Living/Working in China

Get as fluent as you possibly can in Mandarin or Cantonese.

Yeah, that's definitely part of the plan. I'm wondering if I should try to work in an office environment.

I also thought about trying to get a job with an English-speaking Expat magazine over there. I'm not sure how realistic that is, though.

I don't know a whole lot about working in China but I do know that if you end up looking for teaching jobs you should be really, really careful. There's a lot of shady stuff that goes on in regards to visas, contracts, etc, so do your homework. Not that you necessarily can't get a good gig, but if you don't watch out you could get a really awful one.

if you want to do pr/marketing shit, shanghai is the place. big pr companies like edelman want people in china and there are lots of boutique market research/youth marketing/online shit. lots of editing/writing work avail too.

there are more than "a few american companies in the bigger cities." you can find pr/marketing work in second and third tier cities all down the line. (pro of working in a smaller city, you can eat. you can work for like... caterpillar in xuzhou [2 mil people, north jiangsu, 5 hours from shanghai] or like HP in some godawful place in henan and be making big dollars).

recruit.net is a good place to search for jobs.

lots of big english dailys are dying for english major kids that can copyedit. even xinhua (chinese govt press agency) and people's daily and cctv need copyeditors/polishers.

http://www.danwei.org/jobs_available/ is full of media jobs in china but it's really the tip of the iceberg as far as what's out there.

Thanks a ton. I didn't know there was so much.

Are you living there now?

I may be of some use. I taught English in Shanghai for a semester in 2006, to K-5th grade kids.

Start with teaching. You will easily get a job within a few weeks if you're in a big city. If you're in Shanghai, don't settle for less than 10,000 yuan per month, starting wage. I had absolutely no experience or qualifications, and that's what I ended up with, after being offered 8,000 each by two other companies. It's crazy, though, the guilt you'll feel. At one of the schools I taught at, the other (Chinese born) English teachers were making 2000 a month, and the head of the English department was making 3000. They knew that I and other native-English speakers were getting around 10,000 a month. It depends on the school, obviously, but it tends to build resentment, which really comes back to bite you in the ass if you're teaching little kids and you occasionally need a Chinese speaking teacher to deal with a particularly bad discipline problem.

There's a lot of shady stuff that goes on in regards to visas, contracts, etc, so do your homework

This is true, but it didn't happen to me. But yeah, keep an eye out. If you're going to be staying in China for a while, I would think about eventually s

*hit by car in middle of message*

-hifting to one one one tutoring. Once you get to know a few hundred kids through teaching classes, you might luck out and get a few rich kids whose parents will be willing to pay highly for private lessons. Organize enough of these and you'll be making the same amount of money, working fewer hours, traveling less (if you can convince a few of the kids to come to your place for tutoring) and you won't have to deal with the kids in the back of the room who laugh and say "OK" to whatever you say because they have no idea what the hell's going on.

10k in shanghai is the minimum nowadays. 15k to live comfortably.

a furnished apartment (furnished = has a water heater, some chairs, a bed) in a good non-suburban neighborhood is hard to come by for less than 5000 (prob closer to 8000 nowadays). if you want to live downtown, you gotta pay big, even if it's for something grim built in 1921 scheduled for demolition in a year. it's the hardest place in china to find a good, cheap apartment (in the north, at least. not sure about places like guangzhou or shenzhen).

Would I still be correct to counsel learning Mandarin, and then Cantonese, as Mandarin travels better?

I've never been, but have a significant number of friends/acquaintances who have lived there for extended periods.

How do you teach language to people whose language you don't speak? I have always wondered this.

i'm a a semester away from completing a degree in mandarin and love china more than anywhere else i've ever been. so. this is coming from me but.

learn mandarin.

it's easy to get a v. basic grounding in it. if you're going to try to live in china, spend some time learning mandarin. it's a good feeling to be able to be in a foreign place and be able to tell people who you are, talk to pretty girls and read a menu and eat good foods. it's not much effort for a lot of reward.

a place like china, just how it is, is very closed to someone not able to speak some mandarin. even in ferrari dealerships and pizza hut shanghai. if you want to live in china, learn mandarin.

cantonese is useful in vancouver. even in hk, you can get by on english and mandarin (learning idiosyncratic southern chinese pronunciation of mandarin is almost more useful than learning cantonese). firms recruiting for hk jobs even prefer bilingual eng/mandarin over eng/cantonese (all three preferable).

What do you know about the typical contracts for teaching? If I take a teaching job, and then 6 months later find a different job, can I break a year long contract without major problems?

a furnished apartment (furnished = has a water heater, some chairs, a bed) in a good non-suburban neighborhood is hard to come by for less than 5000 (prob closer to 8000 nowadays)

Maybe we were really lucky, but my girlfriend and I got a nice place in Pudong (On Pudong Nanlu and Shangcheng Lu) for 4000. Maybe things are different now, though, that was in 2006.

Yeah I can't stress learning the language enough, especially if you want 'applicable skills.' I live in Japan but I know exactly what dylannn is talking about; I'm surrounded by people here who don't speak Japanese and they're utterly dependent on the few English speakers around. It's so much more convenient (and safer) to be able to communicate with the locals on your own.

On the other hand, don't assume that just by being there you'll become fluent by osmosis. It takes a lot of study and active practice in the language, and will literally take you years. I suggest saving up money teaching and then going to a school or something, even in big cities there are dirt cheap language programs (or at least so I hear).

Having trouble getting something set up in Beijing. Any advice?

The teaching jobs are all paying about 6000 RMB, which I don't think will keep me afloat.

I am pretty set on living in Beijing.

Are you in Beijing yet, or trying to do it all by phone/email?

Do not settle for 6000 RMB. Do not settle for 8000 RMB (unless they're going to pay for your housing or give you some other worthwhile fringe benefit).

Advice: This may seem crazy, but if you can't find a decent job by phone/e-mail, just go there. You'll find one. When we went to Shanghai, we didn't even look for teaching jobs that much beforehand. We just made sure we had enough to live on for a month, and then searched when we arrived. After about a week and a half, we were already in a position where we could pick and choose between 3 different offers. You'll find a job, because they're desperate for native-speaking English teachers, and because so many people break their contracts in the middle of the school year, they're always looking for replacements.

No, I'm not there yet.

My girlfriend just had an interview with a school in Beijing that offered her 6000 RMB with flights and housing included. She bargained with her a bit, so she might be getting as much as 8000 RMB now. Is that sufficient? I want to be able to save up money. I'm not sure if that will be enough.

On the other hand, I'm not very confident that I can secure something for 10,000 RMB unless I am over there first. There are a lot of problems going on right now with securing Work Visas, as well. So I don't think going there without a job will be easy.

probably not that helpful as you're set on Beijing, but I used to teach in Qingdao a while back. think some of the less obvious (but still exciting) coastal cities offer far more earning power as there are fewer native English speakers out there competing for the openings.

right. going without a job right now is hard unless u want to get a 30 day travel visa.

6000?? no one i know in china with a college degree would work in beijing for less than 10k rmb/month. they laughin at u.

Really? wow. okay. I will definitely keep that in mind while negotiating salary.

I just got an interview scheduled for a teaching position in Hong Kong. For some reason, I'm not hearing back from any Beijing jobs, so I decided to apply elsewhere. Judging from the company's website, they pay pretty well. Close to $3000 USD a month, to start off. plus accomodations are taken care of.

Is Hong Kong as ridiculously expensive as everyone says?

yes, hong kong can be pricey - it's the same island nation situation as japan, there's not a lot of room so prices for space go up.

the only thing I'd warn about hk is the smog. all the manufacturing exhaust in southern china gets blown into hk, it's unreal. the locals told me 5-7 years ago it wasn't like that.

here's a picture I took when I was there last september. that's not fog!

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1343/1440987836_ff26393412.jpg

I don't know much about beijing or shanghai, but the southern mainland was nice - I was in dongguan which is near shenzhen/guangzhou. people were pretty friendly and open. going from that area to hk was like going from the american south to nyc - the rudeness was a bit of a culture shock.

Wow. I guess the pictures I've seen were doctored. That's pretty nuts.

Just to clarify something, Dylann...

These people that get paid more than 10,000 RMB, are there apartments paid for by the schools? If so, that sounds pretty good. I would be more than happy having my apartment paid for and then 12,000 RMB on top of that.

Their, not there.

maybe I shouldn't be teaching English

How obvious is the military presence in Beijing. People have spoken of that before.

I can't look at this thread without thinking about Men Without Hats.

one positive thing about hk is you will be able to manuver about and get things done. due to the british influence it's a completely bilingual area.

I'm not sure about the northern cities, but in the southern mainland you better have a base level of proficiency with mandarin or have someone with you who does. when I was in dongguan I would walk around for hours and not see another westerner, or meet someone who had anything more than the most rudimentary english skils.

of course, you also feel like a rock star because your very presence on the street is turning heads.

i was just checking esl teaching job offers out of curiosity, thinking "how they trying to pay people 6k in beijing????" and jeez, they trying to pay people 6k in beijing. mayne. and i see they're paying 10k-12k starting in shanghai and orbiting cities (hangzhou, suzhou). i don't get beijing. 750usd a month, breathing yellow air, horrifying olympic facelift in progress. 太糟糕了.

hong kong with a decent job-- jump at that shit.

So

I'm planning for late '10/early '11 right now. I'm slowly learning Mandarin and trying to figure out which city I'd like to shoot for. Like everybody else ever I'm planning on teaching until my feet are firmer and then maybe shooting for marketing work or something else English major stylee.

a very good friend of mine has been living and working in beijing since he graduated about three years ago. anything specific you want to know about? i could ask him some stuff for you

sounds great. do you think you'll stick to big cities and coastal places or look inland?

there have to be editing or marketing jobs there, at least part-time, but i'm sure it's the kind of stuff you have to be on the ground to get.

I'd like to start costal & metro at first and then maybe spend the first summer there traveling and getting a feel for the interior to decide if I want to settle there for any extended period.

I would hold off on plans to stay there for years and years until you live there for 6 months. I thought I was having a good time, but around the 5 month mark I had developed a habit of buying two 40s on the way home from class, chugging one as soon as I got in the door, and drinking the other one with dinner, and then staring blankly at the wall while listening to the CCTV9 propaganda in the background. It probably ended up that way for me because I'm inclined to drink and be a sad lonely guy just thinking about things, but maybe not.

^^ yeah, you have to have a plan B once the "OMG everything costs 1/10 as much as it does in the states!" effect wears off

big hoos in little china

Yeah I keep hearing that like you can work ~part time~ as a teacher and have enough to get by well, and I keep thinking "ok so what would I do with my extra 20 hours a week" cause I know I could be in danger of stupid solipsism indulgences if I didn't find stuff to do.

xp loll

I knew a guy who had been teaching in China for two years and just signed a contract to teach in Chengdu for three years; he spent all his free time either watching bootleg DVDs or traveling...

Yeah, some people really get into it. My friend has been in Shanghai for 4 years now, and all he does in his free time is watch DVDs, play cheap pirated PS2 games, and smoke really shitty hash spliffs, and hang out with the revolving door of English teacher roommates. He seems pretty happy.

I feel like my fatal flaw was that I didn't enjoy the bootleg dvds enough. I mean, I'm not complaining about scoring 5 seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm for $10, but even if it was free, I can't watch DVDs all the livelong day and not get depressed.

With that said, I'm an artistically inclined dude and I know in a big city there's mad stuff to do. Exploring a new place is the most exciting shit on earth to me, and I'm going with someone who's lived in a few different places in the country for a couple years already. I have a feeling she'll help me stay off the couch for the most part.

Haha my girl watched all of Sex & The City bootlegged in like two weeks at some point, this must be a relatively common thing?

good luck HOOS! I didn't mean to be all Debbie Downer. consider Chengdu - some of the best food in all of China, and prices are still very reasonable even though it's a big city. (by the way, small town in Chinese parlance = 3 million people)

Haha my girl watched all of Sex & The City bootlegged in like two weeks at some point

The first thing that my gf and I did when we arrived was watch 3 seasons over 2 weeks as we looked for a job. It was a nightmare. I would wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, with Carrie Bradshaw whining/narrating "The funny thing about living in Manhattan is..." echoing in my brain

I've also entertained dreams of dropping everything and moving to China, although being ethnically Chinese makes things much harder on the 'teaching-English front', and I've been too lazy to see what other opportunities there are for ABCs

good luck HOOS! I didn't mean to be all Debbie Downer.

Yeah yeah, same here. I'm sure you'll do really well, and plus you have the bonus of having a familiar go-getter to spur you on!

Thanks for the love, guys. I'm super excited and I'm directing a lot of my questions at my girl, but I'm sure I'll be reviving this with more questions as time wears on. I don't even have my fuckin passport yet, I'm gonna start working on that as soon as my next paycheck hits the bank, and I'm gonna try to live super minimal style for as much of '10 as possible.

Hong Kong is the ideal, but expenses make it suspect.jpg.

The girl keeps big upping Beijing in particular, and iirc she's taught at some inland summer camps to finance travel, so she knows that territory to some degree too.

How long were you there all told, Z_S?

I'm in HK right now HOOS; it's pretty great and not as expensive as everyone says it is. rent's the big killer

8 months - 6 in Shanghai, 1 in Tianjin/Beijing, 1 in South Korea & Japan (vacation)

http://www.csr-asia.com/upload/cage2.jpg

$150 a month gets you...a cage of your own

Very homey.

My friend did the 'pack up and leave for China' thing, he decided instantly, spent 3 months preparing and then took off. He ended up staying for 3 years. When he went he didn't speak the language at all, by the end he was in Beijing going to Chinese school and working part time. I guess if you had a lot of extra time/money you could do that.

I've heard Mandarin doesn't really help much in Hong Kong, but I could be wrong? Anyway, 加油!

dyao btw I'm probably gonna be playing annoying little brother to you itt as I get closer and more excited/nervous about this stuff

haha no prob! I've spent two summers in Beijing in addition to going on two years here in HK - feel free to drop me a line

adamj - no, the locals here can understand most basic Mandarin but often don't feel confident enough to speak it - also there's a still a lingering stigma against Mandarin as being the language of the barbarians from the north. also, +oil!

HK's got the weird postcolonial thing going on where if you speak English well, you're automatically bossman #1

Is Cantonese the majority language? Or?

(dialect??)

yeah it's the main language of HK, since most of HK's original inhabitants came from Guangdong (Canton is closer to how the name is pronounced in Cantonese). as Edward III said upthread though, HK is pretty much a bilingual city in that nearly everything is available in both English and Chinese (traditional characters though).

China's interesting in that Mandarin is a lingua franca; Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible. often, you'll get Chinese people who speak a local dialect (maybe the dialect of their village), a regional dialect (like Cantonese or Shanghainese), and Mandarin.

good article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8141867.stm

like it'll be a shock if you've spent a long time prepping Mandarin and you get dropped off in Chengdu and find out everybody around you is talking Sichuanese!

+oil as in "add energy," right? I was taught it means "good luck" or "you can do it!"

Jie oh!

yeah it literally means "add fuel" - you can hear fans chanting it at sports matches...rather staidly, of course

ah good anyway big hoos jia you

top 5 cities i'd like to live in china:

1. nanjing: like china if the guomindang had won the war. it's kinda like vancouver (no ocean) but with lots lots more trees and more universities and dirtier streets and prettier girls. it has a dozen universities, two or three good ones, which gives it a certain atmosphere. it's like hangzhou/suzhou in that it's cultured and has a long history but it's not an asshole about it. good weather, doesn't snow. it has a subway!

2. kaifeng: henan is like the... newfoundland? of china, everyone makes jokes about people from henan being lazy and thieving and it being the dirtiest fucking place in the world and never set foot there, my god. you know those pretty little hutongs they ripped down in beijing to build all those bullshit buildings? kaifeng is still full of those and they don't have starbucks in them and guided tours-- they're neat and tidy and vibrant, and fuck it, you can still eat at kfc, if you want. kaifeng has a rule about not building tall buildings because they don't want to ruin their skyline. and, fuck man, you want culture? this is the center of the central plains, where chinese high culture really began, all that tang dynasty bullshit. i spent a week here (right up the street from where liu shaoqi died covered in lice and his own waste) and i'd kill to live there for a year, doing nothing but wandering back alleys and swimming in the filthy canals.

3. shanghai: what other BIG chinese cities are worth living in? beijing is... the people are insufferable unless they're not from beijing and it's a mess and dirty as it was in 1981 and i really hate it, for multiple reasons. hk is dope but not china. taibei is aight. but shanghai is awesome. i'd live in some preserved old neighborhood, a nice french concession place or something and get fucked up on k and supercut coke every night and party with chen guanxi. ........ it's actually a really nice, liveable city and relative to any major metropolis super affordable and easy to get around, as long as you aren't forced into the suburbs. it's not way up on my list, but if i had to choose a major city, this would be it.

4. xi'an: read too many jia pingwa novels. it's sorta famous for being filthy and unruly but it's filthy and unruly in a way that preserves a china that i'm really fond of. it's like living in... north battleford. but with better food.

5. yantai: it's coastal. it has the same sorta character as lots of other treaty ports (you know, wester-style architecture suddenly slapped in the middle of nowhere), but unlike qingdao, no tourists-- well, actually a fucking ton of korean sex tourists, but they sorta don't venture away from the hookers near the ferries or the big hotels, so it's aight. it's very beautiful and cheap and easy to walk around it and everyone is nice (because it's shandong) and all of the girls look like xu wenjia.

This is still totally happening fyi.