Full episode
467: Americans in China
Act One

Why Do You Have to Go and Make Things So Complicated?

There are about seventy thousand Americans living in mainland China today, according to the Chinese and US governments. A lot of the Americans in China only stay for a few years, but then there are others — American ex-pats who’ve lived in China for a decade or more with no foreseeable plans to come home. Who are they? And how Chinese do they become? Evan Osnos has this story, which starts with an ex-pat named Kaiser Kuo. Evan is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the book Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. (29 minutes)