Once upon a time, I graduated from the University of Minnesota Duluth with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. After graduation, I entered a PhD program on the Minneapolis campus and rented an apartment in St. Paul.

I had always wanted to cure diseases, as evidenced by my consistent playing of healer characters in games, but I felt I was more interested in behind-the-scenes research than in medical practice.

(Healing powers were always my choice of possible superpowers as well, though I’d find myself in a bit of a conundrum if anyone insisted Wolverine-style regeneration was a separate power from that of healing others. When I once asked my students about superpowers as a lesson warm-up, most of them chose flight with the explanation that they’d want to travel around the world or visit their family easily. They were rather crestfallen when I explained to them that getting one superpower such as flight didn’t mean they’d get super speed along with it.)

I was comfortable living in St. Paul and riding the bus to and from school each day, but the program was not a good fit for me and I didn’t do too well in my classes. Though not as passionate about the subject matter as I thought I would be, I did enjoy the laboratory work while I was there. The lab I worked in had several graduate students from China, and I had a good time talking with them about China and Chinese culture.

By my second semester there, I was noticeably more interested in Chinese than chemistry, reading a book of Chinese characters (an older version of the one here before they reorganized the HSK Chinese exam) on the bus and slowly working my way through an old phrasebook my mom had left over from a business trip to Hong Kong (not knowing that Mandarin isn’t widely spoken in Hong Kong). When the end of spring came and my adviser amicably suggested that we part ways, I was already emotionally prepared and made up my mind to go to China.

Interestingly in retrospect, being a teaching assistant to pay my way through the degree was one of the first signs that I was soon destined for teaching. I naturally didn’t enjoy spending numerous lunch hours copying handouts and clearing jams from the photocopier, but I did tend to have fun during the study sessions my classmates and I ran for the pharmacy students, some of whom, amusingly, had been my classmates and graduated with me a few months earlier.

I did some research on teaching in China at the university’s study abroad center and took a few weeks of English teaching classes through the Minnesota Literacy Council. My favorite exercise we did there was called “Trogs.” The entire text was printed mirrored to give us an idea of how slowly students must read in an unfamiliar character system. I don’t know whether this task was created by someone in the MLC or was from a textbook somewhere, so if anyone knows where it originated, please leave a comment below and I’d be happy to give proper credit.

Once we were able to decode the mirrored text, the vocabulary was also unfamiliar, such as “a trog starts granning a steg as soon as it is born.” One of the multiple-choice questions at the end (also mirrored) was “When does a trog start granning a steg?” The point being even if students are able to answer questions correctly, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they understand the material. This was one of the early events that really got me hooked on language teaching.

After completing my certificate, I volunteered to teach English at the local library for immigrants who were studying for their citizenship exams, my main class being the most internationally diverse group I’ve yet had the pleasure of teaching. We mostly worked through a textbook, and everyone had many experiences to share since they had all been living in the U.S. for some time.

One short memory that has stuck with me was a time I substituted in a smaller class as an assistant, and one of the students there was a middle-aged American man from Mississippi who was illiterate and had been coming to the library classes to learn how to read. That got me thinking how much many of us take for granted that everyone we know can read and write, when even some of our own fellow citizens are missing out.

That fall, I elected to sign up with the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) to get some support for my trip, which included assistance with document processing, placement at a school with someone to call if things went wrong, and a week of orientation in Shanghai. I attended many meetings of various organizations (including the Peace Corps, whose representative told the group of potential applicants with eerie specificity, “if you just want to teach in China, there are other ways to do that.”), and CIEE stood out as the best fit for me.

Despite the extra costs, I have no regrets about going with CIEE instead of trying to hack it by myself, though I pretty much forgot about them once I was there and teaching. It’s good that I never had to contact them because my school didn’t pay me or anything, but I also didn’t take advantage of the network of foreign teachers they had throughout China in order to travel. Even from the beginning, teaching in China for me was about the teaching, not tourism.