I moved to China from the US to be a teacher. My $4,000 monthly salary went much further, but there were tradeoffs.
20.01.2025 - 00:57
/ insider.com
This as-told-to essay is based on conversations and emails with Tatiana Smith, 36, who spent five years teaching English as a second language (ESL) in China. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
For the vast majority of my life, I've lived in Illinois.
I grew up in a very impoverished environment, so I didn't believe that I would ever see the world. When I was 29, I joined the Peace Corps. I traveled to Liberia, an African country full of people who look just like me, which is cool but also impacted how I related to the country.
I could blend in, but I was very curious to know what it would be like to go someplace where they did not think I was native.
In 2018, I visited China and explored Zhengzhou, in the Henan Province on a tourist visa. In 2019, I officially moved to Beijing on the Z-visa, or the worker's visa. To get it, you need a job that will write you a letter, a physical, and a clean background check.
I came back to America in August 2024 to spend time with my family. By that time, many of my friends, other expats, had also left.
I've noticed big misconceptions between the US and China since I've returned.
The unspoken rule of talking about politics when you are in China is that you do not talk about Chinese politics. That was made very clear to me.
I've heard a lot about how China's communist regime, but in terms of what I experienced it felt just as, if not more, capitalist than America.
Luxury is big in China. There is a whole section of Beijing where all the luxury stores and expensive places are.
In China, they promote entrepreneurship. There's a lot of opportunity to open a business and the threshold to do so is very low if you're Chinese.
There's also a lot of business turnover. If a business left an area, something else entered very quickly. In Beijing, if I'd walk by a closed shopfront that used to be a grocery store, a month later, it was like a hair salon.
When I came back to the US and explained my lifestyle to people, there was a real cognitive dissonance around life in China.
For example, a teacher in America does not make a whole lot. As an expat teacher in China, my starting salary was 28,000 RMB, roughly a bit over $4,000 a month now.
In China, they have their version of Uber called DiDi. I could take a DiDi to and from work for less than $10 a day. Taking a US Uber for 15 minutes now costs me $20.
I made enough that I was able to eat out almost every day. Cooking was something that I did so rarely that it was an event, and I would invite my friends over.
I could finally pay off all my bills back home and have money to travel. It was much harder to escape a scarcity mindset in the US.
When I had Chinese food in China, it was dramatically different. At an