dictates that we first go for information to our peers. We trust people most like us, who are in the know or who have experienced what we are looking to find out, to inform us best. Failing that, we look for people who we do not know, but who are also, in their own way, experts. This can take the form or an agency, an organization, or internet support groups. Only when have we exhausted the human resource do we turn to print.
Many aspects about living in Shenyang have brought this to the forefront of my mind. Certainly, professionally, I feel completely lost. My personal resources to the South have been helpful, but on occasion the information I've received has been confusing to the point of being almost a hindrance. Help from outside China has certainly been wonderful (Jay! Linda! Thank you!) but cannot necessarily speak to the specifics of my situation. The great firewall, too, has been a thorn in my side. However, more that professionally, where I have found this lack of information most, has been personally.
I may have mentioned (repeatedly) that we're pretty isolated out here. The school is extremely remote. We are a complete novelty here; while it happens less and less as people get used to us, the first few weeks here involved people almost getting into traffic accidents as they turned to stare at the strange pasty faces that had appeared in their village. Some of us are learning a bit of Chinese better than the rest of us, but we still aren't able to communicate well with a population, both in the village and in the city, that almost universally only speaks Mandarin. Do a quick search on Shenyang through Google...or Altavista...or Clusty...or.... You now know what I know about Shenyang, ie. very little. And guidebooks also are not a wealth of help.
Now, we have roughly 20 people in the middle of nowhere, who have lived, worked and socialized exclusively with each other for two months. We need some outside stimuli before we start turning lord of the flies on each other. But, to review, in a city with 7 million people, we have no one, no groups, no internet and no print guides telling us where we might find people we can communicate with. What would you do?
For the last few weeks, a small group of us have been hitting the various bars listed on the 'tourist map' handed out by the Holiday Inn. Over three separate nights, we have started at one bar and found it either completely empty of people at all (on a Friday night! the horror!) or populated only with Chinese peoples. We have a drink, and then move on to the next bar. If we're lucky, we run into a Westerner - usually an older business man who spends a month or so every year in the city, and we follow a tip they give us to somewhere that turns out to be equally unsatisfying. To say it has been an exercise in frustration is an overstatement. Hope is an intensely powerful thing and as the nights have progressed, and we've become more and more depressed, we've moved faster and faster from bar to bar to nightclub to nightclub, desperately wanting the next one to be the one that would be that Shangri-la of western life. And, inevitably the nights have ended with us in a ridiculously camp techno club at 3am, making the best of the situation. The experience, possibly more than the lack of steady water or power or heat or professional issues, has been completely demoralizing. Stockholm syndrome like, we've become a pretty tight group, but I think I speak for everyone when I say that the realization that none of us might not have anyone else to empathize, socialize or generally break us out of our insular world a little bit, has become truly a depressing reality.
Last night, though, we hit gold. Following a lead from a local English-speaking Chinese friend, we went to a bar where...and I cannot fully express how much this meant...there were Westerners. Who live here. And are in the know. After slowly becoming convinced that the 20 of populated the entire Shenyang ex-patriot community, we were suddenly talking to people who a) weren't us, b) had an incredible wealth of insider information, c) provided us with hope that there were even more people out there in this situation, and d) were a really great group of people to talk to. And so, information-seeking behavior asserts itself. Through a person in the know, we were able to find a place where we found the truly best source of information - a peer group.
And, as an added bonus, I've got a lead on possibly the only bakery in Shenyang that sells real bread! In fact, I'm off to track it down now.
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