Spent the first 2 1/2 decades of my life in various US cities. East Coast, then California. Job wanted me to move back to the East Coast, I didn't want to; took severance pay and went overseas.

Had an old college roommate in Beijing, so I went there. Didn't intend to stay. Visited many other cities in Europe and Asia. Launched a digital startup to have something to do. Winter came, and I headed to a tropical island to see if I could be productive there. Verdict: no, so back to frigid, windy Beijing.

The pollution is horrid (though much better than it was a few years ago). The city is dirty and crowded, and the people are loud and blunt. I feel right at home. The only place close enough to it to be long-term livable for me in the US I think is NYC.

Great thing about Beijing is all the "new economy" energy. It's a Wild West of startups and new businesses in a way I imagine American cities and factories were during the Gilded Age. You meet lots of folks running large, successful companies. It's hard to not be ambitious here.

These days, I also have children. That makes choosing a good place harder, and Beijing better. In Beijing, children get the best of all worlds: great education, highly competitive social and school life of a big city, but also a united, homogeneous, family-friendly culture without all the funky stuff children get exposed to daily in Western big cities. I spent a lot of time looking for a city in the US that would serve as both a big city environment and funkyness-free education when I thought we might not be able to stay in China, and came up empty-handed.

Internet access is occasionally an issue here. A few times a year the government will aggressively throttle VPNs, usually when something is happening they don't want Chinese netizens to hear about (first order of business whenever VPNs get throttled: head to Google News, type "China" into the search bar, and see what the American MSM is saying that rankles Chinese leadership).

Overall, there is more actual freedom of speech than the West too, which is just refreshing. When my wife kept her belly too long after giving birth to one of our children, people on the street would ask her if she was pregnant again or tell her she needed to lose the weight. So she got on a diet and slimmed down. People don't pretend to like you if they don't, and no one pretends to hold opinions he doesn't really hold because he's afraid of being ostracized. You just feel free in a way that is impossible in the West.

Yes, you can't talk about the government. Or shouldn't. Personally, I think that's great. The government still feels pressure on it when the citizens are unhappy about something... the Chinese government in many ways works much, much harder for its actual citizenry than pretty much any other government I can think of. Yet in the meanwhile, all the rancor of American politics is non-existent over here. I don't have to listen to people whipped up about sensationalized issues that don't really matter, whose eyes glaze over when you talk about the few that do but go undiscussed.

Violent crime is almost non-existent. There are no ghettos or impoverished underclasses here. The Beijing government put a lot of policies in place to discourage the poor from around the country from moving in, and encourage those who previously migrated here to migrate elsewhere; the city was too crowded, and they wanted fewer poor. The policy worked; there are far fewer very poor people looking for menial work (in short supply) in Beijing now, and an even higher proportion of educated, hard-working, productive people. Policies like these would cause an uproar in the West, with results for Western cities as you'd expect. Crime, ghettos, underclasses, impoverishment. Places in town it's unsafe to be at night. I could fall asleep anywhere in Beijing at night, and the only thing I'd have to worry about is a policeman coming up and telling me to move along.

It's great here. I never feel like "not a foreigner"; I definitely am one. Some day perhaps I will be made to leave.

But that doesn't bother me, perhaps because I've never had a great need for "belonging." And if someday China made me go, well, I have a list of places I've visited and liked and would like to try living. I'll pick one and see how it goes.