By Robin Pascoe
Summary:
Robin Pascoe shares an excerpt from her book "A Broad Abroad: The Expat Wife's Guide to Successful Living Abroad". She offers advice for new expat spouses.
"Mom says there is no way she is ever doing this again," seven-year-old Lilly announced to her father after stepping off the Dragon Air flight from Hong Kong to Beijing.
"Hi, dear." That was all I could manage to mutter. My resentment and exhaustion combined to give me a kind of distorted look of despair. "We made it." Barely.
My daughter was confirming a theme I had mentioned too many times to my children during the marathon of flying we had just survived over the previous three days. ("Remember I said this," I ranted. "I'm never doing this alone again. I must have been crazy to agree to this!") My husband had headed out to Beijing two weeks ahead of his "dependents." I had chosen to remain behind in Canada, ensconced at a rented cottage, absorbing and savouring a few extra weeks of Canadian summer culture. It had been marvellous and therapeutic after a stressful year in Taipei. In Canada, we could be like the party people in the beer commercials, except without the beer: the last to leave the beach, the compulsive gas barbeque users, the credit card abusers.
Arriving at Beijing's then sleepy and less than upscale airport, especially after Hong Kong's old, crazily frenetic Kai Tak (the airport old-timers wax poetic over because you could literally reach out and touch the laundry hanging off an apartment building in Kowloon), I was not a pretty sight. I was a woman who had just flown halfway around the world, on non-stop flights of twelve hours or more, with two young children, too much luggage, and too little mental energy to absorb yet another change in housing…..
You Made It!
At last, after months of taking care of the endless details of an international move (which in the real world would qualify you for a job as a chief executive officer of a major corporation), you are now about to tackle the challenge of settling into a new city, a new culture, new living quarters, a new life.
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First Published: Sep 26, 2009
