So after three years of teaching in China, I decided it was time to return to the US and start working here. I couldn’t make it back to America last summer (and not for lack of trying), but I’m home now, and I’m relishing being back in Washington state.
So I thought, to celebrate getting home, I’d do a quick year-in-review of my three years there.
2018-2019
My first year teaching, my second time living abroad (I’m counting Ireland in 2015), and my first time teaching elementary. This year was difficult for a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason, I think, is that I was doing everything for the first time. I had to learn a lot of stuff on the job, and I spent a lot of time doing stuff that would take an experienced teacher would only take minutes to do. I didn’t really have a social life because I usually went home and just worked until I went to bed, because it took me that long to do a lot of stuff.
There was one major exception to that—every Friday night, I would meet up with two of my best friends, also teachers at the school, and sometimes more than them, and go to a brewhouse near the apartment. We would hang out there for hours. Sometimes we talked about serious issues, like philosophy and history, and sometimes we just laughed at YouTube videos. It was so great!
This was also the year I did a lot of exploring. I had four vacations, which included trips to Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea, and a city called Lianyungang in China. Of those vacations, all of them were with new friends.
That’s the thing I realized about my first year in China—I made a lot of friends.
2019-2020
This year. This dreaded year. The year of lockdowns, online schooling, and ruined plans. The year I couldn’t go back to America. The year of fear, confusion, and loneliness.
It was my favorite year there.
First off, I was back to teaching high school, and I loved it. Not just because I love history—I do—but because I got to move up to teaching on the third floor, where we were all good friends. I actually looked forward to our meetings, because we were such good friends. At any spare moment, we could expect one of the other teachers to drop in for a friendly greeting. The third forgo was lively, warm, and bright.
That didn’t change when online schooling started, because we all lived pretty close to each other. We still met up for parties and social events, and with online schooling, we weren’t bound to the daily schedule, so we could have social events in the middle of the day.
Before everything went to pieces, I did manage to go on two fun vacations. The first one was back to Japan, where Haleigh met me (yay!), and the second one was to Singapore, where Mom and Dad met me (yay!), and then to Malaysia, where I got incredible news—my foot injury could be repaired without needing to replace the joint! I was seriously considering going back to Malaysia for surgery over Chinese New Year, but virus. But that’s honestly all right—just getting that news was spectacular.
2020-2021
This year started off really rough. First off, at the end of the 2020 school year, a lot of teachers were gone. That third floor that was so lively and great the previous year turned into a ghost town. Only two of us from the previous year stayed over. This was a huge blow, because my friends were the main reason I was willing to stay for a third year. For most of them to suddenly be gone was very rough. Furthermore, due to a variety of factors, I ended up only having a two-week break for summer, and then going back to a school that couldn't bring in new teachers to replace the old teachers--China's border is pretty closed, and most teachers can't enter. So yeah, not an auspicious start.
Having said all of that, now that I’m thinking about it, none of that was the reason I left. Nothing in China was the reason I left. The reason I left was that I needed to go to my family—my brother’s getting married, Mom and Dad will be retiring soon, and my childhood friends are still here. I had a reason for coming back, but not really a reason for leaving.
China isn’t a bad place to be. Granted, I have a story about the Chinese government being... fill in the blank... but the Chinese people were, with the odd exception, wonderful. Working in an expat community is a lot of fun, too--there's a wide range of people who are drawn to being expats, but we had a tight and supportive community. The people are wonderful, friendly, and adventurous. And the students--I cannot say enough good things about the students there.
(To my former students who are reading this: don't let that go to your head.)
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