Teaching in China: change is good

Teaching in a country like China can be full of surprises and challenges. Here, our intern Matt gives his insight on how to make the most of your adventure.

Before I begin, I need to say that I am full of love for China, and coming here is the best thing I’ve ever done, there’s a soul about the place that makes me happy to get out’ve bed in the morning. Not soul like New Orleans or Latin America, but the kind’ve soul that comes from a place that is full of great people, great culture and great amounts of weird food, but the soul is slightly throttled by the feeling that the boss might turn up at any second.

After being born in Northern Ireland I have been blessed with the surprising ability to become slightly tanned, despite eighty percent of my fellow Irish and Northern Irish people reacting to the sun like a Bulbasaur at ends with a Charizard. So the sun has been kind to me, and I feel some tremendous benefits and optimism that comes from also being cursed with seasonal affective disorder, so I can alternate every day feeling totally up and down.

My mother told me that in travelling the world to teach and study martial arts, the major benefits would be that I would become more open minded, happier and less racist. (Brushing over the fact that my mother just called me a racist) I’ve found this to be true, to an extent. Racism-wise, I have realised that I have really started to hate ‘westerners’. Coming over here, filling up Hutongs. I have, on the bright side, started to find a different branch of people who are here that don’t spend their days sitting around complaining about China (unfortunately is common and could easily ruin your experience if you let it).

I have also found people from America and from the UK and Ireland, and some unearthly fascinating people from Mexico that have all arrived in Beijing for some beautiful version of the same dream. If love is the happiness of others being directly associated with your own, then these are Men and Women that I can comfortably claim to love – devoid of hyperbole – within two weeks of knowing. I’ve had conversations with people who I never would’ve spoken to that have truly changed my life or at least my perspective on something in it.

China (or at least Beijing) is a glorious place to be and there are so many interesting things to witness and experience. Any cynicism you may download into your brains from reading this comes from the concentrated effort one has to make to avoid falling into a common trap. The trap of spending all of my time with the kind of people I would meet back home in the kind of places I was sick of going to. There are things that shouldn’t exist like the archery bar which is exciting, fabulous hidden treasures like Miles that is the best cocktail bar, bar none, that I’ve been in. Family run shops selling Ocarinas and Mojitos and weird but beautiful meat wrapped in weird but beautiful carbs. The opportunities for adventure in China are never-ending and the people are so happy that you are interested in their culture that they will spend ages explaining things to you that they can’t possibly find interesting.

A strange reaction of being isolated from anyone you really know all of a sudden has different results on different people. Sometimes they party all the time, drink themselves sociable (or insensible) or wander off on their own and gain a disproportionate amount of bragging rights in their own mind of relatively minor decisions, like buying a bamboo steamer. I fall into most of these but the one that stands out is my ability to fall in love with about 30 percent of any given room. The decision to come abroad and to teach has a fabulous way of filtering out all the people who wouldn’t do this, and leaving out the kinds of people that would.

This tea strainer of great human beings are often escaping a dead end job, or escaping a broken heart and wanting to see what the world has to offer other than the tedium of home life. Sometimes a much more beautiful decision has inspired them to come here and they do it in honour of someone who can’t do it themselves. Your fellow teachers that are not necessarily from the company you travel with or necessarily from your school, are almost always going to be intelligent or have a high degree of emotional intelligence making for great connections or conversation one way or another.

If anyone is to find themselves wanting to teach and are scared, then get your brain to tell your heart to shut up and then pay for everything on LoveTEFL and get on a plane, your life will be different, sometimes better sometimes worse but it will change. If you aren’t happy now then as a bus driver will always tell you, ‘change is good’.