Empty nest: Diverse paths find an American family all in China, then gone

An empty nest fills when an American couple goes to China to work, and finds their trailing offspring with them. But now the Beijing-ensconced parents see their adult kids moving back to the US.

By Debra Bruno, Guest Blogger / June 14, 2013

Debra Bruno and her adult daughter, Joanna, eating a meal on a family excursion from their base in China to Hanoi, Vietnam. Bruno's children are leaving China and returning to the United States for graduate school.

Courtesy of Debra Bruno

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Beijing

I had just returned to a Beijing that was hot, muggy, and so polluted my eyes stung, after a lovely sojourn visiting family and friends in the United States.

Debra Bruno

Correspondent

Debra Bruno is a Beijing-based freelance journalist and the mother of two children: 28-year-old Daniel and 25-year-old Joanna, both of whom also happen to live in China. She loves cooking, her 15-year-old cat (whom she brought to China), and travel. She blogs about it all at Not by Occident.

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My phone rang. It was my daughter, wanting to vent about something. We chatted for a while.

An hour later, my phone rang again. It was my son, welcoming me back to China and wanting to catch up.

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There’s certainly nothing odd about a mother chatting with her grown children after a trip. But what’s odd about this is that both of my 20-something children also live in China, a situation that is a happy combination of serendipity and choice. I know many expat families here in Beijing – but all of them are families with school-age children, mainly settled in the city’s suburbs to be near the international schools. The couples our age – let’s just say we’re middle-aged – have grown children who live in other places.

My husband Bob and I get a kick out of seeing the reactions on people’s faces when they ask us if we get to see our children much.

“Yes,” we answer. “They live in China.”

Daniel, our eldest, claims we followed him here, since he was the family pioneer, choosing a job teaching English in China almost five years ago after he graduated from college and bounced around in short-term jobs for a while. It’s been a choice he’s enjoyed, mainly, I suspect, because of the rock-star status he is awarded as a young male from “Meiguo” (Chinese, for USA) teaching in university classrooms full of Chinese college students, mostly female. He now lives in Guangzhou (Beijing is to Guangzhou as New York is to Miami, in terms of distance) but calls and visits frequently.

Joanna, the youngest, followed us. She had also graduated from college and landed a great job, but the prospect of a lifetime of the 9-to-5 grind, daily commutes, and squeezing in adventures in two weeks of paid vacation every year left her thinking that she should explore the world first. So she quit that fantastic job, backpacked around Asia for a month or so with a friend, and landed in our apartment in Beijing for what was supposed to be a short visit. But a month became two months, and I suddenly found her going on job interviews. Before we knew it, she was also teaching English, coming with us on hikes along the Great Wall, and meeting other young expats from the corners of the world. She lived with us for a year until she decided that she needed more privacy, and rented a rare-for-Beijing four-bedroom apartment with three other friends.