To the casual visitor, life in China feels intense — not relaxed by any stretch of the imagination. Taxis and cars drive at erratic rates. Smog pours from smokestacks positioned next to architecturally stunning skyscrapers. Millions of people occupy every nook and cranny. The Man tries to hold you down with the heavy paw of a concrete lion.

David Kellogg, 28, a lifelong Tacoman, disagrees with the above statement. He moved to Qingdao, China, 18 months ago to teach English in a school for the children of Korean expatriates. China, in David’s fully rounded, gray eyes, takes no lessons from the United States, where multi-tasking — in an effort to rob every available free moment and turn it into a to-do list — has become an art form. China, according to David, takes its time.

“It’s less stressful to live here,” David told me as we shared crab dumplings in February on a scrappy side street in the bustling, growing and modernizing port city of Qingdao (site of the 2008 Olympic sailing events).

Of course, this laissez-faire hasn’t stopped David from yelling at Chinese motorists or from humorously relating the story of his fellow Western Washington University buddy who threw an egg at a Qingdao taxi, but I am getting ahead of myself.

Next stop, China

In the spirit of full disclosure, David worked for Swarner Communications, the parent company of the Weekly Volcano, as a journalist until August 2006. That’s when his mom, a librarian in the Tacoma School District, told her son that a private school in Qingdao needed Westerners to teach English there. Months before David had started learning Chinese on a lark, and he jumped at the chance to live abroad. He convinced his Tri-Cities friend Brendan Madden to join him, and within a couple of weeks he presented himself to the most populated and debatably most contentious country on the planet.

Why?

“I decided to come to Qingdao because it was such a serendipitous opportunity to learn Mandarin,” David explains. “I wanted to learn the language, and the chance landed on my lap. I couldn’t pass it up.”

Life in Qingdao dazzled David from the start.

“The first few months in Qingdao were great fun,” he says. “You’re excited to witness the cultural nuances and overcome the challenges.”

Those nuances included sharing beers and eating the day’s catch (squid, octopus, rockfish) from a communal wok with the local fishermen and being stared at to the point of feeling like Brad Pitt had just walked into the room. On the challenging end of the spectrum, he has faced explaining to a taxi driver how to get home, starting an American school with Chinese owners, and learning how to write Chinese characters.

“I’m still horrible (at the letters), but optimistic,” David laughs.

Selling China short remains David’s greatest mistake so far.

“The largest impression I took from arriving to China was how wrong I was about the nation,” he says. “I honestly expected it would be along the lines of crossing the Iron Curtain. Granted, it is different from the West, and criticisms regarding corruption and backwards thinking are often warranted. However, in many aspects, China is much more free — and much more wild — than America.”

It’s like your college days

North of city center, bars catering to expatriates, or expats, huddle among knockoff stores, European-style hotels, massage parlors, and Hot Pot restaurants. It’s here where many of the single foreigners from the United States, Canada, Britain, Africa, Australia, Germany, and other countries congregate throughout the week over Western food such as pizza and popcorn and cheap drinks (75 cent beers) at places named Le Bang, Lennon’s and Charlie’s. Connected by inexpensive cell phones they’ve bought in China, the expats keep each other apprised of the shifting party scene — similar to the shout-outs heard up and down dorm halls on college campuses in the United States.

Comparing life in Qingdao to college isn’t that far-fetched. Though many expats are five to 10 years out of college, the role of working in an unrushed, fairly controlled city as a single person where television and communication suck translates into a lot of young people needing each other to stay amused.

“The expat life in a city in China is, I believe, privileged,” David says. “Many of the expats — myself included — are teachers here. Others work in exporting, work in Chinese factories doing things like quality control, or work in media. Some of these jobs pay more than others, but the general rule is you’re making a lot more money than the average native in China.”

If done right, David states, an expat in China lives several classes above a similar station in the United States.

“(In China, you can) organize yourself with an apartment near where you work, get a maid, eat out in restaurants every day, and still squirrel away a nice lump of cash every month — and enjoy a lot of free time that in the U.S. might be lost doing chores and commuting.”

These expats meet often for coffee, tea, shopping, musical jams, or any other reason to remind each other that they aren’t the only Westerners in a land of a billion Easterners.
But white versus yellow it’s not.

While showing me the German pillboxes and tunnels built in the Qingdao mountains in the early 20th century to counterattack invading Japanese, David hooked up with Chinese rock climbers, trading cell phone numbers and promising to get together for a climb.

David makes a serious attempt to live beyond the expat world, embracing the sights and sounds of authentic China when he can.

“The greater area of Qingdao has more than 7 million people. I try to make it a point to get outside this scene, but it’s hard,” he explains. “There’s a magazine called In Qingdao that organizes events, almost weekly, for expats to congregate. Chinese are encouraged to come too, but they often don’t, which for me is discouraging.”

David says cultural boundaries remain difficult to overcome.

“I think the expat community and the Chinese community are a little too separate,” he adds. “I know one of the major goals of some local expat musicians and event organizers is to change that trend.”

David’s friend Brendan formed a band, The Dama Llamas, in Qingdao with a few other expats. They try to encourage Chinese college students to embrace original rock music, but many locals want to dance and sing to pop hits.

Still, David tries to bridge the gap one meal at a time.

Case in point — our visit to a dinky Hot Pot restaurant frequented nearly exclusively by Chinese diners.

In a Hot Pot spot, a large, divided metal bowl with spicy oil on one side and mild broth on the other sits on a burner inset in each table. Plates stacked with raw meats and veggies arrive at the table for a do-it-yourself, fonduelike meal.

David tells me not to look too closely at our surroundings if I want to enjoy myself.
In Michelin’s world of ratings, compared to the Hot Pot place, American hole-in-the-wall restaurants are five stars. Imagine Tacoma’s Melting Pot restaurant inside a bus station bathroom — it’s that small and scary.

In China, no one stresses about filth.

Brendan, David and I took our chopsticks and ate quality shavings of succulent beef and lamb, firm cabbage, and thick soy noodles right from the same pot with commanding authority-like warlords from the Ming, Qing or Ping-Pong dynasties, all the while continually raising small glasses of Tsingtao beer (China’s leading brand born and brewed in Qingdao since the German’s founded the brewery in 1903) and shooting them down to extinguish the hot chili oil stinging our eyes, lips and tongues. Pure hedonism.

Afterward, we drove 10 minutes north to a strip mall far from the tourist and business centers, arriving at 9 p.m. unannounced. We roused the occupants from their beds and received 60-minute foot massages while sitting in overstuffed chairs watching crappy Chinese television for $3 each.

“You’ve got to love China,” David announces.

Stay or go?

Looking around David’s seventh floor apartment in a classic, gray Chinese apartment complex with cold stone steps, no elevator and the whiff of greasy Chinese spices hanging in the stairwell, it looks like the Tacoma native is living transitionally at best. The apartment lacks a coordinated décor — a lone map hangs on the walls; the fridge needs food.

“My plans for the future are not the longest term; that’s for sure,” David muses.
How long David plans to stay and teach in Qingdao depends on many factors — but homesickness isn’t one of them.

“I do envision returning home, but I can’t picture the number of wrinkles my face will have upon my return,” he answers. “In other words, I want to come back to Tacoma. I want to see Mount Rainier. I want to see friends and family. But the pull of what I have not seen is great.”

David and Brendan make travel films and hope to turn that endeavor into a career. Lonely Planet paid them this year for their mountain biking travelogue through Katmandu and up to Everest’s Base Camp (www.youtube.com/ InDeepFilms). Over the Chinese New Year they took a Planes, Trains & Automobiles type trip from Bangkok to Singapore and hope to sell that documentary as well.

David enjoys his students. He likes the road he’s taken as a teacher, but he sees a bigger future for himself — whether in China or another country.

TV commercials could present another option for the tall, slender Stadium High School graduate. David appeared in a Haier (China’s answer to GE) refrigerator ad running throughout Asia as the “token foreign businessman.” He expects to star in more commercials in the coming months.

An awakening dragon

As a journalist from the United States, the fact that he lives in a news hot spot hasn’t been lost on David either. China remains a big story.

“While the countryside still lags behind due to poverty, the cities are incredibly modern and affluent,” he explains. “Opportunities are everywhere.”

China appears center stage this summer when it hosts the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. David says the country buzzes with excitement over the opportunity to show the world the changes that have taken place inside China.

But, as much as he loves China, David admits certain things wear on him. While David was standing at a busy intersection, a driver laid on his horn for a solid minute because the car in front of him sat idle in the right lane waiting on the traffic light. The horn blower apparently wished to turn right and felt upset to wait. David walked up to the driver’s passenger side window and put his finger to his lips to hush the driver.

A Westerner making a statement such as that doesn’t go unnoticed. The driver stopped honking and quickly scurried on his way.

David tells a similar story about his friend Brendan. Drivers honk their horns in Qingdao a lot. The noise wears on a person. On one especially irritating day, a taxi driver went for a world’s record in horn blowing. Fed up, Brendan tossed an anonymous egg out his apartment window and onto the windshield of the car.

“That just doesn’t happen in China,” David explains. “The driver of that car could only have reacted in one way. He must have thought a chicken flew over his car and laid an egg. There could be no other explanation.”

Regardless, the driver stopped honking his horn. One down, a billion drivers to go. Those are odds that don’t faze David Kellogg from Tacoma. He has plenty of time to correct the etiquette of Chinese drivers and still meet up with his friends for Tsingtaos and Hot Pot. Ahhhhhhh, China.