knowing what to write: the duplicity of our life

It's always hard to know what to write about our lives in China. This post isn't meant to be a complaint in any way, perhaps an explanation about why we don't share more details, or more often, or why we there's a long pause before we answer.

The first reason communicating clearly is difficult is because it's difficult to find the right balance. We don't only want to share the good things going on, but that leaves out our struggles, but we also don't want to over-emphasize our difficulties and leave out the positive stuff. We don't want to complain all the time, but we don't want to be overly-rosy.  We also don't want to become PR experts, always trying to "spin" a story the direction we want. Sometimes we just want to tell the story.

The truth is that our life is neither as glamorously cool as some of you think, nor is it as grimly arduous as others think. When we used to have a house helper, that made our life seem very privileged. "Wow, you're a stay at home mom and you have a helper!" However, we have no dishwasher, no dyer, no convenience products or foods, so the extra help sure it nice. Although we live abroad, we are very much regular people who don't have the have the privilege or prestige of diplomats. We do get to see and experience another life and culture, but most days we just live regular ole normal life.

Here's our family at a UNESCO world heritage site. That was cool, but we were only able to see this because we traveled to a friend's wedding nearby. 

There are parts of our life that are terribly difficult, but not every minute is like that. There's also lots of job, happiness, and fun. One time I was talking with someone in the States about our life in China and she tried to make a comparison between our life and a summer backpacking Europe and living in hostels. It's not that hard. We sleep in our own comfortable beds every nights. While we do have to travel to get to our China home, we are home once we get there. We are well-fed. We have all that we need.

James would also like to chime in and add that our life also probably isn't as spiritual as many of you think is. We are doing our best to maintain our personal disciplines, to guide our children toward faith, and to share Truth with those we encounter, but we are far from perfect and experience many of the the same challenges that most of you do. (and possibly some other as well).

The second reason telling all our story is difficult is because we live on two continents. It's hard to maintain the relationships we have with friends and family in the States when we're in China. It's hard to keep up with our Chinese friends when we're stateside. When we're in China and we need to take care of things (banking, taxes, etc) we have to stay up late at night to make the necessary phone calls. To stay in touch in China, we use wechat, which basically no one in the States uses. In US, our friends use facebook, which is blocked in China.

And mentioning social media brings me to the third reason it's hard to share: technology and security. Technology makes living on two continents SO MUCH EASIER, but it also creates some headaches. In addition to multiple social media accounts, we have multiple email accounts. Some accounts require first signing in to our VPN and the encrypted portion of our hard drive. Some days our internet is fast enough for all that to work smoothly, and other days it's not. Our business accounts in China can't overlap with some of the messages we receive from the States. I maintain this blog and connect it with my facebook account, but we never disclose our location here or on our facebook.

I also manage a blog about the city where we live, but because it discloses our location, I can't connect it here or with my facebook, thus, I connect it with my wechat and have a second facebook account I use to promote the blog and connect with Chinese friends or expat friends connected with our city.

Managing all of the email, social media, and blogs takes time, and generally it's the first thing to let slide when things get busy. But that leaves many of you feeling like we aren't staying in touch as we should be.

We'd love to tell more of the story of the people we serve, but that's difficult to do and maintain what we feel is appropriate security. We'd love a way to streamline all that's involved in communication, but when most of the US platforms are blocked in China and the most-used Chinese platform is not popular in the US, it doesn't seem possible.

If you'd like to connect more with the China side of our life, send us an email and we can send the link to our city blog. Also, we'd love suggestions to improve our newsletter as it seems to be our best venue for communication. And, a little more understanding of all that we're juggling when we respond slowly.