China around the corner

 

As i told few posts ago Kuala Lumpur is definitely an easy crossroads for any trip around asia. So why don't take the opportunity to visit few friends in Guangzhou ? Easier said than done.
Four hours flight with Airasia and there we are. Not much changes over there i thought, same culture, same food, similar weather, almond eyes everywhere and so on.
Guess i was wrong about it.
Culturally speaking China is still far away from any other south east asian country.
China has a unique identity, especially in the remote areas, made of its own customs and habits, where the communism still lingers in the air.
During morning time, around parks and gardens, it's quite easy to see elderly practicing tai chi, in a relaxed and quiet atmosphere; nothing to compare with the primary school children who tidily stand in front of their teacher in the school courtyard at 7.30 in the morning, obeying orders given by the speakers; a self prevention against obesity that in my opionion should be adopted everywhere. Diligence, respect and self-sacrifice they learn at school is something that i regret we lost many years ago in europe.
Anyway, although youngster generations bring relevant improvements, english is not yet a common spoken language, hygienic conditions standard are much lower than everywhere else, they hock up everything in their throat spitting it anywhere and everywhere and they burp after every sip.
As far as you move out of the main cities, they look at you like a star, a gwai lo as they say, as happened to me in Zhaoqing, Guangdong province and Ganzhou in Jianxi province.
By the way the food is delicious and still authentic compare to the standard average one that you can find in the malaysian chains. Warmth and friendliness embrace you as soon as a chinese mate introduces you to someone else, hospitality is still considered the best business card in china and it's quite common to sit on a sofa around a sumptuously decked table during a business meeting.

China might still need to walk through a tough path in order to be considered a "user friendly" country but for sure they are on the right way and the new generations seems to have understood that, although they are leading the world, they need relevant improvements.

Zhù hao yùn.

Lazy Malaysians

I found out that malaysians are generally quite lazy, let's say they rarely give the impression of making effort on what they do. There's is a evident lack of quality in this country, wherever you go it's easy to find something to complain about.

The maids generally won't clean properly, waiters are mostly unprofessional without any care for customers, bankers have limited knowledge, public officers are picked up randomly on the road and even though you point it out the outcome won't change. They nod to you and they keep going in the same way.

Quite often during my day at work i hear colleagues telling me "It's not my fault...I was not supposed to be in charge of that task....I was wrong because...you can't pretend me to work it out so fast...they didn't explain me properly so that's why i made a mistake...i thought it was enough..." and so on.

Once i've also heard "that task is not stated in my contract". WTF!

The frustration caused by such attitude makes quite hard to motivate and incentivate the staff. I've tried in vain so many times and used different ways.

There is no ownership of responsibility, nobody wants to improve.

I really can't understand the reason why they act like that, it most probably depends on their culture, i've noticed you can generally spot the same attitude in south east asia. It might not be related to the culture only then.  Are they just waiting for the next anglo-saxons colonizing generation ?

Chineses and Indians say that Malè people, also dubbed Bumiputra, benefit of preferential treatments in several fields; the government indeed reserves quota for them in the federal civil service, scholarships, educational, they can get access to better interest rates on fixed deposits, discount when buying residential properties, loans with low interest rates and so on. Even private limited companies are commited to hire a minimum quota of Malè staff.

Finally they are lazy because they don't need to strive to do their best at everything they do. Most of the private companies are run by chineses they say.

Fair enough i would say but still i'm not fully satisfied with this theory.

The laziness experienced so far is not limited to Malè race indeed. Most of my colleagues are chineses, waiters at mamak are indians only and maids are mostly filippino.

In my opinion the topic is more a trivial matter and lies in the fact that there is little demand for excellence and a much bigger demand for mediocredity in these countries.

So why do we strive for excellence when mediocrity is required ? 

Excellence causes competition and higher costs and they might not be able to deal with them.

They are easy to please, they live in a relaxed and easy going enviroment. The motto seems to be "why should i do something if i can wait to do it till tomorrow, thereby if i can do it tomorrow it's not so urgent and i might do it the day after tomorrow". 

As long as they can get their daily ration of nasi lemak and happiness without any commitment they probably won't struggle for a better life because they are aware it implies hard work.

the greener grass

Seems that the grass is always greener where you relocate as an expat.

After a quick repatriation in the beloved "Toy Land" i was looking forward to going back to the chaotic, dirty, humid and messy Kuala Lumpur. Frankly speaking when i was there just before leaving few weeks ago i wasn't so excited to go back home. Why ?

It doesn't matter where you come from or where you move to, the excitement of an expatriate is often as inexplicable as it is irrational. Suddenly the public transport are on time and clean, people abroad are open mind and polite, you won't feel stressed as you were at home, life is cheaper, no queue at the post office and so on...

Is it really true ? Not at all obviously.

I'm not talking about the indisputable economic wealth, efficient infrastructures and lifestyle of places such as Australia, Singapore, Shangai or NYC that actually help to improve the life quality. The matter indeed is a bit tricky. The fact is that we can't choose the place where we born and we used to take for grant that everything has to be as we wish there, if not we complain about it. And it is far easier to complain and criticize than to not.

So first of all we should consider the expectation we have before comparing our home town life with the one in the foreign land. Without high expectations there's nothing much to complain about.

Then you need to understand what you want and above all what you would be available to bear. Melbourne is the most liveable city in the world but if you're meteoropathic it might be a nightmare.

Generally the ability to adapt to a new place make the life easier and for some curious reasons expatriates are usually able to perfectly key to the new habits wherever they move to. Again KL is definitely a noisy, dirty and messy city but plenty of expatriates found it a nice place to live in.

We should then wonder if the itchy feet of expatriates (also called "ballo di san vito" in my region) make the grass greener in the foreign country. The continue desire to travel, discover and learn make the life abroad unreasonably better than home and what is ordinary suddenly become great,  deserving appreciation.

My opinion is that after few years, once you've digested the excitement of the new adventure, there is no place on earth that someone living there couldn't find fault with.  There is no best country overall. There's maybe just a country that better fit for your own temporary needs.

One year later, the story so far (flashback)

I have been in Malaysia since one year, exactly one year ago today.
It's been a great adventure and really the time has flown by.
So far it has been a completely different experience compared to the melbournian one and the dublinian quickie. The only common things concern the wrong driving side, the standing nights in front of the tv to support my soccer team and another anglo-saxons colonized culture to get use to (well, i haven't considered the 7 eleven shops managed by lazy indians).
I arrived on Sunday and the next Monday at 9am i was on my desk for the handover with a malaysian chinese who spoke a fast manglish, not even the time to realize where i was landed.

After 5 days i moved into an apartment and in few weeks i started driving a car, a beautiful (euphemism) perodua myvi, the hidden outcome of stressed designer committed by stingy CFOs i guess. In a while i got my working visa and it actually took 6 months to start realizing i wasn't in Italy anymore.

That's pretty much the result of a fast paced working life.

Anyway the day by day tasks kept me quite busy but it didn't prevent me to take few trips to Australia for a friend's wedding, Thailand, Singapore and some walkabout in Malacca. Few friends visited me as well as my family just after xmas. I started going to gym often and playing futsal quite regularly. Thanks to that i have also experienced the private medical treatment in Malaysia due to a microfracture of the malleolus.
I've become addicted to malls already, seldom if ever clubbing, i haven't experienced golf and badmington yet.  That's my ability to adapt to the malaysian laziness. 

Let's see how it goes lah!

expatriate vs immigrant : the misleading root

Recently i have been wondering why people consider me as an expatriate rather than an immigrant and looking for some tips about it i found out that the web community and social network have been talking over about this matter. But despite a lot of arguments i haven't found a satisfying answer yet.
Unfortunately in this case the latin roots doesn't help, indeed etymologically speaking there's not much difference between expatriate and immigrant.
According to wikipedia (“an expatriate  is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than that of the person’s upbringing"), you should expect that any person going to work outside of his or her country for a period of time would be an expatriate, regardless of his skin colour or country. On the other hand the majority contend the idea that it's not the case in reality; expat is a term reserved exclusively for western white people going to work abroad. One of the most provocative assumption read so far says that in the lexicon of human migration there are still hierarchical words, created with the purpose of putting white people above everyone else. One of those remnants is the word “expat”.
I think there's the precise intention to amplify a misleading racial discrimination issue with these discussions; the matter in this case is much more simple.
My country of origin has provided so many immigrants around the world and still now most of them proudly consider themselves italian immigrants. Argentina, Australia, Usa, Brazil, Germany are plenty of italian immigrants and, if not mistaken, we are white. So the word "immigrants" doesn't sound discriminating to me.
In my point of view it's not about the social class, country of origin or race. Basically the trick is in the common bad meaning attributed to the term "immigrant". Actually the purpose of the two different groups set the red line between immigrants and expats.
The purpose of an immigrant is to live permanently in a foreign land, leaving the native country because of economic, religion or conflict reasons. And this is exactly what is happening with afrikaans, south americans and middle east people. And the same happened during 50s and 60s for italians. Both in the past and nowadays they strive and struggle to escape from the native land due to the mentioned reasons, with the precise intention to acquire the new citizenship (in some case they also lose the origin country's one).
It's quite easy to understand then, regardless races, that British, Americans, Germans or Scandinavian have not these priorities at all thanks to the wealth conditions typical of such countries and the only reasons that bring them around the world are related to temporary business opportunities. They might set up later in the foreign country but we cannot consider them as immigrants because they still feel belonging to their origin countries and as i notice they live like they were still at home without any cultural integration.
Put in another way, immigrants may have a larger emotional commitment to their new place of residence.
In conclusion i could say that being an expatriate is a choice, but when you're forced to move then you become an immigrant.