It only takes a few weeks of being back in your hometown to feel like everything you’ve done prior—all that time spent fighting for the attention of hungry Chinese students—never happened. Or it did happen, but everything you thought you learned from the experience… well… never happened. Or it did happen, but… nah, I think I’m done with that joke.

Your time as a teacher is easily justified as wasted, especially during those final evaluations when only one or two of the students can repeat a concept you spent the whole semester drilling. But most teaching positions in China are very impersonal, anyway, and your job isn’t so much about teaching a specified amount of content as it is just giving the kids a chance to have a teacher who isn’t Chinese. In a way, foreign teachers are there to break cultural boundaries, not necessarily teach, but if a little English is learned along the way, more power to you!

Some of my students still stay in touch with me, though, so I didn’t walk away with nothing. And as a young fish out of water standing in front of a class of 50 restless Chinese kids four times a day, your comfort zone naturally grows. Maybe you find you’ve only become comfortable addressing non-native English speakers, but progress is progress! When you tell people you taught in China, they’re just impressed by the word “teach,” if they’re impressed at all, but to you, it’s not that. To you, it was a lesson in confidence and endurance and resisting the urge to crap your pants and run home crying when things go bad.

Things go bad all the time.

As much as I liked my ILP classes (the first teaching I ever did in China), those kids were awful. Class time with the foreigners was “release hours of pent up energy that our Chinese teachers would beat us for” time. They would fight each other. They would pull their pants down. They would yell and throw things at the teacher. They would literally tear the desks apart. But through all that, I finally learned to just be patient and focus on creating a better lesson instead of trying to create better students. That comes later, and it’s pretty much an uphill battle, anyway.

If there’s one thing you learn as an English teacher in China, it’s patience. There’s patience, because the kids’ English is bad, and there’s patience, because their behavior is bad. It was different, though, trying to be patient with my primary classes of 50 students as opposed to the ILP classes of eight. I’ll admit, I lost my temper sometimes. Things were said. Books were thrown out the window. Nonetheless, I’m a much better person now than I was five years ago, and China has played a big part in making me that way.

Okay… that’s swell and all, but how do you remember which one is first and which one is fourth? It’s easy to get them mixed up and makes reading typed-out pinyin a pain (wo3 yao4 gen1 ni3 shuo1 hua4).

Then one day, I wrote the tone markings side by side: – / V \ . Revelation time! They looked like a minus M, or -M. The M can even stand for Mandarin. The minus stands for… look, I’m not going to do all the work. Now, whenever I forget if the falling tone is second or fourth, I just have to think of it as it fits into the -M formula.

While there, we walked around the city’s lake and came across a small amusement park. This particular ride made me laugh, and I had to get a video of it:

It’s a little hard to tell from the video, but the ride is playing the song “It’s a Small World,” and the people in the carts are shooting animals and dinosaurs with laser guns.

… and I’m ready to go back. Nah, just kidding. There are certainly things I miss about China (my girlfriend being first and foremost), but I really wasn’t getting much enjoyment out of teaching, and there are so many things about China that drive me crazy and would have continued to do so had I stayed. For the sake of my sanity, it was important to leave.

But being back in the US has been rather stressful. A lot of chores pile up while you’re away, and the job market ended up being considerably bleaker than I imagined. That’s a rude awakening. But there are some good things about being back, too. It’s nice to be around my family again, and it’s nice to have Mexican food and legitimate copies of video games readily available!

On the other hand, it’s hard to go from being a foreign teacher and being treated like a celebrity (for better or worse) to being just a plain, old US citizen again. I don’t stand out at all, and few people even bat an eye when they hear that I’ve been living overseas for 18 months. If that time has done anything for me, it’s just put me way out of the loop.

Part of the problem is that I’m from a small town in Utah. The population here has yet to break 10,000. Changzhou had a population of 3.5 million and enough shops and restaurants and fun things to do to support that many people. In a city that big and crazy (this is China, after all), every day was an adventure (again, for better or worse). Believe me, I’m hoping I can move soon, but for the time being, I really feel like I’m just treading water.

Riding the bus in China isn’t exactly a fun experience, especially when you’re trying to get on during the busy hours (also know as all hours of the day). Eventually, though, you’re going to need to figure out the bus system in your new Chinese city. I know many expats don’t like bothering with the bus stop signs, because they’re too confusing, so we’re going to walk through this together.

The big mass of characters above the word BUS are the names of the bus stops read from top to bottom. The red highlighted one is the stop you’re at right now. The two characters next to the bus stop number, 下站, refer to the next stop. The red numbers in the top-right corner tell us when the first and last bus run (frustratingly, most of the buses end before 9:00).

Don’t forget to look at the top of the sign, which displays the current stop in characters and pinyin. This is a great way to start tying the two together. If you can start recognizing simpler characters like 大 (da) or 中 (zhong) in the names of important bus stops, it makes it a lot easier traveling around town. But if you don’t care to learn how to read Chinese, at least copy the characters (the best you can) in your notebook so you can compare them with other bus signs when you’re ready to return.

But on the bus, none of this will do you much good, because the stops are announced (if at all) in Chinese, and the marquee (if there is one) doesn’t always work. The easiest thing to do is count how many stops are between you and your destination on the sign, then keep track of how many times the bus stops while you’re on it. I know all of this makes perfect sense already, but the first few times you get on a Chinese bus can be pretty scary. Good luck.

Well, fat Chinese people do exist, they’re just very rare. I only saw one or two truly obese people the entire time I was there. Maybe it’s their diet (of KFC and ice cream) or all the walking they do, or maybe Asians just got lucky in that sense. But not everyone is scarily thin. Some of my students were obviously spoiled and well-fed, and, in the summer, the men do like to roll their shirts up to reveal their beer guts.

Because the majority of people are thin, though, they have a twisted view of what normal weight is. Anybody who has any bit of meat on them is labeled fat, and the only thing that garners more chuckling and pointing than a white person getting on the bus is an obese person. It’s sad how a beautiful Chinese girl by American standards faces constant ridicule for being “chunky,” and it’s sad how people have no qualms about informing said girl she needs to lose weight.

This is the part I will never understand about China. Why is it acceptable for people, even first acquaintances, to tell others they’re fat, that they need to lose weight, that they need to eat less, that their boyfriends will never love them if they continue to eat so much? Yes, these are all common jabs. Even more obnoxious is how my students would always refer to their slightly bigger classmate as “the fat one.” Those kids loved pointing out fat people. It was an obsession.

Apologists like to bring up that China is simply a more open society. And that’s definitely true. Frequent comments were made about my acne and my big nose and even my lack of weight. Open or not, though, if you call somebody fat, even a Chinese person, you run the risk of hurting their feelings. Nobody likes being reminded of their physical flaws. Remember the “chunky” but beautiful Chinese girl? Yeah, her feelings get hurt, too.

Many of the clothing stores in China will have one or two employees standing in the doorway, clapping. That’s all they do. They clap. I gotta admit, though, when I hear the sound of two hands smacking against each other, I’m compelled to buy something. It gets me every time. Occasionally, these employees will yell out specials, but… their job is mostly clapping. And that’s the best job ever.