Snub

A former Beijing resident has been paying a return visit, a rather nice young Englishwoman who lived out here last year. We had been pretty friendly while she was here, and had kept in touch a little by e-mail since she departed.

I was thus rather disappointed to discover that she had come back for a holiday without tipping me off, either before her arrival or subsequently. Indeed, I wouldn't have known she was visiting at all had I not happened to notice her amongst some blog photographs of a party last weekend.

When I realised she was here, I asked around after her and discovered she was staying with another female acquaintance of mine. I sent her greetings via that acquaintance, asked if there was any chance of meeting up before she leaves.

That acquaintance never acknowledged receipt of my message (although I gather from another source that she received it OK). The visitor never attempted to get in touch with me (although I gather from that other source that the message was passed on to her).

I contacted the rest of the visitor's usual posse - all also "friends" of mine, a gaggle of single girlies who I refer to teasingly as 'The Coven' - to ask when she was going back, if there were any plans for a night on the town before that. None of them replied to me. NONE.

I learned from another source that the visitor is leaving on Thursday, was having farewell drinks today. Evidently I was NOT INVITED.

I make as many allowances as I can. Some people are just very BAD at responding to text messages. Sometimes (not often, I think - not nearly so often as a few years ago) text messages here simply get lost in transmission, dropped from an overburdened network. But it is particularly dispiriting when 4 separate people - most of whom I'd attempted to contact about this more than once - all completely ignore you.

Perhaps they were embarrassed by the fact that I was 'excluded' from the reunion, and thought it would be kinder to try to hide it from me? Jeez! I know she's only in town for a week; I know her girlie mates are more important to her; I realise she might want to make her last night out a girls-only affair. I won't try and crash the evening - I'm not like that. I won't be offended; I quite understand. How much worse is it to be cut from the party and NOT BE TOLD? Ten, a hundred, a million times WORSE.

What is wrong with people these days? This kind of behaviour seems to be becoming more and more common. It's crass, it's unnecessary, it's DUMB. It's self-centred, it's inconsiderate, it's RUDE.

I sometimes have fuddy-duddyish moments where I wonder if there's a generational element involved. I find this sort of egregious discourtesy much more common in people under 40, positively rampant in people under 30. Folks in their 40s and 50s, I feel, were probably better brought up.

I took this collective snub very hard because I am particularly depressed and emotionally vulnerable at the moment (it will probably pass in a week or two - 'seasonal' factors in play).

I was reading an observation recently on the importance of having people you can turn to for support in times of personal crisis...... and I fret that perhaps I don't have anyone like that out here. It is often said that because of the transience of expat society our 'friendships' here tend to be more numerous but more superficial. Then again, I'm not too sure how much I could really rely on any of my older friends back in the UK or the US either: isolated by distance, our contact is increasingly infrequent; all of them are absorbed in their own lives and rarely give me a moment's thought these days.

"Friends are the people we allow to hurt us."

Who was it said that? Perhaps it was me.