I am not fond of cities. I am even less fond of big cities. They lock me in: the crowds, the tall buildings, the narrow streets. You can not even see a hundred metres afar. I am dedicated to nature, the sea, wide roaming views, trees, waves, birds. I yearn for opportunities to look far out into the land, at least once a day, at least at the weekend.
A city of some tens or hundreds of thousands of inhabitants may attract me perhaps if there are a few good book-stores, even more if there is a well-stocked map store, and at times I must have the chance to attend a concert of classical music. Only for such purposes I go “downtown”. Wandering around, shopping, a few days vacation there, “flying to New York over the weekend”, how awful! A city of more than one million inhabitants I perceive as a hideous threat.
When I was wound up in China, it was unavoidable that I would set up my base in GuangDong, a province in southern China. The majority of our clients is located there, and from there I would also be able to visit East China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Singapore. At first I was planning to live in a small town on the outskirts of GuangZhou. At the weekends it was wonderful – hills, forests, rivers, birds, I could go for a walk and wonderfully relax.
But for the daily business, it was simply the wrong choice. The traffic connection was unbearable, and I also did not want to be permanently reliant on an interpreter, nor dwell during the working week in constantly changing hotels. So I decided to look for an apartment in ShenZhen.
ShenZhen is medium-sized by Chinese standards. Which means that officially it has seven or eight million people, in fact, according to some sources, 12 to 15 million. If I previously felt uncomfortable with cities of more than 50,000 inhabitants and threatened by one million of them, how should I ever get acquainted with more than ten million residents?