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By Xie Hong
Supposedly I should be keen on immigration, for I am from a Hakka family whose tradition is traveling around. In fact, I didn’t plan to immigrate anywhere at first, because along with my growing older, I have gradually lost my curiosity and taste for practical adventures in an unfamiliar environment. Basically, my personality involves impulsion and perseverance and patience, but I am far from an adventurous man.
Of course, I am still curious about the foreign world, which seems contradictory to what I said above, but is very common for the middle-aged. Being curious, I mean, is from my own imagination, which has been developed from my miscellaneous and extensive reading, and from my habit of consuming Hong Kong TV and radio programs for many years. It seems that my consciousness has been reshaped by many cultural shocks and I have been living in foreign worlds for many years.
On the other hand, I am not new to the outside world, at least in the sense of its spirit, which is familiar to me. This spiritual communication in my imagination has become very important in adjusting my attitude towards going abroad and opening up. When I landed at Auckland airport, seeing low houses nearby, I felt a little bit disappointed, but soon I began to cheer up when I found the beautiful scenery around them.
What I saw justified what I had imagined about “the West,” and I even came to realize that the fairy tales I had read must have happened in such an environment, while the art of the oil painting must have been created in this scenery.
Fresh feelings of being clean, comfortable, bright and excited were just like the feelings of the year when my family went back to their hometown, Shenzhen, from inland China. I didn’t know what I was going to do in my future, but I was very sure that I had hopes for it. The most enthusiastic time was the period when I hadn’t settled down, and kept moving around, taking part-time jobs after school. I came here not to my further study; rather, I came here to observe the student life compared to that of my wife and others with similar experiences.
At that time, my wife had great expectations for the future: at the age of 40, she had resigned her job to study in a new country. Such an approach was common among mainlanders who fled to Shenzhen to make a new and different life. In the beginning, my wife regarded her study abroad as a rest or a break, and planned to go back home in a year or two and settled down again in Shenzhen. But she decided to stay in New Zealand before she had completed her second semester.
My attitude was unclear because I was more hesitant to start the second phase of a different life. It meant we had to start from scratch in New Zealand! Accordingly, I really didn’t like to make that decision, and kept it vague and ambiguous. “If you want, you could withdraw to Shenzhen whenever you like,” I told her. This was my attitude; besides, I could not give her more help.
Before her leaving for New Zealand, our life in Shenzhen was satisfactory and comfortable; I had made a long-term plan for my writing career, and had already achieved some great progress, so I always declined any long trips. After I resigned from the bank, I had planned to go to Beijing for a better chance; however, after my first-hand investigation, I found that it was not suitable for me to restart a new life in a new place because I could not adjust myself to certain circles of friends. After that investigation, I stayed safe in Shenzhen to continue the development of my writing.
Again I was now facing the same choice to make. This time I felt I was going to be uprooted; what was worse, this time we would go to an unfamiliar place millions of miles away. Although New Zealand was beautiful and tempting, being a realistic idealist, I was still not in a position to make a decision after my investigation. With my wife’s encouragement, I kept on travelling between Shenzhen and New Zealand. She always comforted me by saying, “A lot of people in New Zealand are indies like you.”
This was not very rhetorical, but it hit it off with me. The reason that I didn’t want to come to New Zealand was that I didn’t want to start from scratch again, and my life goal is not working to make a living, but to be able to achieve something big in literary creation which enables me to mount the top of the pointed pyramid of literature. The reason that I quit a good job at the bank was also for the above-mentioned goal.
After my wife graduated and found a job, I arranged my family’s immigration, and finally settled down in New Zealand, gradually finding many problems in our daily life which had been overlooked before. For example, after gaining our identity cards, my wife considered resigning and starting a business. Do you want to change your job? To do what? All of this had been considered as a holistic plan: my wife would have thought her working experiences in gardening and greenhouses would help her rent some tents for planting lettuce. We also ran around looking for the ideal vegetable field, and wanted to work in fast food restaurants so we could later open a shop of our own. And so on and so forth.
Finally, all plans failed us because after 2008, the global economy entered recession, and New Zealand was no exception. In the evening newspaper, the recruitment advertisements were dwindling, so we had to seek a different approach: my wife was reminded of her past in part-time cleaning job, and heard that early Chinese in New Zealand had earned their first bucket of gold in it, which had inspired our entrepreneurial passion; then we chose cleaning as our business.
In the beginning, it was hard for us, but it brought quite a nice income which enabled us to make an ambitious plan, namely, to pay our home loan debt within five years. Yet it was not as simple as we imagined. Although we worked hard and our service was of good quality, we found that as franchisees it was difficult to control our own business contracts, because we lost some of our customers for some weird reasons; later, we found out that it was a common trick for cleaning franchisees to not be able to control their own businesses! We kept our bitterness in our hearts and comforted each other by asking why we were so tired. Relax！
Such a situation would easily make someone give up on himself. I often reflected in my mind whether it was worthwhile to live such a life here and give up our comfortable home in Shenzhen. My wife worked very hard, and she even did the work for two people; for me, I was also constantly busy trying to find a better job opportunity, but before you are successful, when your pace of life is slowing down or stopping somewhere, you will surely have confusion in your heart.
Based on these experiences, when I was consulted by friends about immigration, I advised them to think carefully about it because it would involve more of their family affairs than expected, and they would have to be cautious. Still, this topic of immigrantion remains so tempting to them.
Some people think that since they have done well at home, why go abroad? But others argued with me, saying, “You say it is bad to emigrate, so why do you want to do it?” These questions make me really speechless. All I can say is, “Firstly, you need to travel for real experiences, and let other things speak for themselves slowly.” I added, “The environment is good, but the reality is cruel.”
That sounds scary to some people, yet no one is willing to accept it. The latter part of the sentence is the most easily overlooked. At the beginning, when someone said he would go to Shenzhen, did your friends express the same opinion to you? When they did settle down in Shenzhen, they all brought their expectations into truth. It was the same thing here. You have emigrated to New Zealand, but you tell them that New Zealand is not good, so how could you expect them to believe you?
One of my friends was such a good example: when she planned her emigration, I gave her a stern warning like that above; however, it was useless to her. After she had studied in New Zealand, she realized that it was a wrong decision, and then she had to go back to China, having wasted much money and time. Drawing a person out of their comfortable nest is a difficult thing, especially for the middle-aged who feel so good in their domestic life and should act prudently.
Before making such a decision, you must understand the purpose of your emigration. Do you wish to give your children a good start in life? Or to give yourself a new starting point? Or if you have been wronged at work or have suffered a failure in your business, do you bet you can restart them in a new place?
Based on my experience, the middle-aged should avoid such a crazy challenge. In New Zealand, if you want to find a good job, you have to earn a local degree, and you should spend more time and passion in job hunting. Most people still feel it very difficult. When I recalled my early days after moving from the mainland to Shenzhen, I was proud to say that I had tasted what was bitter in life. Like others who were in Shenzhen for a better life, I really did not fear any hardship; now, however, I have been changed and become really afraid of any suffering. Nonetheless, I choose to stay in New Zealand because I believe that my wife can bear any challenge we face.
Reviewing my earlier days in Shenzhen, those who went there held to their dreams, and for these they were willing to endure any hardship. Likewise, we have similar expectations in New Zealand. If you are as common as stars, if you have no important relatives or high social position, if you just depend on your own industry for a stable life, then you can emigrate to New Zealand as the best choice.
On the other hand, if you have a certain successful business in China and you want to start a New Zealand business, you should be very careful with your decision. If you have already made enough money, you are welcome in New Zealand, which will be a heaven to you; otherwise, without enough money, and doing a job you dislike, you can comfort yourself by saying, “Here we have safe food and other safe stuff; people here follow the rules, and everyone plays fair.” But at the bottom of your heart, there is always a deep sigh: your life here is still inferior to the comfortable old homeland one.
To be a migrant or not? There is no standard answer, indeed. It depends on your own case, or your attitude. Concerning our family moving from northern Guangdong to Shenzhen, it was not good for my father, but it was lucky for us kids. At last, of course, my dad’s retired life is lucky, too.
Xie Hong
Xie Hong was born in Guangdong, China. He is a novelist and poet, writing in both Chinese and English. He is the author of seventeen books, including nine novels. He has received numerous awards, including the Shenzhen Youth Literature Award and the New Work Award of Guangdong Province. His work has been translated into English and has appeared in English magazines, such as World Literature Today, Renditions, LARB China Channel, Pathlight, and introduced to Western readers through The London Magazine, Literary Hub, and so on. Xie Hong started writing in English in 2014. His debut English novel Mao's Town was published in 2018. Xie Hong graduated from East China Normal University in Shanghai, China, with a degree in economics, before spending time in New Zealand studying in English School of Waikato Institute of Technology. He migrated to New Zealand in 2008.
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