Living in China

If you are considering the gap year offer from I Go To China (which can also be just six months long), you may be wondering what it’s going to be like. You won’t be going to the well-known places such as Shanghai or Beijing. The whole point is that you will be going to rural China where the native teachers don’t want to stay long term and where having a turnover of foreign teachers is better than not having any teachers at all.
But what would it be like to live in China for an extended period?
Roberto from Italy did an internship in China with the subsidiary of a large European company. Here is what he told me about the experience.

You hear a lot about the ideas and images from China in the west and that obviously influences your expectations. Just be prepared to be surprised. In my case, I was positively surprised but I already went to China with a positive expectation.

There are many things I could mention which I found very positive (e.g. approachable, sense and importance of the family) and many things I did not really appreciate but learned to understand (e.g. no queuing, not saying no if you can’t do something). However, the most memorable impression in China is that there you are just one of a billion, literally. There are just many more people, everywhere.
But not only physically also individually it’s very different. Coming from the west, particularly Europe, you always have this quite individualistic perspective. In China that is not that much distinctive. Of course they focus on some superficial things like phones, cars, money and other status symbols, but in the end, everyone knows his place and individualism is not so important there as it is for us. I can’t say whether I find that positive or negative, but I think it works well to some extent in China and it’s probably a necessary basis to govern so many people. I, in any case, learned that our individualistic behavior is a privilege but we’re missing out on many great opportunities by not focusing more on the whole then on the individual. Well, that is my impression and arguable, but based on what I’ve experienced, I think that the individualistic lifestyle from the west would not work with so many people as there are in China and we could learn a great deal of it.
This country has numerous just fantastically beautiful landscapes and the Chinese are proud of it and they have every reason to be so. The cities are crowded and the air is not always great but my impression is, that it is no worse or better than in other cities. Where there are a lot of people, industries and traffic, there will be not the best air and I have the impression that China is taking measures more actively against that then many other western cities (e.g. building of subways, increasing density of people in cities instead of using more land, high speed trains) etc.

Roberto has a very open attitude to his stay in China and seems very good at identifying the advantages of the differences that he met there. That seems to me to be a very beneficial attitude when trying out the working culture in another part of the world.
If you are interested in a gap year experience teaching English to children for six to twelve months in a rural part of China then visit the I Go To China website to find out more and fill in an application form.
In the next post I will look at some of the first impressions when you go to China on an internship.