Why Teach in China? Learn from past participants' experiences.
One teacher in China tells you....
In January 2005, I went on an incredible journey to teach English in a Chinese school, and was able to work and travel all over the country for five months. I could not pass up the opportunity to fulfill a dream to live in China and experience the language, people, history, and culture that have always been of great interest to me. I taught at a school in the city of Wuxi, which is about 1½ hours northwest of Shanghai. Wuxi has a population of 4,310,000 (compared to Shanghai’s 13.2 million) but it is a growing city with new businesses opening every day. As my Chinese language skills grew, I was able to communicate more and more with the people around me so when I traveled, I met intriguing people and had many new adventures.
During one of my trips, I sat next to a wonderful Chinese family who were some of the nicest people I have ever met. The father of the family had packed lots of fruit for the journey and every time they took out a piece of fruit to eat, they offered me some. If I tried to refuse, they kept trying to offer it to me and I ended up eating pieces of mangos, bananas, and sugarcane, which are all very popular fruits in China.
While I ate each piece, the family and the rest of the people on the train stared at me - the foreigner. They smiled and laughed as I tried to remove parts of the sugarcane, eat it, and then spit out the bitter parts. They stared at me because in the smaller towns, a lot of the people have never seen a Westerner, and they were just interested.
The people I met on my adventures in China and the kids in the classroom left lasting impressions on me and I hope I did the same for them. The whole trip was exciting and extremely fun. I taught young Chinese children English and spoke about living in the West and they taught me Chinese and what its like to live in China. Teaching English in China was one of the greatest journeys I have ever done and I hope to do it again.
- Diana Mellitz , Teach in China participant
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China the classroom
Christmas Eve in Changzhou was absolutely rocking...it was quite a sight to see the locals decked out on a Monday night paying super-inflated, gouging prices at discos so they can blindly feel the spirit of a Western holiday. Heck, most of my students think that Santa Claus and Jesus Christ is the same person. It was a bizarre day.
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When I was at a local noodle shop, I had a brief chat with Papa Smurf. He asked me whether Americans celebrate the Lunar New Year. I told him no, we only celebrate Christmas. He then asked, “If we celebrate Christmas, shouldn’t the Americans reciprocate by celebrating the Chinese New Year?” I gave him a friendly look and thought to myself: ‘Good point, Papa; good point’.
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On the dusty and bumpy bus ride down to Xiahe, I sat next to a couple of Tibetan monks. One of them kept staring at me with a look of friendly and childlike curiosity. When I let him listen to my CD player, his face lit up like the blooming sunflower field outside. Guess he liked David Gray. To reciprocate the favor, the monk offered me the Buddhist scripts he was reading. It was no David Gray, but definitely interesting.
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journeys, internal and external
Another group arranged for transportation back to Kashgar, and all we had to do was wait by the lake for the bus to arrive. What could possibly go wrong? Well, despite the Yurts, the Kazaks and the Tajiks, this is still China—which means that if a bus is supposed to arrive at noon, it could very well mean one, two, or not at all. We waited and waited, and there was no bus. Since we had already purchased our train tickets back to Urumuqi—and more importantly, the plane tickets to Chengdu for Tibet—it was absolutely critical that we make it back to Kashgar on time...Out of desperation, I approached a tour group that stopped by the lake for lunch and begged them to take us back to Kashgar with them. It was one of the few times inmy life when I felt absolutely no shame in begging. It was strangely refreshing.
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The 13 hours we spent in the car were indeed hellish, but when we finally entered the Himalayan Range, the excitement was one of the most emotional of my life. The following morning, we made the 8 km hike to the Everest base camp. It was a wonderfully rewarding experience walking alongside the jagged peaks of Everest amidst the angry, low hanging clouds...The entire time, I thought to myself “I’m climbing Everest!
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reflections
The thought of going home is definitely a strange feeling. A year in China can really test one’s nerves, not to mention its continuous assault on all five senses. But now that I’m on the verge of leaving, I’m not as relieved as I expected... this is exactly what I longed for: to discover exotic places on the map, and also in my soul.
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With this, the most emotional, introspective, challenging, and adventurous chapter of my life comes to a close. It has undoubtedly changed me—for the better I hope.