Flexibility

September 4, 2013

When I checked in at the airport, the lady at the counter asked me three times to clarify my pronunciation. She couldn’t quite believe that I would actually take this flight.

So much happened in the past few days that I am not sure I will be able to chronicle it all faithfully.  There were so many cities under discussion and so many options popped up only to disappear suddenly that I’m sure I have forgotten most of them. In my last post, I was torn between Nanjing and Yuncheng. Nanjing is pretty much the nicest city in China. It has a thriving expat community, the city itself is beautiful and the food is supposed to be excellent. However, there was only one post available in Nanjing, and it went to a girl who has Type 1 diabetes and needed to be in a city with an international hospital. Something to do with her insulin type. It’s hard to begrudge her that spot, but someone’s gotta do it!

In all seriousness though, Nanjing became less important when I found out there was an opportunity to intern in the Ameson office in Shanghai. Teaching has always been a means to my end of being in China, so I was really excited to have an opportunity not to teach. I envisioned crafting a position where I would be a liason between the Chinese staff at Ameson Shanghai and AYC participants. I think a lot of the program’s problems could be at least minimized with a native English speaker around. I made my pitch to the director, but I think they went for somebody who speaks more Chinese. Again, reasonable but disappointing.

That left Yuncheng. And thus, to Yuncheng I go. I’m not disappointed by the placement, I’m actually a little excited, but I am having a hard time wrapping my mind around teaching again. I had started to count on the internship, which was stupid to do, but my mind did it anyway. So here I am, blogging in the airport and waiting to go to a town I know virtually nothing about. Another guy who is going to Yuncheng made an apt analogy to my thinking. He said that Yuncheng is like Milwaukee. Nobody goes to Milwaukee for vacation. There is nothing hugely exciting there, it’s not a destination. But living in Milwaukee is not bad at all. People who live in Milwaukee love it. It’s supposed to be a nice place, and people in Wisconsin are hugely nice, so that can’t hurt. I find it hugely comforting to think of Yuncheng as Milwaukee. I can wrap my mind around Milwaukee and it gives me a familiar point of reference.

If I’m perfectly rational about it, I remember that Yuncheng is going to be perfectly fine. All my anxiety is connected to this bloody dearth of information. If there were at least one well-designed website in English describing how awesome the city is and how great the food is and how beautiful the mountains are, I would be much more at ease. But there is no such website, we only have a Wikipedia page that doesn’t even mention the mountains, only the sex trafficking scandal from a few years back.

At the very least, I’m not in Shenzhen. The people who actually went ended up in a really terrible situation. The school cancelled their contract and “renegotiated” it on ridiculously bad terms. Their apartments are filthy. Pretty much every time the school had an opportunity to shortchange the teachers they have taken advantage of it fully. I read a blog post about a month ago about how terrible it is to work at Shenzhen Yaohua. I discounted it as a privileged American whining about nothing. Now I believe it. Every other teacher I have spoken to has loved their schools and the people there bend over backward to make them happy. Yaohua is not the rule, it is the exception.

I am looking forward to a month from now when I can look back on this post and realize how silly my anxieties are. Because really they are. It’s a city of five million people, not some Podunk town without electricity. Everything will be fine. I just need to keep an open mind and an open attitude. I want to like it so I will. Just promise to send me care packages, ok?