Yesterday you may have read Richard Baimbridge's account of living and working in China. Today he tell us more about he he ended up there and what life is like for him.

About five years ago, Conde Nast Traveler sent me to Beijing to write an article about the city's emerging nightlife scene, and I fell in love with China. I decided to pack up and move here about two years later. So I've been in China three years now, working as a freelancer (I've written for a lot of Chinese magazines since living here, including English language weeklies in BJ and Shanghai, as well as Hong Kong newspapers like South China Morning Post). I've also written for Chinese publications such as China Airlines magazine and Chinese Cosmopolitan. I worked for National Geographic TV as a researcher and translator for one project, and have written about China for Conde Nast Traveler, Wired, Colors, and several others. Two years ago, I wrote a guidebook to Beijing, published by Colliers International. I've also taught English on and off, and did some work for CCTV International -- and spent almost every morning studying tai chi in the park.

But so far the strangest job I've had was acting in a training video for the Chinese Public Security Bureau (the police department that handles foreign affairs). They contacted me through an agency, looking for a foreign actor. When I arrived to do the shoot, I found out that the role I was to play was that of a foreign journalist getting arrested for conducting an illegal interview of peasants during the Olympic Games. They had no idea that I am, in fact, a journalist! As I was being led away in handcuffs by a stunningly beautiful Chinese policewoman (who later gave me her phone number), I thought to myself, "Jesus, my life is just way too surreal."
Along the way in all of this, I managed to learn fluent Mandarin. I was surprised to discover that an appalling number of foreign correspondents here (and I mean for major publications) speak no Chinese at all, relying totally on translators, which perhaps explains why American media coverage of China is so poor. (If you want to know what's happening in China, read French or British newspapers).

Still, I felt I stuck in the mold of the expat journalist who lives in Beijing and knows little of the rest of the country. And I was starting to think that in a lot of ways, I had just replicated my New York life in China. So I decided to head for the countryside, and moved to the mountains near Tibet, to a beautiful part of China called Yunnan, where I lived in what is considered to be kind of the "new Katmandu" -- a town called Dali. It's a place where ganja grows all over the place in the wild and people smoke it out in the open in cafes, thus it is very popular with backpacker hippy types. But alas, that got boring, too. Meanwhile I had stumbled upon an old monastery in the mountains about half an hour away, run by an old master from Shaolin temple who was exactly like the kung fu master in Kill Bill.
Eventually I moved into the temple and began studying full time. I figured I'd last about a month, but I ended up staying more than a year. It was an intense practice schedule: 8 hours a day, six days a week. At dawn you ran up the mountain holding a huge (I mean like 50 + pounds) rock on your head. We lived in the most hardcore conditions imaginable: no electricity, no hot water, bathing in a freezing cold river, drinking river water, getting badly hurt and very sick at times. After a few months, I shaved my head, began wearing monk's clothes and learned how to read and recite prayers in ancient Chinese. I can't begin to explain the feeling of waking up to candlelight and the sound of prayers at 5am every morning in this gorgeous old temple, high in the cloud-covered mountains, far away from everything.

It was one of the most amazing times of my life. I wrote a series about it that was published in Beijing, but essentially I saw very few people and did little journalistic writing. It was impossible given the conditions in which I was living. Besides I wanted to experience a different way of life without distractions.

Eventually I left the temple (in tears) and moved to the city of Guangzhou, because I'd met a beautiful Chinese photo-journalist in Dali who very kindly invited me to come stay with her after I left the monastery, knowing I had no money or place to go. When I left the temple, I basically had nothing but the clothes on my back and a pair of extremely worn-out kung fu shoes. Everyone always says, "Oh, living in a monastery must be so romantic," but unless you're independently wealthy, the reality of re-adjusting to life back in the world is incredibly difficult. I went through a period of extreme poverty (see the article I wrote for MB). But eventually I got back on my feet -- and into a new pair of shoes.

There are very few journalists living in Guangzhou, even though it's a city that is really at the heart of China's economic growth, along with Shenzhen -- both of which were the earliest Special Economic Zones to be developed by Deng Xiaoping in the reforms of the late 1980s.

So this is where a lot the action is (it's where the SARS epidemic first started), but most journalists prefer to live in more "cultured" places like Beijing and Shanghai. Guangzhou (aka "Canton") was, however, the very first part of China open to foreigners. Until the late 19th century, it was the only place the Emperor allowed business transactions – or any kind of contact whatsoever -- to take place between foreigners and Chinese. It was the flashpoint of the Opium Wars, and a hotbed of revolution. So there is a lot of rich history here.

The same magazine that I had written the Beijing guidebook for, City Weekend, had decided to do a guidebook to Guangzhou, including the Pearl River Delta (HK, Macau, Shenzhen and Zhuhai, among others), and since I'm one of the only foreign journos living here, plus having written for them previously, they asked me to take on the project.

I learned so much about the history of this place -- which set the tone for the history of Hong Kong, because Hong Kong culture is essentially British/Cantonese culture, and you can't get any more Cantonese than Guangzhou (GZ is the Capital of Guangdong Province -- population of over 100 million in this province alone). You can also really see the footprints left behind by early foreign traders in this area, from the Portugese in Macau, to the eerily abandoned European churches that still stand in Guangzhou today. And even in people, like the last girl I was seeing, who is the great grand-daughter of a French Missionary Priest who "went astray" with a Chinese woman, back in the Qing Dynasty.

The Pearl River Delta is in the middle of a massive change -- it's quickly turning into one huge metropolis that extends from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, with major cities like Shenzhen and Dong Guan in between. Within a few years, it will all be connected by high-speed trains and subways. Already, there are border stations where you swipe an ID card and take an electronic fingerprint, then you're inside the Hong Kong metro system, in New Territories. Within a few years, the border may disappear all together. This is the future of China as a world super power, and it's taking shape right before my eyes.

One nightmare, however, has been the fact that I've been forced to start learning Chinese all over again from scratch. The "Chinese" spoken in Guangzhou is Cantonese, whereas the "Chinese" I speak is Beijing Mandarin. The two languages are as different as Spanish and French. Northern and Southern Chinese people can't understand each other at all, unless they use putong hua (Mandarin) as a kind of lingua franca. For example, 1 to 5 in Mandarin is: yi, er, san, si, wu. And in Cantonese, it's yat, yi, sap, sei, mm. "Thank you" in Mandarin is "xiexie"; in Cantonese, it's "M'goy sai". Even written Chinese is radically different between Hong Kong and Mainland, where we use a simplified character system created under communism, all of which makes for one tremendous headache.

Last but not least, some friends and I recently opened a guesthouse and school in the town of Yang Shuo, which is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It's called Wu Wei Center (named after the monastery where I lived, and opened with my master's blessings), and is located on an orange tree plantation, surrounded by unbelievably beautiful mountains, right beside the equally gorgeous Li River. The school has training programs in yoga and martial arts, mostly for foreigners, though I often teach yoga in Chinese. We even have some of the monks from my old temple working as kung fu teachers.

Well, I guess that's all. Big shout out to Brooklyn.
Zaijian (see ya) and A Mi To Fo (May the Buddha Bless You).