Ghost Town

A good number of expat families in China's bigger cities live in housing developments that are almost exclusively populated by expats. These places tend to have houses or town houses that are roughly comparable in size to US or European houses and have lawns, garages etc. That makes them vastly different than your typical housing for the average Chinese citizen. We live in one of these places. The residents are probably 40% American, 40% European, 10% other non-Asian country citizens (Australia, New Zealand, Latin American countries) and 10% Hong Kong, Korean or very successful local Chinese. Japanese expats tend to live in their own expat compounds. These compounds are almost always 95% plus Japanese. With very few exceptions, the husband of the expat families in these compounds works while the wife stays at home with school-age children. Almost all the children go to international schools whose calendars mirror those of the European or American systems that they are based on. The summer months in places like ours are a bit eerie because almost everybody clears out. When school lets out for the summer almost all the wives and children go back to where they are from for four to eight weeks. In the case of Europeans, the husbands will also often check out for three weeks. During the warmer months of the school year the streets are just a giant playground of kids kicking soccer balls, riding bikes, skateboards and scooters etc. when you come home from work. Summer is exactly the opposite. The month of July tends to be particularly desolate.

I haven't seen a person under the age of 18 in our compound for over a month. The men seem to just work a lot or hole up in their houses after work. Most days during the summer I feel like I've stumbled into an episode of The Twilight Zone where I go to work and while I'm gone all the residents of my neighborhood have been abducted by aliens, killed by some mysterious pestilence or have fled after an announcement of a pending Godzilla attack which I somehow missed. I'll go out for walks in the evening and find myself wandering empty streets in 95°/95% weather where it's just me and a zillion buzzing cicadas.

Anyway, these are some pictures of a recent evening. There aren't even many cars on most of these streets. Spooky!