Thoughts On Living In China

My journey abroad has come to an end. What began with a 15-hour flight to China stuck in the middle seat ended with a return flight across the Pacific with a row to myself, not a bad trade-off if you ask me. 

It’s been a wild four months. From nearly got trampled by horses in Tajikistan, to avalanche encounters along the Afgan border, to ripping ATVs across the deserts of Dubai, to witnessing first-hand the shit show that was Hong Kong 7’s when PFT and Donnie were wacked of their faces on MDMA, to being offered to take part in a group orgy at a bar in Cambodia, the same bar where my heart felt like it was going to explode after accidentally chasing two shots of absinthe with two packets of caffeine powder equivalent to the amount in 12 red bulls. Now I know how Len Bias must have felt before, well, you know…

It was a truly Crusoe-esque journey, and to wrap it all up I spent my last three days in China in the middle of nowhere at their version of Burning Man, where Donnie and I lived in the woods on rations of uncooked ramen noodles, lost our minds in a trip tank, and pirated a fake yacht in the middle of a heavily polluted lake.

After all that’s happened I’m excited to be back in America. However, there’s a lot I’ll miss about China. The food was incredible and insanely cheap. I’ll miss the excitement of walking into a restaurant, pointing to some random Chinese characters on the menu and having no idea what I was about to eat. Sometimes it was the less desirable boiled chicken intestines, and sometimes it was spicy peanut butter noodles where the smell alone would make your mouth water.

I’ll miss the juxtaposition of the old world with the new. Bamboo scaffolding was used to build skyscrapers. I’ll miss climbing through these scaffolding jungle gyms onto the rooftops of Shanghai. I’ll definitely miss the ease at which I could access these rooftops of the city. Doormen and security guards never stopped me, whereas in New York you need to climb fire escapes, run through emergency exits, and sneak into service elevators all to get a decent view of the city.

I was able to get away with a lot of shenanigans in China and that’s really what I’ll miss the most. My two all-time favorite stunts were when I impersonated an air pollution specialist and gave speeches all day at a middle school in China, and, quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve done to date, attempting to spend a night in a Chinese IKEA. 

With the good always comes some bad: here’s what a won’t miss about living in China. Let’s start with the internet. Living in a country with censored internet got extremely frustrating. Without a VPN, which made already slow internet speeds even slower, I couldn’t use Youtube, Google, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Wikipedia, Venmo, Pornhub… Basically, every website you use on a daily basis is blocked. I remember one day the VPN I was using completely stopped working and let me tell you once you go a few days having to use Bing you really come to appreciate the modern convenience of Google. (Side note, Tinder got pretty weird over there)

You know what else I won’t miss? A sky full of smog. Being able to step outside and take a breath of fresh air without the fear of inhaling millions of pollutants is a pleasant change of pace. Although I will say if they weren’t slowly turning your lungs black, smogsets look pretty cool.

Weed. Getting high in China is not really a thing. The government has had a crazy crackdown on the pot in recent years. Any possession of weed is instant jail time. At any point, if the government wanted to they could give you a drug test, but it’s not a simple piss test which can be easily passed. No; when they give you a drug test they pull out all the stops and give you a fucking hair test. Weed stays in your hair for 90 days, making it a very easy test to fail. And if you do happen to fail the drug test the Chinese government will put you in jail for 14 days, and then make you leave China permanently. Think about that for a second, for just having smoked weed one time in the last three months you could go to jail. That is fucking crazy.  However, 14 days in jail sounds very doable. If the sentence didn’t come with being banned from China permanently I would totally fail a drug test and go to jail for 14 days. That would make for one hell of a story and for one hell of a video.

Also, I didn’t like the weird facial recognition systems they have in place in China. My information is in all kinds of databases within the Chinese government. There is no such thing as being off the grid over there. They have access to everything from your personal messages to what you ordered on Chinese Amazon the other night. I had a French friend who got pulled over by the Chinese police for running a red light on his bike. The officer scanned his face and all his personal information came up, passport info, where he lived, how long he had been in the country. That’s some crazy shit. I know people here are paranoid that the government is watching everyone, which to a degree I’m sure they are, but China is on a whole nother level.

A lot of people have asked me if my view on America has changed after having seen other parts of the world. I think a lot of them are hoping I will answer that I don’t think America is that great of a place. I will say this: traveling has made me appreciate America a lot more. I’ve met people who would give an arm and a leg just to get the chance to live in America. Jamol, our guide in Tajikistan, has been trying to get a green card so he can come to America and become a truck driver. Our political system may be difficult and frustrating at times but I’ll take difficult and frustrating over communism or an absolute monarch any day of the week. We have the ability to openly disagree with our political leaders—try and do that in a lot of other countries and you’ll never see the light of day again.

All in all its good to be back, but I think I can speak for big Donnie too when I say that after a few months in the States you get the itch for another crazy adventure overseas. I’m not sure where the next one will take us, but I’ll be ready to grab my camera and go whenever when that moment comes.