Part One: Intrigued By a Rising China
During the first two weeks of June, my brother and I traveled to China on a vacation. This was the first trip either us had ever taken to Asia. We had each been to Europe – I was there in 2000 on a study abroad program in Spain (with side visits to London & Paris) and he has gone on two separate trips to Amsterdam and Ireland with various friends. In 2004, the two of us went to Europe together for four weeks – traveling to France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. That was actually my brother’s first trip to Europe (and my last one). It must have given him the worldwide travel bug.
But China is a different world. First, it’s half way around the world and it is one of the oldest and most prestigious civilizations in existence today. It also has a radically different language and culture. And, from San Francisco (where we departed from), it’s a 13-hour flight!
What prompted our interest in China? A few things. First, my brother moved from Florida to San Francisco as a sports writer with the Associated Press. He began his work from there in January 2011. Since being there, he is now just one direct flight away from many different hot spots in Asia. Because he had already been to Europe a few times, he was interested in seeing a new area of the world.
Around the same time my brother was moving to California, I made a new friend who was already living in China. One of my friends (and former JMI interns), Alex “Swiss” Hochreutener, introduced me to his friend Gianni Breuer, who was raised in North Palm Beach, FL. As I talked to Gianni, he told me he had been living in Beijing for the past six months (at the time), working in the import/export industry since he had graduated from the University of Richmond earlier that year.
I was intrigued and asked if I could interview him about his experiences for a blog post for The James Madison Institute. He agreed and in fact already had plans to visit our mutual friend “Swiss” here in Tallahassee just two weeks later, in January 2011.
I ended up interviewing Gianni on my birthday over lunch at Chipotle. I was fascinated and intrigued and turned what was supposed to be a blog post into a lengthy interview article titled, “Interview with a Floridian…Living and Working in China.” We published that article on The James Madison Institute’s website in 2011. I encourage you to read it if you have a few minutes.
Almost a year later, I introduced my brother Tony to Gianni while they were both in South Florida during the Christmas holidays. Gianni told us more about China – he had since moved from Beijing to Shanghai for a job with Honeywell. He invited us both to come visit him in China. With Tony being in San Francisco – just a direct flight away from either Shanghai or Beijing – he was ready to go then! I needed a little time to make it happen.
In December 2012, Tony and I decided we would indeed carve out some time to go to China in the summer. Around that same time while Gianni was in South Florida again for the Christmas holidays, I met up with him to discuss specifics. He gave us a lot of inside information to which we are very grateful – including the suggestion to add the city of Guilin to our trip (in addition to visiting Shanghai and Beijing). Gianni has now been living in China for nearly three years, and almost two years in Shanghai. He was even so kind as to invite us to stay with him during our first four nights in China – during the time we were in Shanghai. It was very nice to have a familiar face to show us the ropes during our first days ever in China and Asia.
I have to say before we went I was a little concerned about going to a communist country. My dad and my grandparents are from Cuba and no one from our family has been back there since they left in 1960 – and for all the reasons we have to not support communist regimes or risk our own lives doing so. But, China has been on the rise and they have in recent years opened up to the West and new markets are developing there at a rapid pace. Hearing personally from my friend Gianni and others about their experiences in China made me more comfortable. But I still knew it would be a different experience altogether.