She's HERE! (Patreon)
Content
I'm so relieved and excited to announce that Sasha has successfully arrived in California just in time for her Birthday and will now along with me be living here for the foreseeable future (at least for a year or so).
It has been a very long and difficult process to ensure that she can keep her medical license in China as she will not be able to work on her dependants visa (basically I have a work visa and she is my spouse so can get a dependants visa which is valid for as long as my one is).
I'm incredibly excited to settle down a little even though tomorrow I'll be heading over to Mexico with C-milk and we'll be flying out on an adventure every couple of months, we finally have a place to call home.
This is not without huge challenges however and I know that this is valuable information to anyone who has a Chinese partner that they're thinking about bringing over to their own country.
1) Chinese people now prefer China, It's not like it used to be.
In the bad old days, Chinese people who could were looking for ways to escape China, I'm talking about the 60's 70's 80's and 90's, China was going through awful things and people were starving and having to deal with all sorts of hardships which of course made people want to seek out a better quality of life abroad. This has changed however as China has changed drastically and the meteoric rise of the middle class and the huge amount of wealth that has poured into China has resulted in a very good quality of life for the middle and upper class (poor areas are still very very poor) but people like my wife that have a good job and position in society have no reason to leave and actually prefer to live in China due to the proximity to family (very very important, especially for the 1 child generation) and familiar foods and culture.
I find myself in a position where I need to "sell" our new lifestyle, of course she wants to be with her husband (just as much as I want to be with her) and there's a saying in China along the lines of "you marry a chicken, you must follow the chicken, you marry a dog you must follow the dog" which basically means, you get married, you have to follow your husband.
Don't get me wrong, she's only been here a short time and she loves it but she does complain a lot about things she misses or food that she isn't used to. It's pretty normal and of course in China everyone is used to lots of people and lots of convenience, walking to the market to buy vegetables etc is a daily occurrence and the idea of going to the supermarket only once or twice a week and actually storing things in a refrigerator is a completely alien concept almost as much as using a dryer rather than hanging clothes to dry on the balcony (it took some convincing to prevent her from doing that).
2) We dodged a bullet
As in my previous post about the letter sent to Sasha's workplace, there has been an intensified campaign to harass and intimidate my family by a group of nationalist trolls and it has reached new levels of insanity with them doxing my parents, pretending to be my parents and sending horrible racist emails to local businesses on the same street as my parents live in an attempt to make me stop doing videos (this has had the opposite affect once again and I have even more drive to make more videos now).
The fact of the matter is that these psychotic clowns can no longer affect or reach my wife and that's also why I've been rather closed lipped about her move here as I did not want them to sabotage the visa process or anything of that nature.
3) Challenges lie ahead
To move to another country that you're unfamiliar with is like having the umbilical cord cut for a person like my wife, she is a very strong and intelligent woman, but she will need to rely on me more than ever and I have an incredibly busy schedule at the moment, C-milk and I are working 9-5 on our edits and projects and of course establishing a life in a new place takes a lot of work (furniture, rental, cars etc) and so I'm stretched a little thin. I will however make it work and hopefully Sasha will start to make more videos in the near future to share her experiences living here.
I want to thank you all for your support as this absolutely could not have happened without your help, you have in essence saved both myself and my wife Sasha from a very very sticky situation and for that we will both always be forever grateful.
Love you all and as always
- Stay Awesome
SerpentZA
P.S don't forget the ADVChina early release! We did a fun video about what Vietnamese people do for fun, here it is: https://youtu.be/uDmlYntnwSs