Transience

Today has been a tough day for me. I'm not sure why, but I think it has to do with the transient nature of the expat community here in Shanghai. I just found out some friends of ours are moving back to the States in about two months. This is common - in fact, it's too common.

Transience is part of the deal when you accept an assignment in another country. People have different length contracts, they arrived at different times, are scheduled to leave at different times and sometimes get pulled home early (or left somewhere longer than planned). While everyone knows this intellectually, the emotional impact it has is harder to accept.

I don't think humans have evolved to deal well with transience. I'm certainly not an anthropologist, but when I look at how most people lived one hundred years ago (and how many people around the world still live), it appears that we have evolved to do best in stable communities. People need to be able to rely on others for help - they need to be able to trust others. Trust is built over time, and when a community is as transient as the Shanghai expat community, time to build trust is certainly lacking.

In addition, I recently read a report about stress suggesting that those who deal most successfully with highly stressful situations do so by reaching out to a support network for help. Living abroad is already stressful enough, but the inability to make lasting friendships adds a new dimension to that stress. But is there a silver lining to the transience cloud? Does the need to constantly make new friends and learn to quickly trust new people teach us (especially our kids) any valuable skills? Does it make us more inclined to help others we don't know very well - because we might be the ones needing help from strangers next week? Maybe. I don't know. I know that we are going to keep our new friends' dog for two months when they move back to the UK in June. We just met them in January. We're excited to have their dog, Jessica, stay with us, and maybe if they had a bigger network of longer-term friends they wouldn't have asked us to watch her. We wouldn't have the opportunity to help if they had family here. So maybe that's the lesson we really need to learn from living abroad: we're all most successful when we willingly help others, no matter how long the relationship lasts. But it still would be nice if our friends could stay...