I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a great posting almost immediately. The location was Suzhou, one of China’s nicer cities and definitely more international than anywhere in Jiangxi. KK and I had considered Jiangsu province before after a pleasant conference trip to Nanjing and having seen a high-paying (to us) position advertised in Suzhou earlier, when I was still unqualified, having not yet finished my master’s degree.

I sent an inquiry immediately and got my CV and cover letter together by the next day. After a few more rounds of inquiries and two online interviews, I was accepted. Even more fortunately, it turned out that while two positions were advertised, there was actually only one open. As the starting salary alone was more than double what KK and I were making in Yichun combined, the move was pretty much an inevitability.

We visited the campus in December, where they were just finishing up the semester and I got to sit in in a couple of the final classes. It also just so happened that there was a faculty party taking place that evening, so KK and I pretty much got to meet everyone I’d be working with in the college. I signed my new contract and we returned to Yichun to break the news to our school there.

As KK did not yet have a job in Suzhou, though, she decided to continue working in Yichun through the following spring semester while applying for an English teaching position at the university next to my new one. She ultimately got in, making Suzhou even more lucrative for us, but it did lead to half a year of only spending a few days together at a time and taking two trips to the train station each week.

We stayed in our first apartment for two weeks. It was a complex recommended by my school for starting out, about 10 minutes away from campus by bus, that catered largely to foreign teachers by offering English service and not having to deal with local landlords. It was a bit too much like a hotel for us, though, and our particular room got no sunlight, so we quickly moved out to a normal neighborhood about ten minutes from campus by bus in the opposite direction.

While we enjoyed taking walks along the river, through the wooded park and to the lake there, within a few months they started digging up the road to put in both a subway line and a highway underpass at our intersection. This obviously caused us much annoyance in the areas of transportation, cleanliness, and noise, to say nothing of general aesthetics. Even the first results would not be visible until a couple years after we moved out, but fortunately being on the 19^th floor did mitigate some of the issues.

I thoroughly enjoyed my first semester working in my new position and learned a lot, but many of the teachers had planned to leave for various reasons, and by September I was already the second most senior teacher in the English Language Center, edging out the new director by one semester. By one year into the job, I had been there the longest.

KK also enjoyed her new English teaching position that she started that fall while continuing to work on her second master’s degree. Although adjacent, our schools varied quite widely in size, culture, and student behavior. In a strange twist of fate, I had ended up working at a Chinese university while she worked at an international one. Regardless, we both feel we enjoyed the positions and opportunities we got more than we would have enjoyed the other. I liked the science focus and freedom of my small team, and KK benefited from her large, by-the-book institute.

We didn’t visit the U.S. during our first summer in Suzhou, though by staying we learned just how hot and long those summers were. Two solid months of 38 degrees Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) were a bit much for a Minnesota boy to take. One attempt to get through a day without turning on the air conditioning left us melted into the floor, barely conscious. The day both elevators in the building were offline was none too pleasant, either.

All was not lost, though, as we decided to spend a few days on a cruise ship to South Korea and back. We didn’t experience much more of the country than we would’ve connecting through an airport, but the experience was fun and memorable, deserving of its own future post.

It also turned out that we were not living too far from where one of KK’s cousins lived with her family – in Kunshan, which is technically part of Suzhou but would be considered a suburb of the metro area in the U.S., just under an hour away by car.

I might best describe them as “a bit too generous,” as any outing with them tends to balloon into something unexpected, often starting with a family lunch together and expanding to include a dinner at a restaurant they’ve just purchased, or one run by North Koreans, or that time they put us up in a hotel for the night with no chance to return home to pack.

I’ve gotten used to it, though, and now that I know what to expect I can enjoy some extra adventures that I otherwise wouldn’t have. I can also understand their Mandarin quite a bit more easily than I can most family members at holiday gatherings, so I don’t always have to embarrass myself. I also occasionally help their two sons with English practice.

Our second year in Suzhou carried on much like the first, though we visited the U.S. that summer for KK to attend school and to have a wedding reception for the American side of the family. The latter half of 2017 would bring some major changes, though…