In 2006, my wife and I traveled to China to adopt our oldest daughter. This summer our family returned to China for what the adoption community calls a homeland trip, the purpose of which is to give your adolescent child a chance to explore their birth country and its culture and, when possible, reconnect with any caregivers they may have had there.
It was an amazing trip, to say the least.
Prior to China, we spent a week in Taiwan, the birth country of our youngest daughter, whom we adopted in 2008. Though her homeland trip wasn’t really in the cards for a few more years agewise we figured we might as well work it in since we were going to be, in a manner of speaking, in the neighborhood.
Our itinerary in China took the four of us to cities such as Beijing, Xi’an, Chengdu, Guilin and Wuhan. We had been to Beijing and Wuhan previously (our daughter’s birth province is Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital) and in both cities, I was floored by level of growth and change that had occurred in the 10 years between our visits.
In 2006, when we journeyed the 150 kilometers from Wuhan to our daughter’s birth city with the other adoptive families in our travel group, it was a four-hour ride in an aging mini-bus over a narrow, poorly-paved concrete highway. This summer, we fairly zipped there in just over two hours in our driver’s minivan, thanks to the impressive eight-lane freeway that now connects the two cities. Similarly, we rode in comfort on a massive new freeway on our trip to revisit the popular Badaling section of the Great Wall.
Our hotel in Beijing was near the gleaming Beijing apm mall (the apm comes from the combination of am+pm; the mall’s slogan is “Play more, sleep less”) and while visiting a mall anywhere is never my idea of a good time, necessity landed us there more than once. Each time we entered, I marveled at the hip and heavily Westernized attire of my fellow shoppers. Everyone seemed to be wearing or shopping for brand new sneakers, baseball caps and other clothing bearing the logos and labels of popular U.S. sports franchises and players. The mall was bustling at all times of the day, from the Apple store on the first level to the DQ in the food court.
There also seemed to be a lot more cars in Beijing this time around. And not just typical, standard makes but expensive marques like Jaguar, Mercedes and Range Rover. Beijing’s smog problem has been well-documented and after witnessing the gridlock in many areas around the city this summer, it’s clear Beijingers have fallen in love with the automobile.
Beijing’s hosting of the Olympics in between our two visits no doubt accounts for a lot of the growth and change I witnessed – but not all of it. Indeed, there were similar signs in each of the other major cities that we visited. One of the highlights of our trip was a visit to an elementary school in Xi’an, where our travel group (our family and four other adoptive families) was treated to songs and skits performed in English by the students, most of whom could have easily passed for their U.S counterparts, thanks to their smartphones and trendy clothes.
Keep it rolling
Granted, these examples from my foray into cultural ethnography are purely anecdotal – more qualitative than quantitative, if you will – but it was quite compelling to see with my own eyes the trends I had been reading about in the business press. While there are rumblings that macro forces like the government’s cheap-money policy and a real estate bubble could derail the growth train, my bet is on Chinese consumers to keep it rolling. Having seen them in action firsthand, I don’t think they’ll be slowing down any time soon.