Growing up, I had been through some issues at school that sufficiently made me feel inadequate enough to look outside the west for a better place to be in. I projected this hope onto China and felt that perhaps the supposed 5,000 years of history/culture or what not (something I bought into completely) would cure my own ailments. Nothing prepared me for the characters I was about to meet. The abusive, alcoholic, drug addicted, bullying attitudes of some foreign teachers and chinese managers ruined my first few experiences. The human mind only has so much resiliency. I suppose if my first couple of working experiences were good I might have put up with more crap in my later expeditions, but even that is debatable because I would have lived in further denial and delusion. I do not consider myself a judgmental person, and I only speak out about things that truly had a personal impact on me, even changed my life. Something that the Chinese romanticists and idealists cannot grasp.