How to (Successfully) Find a School to Teach in China—and Announcing my Next Destination!

I have the signed contract and visa paperwork in hand so I think it is only fitting to finally announce where I’m going next year. (I wanted to wait till it was legal before I jinxed anything.)
Next September I’ll be teaching in the beautiful seaside city of….Xiamen.

I know, I know! If your my friend you’ve heard me say a million times I’m NOT going to Xiamen. I even said it in the comments of this blog.
So here’s the story of how I chose the new school and ended up in the city I said I wouldn’t. And I think it’s good advice for newbies deciding where to teach in china.
There is no “perfect” school in China. Every school has some good and bad qualities. While it seems bad schools are more normal, the good news is you can find a decent school in just about any city with a little research.
So the most important thing, when choosing a new school, is location, location, location. Since I’ve spent the past 5 years in southeast China I though northwest would be a good change. Like, Xi’an, home of the famous terra-cotta soldiers.
So I started looking up blogs, schools in the area and doing research. Unfortunately my research kept showing one thing: horrible air quality. In china the air pollution has gotten so bad it really needs to be a factor of where to go. I’m in one of the “cleaner” places and I have just about had it with the smoggy days. So the interior, and most northern cities were out. (Xi’an has worse air quality than Beijing just to give you an idea.)
It was about this time the chinese government released a list of the worst and best places pollution-wise. I actually used the list to renew my search. Xiamen kept showing up on the list of cleanest places but I still wasn’t sold. (Ranking 3rd in the Greenpeace China survey.) I looked on the wikipedia pages of all the cleanest cities and clicked through to the universities in those cities. Some chinese universities have great websites, with clear information in english. Others, not so much. Needless to say I looked at a lot of websites for a few months trying to narrow down my search.

I also started looking at Qingdao. A northern city, but on the coast, so the ocean breeze blew the worst pollution away. And Nanjing, a city not far from me which has been rated “best city for expats” several times. But I was looking at Fuzhou most eagerly. It had low pollution, and I have been there once and liked it.
These cities all passed the pollution test (except Nanjing, but I was still willing to look there), but then came the “city” test. I don’t want to live on the outskirts of a major city. Universities in China tend to say they are located in a city, but the truth is they are about 45 minutes away in some boring university city with no culture or local life. I’ve done the outskirts thing for 5 years, and I wanted to be in the center of things this time.
The Nanjing university was at the end of the subway line, way out of town, so I crossed that off my list. The Fuzhou uni was near town, only about 15 minutes away according to a teacher that worked there, so I went ahead and sent my resume to them. I heard back immediately from a woman who formerly in charge of hiring foreigners, but she had moved on and told me she was forwarding her e-mail to the new guy in charge. Then I never heard anything back.
Having an unresponsive employer is quite common, but also bad news in a school in China. The workers in my school tend to do everything last minute and it just isn’t the best way to operate. So I ditched this unresponsive school.
Qingdao also fell out of the running when I found out the salaries. Pitifully low because its such a nice place for foreigners to live they have a huge amount of supply for little demand (this is also the problem with Kunming, a city I would love to live in. But the salaries for university work are just too low and I’d need to work a part-time job just to support myself, which I don’t want to do.)
A friend in Xiamen suggested her school, and with nothing to lose I contacted them. They were incredibly responsive, replying only after a few hours of my initial e-mail. And they seemed quite accepting from the get-go. Within a one week period I had provided several documents requested, talked to a current teacher for an hour on the phone and had a Skype interview. I was offered the job. The package offered was quite a bit more salary for less working hours than my current school. Not bad.

But meanwhile another friend of mine contacted me. He heard I was looking at school’s in Xiamen and suggested his. (Okay, he more than suggested, he said I was “nuts” if I chose the other school over his.) So I contacted his school and they too offered me a job after a few weeks of back-and-forth (and phone interview and talking to another current teacher. This is a VERY IMPORTANT step in choosing a new school. You need to talk to current and former teachers to get an idea of how the administration works). This was even more money for less hours.
So I was a bit torn over which school to pick. Both had satisfied foreign teachers (about 40 at each school), both were in the same part of the city, both had decent sounding students. So in the end, it all came down to money. I chose the higher salary.
So I accepted the school in Xiamen. I had tried avoiding it, but all the things I wanted (higher salary, good weather, school with satisfied teachers) but it just kept sucking me in. And I don’t regret it. I did a lot of research over the the past year so I feel pretty solid in choosing it.
While the size of the school isn’t much different, this will be a big change. I’ll have about 40 foreign co-workers (up from the 9 I have now) and the area I’ll be in is a big area for several schools. My friend who used to work here explained it as Lin’an, but with stuff to do. I won’t have to take a hourlong bus ride to get to an interesting place, I’ll be in the middle of it. And if I want a beach it’s close too.
So that’s a long story to explain my new school, but I think it’s good to show the whole process. Some people just flit from school to school and often land themselves in a less-than-ideal situation. I’ve had it so good at my current school for so many years I’m not willing to go down in either salary, student quality or life quality. And it took a long time, and a lot of work, but I’m hoping it will be worth the effort and another 5 years goes by just as quick as it did the first time.