Several good reasons for not working here:

• The FAO doesn’t answer her phone and she does not respond to emails.

• Three of my predecessors left with the stigma of one kind of moral impropriety or another attached to their departure. No one could verify any of the allegations. None of the Chinese faculty or students to whom I spoke had any knowledge of the allegations, nor did they mention any improprieties on the part of previous teachers. The FAO at one point suggested that I was “playing with twenty-four year-old girls.” Then she told me that there was “considerable conjecture” that I was married. She would not tell me with whom she engaged in such conjecture. She did tell me that it wasn’t anyone I know. [WTF?] Before I left the school, I found out that a former foreign teacher from that school made the allegations.

• The FAO gossips with foreign teachers.

• The apartment in which you will live is behind the hotel that the school owns. You will be awakened in the middle of the night by employees going to and from the adjacent apartment in which they live. Trucks bringing groceries to the hotel usually arrive at about 1:00 a.m..

• The air conditioning is turned off in June because the college doesn’t want to pay for the utilities. I was told that the central air conditioning was broken and that no repairmen could be found.

• You will not be reimbursed for your airfare into China if you fly from out-of-country unless you sign for a second year (as I did). Then, you will be required to fly to the place of origin. Then the school will pay for your ticket to return. That really isn’t reimbursement.

• Apparently, the air conditioning remains off until the first week of October. When I returned from the summer vacation, my entire apartment was moldy. (See photos). Clothes and shoes were ruined, and the school would not reimburse me for replacing them. The FAO said that it would cost 15,000 yuan to fix the air conditioning. She could not write a check for that amount, she said. (Since when is the FAO responsible for school maintenance?). The apartment building has three stories. One second-story apartment and both third-story apartments escaped the cause of the mold damage. An inspection of the damage to three apartments suggests that while the teachers were gone for the summer, someone turned on the water in the apartment above mine and let it overflow for a long period of time. The watermarks suggest that about 1 ½ inches of water covered the floors. The FAO maintained that humidity was the cause, and that the school was not responsible.

• My microwave caught fire. I reported the incident to the FAO. No one investigated the fire, and I was not given a new microwave, so I bought a new one myself.

• The heat in the building is not turned on until the first freeze. Even after the central heat is turned on, the heat that is produced is only a few degrees higher than the outside.

• Garbage pickup takes place whenever one of the local trash pickers comes to pick through it and take most of it away. Neither the hotel service nor the school will pick up the trash. At one point, the trash was piled about four feet high. One morning I killed a persistent rat with a broom stick.

• The hotel workers will throw their trash on the steps of the foreign teachers’ apartment steps. I found a bag of garbage and human feces on my window ledge.

• If your contract says that you will receive a bonus if your students make good remarks about you, don’t believe it. I saw no such bonus, though I was very popular among the students who did come to class every day (about half in one class. In the other class, every student came to class).

• I attempted to administer a final exam to a class twice but failed. The first time, only six out of thirty-two students came to class for the test, even though I reminded the class of the test date during at least six consecutive classes before the day of the test. On the second attempt, I entered the room to meet near-riot conditions, and promptly left the class. A student told me that a work/group leader told the class that they didn’t have to take the class. They were angry because I required them to take the test. I succeeded in administering the test. Even though I had never seen most of the students since the first week (some I had never seen at all., and they could produce no identification), most of the class scored in the upper ninety percentile, including students who could not respond when their names were called.

• The school is far from convenient shopping. Forget about convenient dining out. The buses stop running at 6:30 in the evening. You may be told that you will be given a bicycle. When I arrived, mine was broken, and when I needed to use it later in the year, the FAO refused to have it fixed, saying that the bicycle was not in the contract. (I found this strange considering the fact that she bought bicycles for three other teachers when they arrived).

• You will not conduct classes on the campus that is close to your apartment. You will teach on the north campus, a post-Stalin era institution. YOUR class room will have broken desks and minimal (if any) AV equipment.

• To get to the north campus, you will have to walk a considerable distance from your apartment to the bus stop and HOPE that the bus is on-schedule. That means that if you have an 8:00 class, you will need to leave your apartment no later than 7:00 a.m. to be sure that you will get there on-time. It will take you about ten minutes to walk to the bus stop. The bus ride is about fifteen minutes. Then you will have to get off the bus and walk another FULL city block because no bus goes directly to the north campus. The commute may take more or less time, depending upon how much road construction is underway.

• There is a security problem with the apartment. I always lock everything up before I leave. ONCE, I left my personal computer on to run diagnostics. I also failed to lock my top desk drawer. When I arrived back at my apartment, I found two other applications open (Skype and Word). I also found my overseas phone turned on, and the phone number directory showing. My Verizon statement indicated that roaming charges began after I left my apartment. That was also the day that a black-and-white checkered scarf disappeared.

• Though the school may tell you that it does not have the money to fix the air conditioning, it DOES have money to throw lavish anniversary parties and faculty-and-family Christmas parties to which you will not be invited.

• You will NOT be able to convert rmb to your home currency yourself, no matter what you do. You will need the help of an adult Chinese person to do it for you. You cannot make the conversion yourself because the FAO does not remit income taxes, and she will NOT help you with the process. I asked for information about paying taxes and providing documentation AT LEAST four times. Three times I was ignored. The fourth time I was given two addresses written in Chinese. Both were the wrong address, but I did find the tax office with he help of a resident of Taizhou. I found that I am not even on the books, so without the help of the FAO, I couldn’t convert rmb. (Even if you have a friend to help you, it will eventually turn into a nightmare if you go to the same bank too many times).

• If you do have to teach a class on the campus that is near your apartment, you will find that the canal that separates your apartment from the campus has a bridge crossing it. You will be very disappointed to learn that the bridge is not there for your convenience, but for the convenience of the administrators who eat lunch at the hotel and for the convenience of the students who work at the hotel. The latch and the lock is on the other side of the bridge, so unless someone leaves the gate open, you will have to walk much farther to class than is really necessary.

• I taught there for three terms. Pay was on-time or early only five of those months. The Chinese teachers were paid on-time.

• I really didn’t want to have problems with the FAO. I asked to speak to the school president through an interpreter. I was told that I couldn’t talk to the school president because he had just quit his job.

• If you plan to renew your contract, be sure to mention it to the FAO. One FT assumed that he would be renewed, but wasn't told that he would not be renewed until about a month before the end of the term. The FAO didn't have the decency to tell him until the last minute.

The city has nothing to recommend it. There are a couple of deafening discos with laser lights, and a few decent restaurants, that that is about all there is. The locals aren't particularly friendly.