Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile Goes to New York

How I Got Here…The Long Short Version

The other night I met a group of Peace Corps volunteers, all based in rural southwest China. They had come to Kunming to sample the nightlife and indulge in Western treats unavailable in their Chinese hometowns, and were playing cards and drinking beer. One turned to me and asked the usual question, "so how long have you been in China?"
"Going on four years"
"Wow, that's a long time".
I laughed and said that time has flown by, and that I knew people who had been here for far longer. Longer than I've been alive, even.
"So, how did you end up here?"

I told him the usual story....graduated from college, didn't know what I wanted to do except live abroad, thought about Peace Corps, decided to teach English, thought China would be interesting, took a job, and voila! Here I am. That, of course, only explains how I got to China in the first place, not how I ended up in Kunming as a language student and part-time tutor. But I doubt anyone wanted to while their evening away listening to that whole tale.

Far more interesting are the little coincidences and accidents that played a deterministic role in my China experience. I was certainly never destined to go to China. I trace my ancestry to the fjords of Norway and the vineyards of Italy, not to the Yellow River plains. I was never one of those white kids with an Asian fetish, either. I never cared for martial arts. Nor anime. And while growing up in the Bay Area I had a lot of Asian friends, my knowledge in China was limited to General Tso's chicken. If you had told me, as a college senior in 2003, that within eighteen months I'd be calling Lianyungang, China home, I'd have dismissed you as a crank.

But there I was, in the fall of 2004, standing in front of thirty teenaged Chinese kids suffocating in the Jiangsu heat. How did it happen?

The simplest explanation was that about a month prior, somewhere in Australia, a young man bound for China had his car stolen. He had been hired to teach English in Lianyungang, and the trauma of the theft so soon before his departure date left him mentally unprepared to handle the move. So he withdrew, and the company (WITT) that hired him was left scrambling for a replacement. Their usual requirements (experience) went out the window, and I was offered the position.

I was informed that my arrival was urgent, and given a week or so to make up my mind. Lianyungang? Where the hell was that? A solitary English-language website offered no clues. Few people had heard of it. In desperation, I asked a friend who worked with Chinese students in the laboratory to supply me with information. He didn't bring back much. "One guy said it's a port". Great.

I thought of holding out for something in a bigger city, like Shanghai. I spoke to my recruiter, who discouraged that idea. "If you go to Shanghai, all you'll end up doing is getting drunk with other foreigners. Go to the smaller place, you'll have a more authentic experience."

These words elicited a romantic series of imaginations, and I excitedly saw myself tilling rice fields while listening to old men swap stories from the war. This would be great. I said "what the hell" and agreed.

Little did I know that getting drunk with foreigners, in fact, was exactly what I do anyway that year.

For one thing, I was totally unprepared to teach English. My TEFL course provided a basic education in how to convey the language to non-native speakers, but I had no conception of how China or Chinese people would be any different than, well, anyone else. The urgent nature of my arrival left my company little time to orient me, and so it took me weeks before I realized the actual objective of my lessons. Prior to that, I was gasping at straws, inventing lesson plans on my walk to school.

I had assumed that learning Chinese would be a breeze, given enough immersion. What I didn't expect was being confounded by the simplest concepts months into my stay. My original goal of learning enough Chinese in one year to use it seemed laughably optimistic. In taxis, I pointed when I wanted to go straight, jerked my arm when I wanted to turn, and held up my hand, palm out (like a cop) when I wanted to stop. Five-minute excursions to buy bread turned into incommunicative nightmares. No wonder I preferred the company of pirated DVDs and jaded laowai.

At around Christmas, I thought: "Fuck this. I'll just travel, have some fun, and then go home. A year is enough."

That was three and a half years ago. If I never imagined coming to China in the first place, I certainly never imagined staying this long. And I have traveled, and I have had fun, but I've also met more than my share of amazing people, learned a tremendous amount, and, through a series of coincidences no less deterministic, found myself happily studying Chinese in Kunming.

I've never met the Aussie fellow whose job I took, nor do I even know his name. I sincerely hope it worked out for him in the end. And as for the thief, for the decency of society I hope he's stopped stealing people's cars. But I'd be remiss if I didn't offer a quiet "thanks".