The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2010

F O C U S O N F S R E F L E C T I O N S T AI T AI : A D IPLOMAT ’ S W IFE IN THE M IDDLE K INGDOM 16 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 lead a double life here in China. In one life, I’m a stay-at-home mom, wife of a govern- ment worker, payer of bills, packer of lunches, master of all things domestic. But in my other life, I’m a tai tai. That means “wife” in Chinese, but it implies muchmore—priv- ilege, position and wealth. The term marks me as an im- portant person, well-to-do, even sophisticated. Imagine that. Me : well-to-do and sophisticated. I own a couple of pairs of jeans and a pile of T-shirts, most of which are marked with baby spit-up. I’ve been known to take the garbage out in my pajamas. And sometimes (ssshhh, don’t tell), I eat my kids’ leftover mac-n-cheese over the kitchen sink. But none of that matters inChina. Here, I’mno ordinary housewife. I’m not a soccer mom. When I walk out my front door, I’m not the middle-aged wife of a government bureaucrat. I’m a tai tai. I wasn’t prepared for this aspect of Foreign Service life back when we signed on the dotted line and left for our first overseas post. I pictured adventures aplenty. I imagined laughing at dinner parties with exotic friends, haggling in foreign languages at vegetable markets, maybe even riding a camel or hiking on the Great Wall of China. I’ve done those things, and more. What I didn’t under- stand, though, was the isolation I would sometimes face as the wife of a diplomat in foreign, not-always-friendly cities. I thought I would learn to blend in on any continent. I never stopped to think that I might spend my life sticking out, marked as different in ways both good and bad. But that’s how it is. With each new assignment, I’ve found new ways that I simply don’t fit in. In China, I’m a tai tai, a foreign woman, the privileged wife of a diplomat. Try as I might, I will never blend in here in Beijing. A Gated Community I live in a gated, guarded community on the outskirts of the city, in a house that was assigned to me by the U.S. gov- ernment. There are guards, young Chinese men from the countryside, stationed around the clock. The houses, occu- piedmostly by foreigners, have garages with automatic door openers, balconies, guest bathrooms and American appli- ances. Our own house is spacious, if somewhat shoddily constructed. You wouldn’t give it a second glance if I plunked it down in the middle of Fairfax, Va. But here, T HE EFFORT TO KEEP ONE ’ S BALANCE ON FOREIGN SOIL CAN BE A COMPLEX AND TRICKY BUSINESS . B Y D ONNA S CARAMASTRA G ORMAN I Donna Scaramastra Gorman is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Newsweek , the Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor . She is moving to Amman this summer with her RSO husband and four kids. Previous posts have included Moscow, Yerevan, Al- maty and Beijing.