When I embarked on the journey towards fatherhood in Beijing, I had no idea what to expect. Not only was there the anxiety of doing this in a place like Beijing, although I had already been here for three years, but also rearing a child in these uncertain times. While this pretty much ruled out the option of moving back stateside, my wife and I were content with our lives in China’s capital.
At the time, I was the Nightlife and Culture editor for the Beijinger, a DJ on the weekends, a moderately successful voice actor for films and TV, and I loved that I was able to mix all of these different careers and side-hustles and start saving some money. I was fairly certain I would be in Beijing for the rest of my life and that I could create a comfy environment for my family and myself in this city over time through continued learning and working my butt off.
After the birth of my son Victor, I became the Managing Editor of beijingkids. It was through my work here that I learned that Beijing is actually a great place to raise kids. It’s safe in comparison to many other cities around the world, and at-home childcare is relatively cheap. Moms are also given a generous maternity leave, while dads are also entitled to a paternity leave to help out during the week or sometimes weeks after the baby comes. This is miles ahead of what you would find in America, where we are usually immediately back to work following a birth, but still behind areas of Scandinavia where equality between the sexes is considered more comprehensively.
But, like most countries with a booming economy and a rising cost of living, work commitments can often take control. This ability for me to pile on work, while good in many respects as we needed the money, also became problematic. It meant longer working hours. It meant always being at the beck and call of the whims of multiple employers. But with the desire to send my child to an international school on the horizon, no opportunity could be ignored. All of these things result in a considerable amount of stress for many parents living in the capital.
A Beijing survey office of the National Bureau of Statistics revealed in March, 2019 that the average working day for Beijingers was about 8.6 hours, just above 42 hours per week. The average of China as a whole sits at around 44.7 hours per week according to the China Labour Dynamics Survey, published by Sun Yat Send University. That puts China at the top of a long list of countries based on data compiled from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), just above Mexico, Costa Rica, and South Korea.
As an added note, and not to throw any shade, Germany ranked last on the OECD list with 26 hours per week, but for good reason. There are initiatives being created in the country to allow millions of Germans to have 28 hour work weeks to spend more time with their families.
This sort of work/parenting balance is something that has been troubling me considerably lately. I would often wake up around 5.30 am, do some work before breakfast, shower up and walk to work, do part-time gigs during lunch, and get home at 7pm. Tired and mangled by the stresses of the day, copy deadlines, and monotonous tasks, I would arrive home a zombie. I could only eat dinner and maybe entertain my son for a couple of hours before putting him to bed and usually passing out in the process. All the while, the weekends were normally spent voice acting or DJing at night, and only occasionally recuperating from the intense workload I had allowed myself to take on Monday through Friday.
My wife was also working a full-time job with abnormal hours; sometimes during the day, sometimes at night, and almost always on the weekends. We were only completely together as a family a couple of waking hours every week. At some points I convinced myself that this was only temporary, and that I would one day find “one job” that would cover all of our needs. But we soon came to realize that this was a gamble and would likely never fully cover the growing costs that Beijing continues to demand.
Something that’s often unspoken but widely known among expats in Beijing is that unless you are a foreigner with some sort of relocation package, living a normal life with the same advantages you were given as a child is pretty difficult. However, it is by no means impossible. So we continued to hope for a change.
All the while, so much about my job with this magazine was learning about what it means to be an effective parent, but I constantly lacked the time to implement anything in my own home. I knew this wasn’t going to change, especially when my son started preschool with a monthly tuition of around RMB 11,000.
Some call it burnout. But it was also something more. I was feeling guilty about not being able to put into practice all of the parenting tools I had accumulated; guilty about relying so much on hired help to do a satisfactory job of watching over my child throughout these early years. Being on the phone replying to messages late into the night was not the example I wanted to set for my son.
I want to play an integral role in my son’s development into an empathetic, intelligent, and, most importantly, happy child. I want to help him understand the world we are living in and give him the tools necessary to thrive. This won’t happen if I’m unable to balance work with life, and while I’m well aware that I’m not the only father in Beijing or the rest of the world going through this at the moment, it was a major factor regarding why my wife and I decided to hit the restart button and leave Beijing for a place that is more affordable.
We all know the tired cliché that dads belong at work, but I can no longer neglect the fact that my son needs me. He needs me to help him navigate this complicated and sometimes scary world we are living in. How else is he going to learn about what it means to be a man, or, more importantly a decent human being? So many of the pitfalls regarding toxic masculinity seem to stem from these developmental years and a lack of positive guidance. Even as an adult, this is something I’m still learning about and trying to reprogram about myself. As dads we need to understand how essential we are to our children, and that no amount of money can buy back the time we lose by not maintaining a proper balance to prepare them for whatever the future might bring.
While this will be an emotional departure for me and my family, Beijing will forever be a part of our identity. This city and the experiences I’ve gained here have taught me that being a good dad isn’t about working yourself to death to provide. It’s more important to be present and a willing participant in overcoming all of the challenges that family life may bring.
This article appeared in the beijingkids November 2019 Beijing Baba issue
