As I prepare to leave for my upcoming trip, which begins tomorrow with a flight to Athens, Greece, I’ve been reflecting on how different journeys I’ve taken have changed the person I am. After all, when you strip away the tangible aspects of traveling — and, in particular, the cheapened, touristy ones — its greatest benefit to a traveler is how it helps him grow and evolve as a person.
The more trips I take, the more I begin to think of travel as like a fast-forward button on life. During my two months in South America, for example, I feel like I gained awareness, experience and maturity it would have taken me a year or more to acquire staying in the same place.
The particular journey (and subsequent transformation) I’m about to talk about, however, relates to the eight months I spent in China and how dramatically they altered the course of my life — and how decidedly more adept at living the life I wanted I became as a result.
The Road to Shanghai
Although I’d made a conscious decision to pursue work in Shanghai, going to China wasn’t as much of an empowered choice as it was the least painful of the options I had in my life in the late summer of 2009.
The day I signed my contract, I was unemployed — and had been for nearly seven months, without any job offers and only a few interviews, none of which were for jobs that actually matched my skills or interests. As I mention in another entry on the subject, I’d originally hatched the idea to teach English in Asia earlier the same year, but backed out for a variety of reasons. I was to have begun my job in South Korea in April, roughly three months after having lost my job.
By August, by which time the length of my unemployment had more than doubled, I was at my wit’s end: I had no other choice, it seemed, but to abandon the American rat race, at least temporarily. I scouted and procured a job with a seemingly reputable company in Shanghai within a couple weeks. That part was easy.
Detaching from my life — or what I perceived my life to entail — was much more difficult. For starters, I’d built up a huge attachment to my apartment, a charming (albeit aging to the point of decay) one-bedroom in a complex on the south shores of Lady Bird Lake just opposite downtown Austin. It was a veritable penthouse, for someone of my income anyway.
It had also come to symbolize, particularly in the weeks and months following the death of my dog (which conveniently proceeded my having lost my job by just two months), my greatest source of comfort, strength and stability.
As a result, when I lost the income needed to sustain my existence in the overpriced cube on the waterfront, it took me several months to become OK with the idea of abandoning it and seeking solace elsewhere, a stalemate that had informed my decision not to take the job in South Korea.
By the time I signed my contract with EF, however, it seemed to be the only way forward. After all, my unemployment benefits would soon dry up, leaving me to pay more than $1,200 per month in rent and bills — as well as my student loans, credit cards and other debts — with absolutely zero income.
Once I packed up in Austin at the end of September, I spent a month in St. Louis seeing my family, a miserable, bleak October that served to remain in painful slow motion of exactly why I’d left my de-facto home as quickly as I fucking could six years prior. It was astonishing to me how quickly my decisive action began to change the course of my life: The moment I boarded the Boeing 777 that would carry me to Shanghai, every single problem I’d been carrying with me the moment I sat down in my seat vanished into thin air.
Initiation Period
I’m not sure anymore what I expected Shanghai would be like, but it definitely wasn’t what I saw when I got there: After exiting the plane into a nearly-empty arrivals hall at the gargantuan airport, I hopped in a taxi and traveled a gargantuan distance to the mostly dreary city Shanghai appeared to be and, eventually, the hotel my company had booked for me. This wasn’t necessarily disappointing: I took to Shanghai’s famous Bund the night I arrived, in spite of the picturesque waterfront view it appeared to offer in pictures being completely obstructed by renovations in advance of the city’s World Expo, planned for the following year.
I flew in on a Saturday and by Monday morning at 9, I was at EF’s Shanghai — and, as it turned out, national — headquarters, which is where I found out I’d be teaching. I was excited less about the run-of-the-mill introduction to my new company and more excited about beginning my apartment search that evening after orientation was over.
It was here that my frustration with China has its origins. My welcome packet included the names and phone numbers of several real estate agents. In spite of the 35 per cent fee using one incurred agents, my company insisted, provided a local perspective foreigners usually miss — and, ideally, a better place to live as a result. Three days, more than eight hours — two of them spent waiting in the frigid rain — and 30 inadequate apartments later, I felt like I had been duped by people who’d been put in place to help me.
I began to adopt a similar cynicism toward my job. I imagined that in addition to also being native speakers of English, my new co-workers would be people with life philosophies similar to my own — that is, using a temporary stint abroad to advance themselves materially and spiritually, a catalyst for progress.
What I found instead, however, was a group of people who had (with one or two exceptions) transferred the outlook people tend to have on life in the West — to make your job and excelling at your job the primary focus of your life, to elevate it to more than just an occupation of your time in exchange for a certain amount of remittance — to their new lives in the East. Instead of taking an opportunity to use the insight gained in living abroad to transcend their own status quos, they left one daily hell an willfully stepped into another — in essence, they transferred prison cells.
Less than a week after I began my observing other teachers, I found myself in hot water. One of my colleagues, an Australian girl of Korean birth and descent, had told her students something that was abjectly incorrect. Not knowing any better — she’d told me, after all, that I could ask questions or give input whenever I felt it was appropriate — I raised my hand and explained to the class not that she was wrong, but that the grammatical concept she was trying to illustrate didn’t actually apply to the situation she was using to do so.
Appropriateness, it seemed, was the operative concept: I bruised the young woman’s ego enough to warrant a reprimand. I would be called into a room and instructed to sit across from my supervisor, interrogation-room style, the same day. In addition to chiding me for having apparently acted out of turn, he went on to question my professional qualifications for teaching, with the obvious implication that he thought I lacked them.
As would come to be standard behavior for me, he quickly pivoted the moment I pushed back and suggested we not dwell on the subject any longer, but it was clear going into my job not so much that my supervisor didn’t like me, but rather that neither he nor my co-workers were doing what I was doing with the same intent I was doing it, a discrepancy that would inform the time I spent at work, in an almost exclusively detrimental way.
That’s What Friends Are For
China wasn’t all bad, however, although it was difficult for me to see that during my first couple months there. The weather alone was enough to drive me crazy, irrespective of professional inconveniences. Literally two days after I arrived, the dry, balmy air — and occasional bouts of sunshine — that had greeted me the first 48 hours or so gave way to frigid temperatures, nonstop rain and a perpetual smog haze.
What did begin to motivate me as time went on was my interactions with students. I’d been lucky enough to be placed at an adult school, which meant that my youngest students were 16. Luckily for me, a significant number of my students happened to be at or around my age — and were eager to help me both to explore my nwq city, and to make the time I spent at work pleasant enough to endure.
Outside of individual classes — which with the exception of a writing workshop I got to teach, were meticulously structured to the point of being torturous for all parties in involved — my main outlet for student interaction was in the “lounge,” the lobby of the so-called “Megacenter” where students were able to congregate freely and in English, without any constraining academic or official backdrop. Each teacher was assigned a scheduled number of lounge hours each week, to supplement his regularly-scheduled classes and office hours meant for paperwork and other red tape.
Not surprisingly, lounge discussions often centered around the personal stories and viewpoints of teachers, young Chinese people curious not only to learn English from Western people, but also to adapt the attitudes and behaviors — what they perceived as “coolness” — foreigners seemed to exude.
Of course, this exchange quickly became two-way: I was just as curious as to how someone my age, but born in China, would approach the puzzle of life.
Although I developed a rapport with many students — actually, I would go so far to say that I regularly ad interacted with almost all of the 500 that attended classes at the center, an outgoingness-cum-popularity that was probably all that prevented my surly boss from finding a bullshit reason to fire me — only certain ones among them became out-of-class friends of mine.
First and foremost was a young man named Jun (pronounced like the month of June), whom I at first assumed to be a fervent homosexual left unfulfilled by the conservative Chinese outlook toward sex. He was neither gay nor unfulfilled: Many of our conversations centered around his sexual exploits, which involved frequent visits to brothels in Shanghai and other cities, and his deliberate effort to keep his long-term girlfriend (whom he eventually planned to marry) in the dark about it.
One interesting turn my life took in China is that for the first time ever, people — meaning local people, my Western co-workers spotted my limp wrist before my plane landed — didn’t automatically assume I was gay. In fact, the subject didn’t come up for months and even when it did, only the most affluent and traveled of my local friends and acquaintance were able to pick up on it.
As a result, when I hung out with Jun, it was as a “straight” man of sorts. My decision to live like this stemmed from several places. Practically speaking, I knew “coming out” at work would generate enough drama to disrupt workplace decorum to an extent that only getting rid of me would fix.
More deeply, however, was the fact that I felt, for the first time in my life, like I was being taken seriously for my accomplishments and character, rather than some societally-defined aspect of who I was, or the role I supposed to play. People saw me not as opinionated and awkwardly cute, but as authoritative and distinctive-looking — and the issue of sexuality was never even mentioned, except of course for when Jun occasionally asked me to describe my own sexual encounters with women, fabrications that were at first improvisational but over the course of our friendship, became an integral aspect of the person I presented myself to be.
Women reinforced my sudden sexual illusory, namely because several of them seemed intent on becoming my girlfriend. One in particular, who went by the English name “Yoyo,” frequently treated me to lunch and dinner and wasn’t shy about expressing her desire to make me reciprocate her feelings.
Some of her methods seemed downright excessive, although I usually benefitted in some way from them nonetheless. When the tooth I’d cracked days prior to coming to Shanghai became infected, Yoyo used her clout at the hospital where she was a pharmacist and got me into the dentist’s chair just moments after I entered the building, allowing me to cut in front of dozens of people and pay nothing out of pocket. “This is an example of guanxi,” she told me, referring to the Chinese phrase that refers to cultivating and using connections to get ahead.
In America, we call this corruption and characterize it as underhanded, going so far as to demonize public figures and celebrities when we learn of their having apparently cheated. In China, however, guanxi is not only social permissible, but something to be proud of and even empowered by: a Chinese person’s success and the amount of guanxi he or she has are directly related.
In this way, it seemed, my having adopted a partially false persona over the course of my first several months in China was not so much deceptive or disingenuous, but rather the means by which I began to live my life less like an American and more like a Chinese person. Looking back, I was taking full experiential advantage of living in China, rather than simply spectating and observing.
Red Flags
Perks or not, my existence in Shanghai, buffered by favors and guanxi as it was, began to grow unbearable. When my boss called me in for my half-year review, I was shocked at his almost cruel assessment of my performance.
In spite of the great strides students who regularly attended my classes had made and how well-liked I was among the entire student body, his commentary was harsh and critical, a thinly-veiled warning that I either become a more active participant in the bullshit show that went on every day in the teacher’s office. The true measure of success, it seemed, was to kiss the boss’ ass while fooling the rest of your co-workers into thinking y’all are still cool — or hit the road.
To be fair, I had never planned to stay in Shanghai long — and almost immediately after I began working, I knew I probably wouldn’t fulfill my contract. This wasn’t much of a problem: I could break the contract, so long as I gave at least one month’s notice.
My living situation, too, had worsened. None of the agents EF suggested to me had shown me any suitable apartments, so I sought help on Craigslist. After viewing about a dozen slightly less shitty properties, I settled on a shoebox — but a newly renovated one! — just 11 minutes from my desk by foot and metro.
Unfortunately, this convenience and comfort came at a price. In addition to the fact that the seemingly new facade of my apartment began to quickly crumble, I also learned that I’d been paying for my neighbor’s bills– a women with whom my landlord was having an affair, apparently — the entire time I was there. A middle-aged man named Ben (which conveniently means “very stupid” in Mandarin when said with a falling tone), he seemed incapable of doing anything right, from providing me with a hotplate that didn’t work, charging me for fast Internet when the connection was slower than dialup and inviting himself into my apartment to make “updates” without announcing that he would do so in advance.
The final straw came in early April, however, just a couple weeks after my “assessment.” When the aforementioned neighbor moved out, Ben decided to change the lock on the metal door that led to the corridor that led to both of the apartments he owned. He attempted to change it anyway: He installed the new lock backwards, locking me into my apartment from the outside — and causing me to be three hours late to work. This was Wednesday.
Escape Path Lighting
By Saturday, I was in a taxi and en route to the spacious three-bedroom Kenneth, editor of Shanghaiist, a popular local blog I began writing for about a month after I arrived in Shanghai, where I’d been told I had a place to stay. After having contacted me regarding an ambiguity in one of my articles, Kenneth bore the brunt of my sick-of-my-apartment, sick-of-my-job rant and reacted sympathetically. “You hate your life here,” he said. “And you shouldn’t — come live with me.”
Kenneth is gay — he’s one of the most outspoken expat gays in Shanghai in fact, fluent in both English and Mandarin on account of his being from Singapore. He was clearly interested in bedding me and although I told myself before I decided to move into him that I would shoo off his advances, my quickly inhibitions vanished when I found myself in his bed, the room I planned to occupy not yet vacant on my planned move-in date.
As my work situation began to quickly deteriorate, my increasingly frequent sexual exploits with Kenneth took on more of an emotional importance, for me anyway.
In spite of the fact that we’d slept together nearly every night during the first month I lived with him, Kenneth apparently didn’t see a problem with inviting another guy over when I was at work, and proceeded to get physical with him as soon as I walked in the door, as conspicuously as possible. They had extremely loud sex that night.
I won’t mince words: I went fucking nuts. I feared I would going to have a heart attack; I was all but certain I’d have the police called on me. Neither of these things happened, but he did make the mistake of inviting the same motherfucker over weeks later, which produced an even more dramatic explosion.
Thankfully, however, I used the trauma of the first incident as a motivator: I decided that since my attempt to salvage living in Shanghai by changing my living place was unsuccessful, that I should quit my also unfulfilling job, with the eventual goal of jumping ship. On May 8, I provided my smug supervisor with a 30-day notice, my last day to coincide exactly with the first day of my friend Dora’s visit to China. This would provide two benefits: Relief from the 24-hour stress fest my life had become; and motivation to eventually get the f out and move on.
Of course, there was the financial aspect, but I was also able to channel my frustration about this aspect of my existence into a solution: On a whim, I clicked the “Contact Us” link on CNNGo, a website operated by the popular TV network but geared at expats living in Asia, and asked if I would be able to write for them. In spite of the fact that I very skillfully talked up my minimal professional writing experience, I didn’t truly expect to receive a response.
Thankfully, it seemed Chinese peoples’ willingness to give willing eager parties a chance had rubbed off on Jessica, the New York native who then served as editor of the website. Within a few days I was in her office, being briefed on style guidelines for the site and how to pitch ideas. Less than a month later, four of my articles were live, with one even having made it on to the CNN.com homepage.
Although I initially pitched articles on topics that required extensive — albeit interesting — research, I quickly began to realize that a wide variety of article topics for which I didn’t even need to be in Shanghai existed, an epiphany turned way out of being stuck in Shanghai. After Dora and her cousin flew out of Hong Kong, where we ended our trip together, I renewed my Chinese visa, but only with the intent of staying another month.
I didn’t have the balls to tell Kenneth about this, however. Instead, I played up one of the limitations of the visa — that I had to leave the country once every 30 days, in spite of the fact that the visa had an overall validity period of six months. I framed my escape to Vietnam, where I’d long plotted to meet two fellow Americans I met traveling in Thailand during the Chinese New Year holiday, as a two-week vacation designed to fulfill the central requirement of my visa. I even bought a roundtrip ticket.
This being said, I was nonetheless nervous and shaking as I packed the most important of my belongings into the three bags I determined I could easily carry for several weeks or even months. A secondary reason I hadn’t informed Kenneth I’d be leaving for good was that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it out on the road. I knew it was at least tangentially possible that I’d have to return.
Three day before I left, I received an email informing me I’d been successful in having applied to produce freelance Web content for an up-and-coming American company, an opportunity that would allow me to work from anywhere in the world, as much or as little as I wanted, and receive payment via PayPal twice per week.
It wasn’t until I began a regular work schedule upon arrival in Saigon, however, that I realized the extent to which my new gig was a blessing. After only a week of traveling, I plotted out a two-month journey westward, one that would take me through the remainder of Southeast Asia, to the Middle East for the first time and to see both my dear friend Bianca and my then-favorite singer Tori Amos in Europe before heading back to Austin — but this time a more successful, confident, empowered person.
The Aftermath
So how did I go from being a sniveling, cowardly victim of the economic crisis to a location-indepedent, free-spiritied nomad capable of easily manifesting his dreams into reality? The technical answer is simple: I moved to Asia to teach English for a year and harnessed supplementary opportunities I encountered to parlay my way into a gig perfectly suited for the lifestyle I wanted.
The truth of the matter, however, is deeper than that. Over the course of my eight months in China, I was deprived of the social order and conventional wisdom that had led me to believe I was failure and as time passed, began to let go of my longstanding accord with my fellow Americans’ assessment of me. Thanks both to the confidence my new students and eventually friends had in me, I was able to fearlessly pursue the life I wanted for myself, rather than being constantly reminded of having badly navigated my seemingly destined path in life.
The tangible impact was also significant: Before I left, I’d been motivated almost entirely by the specific details of my financial situation. The high (by local standards) salary my job teaching afforded me allowed me to focus on bigger issues — and once I began resolving those, getting the money I needed became more and more effortless.
Best of all, the transformation didn’t stop when I arrived back on American soil: It continued. The passage of time — and the absence of social media in China as a means of communication with my country people — had eliminated all but the most basic memories of my having existed from my friends’ minds, leaving most open to taking me as I’d become, rather than as I’d been.
All of a sudden, people were eager to be around me and to listen to tales of my adventure. Just a year prior I’d been a never-ending chorus of negativity and self-doubt almost no one put up with for longer than a few minutes at a time. Going to China not only helped me clean my own slate, but also to ascend to a new psychological echelon I feared I’d only be able to access when I was abroad.
The two trips I’ve taken since then — my five-week journey back to Southeast Asia in conjunction with the Tourism Authority of Thailand’s “Medical Blog Content” and my two-month trip to South America between February and April — have accelerated and enhanced my personal development further. I literally can’t imagine the truth I’ll uncover over the course of the next two months as I explore not only Greece, but Israel, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Spain and Portugal.
As it turns out, today is the two-year anniversary of the day I signed my contract: In other words, the day I made my plans to move to China official. Just two years since making the decision to live abroad, I gained the clarity that the 24 prior I spent in America had all but left invisible. The name of my blog isn’t just a lyric from a latter-day Tori Amos song, but a summation of my philosophy on life: If you can’t accomplish what you want to do where you are, go somewhere else and do something else.
If you get an opportunity to live and work abroad, take it. If you don’t have one, look for one — I’ve written several articles about teaching English abroad, for example, which is probably the quickest and most effective way of making travel happen. No matter what you decide to do while abroad, the different — and dare I say uncomfortable — circumstances of your existence there will provide you with the perspective and clarity you need to begin living life on your own terms.
Robert Schrader is a travel writer and photographer who’s been roaming the world independently since 2005, writing for publications such as “CNNGo” and “Shanghaiist” along the way. His blog, Leave Your Daily Hell, provides a mix of travel advice, destination guides and personal essays covering the more esoteric aspects of life as a traveler.
