Come work in China, they said. It’ll be fun, they said…
After two years of fun and merriment, lectures and late nights, coffee shops and pubs and socials and general joie de vivre that characterised my time at uni, with the advent of my third year things began to change. You graduates – you know how this rolls. One minute you’re sipping cocktails on a Tuesday night with a bunch of your friends, and the next you’re staring at your inbox which seems to be full of bright, falsely cheery information in bold-lettered emails: ‘About to Graduate? Talk to the Careers Advice Centre!’ ‘Come to this afternoon’s Careers Fair!’ and ‘English graduates – fed up of being told to become a teacher? Come work in recruitment!’ (let’s face it, most people want to work in recruitment even less than they want to become teachers.) It was November 2012, and I felt like I should make some kind of decision about what I was supposed to do with my life. The more-irritating-than-a-severe-case-of-hives question: ‘So what are you doing after graduation?’ dogged me like my own personal black cloud, although in all fairness, the only reason I despised the question so much was simply that I had no flipping idea.
Due to cuts in research council funding, I found that I was unable to easily pursue the journalism Masters I had thought I would be doing, and, wending my way home from the open day for said Masters in my student’s union, hands shoved moodily in my coat pockets, I found that I did not really have it in me to fight off stiff competition for that Masters anyway, much less the determination or capability to fund myself through it. It was then that I gave serious thought to the shiny red flyer I had seen in our Careers Centre, advertising a year abroad teaching in China.
Now, I’d always wanted to return to the Far East, having been born in Hong Kong (although I’d moved to Cyprus aged two), and had often given a certain amount of thought to teaching English as a foreign language. I pictured some charming mountain town with a small school full of cute little Chinese kids all incredibly obedient and willing to learn (I laugh at my own stereotyped views even as I write this now!) and thought that it sounded like a sweet deal. I wouldn’t get paid a lot, sure, but I was told that China is so cheap it doesn’t matter, AND I would have free accommodation, AND a free TEFL course, AND loads of time to travel and enjoy myself. I and a friend, Nicola, met with the guy who ran the organisation with which we were considering going, TEIC (Teach English in China.) His name is Phil Thomas and he is a retired professor at Cardiff University (and also Newcastle if I remember rightly.) He travels all over the UK promoting TEIC at universities, though his daughter in law Jasmine Hagger handles all applications.
What seems to happen is that you apply (CV, statement of purpose, photo, standard stuff) and they pass your details onto their partners in China, one in Beijing called Doris (I couldn’t vouch for her professionalism or lack of as I didn’t go with her) and one in Hunan province called Lany (by whom my application was received.) You pay a ‘support fee’ of £190 (directly to Jasmine’s bank account!!) for your application to be processed (whatever that means…) and then as far as I can tell Jasmine does pretty much nothing except email you a bit. Apparently she does the job in her spare time. I mean, it’s not a bad part time job, making money off gullible graduates, so, y’know… probably pays well…
I will admit, it did look a little suspicious and I was wrong to overrule my instincts. It seemed good….too good. I began wondering what exactly Jasmine and Phil got out of it. Phil seemed very eager to recruit Nicola and I although a little vague on the finer details (such as who Lany was exactly; he seemed to imply she was just someone who organised all this out of the kindness of her heart…) TEIC does mention they are affiliated with some government department in China so I wondered if they got a little pay from them for getting foreign teachers. It all seemed barely legit, but little did I know that I had just begun to scratch the surface. It was gonna get a whole lot murkier once I dived in.
And dive I did – for better or worse. I paid the support fee, chose to be placed in Hunan province alone (and not go through Doris in Beijing which would have meant being placed anywhere in the entire vast country that is China…) I began to correspond directly with Lany in Hunan about my placement. When I think of the amount of time in my thoughts, my daily life, and even my holidays, that the idea of going to China consumed, I do feel ashamed of myself. I should have checked this out more thoroughly. But the reason I write this is so that others will do the research I didn’t and think more deeply than I did about rushing off to the other side of the world seeking adventure. I was so keen to escape the rat race that offered itself to me upon graduation that I hardly stopped to consider other options but ploughed all my efforts into going to China.
However, it took a long time for Lany to arrange our placements and I only got a confirmation that I was going to China in mid-June. Which left me with not long to get all the injections/insurance/flights/visa and whatnot – TEIC did not lift a finger to help with this. They promise on their flyer a paid return flight – pah. This translates into ‘you pay upfront and we get your school to repay you a fraction of the money it took to get out here.’
Even with this I didn’t balk – I should have, but in my head I was going no matter what and with a lot of effort again I managed to get most of that done. I’d saved nearly £800-900 from my part time job in final year – all of that went on medical insurance and expensive injections and getting my visa on time and buying my own personal pharmacy, among other things. I even had to make a day trip back to Cardiff when we were all on a family holiday at a festival in Somerset just to post my visa application and get an injection. To get the second of those jabs I had to arrange to have it done when I was in Cardiff for graduation and, when I forgot my money, ask my brother to sub me the cash, which I would pay him back, and run to get it to me. It was not easy getting prepared! Further, I had to ask my parents to pay the cost of the outward flight, which I would then pay them back for later.
To make matters worse, Lany’s emails were vague rather than informative, she seemed to think I wanted to teach older students for some reason (I’d asked for primary kids) and her bad English was weird considering she claimed to have been bringing foreign teachers to China for 30 years. You’d think after that long of liaising with foreigners your English would be tip-top? Apparently not. She seemed friendly over the Skype ‘interview’ we had - interview, pah, she was in her PJs when I was ‘interviewed’! She seemed more concerned with whether I could play a musical instrument, sing, or dance than whether I had any teaching qualifications or not. Again, alarm bells should have sounded but it seemed the switch was broken. I wasn’t hearing any of these warnings. Our ‘TEFL course’ consisted of a 12-page booklet with ‘fill-in-the-blanks exercises, emailed to us TEICers along with a pamphlet about teaching. It kinda seemed like a comphrension exercise than anything to do with teaching.
Well anyway, the fateful day arrived and my arrival in China was as I have described in the previous post - devoid of any kind of teacher training, pretty much without organisation of any kind, a baptism of fire into the so-very-Chinese ad hoc way of doing things. After the initial first few days of training, some people were to go on to their schools (including Nicola), some were to do ‘teaching practice’ at some schools in Hunan (which, I later heard, ranged from light and interesting teaching to drudgery that involved getting up at 5am every day.) I and a few others opted for ‘homestay’ -that was, staying in a Chinese person’s home and tutoring their child for the week in English. I was placed in the home of May and Shu (English name, William Shaw), a lecturer couple who work at Xiangtan University. They and their twelve year old daughter Abigail live in the nice area of Xiangtan in a pretty sweet fourth floor flat. I have to say that while I was still suffering from jetlag, culture shock and homesickness I did manage to enjoy my stay with these kind people. ‘Tutoring’ basically involved just conversation practice – or in other words, hanging out – with Abi and her friend Phoenix, also twelve, who came to stay for the duration of my visit. They are sweet kids and I had fun with them, biking around the campus of XTU (Xiangtan Uni), going swimming, and making apple crumble (well, an attempt at apple crumble anyway.) That was enjoyable although I did feel bad that I had not been trained in tutoring at all so I hadn’t got a clue what to do. I only figured out towards the end of the week that I was ostensibly just an honoured guest and should make myself at home.
After this week, it was time for us TEICers to reassemble at the Green Tree Inn for our medical check in Changsha (the regional capital, about an hour from Xiangtan by bus. We got there, managed to get through the medical, then hung around in Changsha for a bit at Lany’s instigation (who basically told us to go enjoy ourselves in a strange city where we don’t speak the language after a kinda scary medical check – seriously??!) Anyway once that was over our schools came to collect us. I was met by the representative from my school, a young woman named Jenny in a bright yellow silk dress who was about the same age as me, very pretty and very clueless. I liked her, and even the two smiley non-English speaking blokes she had with her, although it was a longer drive than I had anticipated from Changsha to Yiyang (where I had assumed out school was, though it turned out to be in a neighbouring county, Taojiang). We got to Yiyang in about 2 and a half hours and had dinner there, but it was another thirty minutes or so before we reached Taojiang town, a pretty small place, and drove through it to the school, which stands a ways outside the town, on a road where one way leads to town and the other to an even smaller mining town in the hills, where they mine limestone or granite (not sure which). All that was missing were the tumbleweeds…it really looked like the back of beyond.
I was assured that another foreign teacher would be coming later in the week, but their current foreign teacher, a Mr. Allen, was yet to move out. He turned out to have a Mrs. Allen as well, and a brother staying with them in a shiny white marble apartment that seemed a little too spotless and clinical to have had people living in it for a year. What worried me was Mrs. Allen’s response when I asked her if she liked living there. ‘No, I don’t like it. Too quiet. Not any other foreigners.’ Well gee, thanks for making me feel better I wanted to answer.
They were pleasant people, if a little odd. They claimed to be from Canada but their accents were clearly African, maybe West Coast African, Nigerian at a guess. Allen’s Chinese was fluent and his wife’s was pretty good, which made sense as he said he’d been living in China for the past four years in different provinces. His brother was just there visiting apparently, though in the two months he had been there he’d managed to pick up a fair bit of Chinese. This lot left the next day, and I spent my time in the next day or two doing up my room, visiting the supermarket in nearby Taojiang with Jenny and her friends, befriending a teacher named Cassie and watching a lot of TV on my laptop.
It turned out there was nothing much for me to do and we still had a week until we were due to begin teaching.
So with the help of my new friend Cassie, I packed a small bag and went to the city of Zhuzhou, three hours southeast, to see Nicola, who had been assigned to teach in this city, and also had some time before she began teaching. This was interesting; I took the wrong bus into town at first and had to ask the bus passengers for directions with just my Chinese phrasebook! I underlined the word for ‘bus station’ and they all passed it round and it seemed to be decided that I would get off at the same stop as one of the men. He led me to the bus station in the centre of Taojiang town. I knew I needed to get the bus to Yiyang train station, but couldn’t see it. Then a Chinese girl about my age came up to me and introduced herself in English as Jenny. She asked me where I wanted to go, and I told her, so she took my hand and led me across the bus station yard to the right bus and helped me get on. As she led me to the bus, I could not help but think of a Scripture I had read the previous night, a psalm that says: ‘For I the Lord your God will hold your right hand, saying to you: ‘Fear not, I will help you.’ I knew it was God’s provision that I was meeting so many kind, friendly people.
I met some more nice people along the way, including a girl in the train station in Yiyang who spoke to me for a while, a station guard who helped me get on the train, and a woman called Michelle on the train who spoke English fluently and shared her lunch with me. When I got to Zhuzhou, I had a lovely time, and the day before I was due to leave, a newly made Chinese friend called Christina told me there was a job for a foreign teacher at her school in Zhuzhou if I wanted it.
That night, I got a message on Skype from Lany, telling me that I was to pack my bags and go to the city of Yueyang, four hours away from Zhuzhou, with no explanation of why. When I asked - several times - she eventually admitted that the school in Taojiang where I was supposed to teach had no government license to have a foreign teacher and so she was sending me to Yueyang, and had already arranged everything with a school there. I was absolutely steaming mad at her cheek, daring to arrange this without my permission and, as a typical Brit does when angry, sent a very aggressive letter to her. I then attempted to get the job in Zhuzhou I had been offered. The school in Zhuzhou were happy to have me teach there but we had to just get Lany to agree. She tried her best to stop me getting this job, even to the extent of blackmailing the school in order to stop me taking the job, but I dug my heels in and refused to move. The school that were offering me a job gave me an interview with a woman at their office, name of Yahui, who is quite a nice lady. She advised to to apologise to Lany and all would be made well. This made me want to scream - apologise to her?! For what?! But in the end I swallowed my pride and did it, realising it was probably some Chinese face-saving custom or something. That phone conversation was weird - Lany was refusing to acknowledge that she was speaking to me until I uttered the fateful words ‘I’m sorry.’ Like a lightbulb flicking on she was suddenly all sweetness and light and couldn’t do enough to help me. And that unbelievably quick turnaround is the reason I have never trusted her from that day forward.
As I had prayed he would, though, God ‘gave me favour in the sight of my enemy’ and I was allowed to stay in Zhuzhou. Through this time, Nicola’s prayers and help were invaluable and I was very blessed to have a friend like her around.
Before I could go back to Zhuzhou, I had to go back to Taojiang to get the things I had left there. I took a late night train to Yiyang, and the station guards, upon realising I could not speak Chinese, collared a random middle aged bloke who was also going to Yiyang and assigned him to look after me This man helped me with my luggage and made sure I got a taxi when were arrived in Yiyang at midnight. The taxi was a black cab which I know are illegal, so I was terrified, but the man from the train negotiated a price for me, took the driver’s number and took pictures of the front and rear plates. It turned out that the taxi got me back to Taojiang and the school OK, and the next day I was sent to Xiangtan to recieve new papers from Lany and was to be picked up by my school. The school drove me to Xiangtan, whereupon we had a rather awkward ( at least for me) lunch with Lany and her husband (ever had a massive argument with someone and then had them invite you for lunch like it’s NBD? I have. It’s weird.)
From there Lany let me nap in a nearby hotel, renting me a room for the lunchtime nap hour, and then when I was awake, tried to persuade me once more to go to Yueyang and take the job there. I declined, once more, both forcefully and graciously (which believe me is hard to do.)
Yahui was also there by the this point, sitting silently as Lany tried to persuade me into taking her offer. I murmered to her something apologetic about causing her trouble, as Lany paid for the hotel. She shushed me, telling me we could talk later. Once we were safely away from Lany and in her own car, Yahui sat back with a sigh of relief, telling me that she was glad I hadn’t taken Lany’s offer and had chosen her school instead. I got the impression Yahui did not like dealing with a recruiter like Lany any more than I did... a suspicion that has been confirmed since then. She proceeded to take me for a massage and a meal with her cousin, and some well-needed relaxation. Upon getting to my school, I was shown to my room, and fell asleep, grateful to God that He had given me a place I felt like I was happy to be in.
If I could tell you one thing about teaching in China? Do NOT come with an agency. They do not train you. They do not look after you. They rip you off ( I am paid less than half of what I am entitled to; the rest of my pay goes to Lany because of the school’s arrangement with her for my services.) If you have problems with our school (as I did) they do not help. Your ‘return airfare’ will hardly cover your flight out. Your ‘TEFL certificate’ will be worthless, because it is very unlikely to be accredited. NOTHING is as advertised. I am lucky; I have heard since I settled in Zhuzhou and got to know other, more experienced foreign teachers of people who had a far worse deal than me with teaching agencies.
If you are serious about coming to China to teach? Ignore jobs that offer less than 10,000 RMB; they are not worth wasting your time on. Google blacklisted teaching agencies and become aware of the scam outfits. Get jobs through friends, ideally (pretty much everyone these days has at least one Chinese friend, right?) Make sure the school do things like cover your flight out and return (plenty of reputable schools will pay this upfront) and be prepared to negotiate your contract, down to the last tiny detail (ESPECIALLY if you are supposed to get decent, free accomodation. It will most likely hardly be adequate unless you specify exactly what you will and will not put up with.) Also, learn some Chinese before coming out - this will definitely cushion your landing!
And finally, it’s a golden oldie but worth remembering- if something looks to good to be true, it almost certainly is. TEIC and their sister organisation MKT (Middle Kingdom Teachers) and others like them exist to make money, for both the British and Chinese side. Trust me, you do not want to be caught out by them.
Sunday, April 13, 2014
I'm a waiguoren, get me out of here! (or, initial reactions to China)
Dec. 15, 2013
Before I came to China, I was told that the most common word that would be applied to me was the term ‘laowai’ – lao meaning honoured, wai meaning foreigner. My parents, who spent four years in the early nineties living in Hong Kong, slightly cynically warned me to expect the racist insult ‘gweilo’ or ‘smelly foreigner’ at some point. While I personally have never had that applied to me (a guy I know in a much smaller town than me has though) I’ve also never been called laowai either. I’m most commonly known as ‘wai jiao’ (I’ve yet to learn the meaning of that one, but I think it means foreign friend or foreign teacher) ‘waiguoren’ [wAI –go-ren] (wai, as above, meaning foreign, and guo ren being a way of referring to a person’s nationality’ e.g. Zhongguoren [SJHong go ren] means Chinese person. I am, to my students, alternatively ‘yingguoren’ [EEN-go ren] (England person) or ‘yingguo laoshi’ [EEEN-go-lao-SHUR] (England teacher/teacher from England.)
Although it is not quite correct, I have become used to answering the tiresome but expected question ‘Where are you from?’ with simply ‘England’, not going into my life story unless the push me for details. (The Chinese don’t understand not having a hometown…) I’m often, rather charmingly, called by my colleagues and friends who are fluent or near-fluent in English, a ‘foreign friend’ to both them and the students I teach. I’ve grown accustomed to my new status, to being stared at most places I go (either I don’t notice it or it doesn’t bother me as much as it did when I arrived), to being afforded greater privileges and respect by pretty much everyone simply because I’m different, and having my students exclaim ‘Teacher soooo beautiful!’ whenever I walk in the door (not gonna lie, I like that one, and fat chance of ever getting that reaction in the UK…)
I also feel that after 4 months in China, having overcome significant difficulties in the strength of God alone and in His time and provision finding a church, new friends, a gym, having my friend from uni in Cardiff, Nicola, around to keep me sane and to share some perspective, hanging out with the other expats here and discovering that China does do chocolate after all, I have finally become settled here, just about. But that this took about four months to come about may tell you something of the degree of culture shock I’ve undergone in that time, and to be honest it still gets me occasionally. It probably will until the day I leave. And that is because, for all the things that are similar, there are about ten things that are different and some days it just feels like what I imagine being a settler of an alien planet might feel like.
Take my first few days of arrival in China, for example. On August 10th, 2013, my friend Nicola and I flew one of the most mentally and physically draining journeys I have ever taken in my life (even though the flights went well!) from London-Berlin-Beijing-Changsha. It was an 18-hour blur of rushing and suitcase dragging and takeoff and touchdown and pressure headaches and checking baggage and choking on Beijing’s polluted air before we finally touched down in Changsha, capital of Hunan province, where we were to meet…well, whoever the mysterious Lany, the Chinese woman affiliated with our teaching organisation, TEIC, had arranged to pick us up. This turned out to be two students from the Lanhu Cultural Exchange Centre of Xiangtan University (Xiangtan, as it transpired, is a city of 3million – so a small town – to the southwest of Changsha.) Their names were Jet (yes, after Jet Li) and Lily, who met us in Arrivals once we had hauled our suitcases off of baggage claim and were congratulating ourselves upon our more or less intact arrival. Jet and Lily were very pleased to see us but didn’t seem particularly organised (welcome to China.)
They had already collected a small group of waiguoren who were also with TEIC who were sitting on the cold floor of the airport with large suitcases and baggage trolleys dotted around them. We were getting to know one another when the unwelcome news came that we were going to have to wait for the last two girls to come – at 10pm that night – it was 4pm. Needless to say, it was a very grumpy, smelly, sweaty group of waiguoren who finally boarded the Bouncy Express (my jovial nickname for our coach) to the city of Xiangtan, where we were to stay that night. We all nodded off on the coach journey for a while, but I remember waking up with a start when we bounced off the pot-holed motorway exit to Xiangtan.
As we entered the outskirts of the city, huge apartment buildings bigger than I had ever seen before loomed up out of the darkness towards the window, as did massive billboards with incomphrensible Chinese characters splashed all over them. All I could see in the dimly lighted streets was dust and billboards and giant buildings and crazy traffic, and I felt the sudden return of the unreasoning panic that had first overwhelmed me on the plane from Berlin to Beijing. It was a familiar terror in a way – I had moved to utterly different countries before then and I recognised it for culture shock, but knowing the name doesn’t make it any less of a shock. All around me was the unfamiliar and the alien and the bizarre, and the knowledge that I had signed a contract that bound me here for a year was enough to make me want to run away back home with my tail between my legs. I dismissed it as overtiredness that night, trying to reason with myself that it would get better with time.
Of course, the first few days in a new place always seem stretched out, as if time slows to a crawl while you experience all the new sights and sounds and smells - oh man, the smells…that is something that no words can convey…that the new place has to offer. We were staying in the Green Tree Inn in Xiangtan, a smoky, spartan, but adequate establishment where no English was spoken by the staff (not helpful, especially on the night of arrival when they messed up our room arrangements by giving us keys to rooms that were already inhabited…by other TEICers who had arrived the previous day.) After a lot of sign language we managed to get rooms for the six of us who lacked rooms, but due to our late arrival we got only five hours’ sleep. When jetlagged to the max this is not sufficient.
Waking up the next day to blinding 46c heat and humidity, we dragged ourselves off to Xiangtan No.2 School, where our ‘teacher training’ was supposed to take place. Ha. Ha. Teacher training. That’s funny. There was no teacher training about it, it was just a series of lectures on how to survive in China by a Polish guy called Martin, which, though helpful, were not entirely what we had expected. Then it was our first into to Chinese food at lunch, where we found that in most places, the food comes swimming in grease and damn spicy (regional specialty.) Lovely. I tried a Chinese beer and found it just as weak as I had been told before coming (kinda disappointing, but no surprise.) Then after ‘training’ was done, Lany wanted us all to go and take pictures in the park. Photo taking is something of a national obsession. At that temperature all one wants to do is lie in the air con consuming a pint of iced tea every half hour and moaning about how hot it is. Fat chance. Nope, it was pictures in the ‘park’ – a tree lined boulevard that didn’t really much resemble a park – for us. The juxtaposition of familiar words – lunch, beer, park – with things that didn’t really match up to my concept of them was for me as much a part of the culture shock than anything else.
Mostly my memories of those days are of the dust coating Xiangtan No. 2 School, the stinking heat and the bizarre feeling that the sun was closer to me than normal (Hunan is equatorial), the constant need to buy drinks lest one expire in the sweaty lecture theatre where our training took place, and the sweetish-rotting stench of binlang, or betel nut (a mildly euphoric recreational drug that gives one a ‘buzz’ similar to caffeine but is strongly linked to throat cancer.) Xiangtan is famous for it (binlang, not throat cancer.) It was also my first introduction to the utterly bonkers free-for-all that is Chinese traffic, with motorbikes and electric scooters zipping along both pavement and road with mad abandon, and buses, trucks, lorries and cars battling it out for space on the road in a metallic re-enactment of the pushing and shoving that customarily occurs when attempting to take a bus in China. I was both appalled and admiring at the recklessness of the casual Chinese pedestrian, who steps out into this insanity very calmly, often texting away, and manoeuvres steadily between cars without rushing, often inches from a passing truck and not batting an eyelid. I decided very quickly that I stood a better chance of crossing the road in company with these daredevils, and therefore stood foolishly at the side of the road until a Chinese person came along to whom I could stick like a burr until I had crossed the road (I still often follow this policy.) Even now, I often get to the other side of the road and feel like imitating Mushu from Mulan: ‘I liiiiiiiiiiiived!’
Anyway, I digress. I describe the first few days in order to convey a sense of the complete strangeness of it all to me. Everything about China was new and bizarre, and to be frank, I did not like everything all at once. I cried a lot, I missed home like a physical pain and it didn’t help that in fact, I liked very little about China on first glance, and it did not seem like the semi-mythical Middle Kingdom to which I had aspired to go since childhood. Even though I’ve grown accustomed to some things, I still don’t like them (squat toilets?? Why, China, whyyyy?) The culture gap is a big one, and I’m not going to cover everything in one post, but it is worth saying, hang in there. It will take you a while to get your bearings. You might be a wreck for the first week like I was. You may run into massive problems with your visa and your teaching agency and your employers like I did. You may still not like China very much after some time here. (I still don’t, not really.)
But you might be able to make the best of the year you so unwittingly signed up for, and gain some valuable experience from the year here. I would say, only pack up and leave if you have a genuine reason, like a family emergency or something, or if your school is completely and utterly unbearable (which they can be!) but if not, make as much of an effort as you humanly can to look on the bright side and learn from everything that occurs. If nothing else, surviving in China for a year will not only give you some serious street cred back at home but will make you appreciate home and all the people and things and rights and privileges you took for granted back home (family, friends, a proper Christmas, uncensored internet and cheese being in my top ten.) And it’ll be something else to talk about at job interview/look good on your CV and who knows, the skills you gain here may well help you in a future career. Whatever way you look at it, your time here has a lot of potential, and although I think it has helped toughen me up, I would not say I have got through this on my wits alone. I have stumbled and fallen and had to be picked up by my God and set on my feet again. He has provided for me through friends and advocates, the prayers of friends and family, in the kindness of strangers, and in many other incredible ways that I will share about in this blog, and this has increased my faith and trust in His provision greatly.
I hope to encourage my Christian readers with these tales of provision, and perhaps intrigue my non-Christian readers. But if you are a new waiguoren who wants out of here, let me just give you a few hints for adjusting to the culture:
1) Don’t expect to feel fine soon. I know that doesn’t sound good, but seriously, the false expectation that you will feel better about everything once the jetlag has worn off/you start teaching/other short term benchmark is usually not realistic. If you’re worrying about when it will start to feel ‘normal’ to be here it won’t help. Take one day at a time.
2) Don’t feel bad/irritated if you’re the only homesick one. So the other people you came out with don’t feel homesick at all? Well, whoopee for them, perhaps they just simply get on better with Chinese culture than you (some people do – I don’t understand them, personally.) It may well hit them a bit later on, or they are trying to put on a brave face and act normal, or they have a coping mechanism such as hanging around mostly with other expats and drinking a lot…whatever. If you aren’t doing so well, there’s no shame in it, but try not to feel martyred, it won’t help. Just cut yourself some slack and don’t compare yourself with them, it’s not secondary school anymore!
3)Do get accountable. If you came out alone and not with a friend or partner, talk to a trusted friend back home via email and Skype. If you and they are Christian ask for prayer. Just talk to someone who won’t reprimand you for ‘not being positive’ but will listen and offer constructive ways to help. I was very blessed by having Nicola close by, going through the same thing as me, able to pray with me (and for me when I was too choked up to speak) and talk with me. Also friends and family via Skype and email and FB did encourage me and help me greatly during the early days. The fact that my English phone worked for the first two weeks and I could text my dad helped hugely.
4)Do pray. OK, sure, not everyone has a faith. But if you’re really in a dark place…well, I know this guy that really loves to help out people who are at the end of their rope. His name’s Jesus. You could try asking Him for help if you want; He’s sure to give it. Christians, you know how true this is – He will help you get through it all. Romans 8:28.
5)Do get busy. It’s the same principle as moving away to uni, really, or boarding school for those of us who’ve done that. The busier you are the better you will feel, the quicker time will pass and you’ll even start to enjoy yourself. But be careful what you do to get busy. I’ve found personally that watching excess TV series or movies or playing excess computer games or even just overindulging in social networking and reading articles online (with the beauty that is a VPN) can drain me rather than enervate me. Learn a bit of Chinese online. Take up a hobby. Revive an old hobby. Explore the local park a bit. Look for a church, and/or a gym, make the effort with your Chinese colleagues even if they don’t with you. Even just go sit in the local Starbucks and read; you’ll find that the Chinese people who can speak English, even if it’s just the baristas, will start to chat with you. If your town doesn’t have a Starbucks, maybe KFC or McD’s. The cliché is that most expats end up in one of these three places eventually and therefore it’s a good place to go to meet foreigners, so the English speaking Chinese tend to hang out there. Granted, this is easier in big cities; you might run into a few more problems with this in the small towns.
6) Don’t just hang out with expats. This is a classic mistake expats make. Just because you come from the same country or speak the same language doesn’t guarantee you will always see eye to eye on things or enjoy the same activities. They may be extremely annoying or they may be perfectly pleasant, but I’d avoid spending all your time with them. Make an effort with the other expats around you if there are some, but don’t exclusively hang out with them; make friends with Chinese people where you can, whether in the workplace or, as I said, at church or a gym or even Starbucks. If there’s a university in your town befriend the students; they will usually speak some English. Not only will you gain a bit of insight into the culture, but they might end up teaching you some Chinese, taking you shopping, out for meals etc. Chinese people tend to be very friendly towards foreigners and regard it as their duty to show you the best Chinese hospitality. Just don’t insist on splitting the bill if it looks like they’re gonna pay, it’s very rude (so I am told!)
7)Don’t despair. Despite what your teaching agency may have told you, you can leave China anytime you want as long as you have in your passport a valid residency permit (the stamp that you should get sorted out by your school with the local police. (If they don’t do this within the first month you are in deep, deep trouble so make sure they do it!) If you arrive in Aug/Sept, you should have until June/July the following year and it will say on it the date of expiry. If you have this you can go in and out of China like a Chinese citizen would. If you want to go home for the spring break and you can afford it, don’t let any disparaging comments like ‘oh, you should experience China while you’re there’ stop you. You are already experiencing China 24/7 and if you can’t make it through a year without a dose of normality in between, so be it. And if you decide you don’t want to come back…well, to be honest there is nothing the school can do to stop you.
8)Do see the sights. The above being said, the people I know who were the unhappiest in China were the ones who didn’t, for various reasons, go out and see whatever there is to see in their city, the neighbouring cities, or the rest of the province. There is life beyond your little Chinese backwater town, and once you get to places like Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing, China’s real metropolises, you start to appreciate the true scale of the country you’re in. Not to mention, there are some pretty awesome natural places to visit, such as Sichuan’s Tiger Leaping Gorge, Hunan’s Zhangjiajie, the jungles of Yunnan, etc. And then there are the cultural centres everyone knows about like Xi’an which hosts the Terracotta Warriors, and the Forbidden City/Tianamen Square/the Great Wall in Beijing. True, you may get into some scrapes every once in a while. And they may be pretty scary. But you learn from them, and you will have some stories to tell! You are only young once, as the old grandpas and grandmas say. I’ve been to only a handful of places in China thus far, and still have quite a few on my tick list, the Great Wall being one of those…
9)Do have a good attitude. Not gonna lie, it took me a while to learn this one. I can be a depressingly cynical person by nature (I blame my artistic temperament ;-) ) and I am not very patient. But hanging out a lot with Nicola, who is both positive and patient, has rubbed off on me, not to mention the encouragement from our friend Rachel, from my parents and siblings and from other friends, all of whom were pillars of strength to me – it has been a huge blessing. I’ve learned from them to look for the good amidst the crappiness that may sometimes occur and to thank God for every ray of sunshine that breaks the clouds, both literally and figuratively.
10)Do get a VPN before you come out. As I’ll expand on in later posts, a VPN (Virtual Presence Network) is vital for life in China. If you want to be able to browse the internet like you would at home and not even notice the Great Firewall, get a VPN. A couple of the good ones are Strong VPN, Pure VPN, Astrill VPN and Switch VPN although there are more. I strongly recommend that you pay for a year’s subscription. I didn’t and it is costing me now in terms of not being able to access Youtube and a fair few other sites (I have, finally, managed to get a free VPN that works for FB – Identity Cloaker, demo mode.) Simply put, most free VPNs are complete crap and 90% of the time they will not work – and that is if they are a good free VPN. You get what you pay for, i.e. nothing. I’m having problems with my UK bank at the moment but as soon as I go home in the break I plan to sort out paying for a VPN for the rest of my time here. I know some people aren’t big Facebookers but for me there’s nothing to restore my normality than being able to connect with people there and to listen to music and comedy videos on Youtube and access Netflix. Of course excessive use will increase, not decrease, your homesickness but you know, all good things in moderation and all that jazz. Oh and if you haven’t got Skype – a) what kind of rock have you been living under and b) GET. IT. You will need it. That is all. Other helpful connect-with-home devices are smartphone apps like Viber and Whatsapp (don’t use them myself, and I can’t download them here, but my friends use them and say they are invaluable.) Of course, to root you in Chinese social networking you’ll need QQ (Chinese FB) and WeChat, (Weixin) but I’ll talk about those in a later post.
So there you are, and I’ve probably smothered you in quite enough advice and story and things for one post. Until next time, zaijian!
Before I came to China, I was told that the most common word that would be applied to me was the term ‘laowai’ – lao meaning honoured, wai meaning foreigner. My parents, who spent four years in the early nineties living in Hong Kong, slightly cynically warned me to expect the racist insult ‘gweilo’ or ‘smelly foreigner’ at some point. While I personally have never had that applied to me (a guy I know in a much smaller town than me has though) I’ve also never been called laowai either. I’m most commonly known as ‘wai jiao’ (I’ve yet to learn the meaning of that one, but I think it means foreign friend or foreign teacher) ‘waiguoren’ [wAI –go-ren] (wai, as above, meaning foreign, and guo ren being a way of referring to a person’s nationality’ e.g. Zhongguoren [SJHong go ren] means Chinese person. I am, to my students, alternatively ‘yingguoren’ [EEN-go ren] (England person) or ‘yingguo laoshi’ [EEEN-go-lao-SHUR] (England teacher/teacher from England.)
Although it is not quite correct, I have become used to answering the tiresome but expected question ‘Where are you from?’ with simply ‘England’, not going into my life story unless the push me for details. (The Chinese don’t understand not having a hometown…) I’m often, rather charmingly, called by my colleagues and friends who are fluent or near-fluent in English, a ‘foreign friend’ to both them and the students I teach. I’ve grown accustomed to my new status, to being stared at most places I go (either I don’t notice it or it doesn’t bother me as much as it did when I arrived), to being afforded greater privileges and respect by pretty much everyone simply because I’m different, and having my students exclaim ‘Teacher soooo beautiful!’ whenever I walk in the door (not gonna lie, I like that one, and fat chance of ever getting that reaction in the UK…)
I also feel that after 4 months in China, having overcome significant difficulties in the strength of God alone and in His time and provision finding a church, new friends, a gym, having my friend from uni in Cardiff, Nicola, around to keep me sane and to share some perspective, hanging out with the other expats here and discovering that China does do chocolate after all, I have finally become settled here, just about. But that this took about four months to come about may tell you something of the degree of culture shock I’ve undergone in that time, and to be honest it still gets me occasionally. It probably will until the day I leave. And that is because, for all the things that are similar, there are about ten things that are different and some days it just feels like what I imagine being a settler of an alien planet might feel like.
Take my first few days of arrival in China, for example. On August 10th, 2013, my friend Nicola and I flew one of the most mentally and physically draining journeys I have ever taken in my life (even though the flights went well!) from London-Berlin-Beijing-Changsha. It was an 18-hour blur of rushing and suitcase dragging and takeoff and touchdown and pressure headaches and checking baggage and choking on Beijing’s polluted air before we finally touched down in Changsha, capital of Hunan province, where we were to meet…well, whoever the mysterious Lany, the Chinese woman affiliated with our teaching organisation, TEIC, had arranged to pick us up. This turned out to be two students from the Lanhu Cultural Exchange Centre of Xiangtan University (Xiangtan, as it transpired, is a city of 3million – so a small town – to the southwest of Changsha.) Their names were Jet (yes, after Jet Li) and Lily, who met us in Arrivals once we had hauled our suitcases off of baggage claim and were congratulating ourselves upon our more or less intact arrival. Jet and Lily were very pleased to see us but didn’t seem particularly organised (welcome to China.)
They had already collected a small group of waiguoren who were also with TEIC who were sitting on the cold floor of the airport with large suitcases and baggage trolleys dotted around them. We were getting to know one another when the unwelcome news came that we were going to have to wait for the last two girls to come – at 10pm that night – it was 4pm. Needless to say, it was a very grumpy, smelly, sweaty group of waiguoren who finally boarded the Bouncy Express (my jovial nickname for our coach) to the city of Xiangtan, where we were to stay that night. We all nodded off on the coach journey for a while, but I remember waking up with a start when we bounced off the pot-holed motorway exit to Xiangtan.
As we entered the outskirts of the city, huge apartment buildings bigger than I had ever seen before loomed up out of the darkness towards the window, as did massive billboards with incomphrensible Chinese characters splashed all over them. All I could see in the dimly lighted streets was dust and billboards and giant buildings and crazy traffic, and I felt the sudden return of the unreasoning panic that had first overwhelmed me on the plane from Berlin to Beijing. It was a familiar terror in a way – I had moved to utterly different countries before then and I recognised it for culture shock, but knowing the name doesn’t make it any less of a shock. All around me was the unfamiliar and the alien and the bizarre, and the knowledge that I had signed a contract that bound me here for a year was enough to make me want to run away back home with my tail between my legs. I dismissed it as overtiredness that night, trying to reason with myself that it would get better with time.
Of course, the first few days in a new place always seem stretched out, as if time slows to a crawl while you experience all the new sights and sounds and smells - oh man, the smells…that is something that no words can convey…that the new place has to offer. We were staying in the Green Tree Inn in Xiangtan, a smoky, spartan, but adequate establishment where no English was spoken by the staff (not helpful, especially on the night of arrival when they messed up our room arrangements by giving us keys to rooms that were already inhabited…by other TEICers who had arrived the previous day.) After a lot of sign language we managed to get rooms for the six of us who lacked rooms, but due to our late arrival we got only five hours’ sleep. When jetlagged to the max this is not sufficient.
Waking up the next day to blinding 46c heat and humidity, we dragged ourselves off to Xiangtan No.2 School, where our ‘teacher training’ was supposed to take place. Ha. Ha. Teacher training. That’s funny. There was no teacher training about it, it was just a series of lectures on how to survive in China by a Polish guy called Martin, which, though helpful, were not entirely what we had expected. Then it was our first into to Chinese food at lunch, where we found that in most places, the food comes swimming in grease and damn spicy (regional specialty.) Lovely. I tried a Chinese beer and found it just as weak as I had been told before coming (kinda disappointing, but no surprise.) Then after ‘training’ was done, Lany wanted us all to go and take pictures in the park. Photo taking is something of a national obsession. At that temperature all one wants to do is lie in the air con consuming a pint of iced tea every half hour and moaning about how hot it is. Fat chance. Nope, it was pictures in the ‘park’ – a tree lined boulevard that didn’t really much resemble a park – for us. The juxtaposition of familiar words – lunch, beer, park – with things that didn’t really match up to my concept of them was for me as much a part of the culture shock than anything else.
Mostly my memories of those days are of the dust coating Xiangtan No. 2 School, the stinking heat and the bizarre feeling that the sun was closer to me than normal (Hunan is equatorial), the constant need to buy drinks lest one expire in the sweaty lecture theatre where our training took place, and the sweetish-rotting stench of binlang, or betel nut (a mildly euphoric recreational drug that gives one a ‘buzz’ similar to caffeine but is strongly linked to throat cancer.) Xiangtan is famous for it (binlang, not throat cancer.) It was also my first introduction to the utterly bonkers free-for-all that is Chinese traffic, with motorbikes and electric scooters zipping along both pavement and road with mad abandon, and buses, trucks, lorries and cars battling it out for space on the road in a metallic re-enactment of the pushing and shoving that customarily occurs when attempting to take a bus in China. I was both appalled and admiring at the recklessness of the casual Chinese pedestrian, who steps out into this insanity very calmly, often texting away, and manoeuvres steadily between cars without rushing, often inches from a passing truck and not batting an eyelid. I decided very quickly that I stood a better chance of crossing the road in company with these daredevils, and therefore stood foolishly at the side of the road until a Chinese person came along to whom I could stick like a burr until I had crossed the road (I still often follow this policy.) Even now, I often get to the other side of the road and feel like imitating Mushu from Mulan: ‘I liiiiiiiiiiiived!’
Anyway, I digress. I describe the first few days in order to convey a sense of the complete strangeness of it all to me. Everything about China was new and bizarre, and to be frank, I did not like everything all at once. I cried a lot, I missed home like a physical pain and it didn’t help that in fact, I liked very little about China on first glance, and it did not seem like the semi-mythical Middle Kingdom to which I had aspired to go since childhood. Even though I’ve grown accustomed to some things, I still don’t like them (squat toilets?? Why, China, whyyyy?) The culture gap is a big one, and I’m not going to cover everything in one post, but it is worth saying, hang in there. It will take you a while to get your bearings. You might be a wreck for the first week like I was. You may run into massive problems with your visa and your teaching agency and your employers like I did. You may still not like China very much after some time here. (I still don’t, not really.)
But you might be able to make the best of the year you so unwittingly signed up for, and gain some valuable experience from the year here. I would say, only pack up and leave if you have a genuine reason, like a family emergency or something, or if your school is completely and utterly unbearable (which they can be!) but if not, make as much of an effort as you humanly can to look on the bright side and learn from everything that occurs. If nothing else, surviving in China for a year will not only give you some serious street cred back at home but will make you appreciate home and all the people and things and rights and privileges you took for granted back home (family, friends, a proper Christmas, uncensored internet and cheese being in my top ten.) And it’ll be something else to talk about at job interview/look good on your CV and who knows, the skills you gain here may well help you in a future career. Whatever way you look at it, your time here has a lot of potential, and although I think it has helped toughen me up, I would not say I have got through this on my wits alone. I have stumbled and fallen and had to be picked up by my God and set on my feet again. He has provided for me through friends and advocates, the prayers of friends and family, in the kindness of strangers, and in many other incredible ways that I will share about in this blog, and this has increased my faith and trust in His provision greatly.
I hope to encourage my Christian readers with these tales of provision, and perhaps intrigue my non-Christian readers. But if you are a new waiguoren who wants out of here, let me just give you a few hints for adjusting to the culture:
1) Don’t expect to feel fine soon. I know that doesn’t sound good, but seriously, the false expectation that you will feel better about everything once the jetlag has worn off/you start teaching/other short term benchmark is usually not realistic. If you’re worrying about when it will start to feel ‘normal’ to be here it won’t help. Take one day at a time.
2) Don’t feel bad/irritated if you’re the only homesick one. So the other people you came out with don’t feel homesick at all? Well, whoopee for them, perhaps they just simply get on better with Chinese culture than you (some people do – I don’t understand them, personally.) It may well hit them a bit later on, or they are trying to put on a brave face and act normal, or they have a coping mechanism such as hanging around mostly with other expats and drinking a lot…whatever. If you aren’t doing so well, there’s no shame in it, but try not to feel martyred, it won’t help. Just cut yourself some slack and don’t compare yourself with them, it’s not secondary school anymore!
3)Do get accountable. If you came out alone and not with a friend or partner, talk to a trusted friend back home via email and Skype. If you and they are Christian ask for prayer. Just talk to someone who won’t reprimand you for ‘not being positive’ but will listen and offer constructive ways to help. I was very blessed by having Nicola close by, going through the same thing as me, able to pray with me (and for me when I was too choked up to speak) and talk with me. Also friends and family via Skype and email and FB did encourage me and help me greatly during the early days. The fact that my English phone worked for the first two weeks and I could text my dad helped hugely.
4)Do pray. OK, sure, not everyone has a faith. But if you’re really in a dark place…well, I know this guy that really loves to help out people who are at the end of their rope. His name’s Jesus. You could try asking Him for help if you want; He’s sure to give it. Christians, you know how true this is – He will help you get through it all. Romans 8:28.
5)Do get busy. It’s the same principle as moving away to uni, really, or boarding school for those of us who’ve done that. The busier you are the better you will feel, the quicker time will pass and you’ll even start to enjoy yourself. But be careful what you do to get busy. I’ve found personally that watching excess TV series or movies or playing excess computer games or even just overindulging in social networking and reading articles online (with the beauty that is a VPN) can drain me rather than enervate me. Learn a bit of Chinese online. Take up a hobby. Revive an old hobby. Explore the local park a bit. Look for a church, and/or a gym, make the effort with your Chinese colleagues even if they don’t with you. Even just go sit in the local Starbucks and read; you’ll find that the Chinese people who can speak English, even if it’s just the baristas, will start to chat with you. If your town doesn’t have a Starbucks, maybe KFC or McD’s. The cliché is that most expats end up in one of these three places eventually and therefore it’s a good place to go to meet foreigners, so the English speaking Chinese tend to hang out there. Granted, this is easier in big cities; you might run into a few more problems with this in the small towns.
6) Don’t just hang out with expats. This is a classic mistake expats make. Just because you come from the same country or speak the same language doesn’t guarantee you will always see eye to eye on things or enjoy the same activities. They may be extremely annoying or they may be perfectly pleasant, but I’d avoid spending all your time with them. Make an effort with the other expats around you if there are some, but don’t exclusively hang out with them; make friends with Chinese people where you can, whether in the workplace or, as I said, at church or a gym or even Starbucks. If there’s a university in your town befriend the students; they will usually speak some English. Not only will you gain a bit of insight into the culture, but they might end up teaching you some Chinese, taking you shopping, out for meals etc. Chinese people tend to be very friendly towards foreigners and regard it as their duty to show you the best Chinese hospitality. Just don’t insist on splitting the bill if it looks like they’re gonna pay, it’s very rude (so I am told!)
7)Don’t despair. Despite what your teaching agency may have told you, you can leave China anytime you want as long as you have in your passport a valid residency permit (the stamp that you should get sorted out by your school with the local police. (If they don’t do this within the first month you are in deep, deep trouble so make sure they do it!) If you arrive in Aug/Sept, you should have until June/July the following year and it will say on it the date of expiry. If you have this you can go in and out of China like a Chinese citizen would. If you want to go home for the spring break and you can afford it, don’t let any disparaging comments like ‘oh, you should experience China while you’re there’ stop you. You are already experiencing China 24/7 and if you can’t make it through a year without a dose of normality in between, so be it. And if you decide you don’t want to come back…well, to be honest there is nothing the school can do to stop you.
8)Do see the sights. The above being said, the people I know who were the unhappiest in China were the ones who didn’t, for various reasons, go out and see whatever there is to see in their city, the neighbouring cities, or the rest of the province. There is life beyond your little Chinese backwater town, and once you get to places like Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing, China’s real metropolises, you start to appreciate the true scale of the country you’re in. Not to mention, there are some pretty awesome natural places to visit, such as Sichuan’s Tiger Leaping Gorge, Hunan’s Zhangjiajie, the jungles of Yunnan, etc. And then there are the cultural centres everyone knows about like Xi’an which hosts the Terracotta Warriors, and the Forbidden City/Tianamen Square/the Great Wall in Beijing. True, you may get into some scrapes every once in a while. And they may be pretty scary. But you learn from them, and you will have some stories to tell! You are only young once, as the old grandpas and grandmas say. I’ve been to only a handful of places in China thus far, and still have quite a few on my tick list, the Great Wall being one of those…
9)Do have a good attitude. Not gonna lie, it took me a while to learn this one. I can be a depressingly cynical person by nature (I blame my artistic temperament ;-) ) and I am not very patient. But hanging out a lot with Nicola, who is both positive and patient, has rubbed off on me, not to mention the encouragement from our friend Rachel, from my parents and siblings and from other friends, all of whom were pillars of strength to me – it has been a huge blessing. I’ve learned from them to look for the good amidst the crappiness that may sometimes occur and to thank God for every ray of sunshine that breaks the clouds, both literally and figuratively.
10)Do get a VPN before you come out. As I’ll expand on in later posts, a VPN (Virtual Presence Network) is vital for life in China. If you want to be able to browse the internet like you would at home and not even notice the Great Firewall, get a VPN. A couple of the good ones are Strong VPN, Pure VPN, Astrill VPN and Switch VPN although there are more. I strongly recommend that you pay for a year’s subscription. I didn’t and it is costing me now in terms of not being able to access Youtube and a fair few other sites (I have, finally, managed to get a free VPN that works for FB – Identity Cloaker, demo mode.) Simply put, most free VPNs are complete crap and 90% of the time they will not work – and that is if they are a good free VPN. You get what you pay for, i.e. nothing. I’m having problems with my UK bank at the moment but as soon as I go home in the break I plan to sort out paying for a VPN for the rest of my time here. I know some people aren’t big Facebookers but for me there’s nothing to restore my normality than being able to connect with people there and to listen to music and comedy videos on Youtube and access Netflix. Of course excessive use will increase, not decrease, your homesickness but you know, all good things in moderation and all that jazz. Oh and if you haven’t got Skype – a) what kind of rock have you been living under and b) GET. IT. You will need it. That is all. Other helpful connect-with-home devices are smartphone apps like Viber and Whatsapp (don’t use them myself, and I can’t download them here, but my friends use them and say they are invaluable.) Of course, to root you in Chinese social networking you’ll need QQ (Chinese FB) and WeChat, (Weixin) but I’ll talk about those in a later post.
So there you are, and I’ve probably smothered you in quite enough advice and story and things for one post. Until next time, zaijian!
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