Competition among Chinese nationals for good jobs in China is so fierce that many universities require a PhD to be a classroom teacher, while foreign teachers can get by with a master’s degree and sometimes even less depending on location. As such, KK could not come to teach at my school in Nanchang, but I could go teach at hers.
The choice was obvious, even with a slight pay cut for me. In addition, most of the old guard foreign teachers were leaving my school in Nanchang anyway. With Connie, Michael, and me leaving that year, our former school lost literal decades of “Americans in China” experience.
Still newlyweds, it was also pretty nice for me to spend some time living in KK’s hometown. Yichun is smaller than Nanchang (by population, not area) for better and worse, and even a city of over a million people can still count as small in China. Wherever we go there, it’s hard not to run into someone KK knows.
I was surprised by my students’ attitudes towards the city, too; many of them were from the countryside and considered downtown Yichun quite developed. They thought of Nanchang as the huge shining capital, and those lucky enough to have visited Shanghai or Beijing had that experience as a crowning lifetime memory.
Even more, most of them, the majority being business majors, had no intention of moving further than Yichun or at most Nanchang in order to work when I asked in mock interviews where they’d like to be in 5 or 10 years. Moving too far away from the family was simply not in the plan, and hardly anyone even planned to study abroad.
Considering that I had met no foreigners in Yichun besides teachers or students, this made me question the necessity of those English classes a little bit.
At any rate, the students were always happy to see me and the other teachers were fun to hang out with, so life and work there were usually positive, especially since I got to share it with KK.
Our apartment building seemed designed to get us in shape, since we were on the 6th floor with no elevator, AND the first floor was itself up a flight of stairs, AND the whole building was up a hill compared to the rest of campus. Moving in with heavy suitcases and returning home after a day of mountain climbing were rather harrowing experiences, but we endured.
Unfortunately, the apartment the school selected for us was a bit of a dump, and even the workers who came to fix things thought so. The balcony was moldy and needed to be scraped and painted, what little furniture there was consisted merely of thin planks of wood nailed (at best) together, and they even needed to install a sit-down toilet for me, which ended up crooked since it wouldn’t have fit if it were straight.
To top it all off, school representatives kept telling us how the great new apartment building for foreign teachers would be ready soon and we should be preparing to move in. This was not completed until several years after we left.
Fortunately, they let us into the former apartments of some teachers who had left the school, and we were able to swap out some furniture and acquire some tools. Goodbye moldy old couch, hello black leather sofa and chairs!
One of the other rooms had been occupied by a teacher who apparently had a carpentry hobby, and, lacking a garage or other workshop, had proceeded to encase the entire room in plywood (and sawdust) in addition to building his own furniture. We took a nice, solid wooden ladder from there to help with our copious maintenance.
Just starting out, it was actually pretty nice that we lived only a short walk down the road from KK’s parents. We’d go over to eat regularly, and her mom would occasionally pop over to our place in the morning with fresh baozi or raw meat.
That far out into the mountains, we also had pretty good stargazing on the sports field and went out a few times to watch meteor showers. I considered getting a telescope to help reignite my old amateur astronomy hobby.
Then the rains came.
One day, it clouded over and we didn’t see the sun again for two months. KK says this doesn’t usually happen in the fall, so just my luck, I suppose. It’s pretty bad when you wash your warmest sweatshirt, hang it up to dry on the balcony, and it’s still wet two weeks later.
We packed a lot of living into less than a year there, dealing with weird bugs, occasional gas explosions, a botched attempt at creating a Halloween haunted house for our students, and of course all the strangers trying to photograph me. Details of each of these forthcoming.
While a nice “small-town” life experience, it didn’t pay very well for someone who was no longer living a bachelor lifestyle and now had an underutilized master’s degree. It didn’t take too long before KK and I got to discussing how we were possibly going to raise and educate kids on those salaries, and I set about searching the job ads.