Jump into Qingdao
You’re in the last semester of your University career and the unemployment rate for those under the age of 25 is around 54%, what do you do? You forget about the lack of future prospects for awhile by distracting yourself with a few final months of uninhibited partying. But then you see graduation coming at you like a freight-train without brakes and you realize that because you spent four years getting a history degree, and don’t intend to go to law school immediately, that the start of your post-university life is going to look like Dustin Hoffman’s in The Graduate (minus the sexy Cougar, which means it’s going to suck).
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| Foto © Richard Hine |
Just when you’ve given into the un-romantic prospect of living in your mom’s basement while working at a bar down the street, the University’s Business Department sends you a campus wide email about educating yourself to become “China Ready.” Like most campus wide emails you don’t open it immediately, but then your dad tells you that as a graduation gift you can have plane ticket anywhere in the world. You still don’t open the email though because, who would want to go to China when they could back-pack around Europe and meet all sorts of other interesting American students doing the same exact thing?
But then you realize that going to Europe would only be an extended holiday and the largest cultural differences you would learn there would be what types of alcohol are favored in each country. So you search through a few weeks of past emails and find the one about studying in China, but by this time you’ve already missed the information session so you have to arrange a private meeting, it’s all good though because the guy is really excited to get a response since only four people showed up to the first session. You meet him for coffee and discuss your options for studying abroad as graduate. He recommends an internship, and it doesn’t sound like a bad idea, so you take the brochure’s he gives you and tell him you’ll email him your CV so he can help guide you with the decision making process.
You throw the brochures on your bedside table and forget them for a week, but then someone asks you what you’re doing after you graduate and all you can do is shrug your shoulders, so you decide to actually read them. You do a little internet research on the internship mediation companies you can apply to and on the cities you have the possibility to live in. Qingdao sounds like a pretty cool city (they have a brewery) so you decide to apply to Intern China and within a week you hear back from a guy named Jaime Bettles, who sends you really nice emails that make you more and more excited about the prospect of living in China. You send him your CV and tell him you want to stay for four months in an apartment because you need your space and don’t want to wake a host family up at all hours of the morning. He’s says he likes your application and asks you to pick around ten internships from a list of name-less descriptions. You decide to apply for a couple of law firm internships, because maybe you will go to law school after all, but then some media companies peak your interest so you throw them in at the end.
A couple weeks later, Jaime emails you back to tell you that he thinks one of the media companies would be best for you – they’re a local magazine with a laid back environment, and you agree because you’re actually quite happy you won’t be working in a law firm. He puts in you touch with the company, it’s called Redstar and for minute you think you’ll be working for a propaganda rag, but then you talk to the editor of the magazine and he’s from Wales and tells you that the company is guide magazine for expats – Qingdao’s version of TimeOut. The editor says they would be glad to have you for four months and you begin to get excited at the prospect of doing some writing, though you know you’ll be getting your fair share of coffee for the bosses.
One month, a check to cover rent and internship processing fees, and a four hour line at the visa office in New York City later you arrive in China on the July 4th – the irony is not lost on you. You’re greeted at the airport by a tiny German girl, thrown into a bus, then dropped off at your apartment, you have no idea where you are or what has happened in the last twenty hours. You wake up in unknown place, put on a shirt and tie then walk down to the street. You hail a taxi after a while and give the driver a piece of paper with the address of the Intern China office; you still have no idea where you are. You walk into the Intern China office and it is full of other prospective interns who are as blurry-eyed as you. After a brief getting to know each other period, you all exchange numbers and then are shipped off for your different meet and greets with the companies you will be working for. About half of the interns you have just met will be your new friends.
You arrive at your new office and finally meet the boss you’ve been emailing for the last three months, he immediately tells you to lose the tie. You take and instant liking to him and are happy that you get to wear jeans and sandals to work. You discuss what your job will be with the company and are told to come back at ten the next morning. Deciding to head back to your apartment by bus, it is the first time you experience a rush hour in Qingdao; three of the largest cans of sardines you have ever seen pass before you have the courage to fight your way into one of them. A half-hour later you arrive at your apartment after suffering through the stagnant July bus-air that carried you to this final destination. Your shirt now looks like you ran home.
Later that night you decide to take a walk in the areas that surrounds your apartment complex. Stares from stranger on the street, looks full of confusion and curiosity greet you throughout your walk while each child that you pass point and then shout something to their parents – you will later learn this word mean ‘foreigner.’ For the first time in your life you are beginning to sense what it feels like to be a minority, and the feeling is shit. You stop into a restaurant and order by pointing at unknown characters on a menu, just praying that it is something pleasantly edible. Thoughts race through your head that you will never be used to living in China, it is too different and the people too unfriendly and weary of ‘foreigners.’ You go back to the apartment and think about everyone and everything that you miss from home; then you go to sleep.
You wake up to a sunny but cold morning in October; the last of your three alarms is screaming that it is now 8:30. You wake up and go through your normal pre-work routine, then run down to the convenience store beneath your home. You grab a bottle of water and say hello to the guy behind the counter then start walking towards the bus stop, waving at some people who are doing their morning exercises in the apartment complex courtyard. You hop on the usual bus, settle into a seat, and throw your iPod ear buds in to pass the time it takes to get to work. Arriving at work a little before ten, you make a coffee and turn on your lap-top to start the day’s assignments. Lunch roles around a quick two hours later and you and some co-workers go down to the market across the street to bring a healthy amount of cheap delicious food back to the office. The lady you visit almost every day to buy lunch from smiles and starts preparing the usual, (some rice with fish-flavored pork) while you two have quick talk full of simple pleasantries.
The rest of the work day goes by quickly and afterwards you walk down to language school you teach English at. The four cute little four year olds who you teach greet and hug you before the start of two hours of lessons, games, and songs. The class ends with you promising to pick each kid up and hang them upside down, the parents love you for teaching their children and letting them have fun. After class you call your friends and meet them at street BBQ for dinner. Once at the restaurant, those who can speak the best Chinese do all of the ordering. During dinner you get a phone call from a friend in your apartment building that you met by chance, he asks you to join him and his family for a day-hike at the local mountain. Ever since you met him and his wife, they’ve invited you into their home several times and now refer to you as their son’s uncle. Your friend usually tries to talk you into considering a job in international trade while the two of you run and play basketball, and you politely tell him you’ll consider it.
After dinner of few of your friends with host families head home because they told them they wouldn’t be out too late, the rest of you go to a local bar to have a couple drinks and talk for a while. Most of the conversation focuses on the last weekend’s trip where you and eight others climbed the 7,000 steps leading up to Mt. Tai. Waking up at five in the morning, while the wind was still blowing the night’s frost through everyone’s thin layers of clothing, you climbed for twenty minutes to see the sun smile for the first time of the day. You laugh with your friends at the hilarity of the crowd that was there to watch the sunrise with you – thousands of Chinese tourists dressed in the same rented winter military jackets. You finish your drink and then everyone parts ways, it is only Thursday and most of you have to work in the morning.
You hail a taxi and tell the driver the address of your home, making sure he takes the quickest route instead of the meandering route for tourists. Back in your in apartment you set the alarms for the morning and lay down to go to sleep. You remember every early thought you had about wanting to leave this place, every frustrating moment on a rush hour bus, or miscommunication with a waiter or taxi driver. Thoughts of each new friend you met here race through your mind, as does the sad prospect of leaving them. You see how silly it was to have been so concerned with leaving this place in the first couple weeks you were here and now how cruel it is that this early wish has been granted at a time when you’ve grown to love it here.
RJ Hine
