I’ll call the first half of my five years in Nanchang pre-KK, despite the fact that I actually met her during my first semester there. We met briefly as friends of friends, but she soon left campus, to return in a later chapter.

Any given year, there were twenty-something foreign teachers at my university, all of whom lived in the same building on campus, and a little more than half of whom were Americans ranging from their early 20s to retirees. There were about five of us who arrived as new teachers that fall, though I was the only one with previous China experience (a whopping 1.5 years).

Most of us who arrived with CIEE or independently were assigned to teach in the School of Intercultural Studies, where we would teach Business English to students majoring in finance and related fields. The Foreign Languages College where the actual English majors studied was staffed solely by teachers who came through the ELIC organization.

While I mostly hung out with the other new teachers my first year, that didn’t mean I had no dealings with the others. In fact, I got noticed pretty early on for my willingness to volunteer to judge numerous speech contests. Our school had a variety of these contests, drama competitions, and other events that required two or three foreign judges, but Connie’s speech class was the big one.

Connie was a strong and caring American woman who had been at the university for well over a decade, and she spent much of her time running the most prestigious English groups on campus. Her students were some of the most excellent public speakers I’ve heard anywhere, and several of them had national-level competitions under their belts.

The ELIC staff also ran the English Library, which Connie had founded with donated books, and which would be a passion of mine during my time at the school. It was a talking library, basically an open English corner where students could talk in English with each other or the teachers, read books or magazines, or play games. I made many friends there, and my frequent attendance and work on categorizing and bar-coding the books effectively made me the library manager for several years, though Connie was still instrumental in procuring most of our books.

Tuesdays and Fridays became my favorite days of the week, as we never had class in the afternoon, and I would often finish lunch to go to the English Library, from there to Ultimate Frisbee with some of the other foreign teachers and students, then dinner and occasionally movie night. Since all the teachers lived in the same building, it was much more of a college dorm experience for me than my actual college life had been.

In retrospect, my actual classes paled in comparison to these extracurricular activities. I didn’t fully appreciate the sheer number of my classroom constraints until I started work on my master’s degree and heard other teachers describe the situations in other countries. Among those that I collected into the situation analysis for my proposed curriculum were:

• Class sizes averaging 40-45 students (focused on speaking)
• No provided or suggested plan beyond one lousy, error-ridden textbook that none of the teachers used
• Classroom desks and benches that were bolted to the floor
• Classroom equipment usually limited to a blackboard and (if you were lucky) chalk
• No photocopier or allowance for copies, so if anyone wanted to use handouts for class, they’d have to pay out of pocket and by the page for nearly 300 students per week (10x the price per page for color)
• Grades set at 30% participation, 70% final exam

Still, as I wasn’t used to anything better, I made it work and managed to hack together a decent year-long syllabus by the end of my time there.

The university was kind enough to arrange a China tour each semester for the foreign teachers. They were nothing fancy and usually ended up routing to areas where we were pressured to buy things, but they helped me get out to see places that I otherwise wouldn’t have. In the spring we would travel to some other place in Jiangxi province, but we would travel outside in the fall. My notable trips included:

• Henan province, visiting the Longmen Grottoes (very impressive) and Shaolin Temple (might as well if you’re in the area, but my experience was a bit too commercial).

• Shandong province, to see Qufu (hometown and tomb of Confucius) and Qingdao (interesting coastal city with German influence, used to be spelled Tsingtao like the beer still is. KK was actually living there at the time, but schedules didn’t match up).

• Jiangsu province, with my first visit to Suzhou (Tiger Hill and Pingjiang Road) and Nanjing (Confucius temple and Zhongshan, which I would return to later with KK).

• Hunan province, visiting Zhangjiajie (mountains that inspired part of Avatar) and Fenghuang (a famous old town), though completely lacking in the famous spicy food, which I can only surmise was due to the stereotype that westerners can’t handle hot food (lies).

• Within Jiangxi, Wuyuan in Shangrao is a very nice countryside area famous for yellow flowers, and is not far from Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain capital.

Nanchang itself is not a very impressive city by most measures, though I tend to be a bit softer on it than most travel guides I’ve looked at. Anyone who travels there now and experiences the subway and the west side of the river is seeing a different Nanchang than the one I lived in.

Many people have been baffled that I enjoyed Nanchang long enough to stay there for five years, but all it needed for me was to be slightly nicer than Hefei was. My university was relatively remote, so I never really left campus all that much, and it was typically a short shopping trip if I did (or to the train station once I re-met KK).

I started going downtown more often after a couple of years once I started attending the international fellowship regularly, and I became a regular pianist for the group. While lunch after the service provided some variety outside of the school cafeteria food, the Starbucks and Papa John’s locations that started popping up in town proved to be a bit too expensive for us outside of special occasions.

Our school’s fellowship members also kicked off a trend of international weddings that happened one per year until I moved out of Nanchang. It was at the wedding of our friends Michael and Justine that KK showed up again, as maid of honor and MC/translator, that would fatefully end up sitting at the foreign teachers’ table when the wedding party’s ran out of space…