Almost exactly a year ago I packed up all of my worldly belongings, everything I had accumulated over 5 years in Kunming, and moved, along with my husband, infant son, and our cat, to Beijing. Kunming to Beijing is no small journey, and one that required a lot of planning to pull off. Moving across country, whether that country is China or America or Australia, is always a hassle, and one that many expats in China may encounter if they plan on staying here for the long term. Now, after a year in Beijing, we’re planning on moving back again and the very thought of moving is almost enough to put a halt to our plans. Moving across country twice in less than two years is no one’s idea of fun, in fact its almost overwhelmingly stressful, even more so because we’re in China, where nothing is ever clear cut or simple.

Photo: kafka4prez

First, there’s the question of what to do with our stuff, of packing up what we want to keep, and getting rid of the rest. On our move to Beijing we brought our two computers, but sold the monitors. We left our desks and chairs behind, but brought our baby’s crib, which we’d only purchased a few months prior and couldn’t really part with. We brought the vast majority of our clothing, but threw away great heaping piles of stuff that we hadn’t worn in years (even though parting with certain favorite articles pained me!), and brought our wedding quilts, pillows, and sheets, as well as all of the baby’s numerous articles of clothing and toys. We left our foreign-brand Maclaren stroller, a double-stroller given to me by a friend as my baby-shower gift, behind, a sacrifice that we both hated, but the stroller was such a big, bulky thing, that we couldn’t possibly make it fit, but took with us a smaller, more compact version we’d bought at Wal-Mart. We threw in odds and ends, our wedding photos, my husband’s guitars (which took up almost a whole crate), but left behind most electronics. Deciding what to take and what to leave was hard. I wanted to bring it all, but we were limited for space and each extra crate would cost extra money. We had the choice of using trains, plains, or automobiles to move our stuff, and finally settled on a trucking service.

The trucking service turned out to be a bit of a disaster. One of our boxes fell apart on the trip from our apartment and when my husband arrived with the rest of the boxes at the trucking facility they declared the rest of our boxes unfit and proceeded to encase them in heavyweight plastic bags. At this point we were running out of time, and simply had to leave things to fate. When our stuff arrived in Beijing the boxes themselves had almost completely disintegrated and a lot of our stuff was somewhat free floating in the bags. Some stuff was broken, but thankfully the important things remained intact. Our belongings took about a week to arrive in Beijing and the entire shipment of 7 boxes cost us about 600RMB to ship to Beijing, the low cost perhaps accounting for the rough treatment of our belongings. We spent our first week in Beijing living out of the few suitcases we’d brought with us, or son sleeping on a pallet on the floor. When our belongings finally arrived we were overjoyed to at last have “things” to fill up the house, reminders of the home we’d left behind.

Photo: gruntzooki

As for ourselves, we flew, knowing that a train journey after a long move would probably be too much. After a long battle with my husband, he’d finally relented and allowed me to bring one of our two cats along for the journey, the other cat having run away about 2 weeks before we moved. My husband’s condition was that he didn’t want to deal with it, that moving the cat would be my responsibility. I’d read online that it was possible to bring animals on certain flights, and upon calling our airline they said to be sure to arrive extra early at the airport, to have the animal up to date on its shots, an in a proper carrier. When I got to the airport, 2 hours ahead of my husband and son, a man affiliated with a shipping company approached me about the cat and offered to arrange things, for a cost (it ended up being around 500RMB), and took my cat in her carrier and wandered off. He assured us the cat would be on the same flight as us, but when we landed in Beijing we couldn’t find her anywhere. Frantic calls back and forth between the man, their Beijing company, and us finally revealed that the cat had been placed on a later flight. We decided to first head to our new apartment and come back later for the cat. “Later” actually turned into the next day, as my husband made no fewer than three trips to the airport trying to figure out where our cat was and how to get her. Finally our cat arrived home as well and is sitting on my lap this very moment, so all is well in the end. I plan on bringing the cat back to Kunming for our return trip, my only consolation being that Kunming’s airport is much less daunting than Beijing’s, and hopefully the process will not be quite as complicated in reverse.

Photo: Marc van der Chijs

Ultimately the prospect of moving again, while raising my blood pressure ever so slightly, will not keep me anchored to Beijing forever. I’ve moved several times over the course of my life, albeit usually with less personal possessions in tow, and I’m sure I’ll move yet again in the future. I can only imagine that if we were moving internationally the process would be that much more of a hassle, and the flight would be a lot longer than the flight from Kunming to Beijing! While we human beings can get from one place to another in a few hours, the process of transporting your whole life to a new setting can be infinitely more complicated, and getting through it in once piece takes a whole lot of patience and flexibility, perhaps even more than what is normally required just living in China.

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