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Making music, and a family in a new home
A keyboard, bass instruments, a drum kit and a guitar with a trunk shuttle back and forth past some iconic Shanghai spots — it’s an intriguing music video for a German song with Chinese lyrics created by several German old boys — JK & the Troubleshooters.
JK, the vocalist, is Jochen Klein, a 57-year-old German who has lived in Shanghai for 13 years.
In 2005, just after a business trip, Klein immediately decided to quit his job in Germany and pack up for Shanghai, an energetic and dynamic city he fell in love with at first sight.
“In Germany at that time, nothing moved any longer,” he recalls. “Everything was just stable. When I came here, I can see there was movement in life, it is interesting.”
Indeed, Klein, whose Chinese name is You Heng (a pinyin pronunciation of Jochen), is the kind of person who always explores new fields in life.
Besides his job as a communication and marketing manager and his hobby as a vocalist in the music band, another achievement is writing a Shanghai guide book in German.
“Hundreds of hours’ work for very little money,” Klein, with a head of golden hair, tells Shanghai Daily. “But the city deserves to be known better by Germans.”
When Klein first arrived here, he never imagined he would be a father. But he says the city gave him the most amazing treasure in his life — a family with a Chinese wife, Zhan Jia, and their 1-year-old baby girl, Francisca.
“My world has changed because of her,” Klein says with a warm voice. “That is the most beautiful gift for me.”
Q: Can you tell me how you got your Chinese name You Heng?
A: When I came to Shanghai for the first time, I was working as an editor for a German Weekly and they asked me to report from the World Engineering Congress.
That was a 14-day stay and those people I met, some of them really became friends. So we stuck together and then they told me “you need a Chinese name.”
You know usually, as a foreigner, the Chinese name you get here is just meaningless. But they wanted me to have a name with meaning, and then we were sitting in the living room with four people, and they discussed, and were searching books and stuff like that, drinking some wine.
After a few hours, they came up with the name You Heng (优恒), which sounds a little bit similar to the pronunciation to my German name while meaning “eternal excellence” in Chinese.
Q: What made you decide to stay here for such a long time?
A: In October 2005, I took two pieces of luggage and moved to China. Half a year later, I had two jobs in Shanghai: one was with Bayer Technology Services where I did the communications for them and the other one was for the German school.
After one and a half years, I quit the job with Bayer, and became the head of communications for the German school.
It is exciting to be here and it is an amazing city to live in. A lot of things are going on here.
I think one reason why I stayed here was ... of course it is a different culture, so you can learn a lot. But the main point is, I get to learn about myself. I learn something about myself all the time.
Q: You mentioned you wrote a guidebook about Shanghai in German. Where did the idea come from?
A: The publisher contacted me and asked me if I could do it within six months, but I had a job at that time and I couldn’t do it in such a short time. I asked them to give me 10 months.
So I spent a lot of time researching, and visiting a lot of places. The first edition of the book “Shanghai — Zeit für das Beste” was published in 2015, and now I am working on a new edition and making some new changes. (The second edition was released in April.)
Q: As an expat in Shanghai, which places do you like best? And why?
A: For me, I like the places where I can sit outside to have coffee or something. And I like Qingpu for example, because it is more Chinese. I’m interested in Chinese life and culture and the further away you go from downtown, the more you will see Chinese life.
Q: What makes you love Shanghai?
A: The fast dynamic of Shanghai. I think most of the foreigners will say that. I love changes; I love movement. Stopping means dying.
The dynamic has pros and cons. Sometimes it is very hard to deal with, but the pros outweigh the cons, because everything is changing. There is always something new, and you can see some progress. The city and the country are developing.
Q: What do you dislike here?
A: The city is honest. It is not pretending to be something. But that might change in the future, because if it is trying to become just one of the big mega cities worldwide which are all the same, that will be a pity.
The traffic I don’t like. I don’t drive, but I ride a motorbike sometimes. The behavior of a lot of people in the traffic here has to be changed. Of course, it is getting better now, and we need to put pressure on those people ... to make it better for everyone.
Q: Any remembered happiness to share with our readers?
A: There are a lot of happy memories, but the most impressive story is my wife. I met her in Bayer. She is of course an additional reason for me to stay here. She studied biology, but she was always interested in German culture.
Before I met her, I couldn’t imagine being a father. Some 20 or 30 years ago, if you asked me “Would you have a child?”, I would have said “No! No way.”
Q: What changed you?
A: A lot of things changed me. You feel a little bit more peaceful and get more even-tempered when you become older. I just learned a lot over the past 20 years that everything will be fine, if it is not fine at the end, it means it is not the end.
We planned to have a kid, a daughter. And then my daughter was born in July 2017. It was just the right time.
Now I am working part time, partly from home, being able to spend more quality time with my daughter. It is beautiful to see her, my daughter, every day.
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