Back to China

I haven't posted in a while now, which isn't that unusual for me, but I have a really good reason this time. This blog is supposed to be about my time living in China and I've been living back in the US for almost five months now. No, I haven't abandoned China. In fact, the reason that I returned was to get a proper work visa for China. Did I mention that my original visa was a tourist Visa? I probably left that off to keep friends and family from worrying. While it's very common to work in China without a proper visa, I always wanted to get the correct visa. Unfortunately, it's somewhat uncommon for a school to have the credentials necessary to legally hire foreign workers. The kindergarten that I'd been working at for the previous semester had all those credentials and wanted me to get the necessary paperwork. I was eager to get the visa right away, but it's really something that you have to be in the United States to get. So after my first semester working for him he agreed to send me back to the US to get the visa. That was April. I won't bother to bore you with the details of all the different elements, but it should suffice to say that it's complicated. Really complicated. And the ultimate goal is a temporary residence permit, which is basically a green card. With that you can work in China legally, stay indefinitely (as long as you maintain employment), and enter and leave the country at will.

My first stop back in the US was Salt Lake City, my most recent place of residence and employment. Some of the paperwork had to come from there, but I also needed paperwork from my university, which is Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. The first sign of problems with my employer in China was when, after being in Salt Lake for two weeks waiting on paperwork, he was unable to decide whether I should proceed to Atlanta to continue the process. I was sleeping on a friend's couch to save money, but I still had to buy food and pay incidentals, so every day I lingered somewhere I didn't need to be was costing me money. So I proceeded to book a ticket to Atlanta without the boss's approval and continued the process.

I should say that I was given a month and a half salary plus airfare to come do all this, but I also told him before I left that I didn't know how long all this would take and might need more money if this whole process ended up taking more that a couple of weeks. By the time I'd flown to Atlanta, I had already spent a substantial amount of the money and was now needing to pay for hotel rooms. I got the process of getting that paperwork started, visited some friends, then hopped a train to Alabama, where my father and sister live. I've been here ever since and never received any more money for the trip.

Luckily, my father has been helping me greatly, financially, while I've been here, so I haven't gone hungry. But one of the pieces of paperwork necessary for the visa is an employment contract. Since the contract made while I was using my previous visa wasn't legal, we needed to sign a new contract. The one my boss sent me increased the number of hours I would be teaching and gave no pay increase for the next two years. I received this new contract just before my father and I left for Fort Myers, FL to visit my uncle Grover. Over the week we stayed there, I tried to negotiate a decent contract with my former employer at the same time I went looking for a new school. By the end of the week, I had lost the job at the kindergarten I had come back for and gotten a new job at a training school in a different city.

Well, to be fair, I had gotten a prospect. But shortly after I returned to Talladega, I did an interview via video chat and got a contract sent over shortly after. I signed the contract and was on my way to a work visa with the new school. Since then I've been working towards that visa. Luckily, I didn't have to start from scratch but I did get rejected on the first try. A month later, re-submitting the exact same paperwork yielded some progress. Now, all the necessary paperwork for the visa has been submitted and I'm simply waiting on the visa to be issued, which should happen next week. 

The new school is located in Yueyang, which is in the far northern end of Hunan Province. The city I've been living in for the past three years is Chenzhou. Same province, but at the far south end. I've gotten used to Chenzhou and made a lot of friends there. But some of them have already moved on and I think it's time to see another part of China. Well, another part of the province anyway. In Chenzhou, I was close to Guangdong province and Hong Kong, which has always been a cool place to spend weekends and holidays. I've gotten to know several places in Guangdong and have really enjoyed my time exploring the area, but there's so much to see in China and the new city is very central to the whole country, so I'll only be five to seven hours from several major cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and even Chengdu (the capital of Sichuan province), along with exploring more of Hunan province itself.

Unless something goes wrong, I'll be in China the next time I post. I expect the first month to be insanely hectic, but I hope (as I always do) to post regularly. I'll try to make another post within the first month of being back.