Teaching/Living in Beijing, China

[Alexander]

For those of you who have studied MA in China, and/or have simply stayed long-term, what was the easiest way to do so?

I'm heading to Beijing this summer for at least a year, but probably a few years, to do some intensive MA and bagua training. I guess my best option right now is either A) go to a university and major in Chinese just so I can have a place to stay, or B) Save/earn/balance my money by teaching English.

For those of you who have taught English, can you recommend any universities that often have open positions?

Any help is most appreciated

[Peacedog]

The Chinese government has really cracked down on the visa situation over there. It used to be you could just show up on a tourist visa and stay for years on backdoor business visas while doing English instruction on the side.

I've been told this is no longer the case. Folks living over there now can elaborate.

If you don't have decent Chinese going to school is probably a better idea. If you apply yourself. If you don't it won't matter if you go to school or not. We've all known people who have lived in the Middle Kingdom with half-assed Mandarin for years. Make the effort, it is worth it.

If you are young enough for it to matter, you can often translate a year or two of Mandarin instruction at the university level, i.e. not from a local language school, into college credit. Regardless, take the HSK before you leave the country as this is a verifiable certification. You should be able to pass at a middle level within 2-3 years.

That said, teaching school fulltime will cut into your time for training more than going to school, although it will cover your living experiences if you are careful.

Keep in mind the following. Barring going to work for a multi-national as a full salary foreign employee with benefits no one will care what you did in China. Working as an English teacher gets you nothing back home in the West. At the very least don't be lazy and come back with some slamming bagua and a good HSK score.

Also, if you find your training interests changing and have the opportunity to study with a teacher in another part of China, such a Fuzhou or Sichuan, move immediately. Don't stay in Beijing to "work on my Mandarin."

[bailewen]

Barring going to work for a multi-national as a full salary foreign employee with benefits no one will care what you did in China. Working as an English teacher gets you nothing back home in the West.

....unless you come back and look for work as a teacher . . . just sayin'.

It's something I find to be an extremely likely possibility for myself. Having essentially sacrificed any professional career I might have had on the altar of CMA training, my sister, a school teacher herself in Los Angles, is always recommending I go that route. I have a degree in Chinese and Chinese is being taught more and more in the states, especially at high end private schools.

Having done both, student and teacher in China, if you can afford it, I definitely recommend the student path. Teaching ESL can be as difficult as learning Chinese. Depending on where you work it can be quite challenging to do properly. Some people take right too it. I think teaching adults is a hell of a lot easier than a room full of rowdy kids.

Having a place to stay will happen regardless of going the teacher of the student route. Most ESL jobs offer accommodations anyways. Just make sure you make arrangements before you go because, yes, the Visa regulations are completely different from a few years ago. This year was a rude awakening for me as I arrived on a tourist visa, as usual, and neither my employers (a major University with close government ties) nor my friends in the Public Security Bureau were able to help me avoid leaving the country and coming back in again.

If you don't enroll in a school (and it doesn't have to be a University with transferable credits unless you are doing this as part of a degree program) you will very likely not learn much Chinese, especially in Beijing. I've not met anyone ever with Chinese worth a damn who did not at least have a very solid foundation in a formal learning environment. The immersion accelerates things and you learn to hear and understand but you will just not learn to speak it without instruction. The people who have lived here for years and can barely speak Mandarin that Peacedog mentioned are not the exception, they are the rule. (sad to say) There's enough English speakers and ex-pats around in Beijing that you really can live without it, especially on a college campus where the entire student body is cramming to pass their "Band 4" or "Band 6" English exams to graduate.

Anyways, having a job or a school helps A LOT because you have not just a place to stay but a structured life, instant peers/friends, people to turn to for help with whatever you need help with and so on. If you are going alone and don't speak Chinese, your employer or your school can be a great ally. Free yourself of them ASAP ...but when you first arrive, it's good to know they are there.

[Alexander]

Well,
I already have my undergrad degree (B.S. in Biology) and I want to come back for a PhD (non-education related).

I'm going to have about $15,000 just lingering in my bank this summer from work -- so I could, in theory, use that to be a student at one of the Beijing colleges.

I've already taken 1/2 a semester of Chinese (taking night classes at a local college while I work), and will be taking Chinese all the way until this summer, which should be when I depart.

I'm really just trying to decide whether to pay the money (go to school and really end up fluent in Chinese), or just break even (so I will have all of my saved money) by teaching English.

Edit: I was also under the impression that teaching English jobs usually max out at ~ 20 hours a week..that would leave me a hell of a lot of free time. I work almost 2x that and I still have time to train multiple hours a day. Maybe there's something I didn't quite add up.

[Alexander]

Keep in mind the following. Barring going to work for a multi-national as a full salary foreign employee with benefits no one will care what you did in China. Working as an English teacher gets you nothing back home in the West. At the very least don't be lazy and come back with some slamming bagua and a good HSK score.

Also, if you find your training interests changing and have the opportunity to study with a teacher in another part of China, such a Fuzhou or Sichuan, move immediately. Don't stay in Beijing to "work on my Mandarin."

Good Points. Personally, doesn't matter to me if any credit transfers over at all.

I am only teaching English so that I will have a home to live in, and will be able to balance out my income. The rest of my time will be enjoying myself learning Chinese, doing as much Bagua as my body will physically take, and eating great food and drinking great tea. Worst comes to worst, I can use the money I will have saved by the end of this year working, and that can translate into a couple years at a university there.

I don't plan on continuing in this field, thus I don't care if any sort of "credit" comes back with me. It's just a time off post-undergrad -- before I go to grad school -- to pursue something I'm passionate about before life catches up and I can't afford to do that anymore.

[Michael]

A quick note, more to come, but 20 classroom periods (usually 45-50 clock minutes each), may require very little or a lot of preparation from the teacher. I teach in the Continuing Education College of what I'm told is a major foreign language uni (one of the top 3 in China ), am usually given no information about the class objectives, a syllabus? hah!, dream on, and I create most of the material for the classes I teach. Sometimes they give me a book the students don't have. Yeah, that's a big help. The plus side is I have total freedom in the classroom as long as the students don't complain.

The students' expectations are according to the local teaching standard, which is abysmally low. The students are generally thrilled to have someone with energy who doesn't drone on forever. Although sometimes they're relieved when I revert to "boring, book-recitation, teacher mode" so they can veg out and take notes. There's only so much thinking they want to do in one week.

Also, there are a lot of teaching jobs in China where you will be required to teach your 10-20 hours in many different physical locations around a neighborhood or even spread around a city. This is not only a time-sucker, but a massive energy drain when riding a public bus in any sizable city in China. The buses are packed like sardines; the pollution outside the bus is horrendous; inside you get "dead-air pollution" with people vomiting left and right; the pickpockets keep you on your toes, so even if you're feeling light-headed, you'll be growing eyes on the sides and back of your head while constantly patting your pockets to see what's missing.

Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more common in ESL jobs outside of universities to be required to put in a full, 40 hour work week in the office. The actual teaching load may be reasonable, or even light, but you have to be there 5-6 days/week, 9 hours/day, usually with non-consecutive days off. If I wanted that, I would have stayed in the US. Currently, I teach 20 class periods per week, M - Th, and have a lot of free time, even after class preparation.

[bailewen]

What Michael just said. 20 teaching hours. That doesn't include, for instance, teaching say one class from 9:00 - 9:40 and then having your next class at 10:30. It's not like you can go home for that 50 minute "break" between classes. In my experience, 20 teaching hours equals something closer to a 30 hour work week which is still light compared to what you'd do at home but it's still more than a "20 hour week". In contrast, as a student, you will probably have Chinese classes from 8 or 9 am untill noon M-F and then be free the rest of the time. Since you don't care about taking credits home and just want to learn a little Chinese, you can do what I did which is go to classes and ignore most of the homework and blow off the exams. lol. I spent most of my evenings at cheap Karaoke bars getting drunk with the locals and while my reading and writing skills suffered for it, my general spoken fluency, listening and speaking both, took off like a rocket.

I never even took the HSK. It used to bother me but now that I have a BA in Chinese, I think that that trumps the HSK anyways. The HSK is really just an entrance exam for foreigners wishing to study at Chinese universities. It's like the IELTS or TOEFL for foreigners wishing to study in the west.

Currently I work for well below what I could now that I have my degree but my class load is really light. Only about 16 classes/week with nearly 3 months paid vacation (summer and spring break from school). I get a food card so I can eat for free at the school cafeteria and periodically get weird random gifts from the school just like the locals do. Last week I got a case of Fuji apples. A month ago they took my measurements for what I am sure will be a really crappy looking custom suit.

Anyways, the pay is low but you can't beat the hours.

hm....actually I guess if I only divided my annual salary among the months I actually worked then it wouldn't seem to low.

[grzegorz]

Alexander,

You're getting some sage advice here.

I echo what these guys are saying. Having taught 5 years abroad in Europe and in China I can tell you that ESL is not without its challenges. It takes a couple of years to get the hang of it and in the beginning planning your lessons can get pretty time consuming. I highly recommend getting a CELTA or some type of TEFL before you start, you don't need it but it will be easier to get the good jobs that way and you'll have something to compare the standards of your lessons to.

But besides the English getting over cultural barriers can be tough too. For example, in the States and in Europe you can pull up pictures of famous people and they'll know them, but not necessarily in China and this can make it hard to get a discussion about famous people going.

Sometimes the obstacles are political. I can remember one time I was drawing a map of Asia and I kept choosing different colored markers for different countries. I drew China and when I drew Taiwan I used a different color. Of course I didn't mean anything by it but everyone started speaking Chinese and I could see some of my adult students were angry and asked me why I used a different color. Of course I just did it to make the map more interesting (this was a 4 hour class) but they thought it was some type of political statement that Taiwan is a separate country. Needless to say these cultural blunders can be frustrating and some foreigners in China become very bitter at the Chinese.

I still encourage anyone to go but be prepared for the pitfalls.

The other thing I recommend is being open about who you train with. I would just go and see all the different styles that there and then decide who you want to train with. Because there are some high level players in China but if you're stuck on only one particular style you might pass up a teacher of another style who would have shown you a lot more for a teacher who will show you a lot less.

G

[Peacedog]

To reinforce, the advice you are getting here is priceless. I wish someone had told me all of this in advance as well.

First, definately look around as to styles. If I had to do it again I would have headed out to Sichuan or Fuzhou. Turns out I like their stuff more than the regular IMAs anyway. Some real resources are on this board to contact folks you would never meet other wise. Between breaks in class take train trips to meet some of these folks, even if it is just to cross hands and say hello. You may end up meeting someone who changes your life, hopefully in a good way. At the very least check out the yichuan set in Beijing. Learn a little dit da ke while you are at it and take some dit da jow and needles with you when you go to visit folks. It helps with the bruising and injury recovery. Same can be said of finding a good masseur and using them frequently. Chinese medical massage is a great thing (no, I am not referring to “a general health massage” either). A good tuina expert is also the equivalent of a chiropractor. Take advantage of both as they are dirt cheap over there as opposed to the West.

Second, and I cannot stress this enough, buy health insurance from a reputable company in your home country. This will cost you real money, but if you get sick the way I did (or severely injured) it will save your life. Without this I would have died. People disappear all the time in China. If you hang around the expat set long enough, you will see this happen. Make sure it doesn't happen to you.

Otherwise have fun. You will remember this experience for the rest of your life, regardless of how it goes. So make it count.

Peacedog out...

[grzegorz]

Also you have to be careful in Beijing that is where all the starry eyed foreigners go to learn CMA and according to Tomasz the teachers there have ripping off the Laowei down to an art.

In BJ I would do SC. Just because it would be easier to figure out if they're holding back the real shit.