stopped off there was so that we could use the caption: “Two Gentleman of Verona”. 🇮🇹👬🇮🇹
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Disney Anniversary
This was the moment I joined the surprise celebration to mark Denny’s 30th official year working at Disney. 😮
Very grateful to his amazing team for conspiring to bring me backstage. And very proud of Denny for reaching such an incredible milestone. 🥰
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Turtle Power Shower
Yes it’s my neighbour giving her pet turtle a bath. Nothing to see here. 👵🐢🫶
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Pride and Prejudice
It’s June, and that makes it Pride Month.
The most visible aspect of Pride are the marches, the celebrations, the rainbows, the silly spectacles. These often elicit eye-rolls and head-shakes. But they’re important symbols of a simple idea: the idea of living visibly, without fear. They’re visible aspects because Pride is about visibility. Visibility promotes familiarity, and familiarity is the best inoculation against hate and fear. That’s why Pride is not a party, and Pride is not a joke. It’s the ability for all of us to be part of public life. To not be threatened by thugs on the street. To not be denied access to employment, shelter or dignity.
Without Pride - without visibility - there’s lack of awareness. However innocent, this lack of awareness leads to ignorance, ignorance then leads to fear, fear to distancing, distancing to othering, and othering to dehumanising. From there it’s very easy for malevolent leaders to victimise us, scapegoat us, menace us. Segregate us, remove us from society, annihilate us. Of course that sounds hysterical, we’re not in 1940s Europe. But the playbook is still lying around in 2025, just waiting to be picked up.
There’s a reason I haven’t specifically mentioned the LGBTQ+ communities in this post. Because there’s somewhere in the world where YOU are the minority. Maybe you’re there right now. Maybe you have to imagine it. Or maybe you experience life as a minority, yet you still victimise others lower down the pecking order. Our leaders can only scapegoat enemies - of whatever identity or persuasion - if we let them. So please don’t be blind to what Pride means for us all in 2025.
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Barcelona and Location Independence
The biggest change I’ve noticed in Barcelona since I was last here seven years ago is the way its popularity has soared. I don’t mean as a travel destination, we all know about the city’s efforts to clamp down on over-tourism. I mean as a place for people to base themselves for work, especially now that location-independent careers have become more accepted since COVID-19. It’s an incredibly well-connected city, offering a balanced lifestyle, in a permissive culture-rich environment.
On the subject of location-independence, I need to forgo my usual British fake modesty for a second… because we were so far ahead of the curve on this when I co-founded ChapmanCG in 2008. Peripatetic and paperless, we were liable to pop up anywhere in the world, it’s no wonder that I still live these values six years into my retirement from the company. And if that means that for a short while I get to see the people in these photos - including Ben Davies, who we hired into the company 15 years ago - then I don’t yet see a reason to stop.
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Hong Kong is Still Badass
Comparing my previous home of Hong Kong to my current home of Shanghai is fairly straightforward. Both are sophisticated international Asian cities with vibrant culture, arts and food scenes. If anything they’re becoming even more similar, with comparatively less Cantonese and Shanghainese being spoken on their respective streets these days. Those businesses that didn’t learn how to pivot away from international consumers and cater more towards mainland Chinese tastes… are the ones that simply aren’t around these days. And the effect is arguably more noticeable in Hong Kong because of the high proportion of frugal day-trippers from across the border.
Having said that, on my recent visit back to Hong Kong I still heard lots of reassuring sing-song Cantonese amidst the argy-bargy Mandarin. And some things will always distinguish Hong Kong from everywhere else. Of course the city’s access to nature is unparalleled, I’ve personally only seen something similar in Vancouver and Zurich, but both are tame in comparison. The Chinese antiques for sale on Hollywood Road are the best and most plentiful you can find anywhere, there’s just no point mentioning any other city because nowhere comes close. And finally there’s that feeling you get when you learn how to navigate the maze of overhead walkways in Central, where your feet don’t need to touch the ground for miles. I’ve seen something similar in Minneapolis, which is both impressive and highly functional - it keeps you warm in the winter and gets you to where you parked your car. But Hong Kong’s human-centric city planning goes much further in making the little pedestrian feel like the king of the urban jungle, cowed neither by traffic nor topography. And that feeling is simply badass.
A big thank you to all the people who made time to meet up during my short visit, some of whom may not have described themselves as badass until now. And perhaps some who are shaking their head as they anticipate me writing the word badass for a third time, and for absolutely no reason.
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Six Doors Away
I lived six doors away from this boy until the age of 18. He had a ginger cat called Rex who could climb up the wallpaper with his claws, but not climb down again. We played Sonic the Hedgehog on his Sega Mega Drive. He had a little sister called Suhasini, who liked Boyzone. Their house smelt like chai latte. My house smelt like pork goulash. At mine we played Monopoly and Scrabble: here’s photographic evidence from August 1993 - I was already 16 years old but still looked 12. I wasn’t very popular at school. I can’t speak for Amrish, but I don’t think he was either. So it was good to have a default buddy to fall back on when we had nothing else to do at the weekend. I remember one day spending eight hours at the North Harrow Superbowl. They must’ve had a special summer daytime deal, we bowled until our fingers were raw. Otherwise I remember mostly going to the St. Ann’s Shopping Centre in Harrow-on-the-Hill. We watched movies and bought electronics and cheap clothes.
Then we didn’t see eachother for the next thirty years. We kept in touch electronically, and shared a passion for travel. Out of the blue I got an invite to his wedding. I was amazed and touched to receive it. I knew I probably couldn’t go, since I had no plans to be in London at that time. So I sent an immediate reply to apologise. But then I realised… there was actually nothing stopping me making the trip. And so here I am. This is the reason for my trip. I want to celebrate Amrish’s wedding to Anna. And I want to thank him for being an old friend.
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Why Visit Saudi Arabia?
I never imagined I would step foot in Saudi Arabia. But a decade in China has taught me that sometimes the challenges of living in a country with a certain reputation are maybe a little different than you might expect. And as someone who wants to remain open and curious about the world - a world which, let’s face it, might not remain open and peaceful forever - I wanted to see this place for myself.
What I learnt is that Saudi Arabia is undergoing an economic and social revolution that reminds me very much of China. Neither are democracies, and neither have planned their development based on models borrowed wholesale from the West. This engenders an inherent discomfort and distrust from many onlookers. Furthermore, the outside world judges them based on a certain basket of baked-in perceptions. Yet both have managed so much change - and in such incredibly short timeframes - that many of these perceptions are increasingly outdated. Not all… but many. I thought that China changed fast in the 2000s and 2010s, but Saudi Arabia of the 2020s makes this all look rather tame. It’s no wonder that many of the young and hungry international entrepreneur-types that used to be such a common sight in Shanghai and Beijing are now popping up in Riyadh and Jeddah.
I’m no deluded apologist about either system, both countries have myriad issues and it’s important to be critical when it comes to seeing what they can deliver over the coming decade. But “seeing” is indeed the first step, and I’m glad that I took a week to do so for myself. And speaking just as a visitor, I would also say that because the tourism industry here is so brand new, the Saudi sense of hospitality feels totally genuine, and not yet jaded by years of mutual ambivalence. So for that reason alone, it was well worth the trip.
I spent 6 days in Saudi Arabia: 3 days in Riyadh, followed by a flight to AlUla, a car to Medina, and a train to Jeddah. To summarise:
🌆 Riyadh seemed to me like one of those capitals where you’re always aware of your proximity to power. It’s this proximity that has afforded it lots of new trinkets and lavish infrastructure, but in exchange it feels a little... tightly-wound. People here know how to blow off steam, but they do so mainly within the perimeters of their private residences.
🛕 AlUla is being carefully and authentically developed as *the* premium tourist destination of Saudi Arabia. A blend of geological wonder and ancient civilisation, with a unique ambience and a modern eye for detail. The tourism industry is so new that the Saudi sense of hospitality feels totally genuine, and not yet jaded by years of mutual ambivalence.
🕌 Medina is the second holiest city in Islam after Mecca, and they’ve just started allowing non-Muslims to visit. (Mecca remains strictly off-limits). There are something like 20 popular mosques to visit, I ended up getting driven to five of them by an eccentric Yemeni taxi driver called Habib before heading to the train station.
🏖️ Jeddah is the Red Sea port city with a history of migration and openness. If Riyadh is the Beijing then Jeddah is for sure the Shanghai, albeit with better seafood. And if Medina represents the sacred, then Jeddah represents the swagger. Case in point: as I’m writing this on my flight out of Saudi Arabia, the Formula One weekend is kicking off on the Corniche.
Top 3 fun facts:
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia imports sand. The country is literally covered in it, but it’s the wrong kind for making concrete.
🇸🇦 The King Fahd International Airport is the largest in the world. At 9,080 acres, it’s bigger than the neighbouring country of Bahrain.
🇸🇦 There are no rivers in the whole of Saudi Arabia. It gets its water through desalination, wadis, and groundwater.
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The Permission Structure for Ignorance
The tariffs debacle is just another scaffold on a broader structure that has been carefully built over the last decade: the permission structure for ignorance.
Expertise is now widely derided, in favour of blind loyalty, bigotry and bluster. Economists can scream blue murder, but it’s fine to ignore them. Because we’re already ignoring experts in climate, vaccination, gender, war, immigration, the list goes on. The permission structure allows us to dismiss expertise, if labeled as ‘woke’, ‘globalist’, ‘deep state’ or ‘fake news’. Everyone with access to the internet has all the information at their fingertips. But it’s all for naught if we’ve been given permission to never seek out anything that challenges our biases and blind spots.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe in questioning authority, questioning norms, questioning everything. I believe in lively and fierce debate. But I also believe that we can’t become foot soldiers in the war against expertise. As individuals, we are all at the mercy of the purveyors of information and misinformation: they represent the foundation of this permission structure of ignorance. To have any chance of countering them, we all need to become armchair experts ourselves. Experts in media literacy. Experts in history, lest we neglect its mistakes. And experts in epistemology: the study of knowledge, belief, truth, evidence, and reason.
It’s a massive personal responsibility. But it’s fast becoming the hygiene factor of every social interaction we have.
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